What is the most detailed setting available?

[Blue Orange]

Big ones seem to be Forgotten Realms, Tekumel, Golarion.

If you want to start listing real places, how about Imperial China? Several thousand years of history, just about every city over a million for two millennia...

 

[Jd Smith1]

Big ones seem to be Forgotten Realms, Tekumel, Golarion.

If you want to start listing real places, how about Imperial China? Several thousand years of history, just about every city over a million for two millennia...

This is about game settings.

 

[aramis erak]

The Imperium deserves special mention because you could set a campaign at a great number of times. There is playable setting material for the Interstellar War period, Year 0 of the Imperium, the Golden Age, the Rebellion, the New Era, and the alternate history where the Rebellion didn't happen.

Just to put some dates
IY -2408 (2110 AD) is the start of the Interstellar Wars; they end with the "Rule of Man" (aka 2nd Imperium) in IY -2204 (2314 AD). GURPS Traveller Interstellar Wars uses this era.
IY 0 is 4518 AD. It's the declaration of the 3I. And the startpoint of the Year Zero setting; later works push to the IY 120 range. This is the default for T4 aka Marc Miller's Traveller.
IY 950 is the start point for the T20 Traveller's Handbook (d20 Travelller) Ruleset's setting.
IY 1100-1115 is the timeframe of the OTU as described in Classic Traveller. It's also used for Mongoose's Traveller (MgT). Mongoose is making a bunch of changes, so it may be better to think of them as separate settings.
IY 1116 to 1120 is the Rebellion; this is the start for MegaTraveller (MT). MegaTraveller continues on into...
IY 1120-1135 Hard Times. Setting not well developed, only one book, but it's a dark time...
1135 to 1200 The virus...
1200-1250 The New Era. The Reformation Coalition breaks out, and the Domain of Deneb gives up on reuniting the 3I in the near term... This is the default timeframe for the T:TNE edition.
1250-1350 the 1248 subsetting, for TTNE and T20.
IY 1900 - the official setting for T5 is in development. It's ... different.

I'm not sure how Traveller's Third Imperium setting rates in this. On the one hand, there's an absolutely massive amount of material from the various companies (and their own Open material) that have made products over the years. On the other hand - there's 11000 worlds in the Imperium, many haven't more than a short code describing them, one's outside often have less, so the detailed areas are rare. True also of course for other settings, but more obvious on the scale of a small patch of the Milky Way.

Traveller has a huge breadth... but it also lacks a lot of detail. 99% of the setting is represented only to the level of a mainworld name, and 40 characters of encoded data.

 

[AtomicPope]

Big ones seem to be Forgotten Realms, Tekumel, Golarion.

If you want to start listing real places, how about Imperial China? Several thousand years of history, just about every city over a million for two millennia...

Warhammer 40k has 40,000 years of history.

 

[Committed Hero]

IY 1100-1115 is the timeframe of the OTU as described in Classic Traveller. It's also used for Mongoose's Traveller (MgT). Mongoose is making a bunch of changes, so it may be better to think of them as separate settings.
IY 1116 to 1120 is the Rebellion; this is the start for MegaTraveller (MT). MegaTraveller continues on into...

GURPS Traveller is this period as well, with 18 full size books and a handful of shorter titles. But in this timeline there is no rebellion so it's definitely a separate setting. This stuff was 95% third edition GURPS while Interstellar Wars was 4th.

And beyond the 11,000 worlds of the Imperium there is the map of the Zhodani expeditions to the core of the galaxy:

 

[Blue Orange]

They said 'detailed' though--a lot of these sci-fi settings (logically) have much less detail on a planet than a fantasy setting will have on a town.

What you really want is the total character count over all material for a given setting, but you're never going to get it (though you could estimate with page count).

 

[heks]

harn and glorantha are the two that immediately spring to mind.

 

[MNblockhead]

Total volume of material matters less to me these days than how useful it is to actual use the material when prepping a game and in game. The Lost Lands has thousands of pages of setting information spread across many large and expensive books (which thank god they sell PDFs for them). But they are very verbose and not easily referenced on the fly. But having the recent Lost Lands setting book in World Anvil has been a great tool. I wish more setting publishers would make better use of digital tools.

 

[Hand of Evil]

Warhammer, between all the versions; Fantasy Battles and RPGs and White Dwarf it is very detailed. The you have Bloodbowl for team sports.

Forgotten Realms is good but it is too clean.

 

[Bluenose]

IY 950 is the start point for the T20 Traveller's Handbook (d20 Travelller) Ruleset's setting.
IY 1100-1115 is the timeframe of the OTU as described in Classic Traveller. It's also used for Mongoose's Traveller (MgT). Mongoose is making a bunch of changes, so it may be better to think of them as separate settings.
IY 1116 to 1120 is the Rebellion; this is the start for MegaTraveller (MT). MegaTraveller continues on into...
IY 1120-1135 Hard Times. Setting not well developed, only one book, but it's a dark time...

Quite sure T20 Traveller is a little later. the Solomani Rim War is happening, so at least 990.
Perhaps worth adding Gurps Traveller, an alternative 1116-1123(I think the TNS entires went that far) period which doesn't have the Rebellion.

What you really want is the total character count over all material for a given setting, but you're never going to get it (though you could estimate with page count).

Of course the issue there is that many of the longer-lasting settings have gone through several editions of rules and often repeat the setting information multiple times - Waterdeep for FR, the cult of Kyger Litor in Glorantha, the Spinward Marches in Traveller - so a simple word/page count isn't necessarily the best measure of how much of a setting has much information.