D&D General What geographical size is best for campaign settings?

[Li Shenron]

Currently my preference is planet.

I can understand a designers need to leave the door open for a DM to add their stuff, but frankly the "unexplored continent" cliché has run its course for me. Give me a fully-defined planet instead, and if I really want to add another continent I will play it like when Columbus discovered the Americas i.e. I will just announce the discovery, say that all your maps were wrong and update the planet. Or maybe I'll add another planet.

That said, I prefer small planets. I hate to see another copy of earth, where everything takes place in a western-like continent and then you need to have a vaguely defined asian corner, a vaguely defined mesoamerican corner, a vaguely defined african corner...

So that might mean my preference could be "effective as large as a continent, but with boundaries like a planet" and no undefined continents around it. There is plenty of room for "here be dragons" areas also within the main location.

 

[squibbles]

I hate to see another copy of earth, where everything takes place in a western-like continent and then you need to have a vaguely defined asian corner, a vaguely defined mesoamerican corner, a vaguely defined african corner...

Man, I couldn't agree more.

A lot of planet-sized settings initially come off as cool and flavorful but then, upon zooming out from the best-described region, one realizes that the cool flavorful part is where Western Europe would be and then there's a poorly concealed East Asia stapled to its right side and a poorly concealed Egypt or Arabia stapled to its south side.

 

[Lyxen]

For me, the main criterion would be "expandable". It's important to start small and to be able to add to it if the campaign takes an unexpected direction, but you don't need it at the start. And because D&D is designed to do high fantasy, this means that the directions don't have to be on the surface of a planet, they can be in space or in planes. But you don't need to define the whole planet for this...

 

[S'mon]

I was thinking while reading the Can we salvage Toril? thread that I would like the Forgotten Realms setting a lot better if it didn't include Kara-Tur and Al-Qadim, if those settings were each treated as their own thing, and if none of them shared the same world map.

I don't think the size of the game world is at all relevant to the size of the campaign setting, where it's actually played. The size of the setting will vary according to theme/tone, eg my Primeval Thule S&S game ranges all over a ca 2000 mile map, while my Faerun Adventures sandbox game almost all occurs within an area 120x100 miles, with the main focus in a 50x60 mile area. With 2 mile hexes, I find this ideal for long term sandbox play.

 

[Tonguez]

adventures need to be small sized, campaigns though are as big as they need to be. Take Spelljammer for instance, the ships might be travelling the vastness of space but each adventures take place on a defined part of different worlds

 

[Lanefan]

I always run homebrew, so my size is almost always "undefined". The borders get pushed back through play, even when the players haven't been there.

Same here.

I'll start with about half a continent - enough so that if an adventure needs a specific setting (arctic, jungle, maritime, desert, etc.) in order to work I've got somewhere to put it, and so that the various common species/cultures have somewhere suitable to live. After that, it expands as needed based on what the PCs hear about and-or where they go.

 

[Lanefan]

Man, I couldn't agree more.

A lot of planet-sized settings initially come off as cool and flavorful but then, upon zooming out from the best-described region, one realizes that the cool flavorful part is where Western Europe would be and then there's a poorly concealed East Asia stapled to its right side and a poorly concealed Egypt or Arabia stapled to its south side.

In my current setting this was very intentional: my initial design basis for the core region was "What do I get if I take a faux-Mediterranean and, using Greece as a pivot point, stand it on its end such that the sea lies north-south instead of east-west?". Answer: a setting that after 13 years still falls into the "so far, so good-and-more" category.

 

[Baldurs_Underdark]

There is not one answer to this question. One campaign might be a roadtrip, across a continent. The next is a murder mystery that never leaves a mansion. Sometimes the DM needs something to be "far away", and sometimes that's not necessary for the challenges for the PCs.

The lure of having a continent like Faerun with all its details is for a DM to pick a place for the campaign to start. It's incredibly handy to have a wiki that gives you the first introduction to any country, town, mountain range or forest. In other words, I just don't want to start every campaign in either Waterdeep, Baldur's Gate or Neverwinter. It's nice to start in Teziir or Alaghôn.

 

[Ixal]

Aim for continents (at least) unless you want either insular places with no connection to anyone else or a kitchen sink of mismatched places which exist but do not influence each other.

 

[Shiroiken]

In a published setting, I want something large to work with: continent or larger. In any given campaign, however, you're not going to use more than a small fraction of this area. The advantage is that it gives you more to work from, keeping the setting fresh. In 5E I've run Greyhawk campaigns based around the Western Marklands, Nyrond, and Saltmarsh, while I've still got ideas to run in the Great Kingdom, Nyr Dyv, Spindrift Isle, and the Barbarian North. There's so much available, that I'm likely to run out of players before I run out of ideas.