D&D General What makes a good setting book?

[TheAlkaizer]

So, I don't buy setting books. I've never been interested in the core settings of D&D, they've always felt excessively generic to me. But to be fair, I also never really dug to see what else is available; both in term of older editions and 3rd party. So lately, after putting one too many hours prepping a setting for a new campaign, I wondered what it would take for me to buy one. Let's say I was exposed to a product and I could have a glance at the table of contents and the book's content; what could make me go "oh I want to run a campaign in this".

And then I realized that I don't any references. I don't really buy adventures either, but I've often read and dug about what adventures people liked, what are the classics and what's cool about them. But not with settings.

I've read many times that the Sword Coast book for 5E was not great. I own it, I read it but I don't understand what's wrong about it. I also read that the Planescape campaign book for 2E was fantastic, I also own it, read it and not fully understand what's that much better about it. I also started getting into Vampire the Masquerade recently, and their core rulebooks have much more lore and story that I expect from a core rulebook, but surprisingly, I don't hate it.

Let's ignore everything marketing or production related (quality of the print, good editing, good name, nice art, etc). Let's focus on the content, what's written in the pages. Also, let's ignore stuff that's splashed over multiple books. I'm curious about what people expect or are looking for in a single product that introduces a setting.

I'd like to start a discussion around the following questions:

• What are you looking for in a setting good?
  • Mechanical content (custom subclasses, magic items, monsters stat blocks)?
  • Lore?
  • Good characters?
  • A unique twist?
• What proportion of each? A little bit of mechanical content and a ton of lore? Or the opposite?
• Are you looking for something fully detailed and a bit more rigid?
• Or for something more modular and actionable?
• What's more important to you: not having to put in time to adapt and use the content, or have the content be easy to be modified and adapted?

I'll even go further: what are your favorite setting books? Or what are the worst?

Oh, do note that I'm talking about D&D here, but if you have insight regarding setting books for other systems, I think it's applicable.

 

[Aldarc]

Play hooks. I have seen settings deliver on great lore, mechanics, and such, but then utterly fail with play hooks that make it easy to understand what the players would be doing besides setting themepark tourism.

 

[jdrakeh]

A rich cosmology, humanity and other species with multiple cultures (instead of single, unrealistic, monocultures), an explanation of why magic works the way it does in the setting. Those are the three big things that I like to see.

 

[NaturalZero]

I want a setting that feels fresh in an exciting way. If a setting just feels like generic homebrew number 345,304 but with professional art and editing, I'm probably not going to be invested enough to run it instead of working on my own concept.

I also want enough explanation and depth in the book to feel like I have a grasp of the setting without having to make most of it up myself. Ravnica, for instead, is intriguing as a concept but after looking through the book I feel like I'd have to do a ton of worldbuilding to make it make sense, to me.

 

[Mind of tempest]

ideally, everything mentioned so far but expanding what I can do is important to me either a new way to play in settings or genre so pushing towards the time I can play in any madness my fevered brain can make.

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

My three favorite setting books in D&D 5e are Explorer's Guide to Wildemount, Eberron: Rising from the Last War, and Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft. They all follow the same format that WotC has used for all of its setting books that came out after the SCAG, which includes a section for character options, a section for DM advice, a gazetteer section, a monster section, and a lore section. I've found that this format works incredibly well, and is very compelling.

Yes, lore is a significant part of it. The player options included are also a major part of it (Wildemount would be very different without Dunamancy and Eberron would be very different without Artificers, Dragonmarks, and its main races). The format and given tools are very important to me. However, the main thing might be the basic concept of the setting (if it adds anything to D&D that we don't already have in the existing setting). Eberron, Ravenloft, and the M:tG settings are very different from the core assumptions of D&D 5e. Wildemount as well, to a different extent. If a setting is really close to the base assumptions of D&D 5e, it needs to do a really good job at highlighting its differences to avoid the feeling of "just another Forgotten Realms/Greyhawk", like how Explorer's Guide to Wildemount focuses on its history, conflict between the Kryn Dynasty and Dwendalian Empire, Dunamancy, the Arms of the Betrayers/Vestiges of Divergence, the Heroic Chronicle, and its in-depth and amazing gazetteer section that gives plot hooks specific to the world in every location that it details.

