One world for all your campaigns, or do you set campaigns in different settings each time?

[pemerton]

From the mid-80s to the late 90s I ran a series of games in Greyhawk, though over time it diverged to quite an extent from "official" Greyhawk.

In the mid-80s I also ran an Oriental Adventures game, using the description of the lands in the OA book. From 1998 to 2008 I ran another Oriental Adventures game, this time using the boxed set for maps and a bit of backstory. (Much more of the play-relevant backstory came from modules and my own imagination.)

Since 2009 I've been running a 4e game, using the default cosmology and mythic history, but using the map in the old module Night's Dark Terror, supplemented by a city map from Speaker in Dreams (which is merged with the Threshold city map from NDT). On current projections, I would say that the end of that campaign has a good chance of seeing the end of that world, so no replay (unless via Dark Sun, if the world goes in the Primordial rather than the Divine direction).

Once the 4e game is done, I'm hoping to run a Burning Wheel game. My plan would be to use Greyhawk for the basics of setting for that (but BW is not big on detailed backstory prior to play, so that would be for some basics of maps and names, rather than lots of detail).

 

[Jan van Leyden]

I'm just wondering how approach your campaigns. Are they all set in the same world? Different worlds each time? Do you return to favourite settings but otherwise explore the possibilities?

I use several worlds according to the intended style and tone of the campaign: Greyhawk, FR, Eberron, parts of Mystara, Ptolus, Shadowworld, and the yet-to-be-defined own worlds. I'm not so much invested in any one of these, so canon purists would probably throw up their breakfast. These camapign worlds are like templates to build a campaign from.

Consequently, my campaigns tend to only graze things like deatails and metaplot. When the players would show interest in a setting beyond the current adventure(s) I'd be happy to oblige. Exoperience shows that their interests are focused on the adventures, not on the setting, though.

And will anything be changing when 5E comes by?

What would this "5E" be that I would change my habits?

 

[MortalPlague]

During the lead-up to 4th Edition, my buddy ran an Epic 3.5 game. Well, it ended in a TPK, and we found ourselves with a couple of months to fill. He and I (being the most common DMs) decided to create a shared setting where we would run our games from there on out. We drew up a continent, put down some countries, and decided on a few shared themes.

We decided that to usher in 4th edition, this world would experience a world-shattering event. So he ran a brief 'evil' game where we played villains trying to topple the old Tothandren Empire, and to bring ruin to the civilized world. The finale had our party raising the Tarrasque to destroy the Empire's capital city.

All of our 4th Edition games were set in the same world, but a hundred years later. So the shattered ruins of the Tothandren Empire lay all about, and while a few nations had formed from the ruins, much of the land had yet to be reclaimed. It meshed nicely with 4th Edition's 'Points Of Light' theme.

I ran four campaigns set in the world, while my friend ran one more. It was great to have characters happen upon the sites of ancient battles, where previous characters had fought and died. However, our most recent games have drifted away from it; in the end, the desire to create new and interesting worlds keeps me moving.

 

[Viking Bastard]

I have one campaign setting that I keep going back to, which I first created when I was 9 or 10 years old (mid-90s). I revisit it every few campaigns, each time advancing the timeline or focusing on a different part of the world. So far I've DMed about 2000 years of world history.

Originally, it was about defending the small fairy tale-ish kingdom/fiefdom of Caladan, which was besieged by enemies on all sides (I discovered the old Dune video games around the same time, *ahem*). Whenever the group got bored of their characters, I'd jump ahead a few generations, with the previous groups being champions of renown (and sometimes still alive as NPCs). With each timejump, Caladan became a bigger power--from a small kingdom, to a big kingdom, to an empire, to a superpower, to the superpower--until I turned it around, and started chronicling it's collapse--to a stagnant superpower, to an evil empire, to a xenophobic fascist state.

By the time it had become a superpower, it stopped being the focus of the games, retreading into the background, eventually becoming the bad guys. It's gone through an industrial revolution and is currently experiencing a great depression. I resurrected the setting for my current game, which is set around a great migration of settlers from the former territories of the Caladan empire to a previously established New World.

 

[Lord Vangarel]

Pretty much used a different world each time. Back in the early 80's the world was a loose interpretation of the OD&D world as presented in the Basic and Expert books. When Dragonlance came along I created my own world with strong similarities. Later in the 80's we switched to actually play in Krynn and the next campaign was set in the Forgotten Realms. We played Warhammer in the 90's for a while and the temptation to play in the Old World was too much to resist. With 3rd Edition I created my own world again and played in there for a while. 4E was the default world but was shortlived, and the most recent campaign used the world provided by the modules we used. So I guess I pretty much chop and change all the time. As a group we did briefly revisit my Dragonlance clone world a couple of years after finishing the original campaign but it didn't recapture the magic.

I think my attention span jumps around too much and I have too many different ideas with campaigns, and I don't want to squash them all into the same world. For example I'm currently thinking of a shattered world campaign where inhabitants live on floating islands and use floating ships to move between them.

 

[delericho]

I default to Eberron unless I have a specific reason to do otherwise. I don't expect that to change any time soon, although partly because I don't expect to be running D&D (or much of anything, really, once my current SWSE game is done) for quite some time.

(Obviously, for non-D&D campaigns I'll use a different setting, but I assumed that went without saying. )

 

[Cadence]

We had one homebrew we used for half a decade for multiple games and multiple DMs back in the 80s.

Since then I've made four or so different ones that had their run of one to three years and weren't picked back up again. Typically they had a small 5-15 page booklet of background, deities and customized clerics, and modifications to the races or character classes for the players

Sometimes its tempting to re-use them, but like some of the posters above there are always so many other ideas that want to come out. Given that I'd have to update the old ones to the new system, the new ideas have kept winning so far (although I do cannibalize my favorite parts from the old write-ups).

 

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

I always switch worlds, and generally don't do homebrew. Even in d20 Modern I started moving the games into earlier decade.

 

[SkidAce]

Main campaign used in one form or another since 1981: https://alfaysia.obsidianportal.com/

Current campaign set in a sub-are of the main campaign since 2012: https://unconquered-kingdoms.obsidianportal.com/

good times...

edit: as a note, it was easy to re-use the world since in the military for 26 years, every 2 or 4 years it was a new group.

 

[SkidAce]

As a counterpoint, I also have a Final Fantasy world, a modern day magic x-files/buffy/MIB world, and a Rifts campaign.