Favorite Campaign Settings


Gamer Life General Discussion

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Let's carry on the conversation from the other thread...

Grand Lodge

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Pathfinder Lost Omens, Rulebook Subscriber

With great relish!

Eberron is definitely a favorite of mine for a number of reasons. 1st, of course, is that it was the 1st setting I encountered that codified the idea of alignment ambiguity, where things like ancestry and even faith were disentangled from alignment.

Also, the settings’ original creator continues to write, clarify, and answer questions about the setting, so there’s new content even if there’s sadly no official support.

I also, like was mentioned in the other thread, adore the many possibilities for story exploration. What is it like to contend with being born to be used as a weapon and then have a war end, leaving you adrift? What is important in war, and how do we move past its traumas? What is the nature of faith?

And then there’s the moral grey of the dragonmarked houses, the political intrigue of places like Droaam and Breland. It’s just…ahhhhh, it’s good

Silver Crusade

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While obviously not for D&D, I think my favourite campaign setting is the 1920's or 1930's.

The world is sufficiently explored and known and familiar that the players pretty much know the basics immediately. The technology is both reasonably effective but still primitive enough that you can tell stories without having to worry about the internet, cell phones, etc etc.

There is a whole load of supporting material to either use unchanged or to use as inspiration. Both lots of modules and lots of rule systems.

It easily supports just about any campaign type you want to run. You can explore the world in darkest South America or Pacific Islands (well, as long as you don't care about TOO much historical accuracy :-)), you can have political campaigns of all kinds with stakes large or small, you can run Supers (low or high powered), realistic, pulp, horror, SciFi campaigns and more.

With fairly little work just about any modern campaign can be adjusted for the 20's or 30's (I ran a Buffy campaign, for example). There is a whole HECK of a lot of supporting material available (maps, guidebooks, etc etc).

Second favourite is probably Victorian age. Many of the advantages of the above (somewhat reduced since travel times make a truly world spanning campaign difficult) plus you get to play with the social mores and customs.

RPG Superstar 2012 Top 32

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I have a love/hate relationship with Eberron and Faerun, while Golarion is... tolerable, but certainly not my favorite.

Faerun: This is the first campaign setting I encountered, and really, via R.A. Salvatore, the first fantasy setting I really immersed myself in when I was in middle school (while I read the Tolkien books earlier, they were too dense to appeal in the same way, and I was too young to fully 'get' them). So for me, this is where everything began. It was huge, it had tons of magic, and plenty of neat things to do!

Yet the more I played in it, the more things ended up... weird or disappointing to me. It was a bit of a letdown when I found information about Halruaa, and the treatment of the 'new world' was incredibly uncomfortable, as I've got a decent portion of native blood, and look it. I think I like the deities more (in general terms) than in other settings, but what happened during the transition to D&D 4e kind of soured me on it permanently. Eilistraee in particular, but the whole spellplague soured me on things, coupled with some dramatic shifts in lore. I still love it as it was for the most part.

Eberron: First, I need to note that I'm going off the 3rd edition (3.5? I don't remember.) D&D version of the setting, not anything more recent. I love the magitech in the setting, the idea of the dragonmarks, and the manifest zones. There is so much rich detail in the setting, and it's incredibly impressive to me. Oh, there's some things I don't like about it. I don't care for the moral ambiguity some people like, or how indistinct the deities are. The warforged and the Last War... eh, I can deal with it, but I'm not fond of it. I like the idea of sentient constructs, but the general same-ness of their appearances and the fact that they're supposed to not be built anymore (yet there are somehow still 1st level warforged around) bugs me. I'm not as fond of the portrayal of the drow in the setting, but they can definitely be neat. So many things to mine in the setting.

All that being said, I just... don't really play in either of them anymore. I've run a few APs in Golarion, but it's too much of a kitchen sink for me to really enjoy. Add to that the fact I'm an author with my own settings, and it really screws with things. Which is why I've started dipping my toes into commissioning freelancers to create PF2e material for one of those settings to see if it's something I want to do more with.