That's what I think makes a good D&D setting book. Don't tell me what I already know about the world (the base lore included in the PHB), tell me how the world does things differently and how the PHB fits into the world.

 

[Yora]

Play hooks. I have seen settings deliver on great lore, mechanics, and such, but then utterly fail with play hooks that make it easy to understand what the players would be doing besides setting themepark tourism.

Are you talking about Planescape? Because this sounds much like Planescape.
Amazing world, but offers nothing to have adventures in it.

 

[Azuresun]

1: At least one clear reason in the setting for PC groups to form, and clear objectives for them to pursue once they do form. There are a lot of RPG's that kind of forget to do this! Scion springs to mind, where I read the books and thought "This is cool, what the hell do I do with it?"

2: Adversaries who can challenge the PC's, but are not genre-savvy and entrenched in the setting to the point where they become unassailable. There are a lot of settings where the authors get a bit too carried away with writing their villains, and forget to provide any way by which a small band of quirky, individually powerful adventurers could plausibly be a threat to them, and forget that any "bad guy" nation or culture is also probably going to be ridden with corruption, political infighting and inefficiency. In the Demon: The Fallen RPG, the Earthbound are an example of how to do this well--they have much more raw power than the PC, but also outstanding weaknesses (they're immobile, and heavily dependant on their cultists to enact their will in the world).

3: Factions. Eberron and Fading Suns are two of my favourite settings, and both of them feature a large number of factions. And for almost all of those factions, it's entirely plausible that I could come up with both a hero and villain from it--two different Avestite characters could be a zealous bigot out to burn the impure, and a beacon of pure faith standing strong against the dark forces that wish to obliterate humankind.

4: There are things that need fixing, but the setting is not doomed. That's an important distinction. For example, Warhammer 40K is a very dark setting overall, but the PC's can still win meaningful victories on a smaller scale. Wraith: The Oblivion tips too far into the "Why bother?" side for me, when Oblivion has infinite soldiers and resources and nearly everyone on the not-Oblivion side is a raging jackass at best. And Blue Rose leans a little too far in the other direction, where there's a scarcity of villains and most of them are clustered up together in the designated Bad Guy Land.

5: More importantly than getting a census of the world, I want to know what it's like to live there. The 5e Eberron book did this magnificently, to the point where I consider it the best incarnation of the setting so far. Things like rolling to see how a random village has been scarred by the war, or to see what sort of intrigue or zany scheme my gnome character is tangled up in are more useful to setting the tone of a place than pages of dry statistics. I like how the Wildemount book included adventure hooks for each location. And in another setting book I read, I really liked how they provided generic types of characters that you might meet in a certain location--characters like "Ill-Mannered Old Money", "Braggart Mercenary", "Worldly Priest". And so on.

6: Make non-humans feel non-human. This is a bit of a pet peeve of mine--dwarves and elves should not feel mundane. They should be getting different reactions from a human and have some way that they don't quite think or act like humans do.

7: No metaplot.

 

[Aldarc]

Are you talking about Planescape? Because this sounds much like Planescape.
Amazing world, but offers nothing to have adventures in it.

Honestly I was foremost thinking of a non-D&D setting - Tekumel: Empire of the Petal Throne - but I can see how Planescape could apply.

 

[Shiroiken]

The primary thing a setting book needs is to explain the style of the world, which helps players and DMs decide if it's what they're looking for. It also helps differentiate it between similar settings (Greyhawk as sword & sorcery, Realms as heroic fantasy, Dragonlance as epic fantasy) and to promote any unique twist (Dark Sun's defiling, Eberron's steampunk, Ravnica's megacity). WotC current setup seems good, balancing character options, DM options, and lore, and while I personally I prefer more DM content and lore than character options, that doesn't sell books.

The book needs to strike a balance between utility and inspiration. The Living Greyhawk Gazetteer is a wonderfully detailed encyclopedia of the Greyhawk setting... that reads exactly like an encyclopedia. Conversely, the original boxed set was filled with all kinds of inspiration for the DM, but was lacking in a lot of detail. It's presumed that the latter was done on purpose to allow DMs to fill in as they see fit, but this isn't useful to a lot of DMs. An overly detailed world, as the Realms had become by the end of 3E, also limits the DM in how much leeway they have in making adventures and locations.