D&D General Why did you pick your campaign setting?

[Li Shenron]

As a new DM in 3e, after getting the core books and the first wave of small splatbooks I wanted to add an actual fantasy setting book to my growing little D&D library, and I chose the Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting because I thought it was the most famous setting for which there was already a 3e version of.

 

[gamerprinter]

I create and run homebrews, but I publish the best ones - the Kaidan setting of Japanese Horror for Pathfinder, and now working on and releasing soon the first of an ongoing series of mini setting guides, one star system at a time for my Starfinder interstellar setting of Colonial Space.

 

[Brotton Goodfellow]

The Setting: Barrowmaze and the Duchy of Aerik
Why?: We tend to play beer and pretzel style as we only have 2 hrs of gaming each session, thus the focus is on action and adventure and less on character arcs and such. Having the classic home-base-with-a-dungeon-nearby setting allows me to pick up and play with very little prep. The other reason is I’m using rules that lower the power level of the game to make it more lethal (yes, I’m one of THOSE DM’s), and the Barrowmaze seemed like a gnarly dungeon crawl that fit the tone and feel of a deadlier style of play.

 

[wedgeski]

My friend was selling a load of Dragonlance material at a time when the prospect of deep-diving into a singular setting was very appealing, so I snapped it up and read the lot. When an opportunity came alone to start a game at uni, it became my setting of choice for a good couple of decades. These days I run homebrew against a pretty generic Forgotten Realms backdrop. The only thing I want out of a setting is maps, places, and a few factions to play with.

 

[Yora]

I pick homebrew because I think I can do a better job at making a setting that is exciting to play in as a group of tresure hunters, instead of being a backdrop for novels.

 

[glass]

Why did you pick the setting that you did for your campaign and how much affect does it have on the adventures you run there?

Of the two things I am currently running, the Sunless Citadel adventure path is in Greyhawk, because that is where it is written to be*, and because shifting things from setting to setting is not usually worth the hassle. The unQuiet Dead mini-campaign**, is in my homebrew world of Pelhorin, because that is a setting that I made myself to conform to my preferences so obviously I like it a lot.

EDIT: My recently finished run of Rise of the Runelords was in Golarion, because again that was where it was written to be set, and it is easier that way. Plus, I like the variety of using different settings even if Pelhorin will always be my favourite.

_
glass.

* Well, "default D&D" in th 3e era, which pretty much means Greyhawk.

** Which I wrote myself. Well, am writing....

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Since "I picked homebrew because that let me do it myself" is a bit lacking as far as useful answers go, I'll go a bit beyond that into, "Why did you choose the specific themes you did for your setting?"

So, to start out with, the absolute bedrock core of Jewel of the Desert is Al-Rakkah, known by the titular epithet (when one waxes poetic, anyway; it's not commonly used in everyday speech): a mid- to high-magic Arabian Nights/vaguely "sword and sandal" city. I chose an Arabian Nights theme because I wanted my players to intuitively feel like they HAD to ask questions, that they couldn't presume things work the way they would expect in a typical fantasy game. Normally, my go-to would be wuxia instead of Arabian Nights, but everyone I play the game with is a fellow Final Fantasy XIV player, and generally is pretty into Japanese RPGs, so that aesthetic runs the risk of having a little too much familiarity, a little too much presumed background knowledge. By framing it with Arabian Nights, and actually doing a moderate amount of research on Golden Age Islam, Al-Andalus, pre-Islamic Arabian mythology, etc., I have been able to cultivate a setting where everything feels just a little bit unfamiliar without feeling totally alien, which encourages the right mix of imagination and questioning.

The second core theme I wanted to pursue is the playstyle sometimes referred to as "Paladins & Princesses," or as a "bright" and "clean" fantasy. More accurately, brighter and cleaner, because there are absolutely dark and dirty things in this world, they just don't predominate here. The 4e setting refers to itself as "Points of Light," a world swathed in darkness with small, quavering bastions of the light of civilization and prosperity, under threat of being snuffed out for good, but not down for the count just yet. I didn't want things quite that problematic, but I still wanted a world where adventurers matter, where heroism actually has an impact, where the choice to be good and noble or ruthless and efficient has lasting consequences. As a result, I think of Jewel as being more chiaroscuro, rather than "points of light": it is an interplay between the bright and the dark, a stark contrast between sunlight and pitch-black shadow. Overall, it's a pretty bright world; slavery is socially unacceptable (the result of the civilization of the area having arisen by throwing off their former genie-rajah enslavers), sexism is fairly minimal (in part because the two main faiths of the region, the Safiqi Priesthood and the Kahina shaman/druid combo pack, are purely egalitarian when it comes to gender), literacy is high, and the city-states of the Tarrakhuna are in a period of peace and prosperity. But on the flipside, there's an assassin cult finally rising up from the shadows again to cause trouble; there's a black dragon trying to take a stranglehold on the city; there's a subversive Cthulhu-esque cult causing trouble; there are creepy eco-terrorist druids who want to become one with death. And if it weren't for heroes stopping them, these people could do VERY bad things to the world. Hence chiaroscuro, light and dark going head to head, with victory possible but never assured and never truly permanent.

