D&D General How thorough do you like your settings?

[Shiroiken]

I don't like the idea of a 100% fleshed out world. If a player were to read about it, they'd already know everything I might want to keep hidden!

I'm a fan of the Greyhawk Boxed Set, but I'm paradoxically a fan of the Living Greyhawk Gazetteer. The boxed set provides an evocative world, with lots of adventure ideas. The Gazetteer... it's an encyclopedia, and just as interesting. I use it to periodically fill in some of the minutia for my Gygaxian Greyhawk campaign that I don't feel like making up on my own (holy symbols, coinage, etc). I lean much closer to the Boxed Set, but it's nice to have a source like the Gazetteer to draw upon for those tidbits.

 

[Fifinjir]

It depends on what the setting is like in the first place, but if there’s things that I think are cool, then yes, inject it directly into my veins.

 

[Benjamin Olson]

Ultimately for me it's a matter of how well indexed and crossreferenced it is, how well designed, and how well it integrates with a virtual tabletop.

The reasons I, after paying for a published product, still feel the need to make up my own radically different person partially have to do with my own desire to be creative or adapt to player decisions the designers never could have anticipated, but more often they are driven by inability to find the information I need quickly enough, the design being inadequate in my opinion, or needing to restructure things around a map I found for free online.

So for me the ultimate product in this vein would have information not only available but easily accessible (RPG designers seriously need to learn to use marginalia to crossreference things). It would have digital assets available to drop major locations into a VTT as that is often what I'm using. It would also, and this is the hardest part, avoid design decisions I found inadequate (like an economy that made no sense, dungeons with no logical ecology, enemy fortresses with no beds or toilets).

As for the actual "blank space" question, I'd say that with a sufficiently well thought out world I'm okay losing much of that authorial space for myself, but that I would want there to be the flexibility for players to feel comfortable making up the village or distant land they come from, or the obscure god they worship. It's one thing for the DM to decide they don't want to do their own worldbuilding, its another thing to cut everyone else off from those options.

 

[humble minion]

I want lots of content in my premade settings, and I don't want huge nebulous blank gaps in the map (if I want a blank map, I'll homebrew) but I want it at a reasonably high level. Don't detail the name of every innkeeper, or indeed every inn. If I'm running a game, and the PCs go to the city, I'm not going to remember the names of every shop they go into or every street they might decide to wander down, and I don't want to either have to cram my brain with every possible NPC before each setting, nor do I want to be continually referencing the setting book in play to avoid going off-canon (because if you use a detailed worldbook, the players will know about it). Cover the high points, general info about geography, rulership, attitudes, important locations, power groups, sources of conflict a few bits of local culture for flavour, local monsters etc, maybe a handful of important NPCs. Beyond that, cover any important organisations that span geographical regions, deities and how their religions/worshippers operate. Give me an array of possible warlock patrons for various different pacts, and what they might want from their pactees.

I can invent basic NPCs on the fly, don't worry about giving me the statline of every guard or streetsweeper. But give me ideas. Give me organisations to work with or against, give me plot hooks and adventure locations out the wazoo, give me NPCs with motivations that might work with/against/at crosspurposes to the PCs and give me plot hooks pertaining to them and some material I can practically use about how they operate.

 

[Minigiant]

I want

1. A lot of thorough filled in space
2. A lot of open empty space

Givem a few cties and towns and dungeons where you tell me everything. Then some towns and dungeons and wilds where everything is mostly unknown.

 

[jgsugden]

...The reason I ask is to gauge how much value "blank space" is worth. Areas where the DM can go in and paint their own stamp without contradicting established lore. At what point, if any, does detail get in the way of creation. I get there is no one size fits all answer, but I'm looking for at what point does being through become a liability? Or does it not and there is an untapped market for a product that does all the world-building for the DM. After all, APs and setting guides do sell...

What is important here (to me) is not quantity or lore, it is organization and utility.

As a starting block, I would welcome the depth regardless of how I wanted to use the product - but with a caveat.