That's my view on things. Alas, never had much to do with Grayhawk or the older campaign settings, so I don't know much about them. Midnight intrigued me, but more in a 'I can't pull my gaze away from this slow-moving train wreck' sort of way.

Dark Archive

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Zakhara / Al-Qadim, always gonna be my number one. I just loved it. Kara-Tur was second place, for settings inspired by real-world cultures.

The Scarred Lands / Sharn, from White Wolf, would be my favorite non-WotC setting. It was just so amazing, with some focus for just about every core class and race, rather than some just sort of being in the rule book and then never mentioned in the setting (including an entire country populated mostly by half-orcs, descended from other half-orcs, without the usual 'unfortunate implications').

Freeport, from Green Ronin, was more of a 'mini-setting,' since it was all set for the most part in and around the city itself, and didn't spend much time on the distant nations, but man, it was a *richly* detailed city and we had many fun games in it!

I'm not gonna count Golarion, 'cause it's a given. I'm not on the Zakhara or Scarred Lands forums, now, am I? :)


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I'm a sucker for thick lore books, so I'm down for almost any setting for that reason alone. As all of my gaming right now is PF APs, Golarion is where I currently vibe. My true home is urban gothic fantasy, though.


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Golarion has become my #1 setting.

But before that - Dragonlance. How I loved Dragonlance! I was able to GM both the original Chronicles modules, homebrew updated to 3.5, as well as the Chaos War modules.

I had an ambitious thought experiment of designing a Taladas campaign using the Pathfinder 2e ruleset, and even started drafting a homebrew campaign sourcebook, but I get hung up on trying to draft awesome-yet-balanced ancestries. That part is a lot more work in PF2e than any prior editions.

Long live the Lance!


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I’ll write a reply later, but for now I just want to ask that this get moved out of the Paizo Discussion forum.


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Starfinder, Pathfinder, Ravenloft, Shadowrun, Eberron, and Dragonlance.

Dark Archive

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Pathfinder Starfinder Roleplaying Game Subscriber

Numenera and various Cypher system settings ;P Eclipse Phase setting in theory at least, I've never gotten to play the system since heard its bad, Cthulhutech setting was interesting until I learned of the creepy weird "Is this someone's fetish or writers being edgy" details, Shadowrun setting is nice. Deadlands has nice ideas to it, but bit turned off by "writer's favorite characters"(TM)

Golarion is definitely my favorite RPG setting though because I think its best example of RPG setting written as RPG setting for Tabletop RPGs and not novels or such :D

(Numenera is very much greatest Weird fiction setting though. But yeah I'm mostly here to bring up that there is greater variance of settings than the D&D sphere, happy someone else did also mention shadowrun though)


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Creation for Exalted

Grand Lodge

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Pathfinder Adventure, Rulebook Subscriber

I don't really have a favorite setting. Probably whichever setting I am playing in at the time. Before it was Greyhawk, now it's Golarion. I like Eberron just fine and would enjoy playing in some of the other settings I've read about.


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CorvusMask wrote:

Numenera and various Cypher system settings ;P Eclipse Phase setting in theory at least, I've never gotten to play the system since heard its bad, Cthulhutech setting was interesting until I learned of the creepy weird "Is this someone's fetish or writers being edgy" details, Shadowrun setting is nice. Deadlands has nice ideas to it, but bit turned off by "writer's favorite characters"(TM)

Golarion is definitely my favorite RPG setting though because I think its best example of RPG setting written as RPG setting for Tabletop RPGs and not novels or such :D

(Numenera is very much greatest Weird fiction setting though. But yeah I'm mostly here to bring up that there is greater variance of settings than the D&D sphere, happy someone else did also mention shadowrun though)

Eclipse Phase 1e was a bit rough but their 2e and the Fate edition are both solid, on top of a really cool setting.

RPG Superstar 2012 Top 32

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Oh wow, I'd almost forgotten about Cthulhutech. Such a weird setting. I think I still have the rulebook PDFs around somewhere...

I do like some aspects of the setting for Anima: Beyond Fantasy, but it was a bit too monolithic for me to really get into. Well, that and the combat system was too hard for my group (or me) to deal with properly. I'd love to convert it into a d20 system sometime... started on that ages ago, but petered out.