The third theme I wanted (as alluded above) was somewhere my players could feel safe to be who they wanted to be, to explore the stories they want to explore. As a result, although dark things do exist, I have labored to include silver linings and other angles. I have worked very hard to ensure that, although there is very strong faith, even beings like celestials will straight-up say, "You have no way of knowing with absolute certainty whether these things are true, or not; you must decide for yourself where you put your faith." They do generally agree on various things, but perspectives are many and varied. Beyond this, though, I have worked to demonstrate that race has little if anything to do with alignment. A bandit is just as likely to be an elf or a human as they are to be an orc (quite common and well-integrated in this setting), and the party has met minotaur shopkeepers, ogre caravanserai masters, and a variety of other races in all sorts of social positions. (Some pure-evil races do exist, but it's only stuff like mindflayers.) Through both these "internal to the story" choices and other, "external" choices (like "characters don't permanently, irreversibly die unless the player and I agree that that's how the character's story should end") I have labored to give them a setting where they can be who and what they wish to be, without having to worry about whether they'll be made to feel bad about that. There are, of course, people who dislike, fear, or even hate them, but random bigotry etc. just doesn't happen.

Fourth and finally...I wanted a world that was fantastical and VERY actively embraced player involvement. At least 75% of the time, I'm on board for whatever my players want to do, no need to even sell me on it--the roll might be tough or might require a sequence of events or the like, but I'm there for it. And for almost all of the remainder, I just need to have them walk me through what they want or why they want it and I'll almost certainly either give it to them outright, or tweak it very slightly. In the very rare occasions I have to put my foot down about something, I do it as gently as possible and work to make up for it in some other way. As a result, I have cultivated a relationship with my players where they're willing to throw out ideas that come to them, and more importantly, talk with me about them, as opposed to keeping all those thoughts locked in their heads. We have gotten so much truly excellent content specifically because my players have spoken up about their ideas and have truly impressed me with their creativity in the doing. My players know that if they're excited about something, I want to be excited about it too, whatever it may be, and that has helped make this game really, truly delightful for all of us.

So, to TL;DR that, I chose the homebrew elements I did because:

1. Arabian Nights induced my players to actively ask questions and seek answers, rather than acting on presumed knowledge.
2. A chiaroscuro world has the right balance of "beautiful, bright things to protect" and "horrible, dark, destructive things that must be stopped."
3. I wanted to give my players a space where they could safely act out their fantasies while still having to grow and make tough choices.
4. I like high-fantasy, high-action stuff, and I am deeply committed to cultivating player enthusiasm.

 

[Hussar]

I think, for me, it's campaign first, setting second. So, depending on the campaign, I'll pick a setting that fits with that. Sometimes it's a direct sort of thing - my Candlekeep campaign is set in Forgotten Realms for example, or my Ghosts of Saltmarsh was set in Greyhawk - and sometimes it just kind of happens - my last campaign was nominally set in Nentir Vale because I reworked the 4e remake of Caves of Chaos as an introduction campaign for my new group. And, really, the campaign could have been set anywhere since it drew on whatever caught my fancy by the end of the campaign.

I have to admit, this new Spelljammer thing has really caught my eye. So, while I have been off and on again building a home-brew campaign, I might go that direction instead.

SO MANY CHOICES. I mean, just in 5e alone, I've used Primeval Thule, Greyhawk, Forgotten Realms, Nentir Vale (sort of). I also played in Dragonlance and Ravenloft. Damn I've really been making the rounds.

So, yeah, setting is usually dependent on the campaign. It's usually pick a campaign (whether design or buy) and then shop around for a setting that fits that or make something on my own.

 

[Shiroiken]

I started in Greyhawk, under the 80s Boxed Set. I looked into Dragonlance, but I felt just wasn't a great setting for an RPG (although I loved the novels). I played in the Forgotten Realms in college, but found the sheer volume of information to be overwhelming, as the novels were considered canon. Dabbled with the slew of 2E settings, but never found any that were as interesting to me as Greyhawk. The only WotC setting I've liked was Rokugan, but that's because I was already playing L5R, which was a better system for it.

 

[Bitbrain]

I spent three years of my childhood in southeast Turkey. 70 degrees Fahrenheit was unheard of (except at night after the sun went down), and the whole place was a desert where literally everything outdoors was this gray-brown color.

There was a prehistoric ruin just outside town that had been there since before recorded history. In town, there was marketplace where you could buy almost anything. Anything.

Dark Sun makes me feel like I’m back there again.