How "deep" into a setting will you buy?

I buy the initial book or boxed set, a monster book if one is available, and a city book if one is available.

I love cities and adventures that detail the city/area they are in for possible use in my homebrew. I may never use the adventure, but I've been known to use the city or area.
 

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If the setting looks interesting to me at all, I'll buy the core setting book. Then, it's a matter of which other setting products look interesting and/or useful to me. For most settings, that means very little, but occasionally, it means almost the entire line. I've gotten pretty deeply into the Paizo Golarion setting lately, for example, but that's largely because I see a lot of their material as useful and/or interesting even if I'm not using their setting. I also bought most of the Freeport and Iron Kingdoms setting material, but then again, there wasn't really tons of setting material in those lines; they were always somewhat limited in scope. With Eberron, I bought the main setting book, the Sharn book, the Sarlona book, and a few others, but didn't really splurge; that was an example of a setting that I liked well enough, but the line was too deep for my taste, and I didn't have the will to keep up with all the details.

This is all also predicated on the fact that I don't use settings, exactly. I like to raid settings for good ideas, but I'm addicted to homebrewing.
 

Six books at $19.99 for Kingmaker, also available at $13.99 as PDFs.

Also, it's worth noting that those are an Adventure Path (modules), and not necessarily part of the setting as such. $120 is probably not too bad for a full campaign good for at least a year's gaming...

But Pathfinder can certainly get horribly expensive if you try to get everything.
Although a lot of setting detail turns up in the adventure paths and other modules, I think he meant the actual setting splats. I.e., the Pathfinder Chronicles and Pathfinder Companion series, or whatever they've been renamed to. I've spent way more than $120 on Pathfinder setting material, and that's not counting the adventure paths. Off the top of my head, I've got: the Pathfinder setting book ($50), the Guide to Korvasa, Classic Monsters Revisited, The Guide to Darkmoon Vale, The Guide to Absalom, Guide to Katapesh, the Great Beyond, Princes of Darkness, Seekers of Secrets, Cities of Golarion, Classic Horrors Revisited, Faction Guide, Heart of the Jungle, and City of Strangers (all... what, $18-20 or so?) and the Osirion book, the Taldor book, the Qadira book, the Sargava book, the Orcs book, and the Cheliax book (all $10, I think.)

Not even counting the adventures, I've spent at least $350 on Pathfinder setting material, and I've only picked up about half of what's available. So yeah, being a collector/completionist over Golarion might possibly be the most expensive setting endeavor you can do. They're in their seventh adventure path, with six adventures each (at $20 each) and there's gotta be nearly fifty unlinked modules available too (at #13/pop). Even to date, you could easily have spent $1,000 on Golarion material, and there's more coming all the time.
 

So yeah, being a collector/completionist over Golarion might possibly be the most expensive setting endeavor you can do.

This is probably not much different than being a compulsive collector/completionist of Forgotten Realms supplement books and box sets during the 2E AD&D and/or 3E/3.5E eras.
 

Seeing how I own every Shadowrun book published to date I would say pretty deep... It really depends on the setting though for FR 2 I bought the main box, waterdeep, volos guide to the sword cost and the elmisters ecologies and that was it. I usually will buy the core book and a city book minimum.
 

Seeing how I own every Shadowrun book published to date I would say pretty deep... It really depends on the setting though for FR 2 I bought the main box, waterdeep, volos guide to the sword cost and the elmisters ecologies and that was it. I usually will buy the core book and a city book minimum.
I think there's often a question of how deep does the setting material go anyway? There are several settings where I'd probably go even deeper if more stuff were to get published (cough, cough*** Iron Kingdoms** ahem) but alas, it seems like those lines are kinda done and what there is published to date is all there's gonna be.

How deep is the Shadowrun line, anyway? Is there a lot of depth there?
 

How deep is the Shadowrun line, anyway? Is there a lot of depth there?

There is an ongoing metaplot. The game started in 2050 and is now up to 2072. A dragon has been elected president and then he sacrificed himself to stop the "horrors" from returning. Chicago got nuked, the matrix collapsed and was rebuilt, etc, etc. So a lot has happened since it was 1st published in 89'
 

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