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Forgotten Realms, Darksun, Eberron, Dragonlance, Ravenloft (how could I almost forget you!) and Greyhawk all have their own reasons for being great IMO. Hard to name A favorite. (I have nothing against Golarion, I mean I play PF).

Grand Lodge

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Pathfinder Adventure, Rulebook Subscriber

Midgard looks good from the initial setting book I picked up. Oh, and I do love Karthun's worldbuilding.

Grand Lodge

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I have never really found a specific campaign setting to be better or worse than others. My experience has almost always been directly tied to the quality of the GMing and the players I'm engaged with. As long as the GM is invested in the campaign they are running, it should be a good experience. I have never read about a setting and thought, "that sucks. I'll never play that."

If my life depended on it and I had to name one I would probably say Golarion (specifically org play) because I met my SigO while participating in it. Course the setting has nothing to do with it other than to create the, well, "setting" for us to meet. :-)

From strictly a game standpoint, Greyhawk would be my favorite. Its the one I played in the longest and carries the most nostalgia.

The Exchange

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I partly blame Paizo for Golarion not to be higher on my "most favorite settings" list. Back then, when they published Age of Worms, I fell so in love with the Forgotten Realms and Eberron Conversion Appendices written by Eric L. Boyd and Keith Baker, that adapting adventures to other settings has become a favorite pastime of mine.

So whenever I read a new Paizo adventure, my mind goes from "Oh, this is great" immediately to "hm, where to put it in Eberron/Faerûn."

I also steal freely from the Pathfinder regional sourcebooks because they are shockfull of cool ideas, that can be used to expand on the lore from those other settings.

Of course, that involves a lot of rewriting and -painting, but that's part of the fun.

Sovereign Court Director of Community

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Moved thread from Paizo-General Discussion to Gamer Life-General Discussion

Liberty's Edge

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It wasn't a formal published setting but for me the all-time best experience I ever had running Pathfinder was when I mocked out and spent way too much time on building and running a game in the Avatar world/setting after Occult Adventures was released.

The game only ran for I think five or six sessions but it was SUPER rewarding, easy to lean into, and it helped all of the players get a feel for the game and the setting by the pure nature that we had all watched through the whole of the two shows and some even digested the comics that were released at that point. Instead of having to practically assign my players a reading list to get them caught up on the world they are playing in they were pretty much ready right away and things fell into place without needing to coach the players on the world or lore.

It took a good bit of work and I set the game during the time when Kyoshi was just an infant so that I had plenty of space and lore the play around with that wouldn't heavily impact or taint the lore and story of the show itself. Very fun to play in and I'm looking forward to seeing what Magpie puts out for Avatar Legends RPG.


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I'm a big setting girl; I truly love soaking up a big established world, and did so a ton as a kid especially. ADHD and autism are a potent combo when they align on getting way, way too into something.

Forgotten Realms was my gateway drug, and while I got a taste of the 'classic' Realms from some old novels I got my hands on, I didn't get into the RPG side of things until right after 4e hit. The Spellplague is one of the most divisive fictional decisions I've ever seen... but I ate it up. The classic assumptions of D&D were already stale genre conventions, having been done endlessly in books and videogames I'd burned through; this was instead of a world of flying islands, mutation-causing blue fire, and dragon-people from an another planet. There's a lot of good fantasy settings out there, but for me? I don't know that another world has jumped out and begged "Explore me! Save me! We need heroes!" quite so well. Nothing has felt quite as fresh since, and I miss it every day.

The 4e Neverwinter Campaign Setting takes my vote for the best book WotC's ever released.

I got sucked into Eberron once that setting released for 4e, and immediately jumped into the backlog of (incredible!) 3.5 resources; I'm still here over a decade later, and we're lucky enough to be in a new golden age thanks to Keith Baker pouring out awesome new stuff on the DM's Guild for his setting constantly. D&D meets pulp fiction and hardboiled noir? An attempt the see what D&D's magic would actually do to a world? Throwing racial alignment out the window and telling us that goblins and gnolls can be heroes, too? Brilliant decision after brilliant decision. I chafe a little at the obvious blind spot a lot of the writing has for colonialism, but it's broadly a masterpiece of setting design.

