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

[Evilhalfling]

I like world building.
and I really hate the idea that I had to use a source as written, or had to read & remember many pages of text when PCs went to a new location. Especially if there is a good chance that a player has read the material as well, and for example wants to know why the Lord of Daggerford is not the same guy as in the book, and expecting a huge temple of Tymra in the town, when I need it to be Torm (cause that's what the group's priest is). When the Honest answer is " I read the description of the town last week (or last month) and I don't remember it very well, and I don't want to look it up mid-game."

I have occasionally bought setting material, mostly to steal classes/spells/monsters from.
What I would really love is an evocative name and 2-5 paragraphs of text that I can flesh out, sparks to help fire my imagination

Greyhawk Adventures (1st ed) was just about perfect. I have stolen many of the adventuring locations from it over the years.
I have never run the full adventure from the book.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

So, I have used Ptolus since 2006. And it is a brick. At the time, it was the largest RPG book ever published and is almost certainly one of the biggest still today.

But even in the city, I don't know what each building is or who lives there, and there are whole neighborhoods that are pretty lightly sketched. In the Dungeon beneath the city, points of interest are detailed, but there's a lot of blank space. And outside the city, there is only the lowest level of detail. Whole countries get less than five sentences of information. (It's not Harn, in other words.)

And to me, that's just about perfect. When I want something pre-written -- who is in the palace of the Emperor of the Church, which captains of the watch are on the take, give me some lore about the dominant religion in the empire -- it's there. But if I want to drop, say, Lost Mines of Phandelver into the setting, which I've done, there are lots of blank areas of the map that I can do so without having to do surgery on the adventure unless I want to.

When I use a pre-written setting or adventure -- and I mostly don't -- I purchased it because it offers something specific I'm interested in. (Ptolus is a renaissance-era city about to fall backwards into a Dark Age, featuring a pseudo-Holy Roman Empire on the verge of a civil war, and a setting that explicitly includes everything in the 3E core books, rather than them having to be shoehorned in. Freeport, which I also own, is a pirate city.) I want it to provide that thing and then get out of the way. Don't give me so much of stuff other than your hook that I have to cut it away to fit it into my game.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Also, re: NPC names

Instead of telling me the name of every character in the region, I'd rather have tables I can use to generate those names myself. That way, they can all feel right and fit together nicely, but I'm not required to remember that the miller's wife is named Anne, and if I get it wrong, I either have to make a note or explain what happened to Anne when I said the wife's name was Bonnie.

So the names can still be bespoke without a DM being required to use each one.

 

[Redwizard007]

If I'm paying for a setting, it needs to be packed full of detail. Now, I might very well scrap 50% of it to drop my own (or other published) material in, but that's a matter of personal preference.

 

[Incenjucar]

I just need rules, hubs, broad maps, major conflict points, and examples, which is part of why things like Dark Sun and Planescape get most of my attention. I don't need granular location details for human settlements, but stuff like the Thri-Kreen of Athas is great.

 

[Tonguez]

I’m interested in fun set peices, interesting relationships, cool NPCs and usable hooks and adventure scenarios. Stuff that I can cut and paste and adapt to my own ideas.

 

[delericho]

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

Would you buy it? Why or why not?

Maybe, but probably not. The thing is, if the work is as detailed as you say then it's great, if it's exactly what I'm looking for. But the odds are that it will fall short in some regard, which means making changes, and the more detailed you get the harder it is to make those changes.

I'm increasingly inclined to think that I want a setting done twice: first do the series of big detailed sourcebooks (which will necessarily include a load of stuff that works and a load of stuff that doesn't work, all muddled together), then do a second digest version that just gathers the "good stuff" - like Eberron in 3e (the detailed version) vs Eberron in 4e or 5e (the highlights).

 

[Voadam]

I have used very few adventures from setting books. Some of the short ones from the 1e/2e Greyhawk Adventures book and a couple one-page cardboard sheet adventures from 2e's From the Ashes and City of Greyhawk.

 

[GuyBoy]

Give me a beautiful map. With interesting place names and varied geographical features and climate.
Give me some well-detailed sites - towns, villages, ruins - and some interesting culture, people and legends to build on. Leave a lot to my own creativity, but also give me some fully realised adventures that I can use, because time is not always my friend. Then I’ll buy.
In fact, just give me Greyhawk, Wilderlands or the Scorpion Age!

Great post btw. Lots of fascinating responses.

 

[DammitVictor]

I prefer very loose "toolkit" style settings, little more than a genre, subgenre, and a handful of themes. Think of Spelljammer with only sphere/planet creation rules, or Dark Sun replacing all of its cities and Sorcerer-Kings with random tables for generating cities and Sorcerer-Kings.

I'm going to rip out and/or rearrange all of the existing lore to make it fit better with what my players want to explore. The more detailed and seamless it is, the more of the content I'm paying for is just going to end up on the cutting room floor, and the more effort I'm going to have to put into putting it there.