I rarely use a product as is. I steal from it, but I usually add that theft into my existing game settings. To that end - the more the merrier. I'm using TPPs for inspiration, so give me as much inspiration as you can. If I were going to be asked to run a game in the setting, then I'd also welcome the depth because I feel comfortable that I could adjust around any depth of lore that I wanted to bypass or discord if I was able to understand what was there.

The caveat is that the information has to be accessible and organized. If you just weave little tidbits into paragraph after paragraph of 'stuff' it becomes so hard to find it that it might as well not be there. If you want to sew something, you need a needle. It is equally hard to use one if you don't have it or if it is buried in a pile of hay.

If you have a villager in Village 17 in Region 4 that wandered into town after losing his memory and a Farm Family in Village 11 of Region 1 that is looking for their lost son that wandered off after bing hit in the head by an ogre you need to have a way to connect those dots to each other, and also a way to lay out the storyline someplace where it is cohesive.

This creates an exponential problem for the size of your described area. The more that you weave into it, the more you have to add to keep it accessible and organized.

Further, for those DMs using the product as is, how much can a DM use? If one party is going to go through the adventure and then the material will be set aside, then a lot of what you write will be wasted, and the more there is the harder it will be to connect the dots. You may provide them with many options to explore, but if there is a central storyline to be followed it becomes harder and harder to find the pieces of it when it is buried under more stuff.

If you like this level of depth, you're better off building the connected puzzle pieces and putting them out there as a unit that a DM can place in a setting, not preplacing them and clogging up a world.

 

[DEFCON 1]

I would 100% rather have this type of setting book than any other.

Curse of Strahd is my favorite 5E setting/adventure book because it is a constrained space with all the primary locations within it defined and filled with stuff. No matter where the players go, if they come upon an "encounter location" it gives me exactly what the plot hooks are, a map of the area, and a listing of the creatures and events that will occur there. And almost all of the areas are connected to other areas, and the story of the adventure can and will take the players there-- but there's no one set path to get there... they may find any number of different orders of operations to arrive at these places depending on where they have gone and who they have met.

But in addition to that specificity... there is also plenty of blank areas of the map that would allow me to add something there if I wanted to... but that would be entirely my choice. If I don't, then that area remains empty-- it's not a location that the setting/adventure defines and places on the map as some sort of important landmark but then gives no indication of what it's there for or why the players should be interested in it. I don't need that kind of stuff. If you're going to put a village on the map... then detail the village. If you're going to put a ruined gatehouse on the map, then tell me why it's there and put an encounter there to make it useful to have. Otherwise... leave the area empty and I can then choose for myself later on "You know... I have this gatehouse encounter from this other product that might be cool and fits the theme of the adventure... maybe I'll place that here on the map!"

Another somewhat cool adventure/setting location was Lost Mines of Phandelver. It had a good number of the locations of the area fleshed out, which I appreciated. However... they also still included areas like Old Owl Well that were basically a "named" area and gave a basic idea of what you could encounter there and they told us that the story of the adventure recommended the players go there... but then gave us no specifics about it. An area that could have had a fully fleshed out dungeon, but the adventure didn't supply it. That's less useful to me. Me personally... I'd rather they just not include that location at all-- and not make it a location to go to as part of the story of the adventure-- and then let me decide if I want to put something there myself. And this is exactly why when I ran Lost Mines over the pandemic I also picked up Icespire Peak and the 4E Neverwinter Campaign Setting book... because when you combined all three products together it gave me the much more filled-in setting area that I was looking for. And that allowed me to have any number of complete locations ready to throw out there as hooks if one of the players mentioned something about wanting to go find 'X'.