Golarion I only really came to with the advent of 2e, drawn in by the sound of a more inclusive take on genre classics. Much of Avistan does very little for me, and I'm not all that hooked by the deities, but the joy of a world that actually explores analogues to cultures outside the European fold, or explicitly has queer folks in it. I'm here for more stuff like the Mwangi book, and am waiting desperately for as much Arcadia content as they feel like giving us. I've never lived outside of the American Southwest, and so exploring fantasy that draws on the amazing history and peoples of the region I'm lucky enough to call home has a real appeal. Lost Omens: Fallen Razatlan is what I want most.

Honorary spot goes out to Dark Sun, for being vaguely Bronze Age in a real cool way, having strange player options, and actually making a killer vehicle for stories about stopping slavers and despoilers of the environment! The 4e book is, yet again, one I think got slept on; the timeline reboot was sorely needed, the new races fit well, and Themes are a super smart mechanical move.


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TriOmegaZero wrote:
Midgard looks good from the initial setting book I picked up.

Midgard is my favorite. I moved there from PF1e once the 5e version released. But I would love it if KP statted up both Tomes of Beasts and the Creature Codex in PF2e!


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With the exception of a one-shot module here and there, I've never played in a published campaign setting since I started gaming in 1985. I started out as a player in a homebrew world and I just continued doing that. That's not to say I don't cherry-pick from this setting or that world, because I do. The published settings I WISH I could have played in are Al-Qadim and Birthright for AD&D 2e and the ancient Egyptian-based Hamunaptra for D&D 3e or 3.5.

Non-D&D "official" settings I've played in and loved are Boot Hill and Gamma World (from the same era as AD&D 1e). I got to play a little in the original TORG game, but not much and I enjoyed it, too.


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Oh, I should probably insert a shameless plug: I wrote Blessed of The Traveler, a DM's Guild mini-supplement about transgender characters and culture in the Eberron setting - and enough folks liked it to make it a Gold Best-Seller. It was inspired by a really lovely series of emails I had on the subject with Keith Baker, who's a real stand-up dude.


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keftiu wrote:
Oh, I should probably insert a shameless plug: I wrote Blessed of The Traveler, a DM's Guild mini-supplement about transgender characters and culture in the Eberron setting - and enough folks liked it to make it a Gold Best-Seller. It was inspired by a really lovely series of emails I had on the subject with Keith Baker, who's a real stand-up dude.

That is tre cool.


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1) Forgotten Realms. I joined it early in 1E. The Grey Box? Muah-a masterpiece. A world with Celtic isles, merchant kingdoms, small dales, evil fortresses, and savage wildernesses! Still enjoyed it into 2E, but in 3E it got a bit stale.

2) Planescape. The art and the dialect made this happen. Don't argue with me about it, you sodding sod ;)

3) Scarred Lands. My actual 1st setting in 3E because I got the Creature Collection right before the Monster Manual came out. I got to play around with a few of those critters before retiring as a GM. The cultures were many and varied, though I admit, I did get tired of how dark it seemed at times for the divine races.

4) Eberron. Not a fan of all of it, but the politics of the Five Nations always intrigued me. Jungle drow and halflings on dinosaurs? Yup.

5) Rifts Earth. Yes, the game system needs...something substantial. But the thought put into the development of a post-apocalyptic world? Staggering. Tentacled monsters that look like Cthlulu's siblings in Atlantis, skull-emblazoned troops wandering North America with anthropomorphic dogs, demons, power armor with rail guns...incredibly varied, well considered on many levels.


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Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Superscriber

1. My home setting. I worked on it for 30 years, tinkering endlessly. A moody setting inspired by the real world late Roman Empire (Byzantium, to you heathens) and mixed bag of Tolkien, Moorcock and Zelazny. My last visit there was at least a decade back.

