D&D General What makes a setting

[Voadam]

Often a smaller scale sourcebook on a specific nation/kingdom/city will be called a setting sourcebook. So Al-Qadim could be its own setting or part of the greater FR setting. Sometimes these are not connected to any specific world at all such as Ondine Publishing's Parsantium City at the Crossroads and often these can be fairly plug and play into a different campaign setting world. Some setting stuff is canonically in multiple worlds. Take Freeport, it is in its own Green Ronin World, but the pirate city is also found as part of Goodman Games' Known Realms, Misfit Studio's Spiros Blaak, Second World Simulation's Second World Sourcebook, and others as the original adventure was 100% open under the OGL.

 

[embee]

For me, setting is a holistic approach. It's not just the where. Dark Sun is the prime example. It's D&D, yes, but damn is it different. Far less magic, additional weapons mechanics, a different bestiary, and a dependence on psionics. Which makes it a different setting.

Eberron is another example. It has that pulp noir aesthetic. That's its hook. It isn't Faerun.

You could even possibly argue that Pathfinder/Golarion, being a fork, is a setting. Yes the mechanics are wildly different when comparing to 5e. But it's still recognizable.

 

[Remathilis]

For me, its enough of a backdrop to tell a story. It needs:

• Some urban area to act as a base for PCs
• Enough rural area to adventure
• A list of common races and monsters
• Local deities or faiths
• Guilds, organizations, or other power groups
• Local legends, history, and rumors
• A map is generally preferred.

So, something like Keep on the Borderlands isn't quite a campaign setting, but it's a good start. Karameikos is a more complete, and a setting like Greyhawk is a good example of a complete setting. Obviously, Forgotten Realms and Eberron are very detailed, but even Theros or Ravnica still checks the boxes for a setting. Heck, even Barovia from CoS has enough info to be a barebones campaign setting.

 

[toucanbuzz]

Does the 'setting' in a world sense, that a DM tell you about make you want to play or not play more?

Setting is (now) the unique terrain "hook" for your adventure (e.g. Underdark demon lords, adventures on the high seas, jungle, icy wilderness, vampire stalker in alternate dimension), all set in a generic fantasy world with every option available.

Personally, I'm an old-school gamer, but over the last 20+ years of DMing, I think only 1 gamer has avidly read books connected to my setting and had a passion to play that world. The rest: they just want a good storyline and it doesn't matter where we go.

My Historical Take: I get the feeling Wizards, and competitors like Paizo, have taken lessons from the '80s and '90s heyday of TSR when players were discovering D&D for the first time. After a decade or so, when players got bored with the "same old stuff," TSR introduced a slew of highly-detailed, awesome gaming worlds in boxed sets complete with maps, new rules, spells, NPCs, and hundreds of pages of background: Planescape, Spelljammer, Dark Sun, to name a few. Great for players, some amazing stuff. But, TSR went bankrupt (for a variety of reasons, but pushing extreme volume of product was one). And, they split the gaming market. If you were playing Dark Sun, you likely weren't buying the latest Spelljammer product.

So, the lesson they felt was to have a generic, endless world, that could accommodate all your cool terrain hooks. Like Paizo, every adventure takes place on their generic world (e.g. desert mummies, a nation that makes pacts with devils from the hells, an icy Baba Yaga setting, and so on.) WOTC seems content with a few pages to get you through Ravenloft and the Underdark. I'm not a fan of this, but I think they're banking on the slew of new players having no idea what that is, thus not needing those boxed sets, and old-school gamers either already having the material or getting it off DM Guild. If you want to tweak it (e.g. have a Celtic pantheon or restrict available races/options), that's an easy fix. No boxed sets needed.

Summary: the game world may not matter anymore to players who don't have a clue what the difference is between Greyhawk and Mystara. Rather, setting is about going to a cool, new place, that we haven't seen before in prior adventures, and this can be done on a generic gaming world.

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

A cool feel, unique individuality, opportunities for the characters to do what they want while also being emerged in the setting, as well as lore/npcs/magic-items to interact with.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

A "setting" is a bit like "art"; we all agree that some things are examples, and some things aren't examples, but giving a hard-and-fast distinction is going to fail in both directions (false negatives and false positives). As a rough pattern, however, a "setting" will generally have some sense of place, theme, and history (or context, for things like really hardcore sandboxy campaigns).

Place can be anything from a multiverse down to a single village or school. The most common is a "region," which generally means something smaller than an entire continent but larger than a single city's practical reach (in terms of guards, army, taxation, etc.) or a single biome's reasonable size. Often, "place" also brings with it cosmology, explaining stuff like why there are devils and demons, or where souls go when they die (if this is known).

Theme has enormous variation, as one might expect. Dark and gritty. Noir intrigue. Fallen civilizations. Fantasy supers. Digging up ruins of the past. Etc. This is where most of the "flavor" of the setting can be found. Planescape, for example, has a theoretical place of "the whole multiverse" but is pretty thoroughly centered on Sigil as its place...and yet the punky aesthetics, the funny Sigil cant, the especially strong intermingling of planar forces, that's entirely Theme in nature.

History/context is the backdrop stuff, the immediate recent events, the climate around which things occur. So, for example, "metaplot" Dark Sun has a different history/context than 4e Dark Sun, because certain events from the Prism Pentad have not occurred in the latter but have in the former. If people reject a particular setting element introduced after a big setting is established, that's an example of preferring one history over another. While this part can theoretically be as open-ended as Theme can, in practice it's constrained by the previous two things because this is where you ensure that adventuring in this place, with this theme, actually makes sense.

But, as noted, there can be some real exceptions. A super-ultra "beer and pretzels" game may have no real theme beyond "diving into murderholes for phat lewtz," may have no well-defined "place" because the DM randomly generated all of the surrounding hexes and never put much effort into defining the starting location, and may have little more context than "you're a group of murderhobos taking jobs and exploring around, there's probably a king somewhere out there and some religion, but who really cares." I think such incredibly no-investment gaming is unlikely to remain stable in the long run, if only because individual characters will start becoming presences or parts of the history/context, and place was a key component of a lot of early hexcrawl play (that's literally what establishing your ruled-plot-of-land was for!), but an argument can definitely be made that this kind of game defies my classifications.

 

[Imaculata]

I use a homebrew world as the setting of my campaign, but only a small region of the world is actually used; a collection of islands called the Emerald Coast. While the rest of the world is referenced often during play, I try to keep the campaign within the confines of the region at all times. Both I consider the setting: The world and the region.

 

[Lanefan]

Personally, I kinda define "setting" as including anywhere the PCs might go, or see, or learn about during the course of the campaign.

Which means the setting not only includes the world they're on and all the astronomical features they can see from it, it includes any other worlds or planes they might visit or hear about and in some cases might also include other times if time travel is a thing in the campaign.

Now of course most of this isn't going to be greatly detailed until-unless needed; but that doesn't mean it's not out there waiting.

 

[Hriston]

A game’s setting is comprised of things described by the game’s participants about a fictional gameworld including such elements as time-period, specific locations and cultures, historical events, and characters.

 

[Blue]

A setting is as big or small as it is.

If you excise all mentions of elsewhere, Icewind Dale can be a setting. If you have NPCs and political machinations and such from elsewhere, those elsewheres are part of your setting to some degree. The cosmopology could be part of your setting - for example in Balder's Gate: Descent to Avernus you have parts of FR, you explicitly have Avernus, and you implicitly have other planes such as where the devils and celestials come from.

Ptolus was a city/underground that was a whole setting, though it could be played as part of a larger setting.