Kitchen Sink Expeditions: The Lineup

I'm going to try to do a regular series of posts (again), that require mostly reading and critique instead of coming up with stuff. The series will be called Kitchen Sink Expeditions, and has nothing to do with Kitchen Sink press or any other entity or organization with the phrase Kitchen Sink in it.

Anyway, having already mentioned several RPGs and settings that I've noted are kitchen sink settings -- settings that have sufficient depth and breadth, along with pretty hard to miss homages, to handle a variety of genres, subgenres, and characters/gear/organizations from many sources in the course of play -- I think that I should alternate coverage between the already mentioned and the unmentioned.

My current planned listing is as follows:

• Lightspeed by Christian Conkle
• Code: Black by BTRC
• Fading Suns by Holistic Games (now under Redbrick)
• RIFTS by Palladium
• "The Hero Games Setting Timeline" or "I got your meta-meta-meta-plot right here" by Hero Games (Steve Long)
• Astral Empires by Port Nova Media
• D&D by some company named TSR

And we'll see where we go from there. As for what I'll be talking about: it'll primarily be things that interest me about the way each setting's "kitchen sinkiness" was handled. I seem drawn to settings that do this well, and so I'd like to figure out why through this exercise. Given that each one seems to be huge (by the very nature of kitchen sink settings), I can only tackle what interests me -- hoping to discover some reason as to why I enjoy them.