2. Golarion. I've played all my Pathfinder games in Golarion. Good depth of lore.

3. The Third Imperium and The New Era - implied settings for the Traveller game.

4. Greyhawk - It's where I started back at the dawn of the RPG age. It exudes OD&D charm and fresh wonder.

5. Amber - I miss my old Amber DRPG days. Some of the best role-playing I ever encountered.

6. Earth - It's where I keep all my stuff.


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I've been in a PbP campaign since 2006 using Monte Cook's "Ptolus: City by the Spire" campaign setting. The setting's primary focus is on one city and the mega-dungeon beneath it, but we've played just as much in other lands outside of that city, filling in the details of those areas as we go along. We have a wiki and everything.


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Golarion, baby. I love Golarion. Even the more generic genre send-up places are great - I looooove Ustalav. I care deeply for a good number of the deities, who I consider interesting examinations of various topics and just like. Cool in general.

Dragon Empire: 13th Age's core setting. A broad strokes generic setting a la Nentir Vale with some defined features, but meant to be expanded by players. My first game played was in there, and it's a delight even just from what's written in the books. Nice and simple.

Lancer's setting: yeah baby we love a communist utopia with weird Destiny-style science-magic stuff


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CorvusMask wrote:
(Numenera is very much greatest Weird fiction setting though. But yeah I'm mostly here to bring up that there is greater variance of settings than the D&D sphere, happy someone else did also mention shadowrun though)

I bought the rule books and a number of adventures from a Humble Bundle a few years back, and from what I've read, I love the setting. I hope to get a chance to run or play in a Numenera game some day. Or any Cypher system game.


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Greyhawk was my go-to for years, even into 3x D&D. I have made several settings over the decades; all have been shameless homages to GH. Currently though, I'm getting very fond of FGG's Lost Lands setting. There is something to be said for settings that are tens of thousands of years old, with suggestions that some of the system's more powerful high-level magic has been around for a millennium or more, yet such magic is STILL treated as a mysterious rarity in such settings.

For non-fantasy stuff, I tend to gravitate to what I know. Every Marvel SH or V&V game I've ever run has been set in 1980's - 1990's Chicago. All of my WoD games go there too. My Cyberpunk 2013 and 2020 games were in a hyper-cyber, Bladerunner-inspired version of Chicago. Heck, the couple of CoC games I ran in college were set in Chicago, circa the 1930's.

Thing is... nearly every one of those non-fantasy games in Chicago also features details, cameos or some other reference to 80's and 90's Marvel comics. For Cyberpunk games, for example, I had an entire corp assault team of NPCs based on the classic Claremont X-Men; Nighcrawler, Rogue, Colossus and Wolverine were pretty easy to dupe most of their powers with tech or body mods; Cyclops was tougher but I modified some laser weapons from supplement books; Shadowcat was just a Netrunner whose powers appeared in the virtual. Storm was always pretty tough, so I basically just used de-powered Storm instead.

There were also X-Men references in my WoD games, there was a reference to Dr Erskine in my CoC games, and the Supers games I ran were pretty obvious


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Funny enough when I first entered the world of RPGs through D&D as the gateway we had no setting,

Once the initial group we began reading the novels then we began playing in specific background.

The first setting we played in was the Fogotten realms. The combination of high magic and at the time of 1E box vast areas to explore, play and run was a godsend for a beginner DM. Some of it lost its shine when in later editions every area was explored and the prevalence of high level NPCs was annoying.

Dragonlance was my second. I liked and still like the initial six novels even if Dragons of a Summef Flames ruined the series. I like the Solmanic Orders and three schools of magic.

Eberron

I had written off and it was a mistake on my part as instead of reading the book listened to other rather negative opinions of Forgotten Realms. Too many high level npcs. Eberron is better because it is grim and gritty etc. I never understood the first as a major negative. It is great that the setting has lower level NPCs yet what happens when the party gets High level. Artificer is my favourite class

Midgard looking for a copy of the Pathfinder version of it and willing to trade two extra hardcover core pathfinders books. Looks good though never read or played it.