My current campaign is Mythic Odysseys of Theros... and while I love the Greek-inspired setting and the names, peoples, gods, and concepts of the entire land... the fact that there's really nothing actually fleshed out except for the one starter adventure in the book has made things less than ideal. Yes, I've collected a whole heap of Greek-inspired material from DMs Guild and tried to adapt older products and articles I own to use as the locations that the setting book mentions and talks about... but they are not designed specifically for the setting and I have to do a lot more jerry-rigging than I would prefer (and a lot of the maps I end up using do not look Greek much at all unfortunately which takes away from of the setting feeling.) I also find it less than thrilling the fact that I can't seed the adventure the players are currently in with hooks from the stories of other locations on the map because none of those locations are fleshed out and I'm not about to try and fill in that complete and entire map of Theros with "stuff" just on the off-chance the players mention something about them. So instead... I'm throwing down the railroad tracks in front of the train, only creating locations just prior to the party arriving to them. Which is less inspiring to me.

Give me a smaller area that is completely detailed for the adventure path the book is giving me... and then let me decide if I want to fill it up more just to give it more locations or flavor. But don't give me areas that are important to the story but then make me have to create them. I'd just make up my own setting altogether if I wanted to do that.

 

[WarDriveWorley]

Personally I prefer campaign books/sets/guide to have a LOT of specific information to flesh out the setting (such as archetypes, feats, heritages, spells, etc.) that's still generic enough to be changed, a good sampling of major points of interest with information about them, and the rest should open for the DM/Players to shape.

As an example the campaign guide may describe a region called "The Borderwilds" (insert fanfare here) and explains the typical inhabitants, one or two major settlements, general politics, and a broad framework of adventures generally found within it. Everything else is a blank slate.

Enough for me as the GM to write up information on the area that makes sense, but not enough to pigeonhole me either.

 

[fjw70]

My preference would be a main product that was an overview of the world. Then have supplements that fleshed out different areas (preferably in the form of adventures) that I can purchase if I want more for particular areas.

 

[DEFCON 1]

Let's engage in a hypothetical...

A new product has been announced. It is a guide to a Kingdom setting. It has a beautiful region map, with dozens of points of interest, and the selling point is they are ALL detailed. Every town has a map and is brimming with premade locals. The various mountains, forests and other biomes come with proper random encounter tables and special encounters. Local monsters, tribes and other people are described. There are several fully stocked dungeons ready to use. There is detailed lore on the local history, nobility and religions. Each area comes with potential adventure hooks. Almost no area of this region is undescribed. You could run an entire campaign with what's in it and never have to create a single thing. The book is huge and reasonably priced, from a company you trust.

Just to speak on the specific idea you posed... change 'Kingdom' to 'Barony' and I think you are good.

Kingdoms are too large to detail everything well enough to be useful in my opinion. Give me a barony detailed out fully like Curse of Strahd or Nentir Vale (only after of course bringing together ALL the lore from ALL the different 4E products they eventually created for it) and the product you have is spot on.

And then eventually if you have the idea of making three separate barony-sized products that can eventually combine together to form a complete County, then great! And eventually then you make two Counties and create a Duchy, then awesome! Then a pair of Duchies to THEN have an entire Kingdom, then that would be the gold-standard. But as we notice... that would be 3 baronies x 2 counties x 2 duchies = 12 barony-sized detailed products to reach your desire for a Kingdom.

And this explains why doing a single Kingdom product wouldn't really be useful-- because your details in that one book would be woefully lacking when compared to the 12 baronies worth of detail it probably should have. In my opinion of course.

Look at it this way... the 3E Forgotten Realms product Silver Marches book gives a tremendous amount of detail about the area of the Silver Marches, probably what we might call a Duchy-sized location. But even then... all the cities only get like a chapter each with the barest of maps for them... and a whole heap of locations strewn across the area get at most a paragraph describing what the location is (and maybe a single plot hook if you were lucky.) Now it definitely had its uses to me as a product when I moved my Tyranny of Dragons campaign in it... swapping out all the locations in those modules for areas from the Silver Marches book... but I still also think that product could have easily been split up four, five, six ways and given grander detail. Heck, Silverymoon could have supported its own book... the Uthgardt barbarian tribe locations could have all had their own book, and so forth. I LOVE the Silver Marches product (one of my favorite D&D setting products of all time) but I still think it could have been even better had it drilled down even closer to areas and gone into even more detail. That's the kind of thing I love to see.