The Exchange

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Particular Jones wrote:
It is great that the setting has lower level NPCs yet what happens when the party gets High level. Artificer is my favourite class

That Eberron (at least in the original setting book) seemed a better fit for lower-level characters was, in fact, one of the major early appeals for me. I've never been fond of high-level play too much, because it changes the style of the game in a direction I don't care for. I don't want to play super-heroes, and Eberron initially did a great job focussing on the lower-level experience.

This said, I think there's a lot of higher level stuff to work with, and later books often expanded in that territory, so it's not as if you had to stop at level 10.

Midgard has been great for me, because it just came out at a time I was thinking about creating my own homebrew steeped in the myths and fairy tales of middle-european folklore. Also, Empire of the Ghouls.


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Just about everything other than Forgotten Realms, which I hate due to its inescapability/hunger for worlds that are proving more popular than it at the moment(looking at you Al Qadim). Love Dark Sun and Spelljammer and Ravenloft(prefer 3.x to 2nd though) and Dragonlance(my first novel world) and Taladas and so on and so forth.


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The Empire of Gjouls is a great addition. I liked riding up on them in the various monster manuals for 5E from Kobold Press. For me it’s the many non-standard races like Kobolds and Gear forged which are included as playable races. Other backgrounds including Golsrion they fell added on with no rhyme or reason and just as anothercPC option and the production values of the books are top notch imo. Too bad they switched over almost exclusively to 5E support.


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Dark Sun and Planescape are my favorites. Ravenloft is pretty close behind.

The problem I have with a lot of older settings is that they often felt really small. Even with different planes of existence, you'd have a single defining feature. That is what I appreciate about Golarion as a setting. The diversity of places makes it feel a lot bigger.


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Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Superscriber
Andostre wrote:
I've been in a PbP campaign since 2006 using Monte Cook's "Ptolus: City by the Spire" campaign setting. The setting's primary focus is on one city and the mega-dungeon beneath it, but we've played just as much in other lands outside of that city, filling in the details of those areas as we go along. We have a wiki and everything.

Second the mention of Ptolus. Not only am I GMing a Ptolus game on these boards, but I've been a fan of Monte Cook's work for decades.


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I should also mention; last year, I played a very long session of Microscope (a game about building out the timeline of a world) in order to build a setting for a Beam Saber campaign one of our group was looking to run. We wound up with an entire corner of the galaxy defined, and I decided to write up a planet within as a Beam Saber setting for fun.

Fast forward to now and I ran that campaign, as well as one-shots elsewhere in the timeline of Scum & Villainy and Armour Astir: Advent, while two other campaigns and several one-shots I had nothing to do with have taken off in other corners of the world. Things very rarely interact, but we're all working with the same broad factions, cultures, and technologies, which has made things feel real and substantial.

Cannot recommend Microscope enough!


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I forgot about Ptolus. Never got to read it much but loved the comic.


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Pathfinder Rulebook Subscriber

I’ll second Exalted’s Creation setting. I loved its first edition version and it’s grown more intricate and much more massive since then.

I’ll also acknowledge I’ve spent a LOT of time playing in a galaxy far, far away.


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Aventuria (from a German RPG): Which I really got my first years of gaming with (despite at that time speaking little German).

Also still forgotten realms and Birthright because of the fond memories.

GM mainly in a home made setting the last years, which takes inspiration from (some parts of) Golarion, 17th century Europe, and a smattering of other sources.


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Rifts hate the rules. Love the setting very Gonzo in its kitchen sink approach. Before I began to dislike the rules the second rpg I played the most in D&D.


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I grew up playing in Greyhawk campaigns and fell in love with Dragonlance through the novels. Love all things Krynn and I think that fan conversions to PF1E did much to bring the world to a really playable setting. Love the Orders of High Sorcery and the Holy Orders of the Stars, but love the setting all around.

I appreciate Ravenloft since the setting came out when I was in high school and I was reading much vampire literature at the time.

Never been a fan of the Realms. I played in a year long Spelljammer campaign based on 5E rules that had to be so homebrewed as to almost not be Spelljammer.

I like Eberron as well, I had fun playing a kalashatar soul knife/telepath in 3.5.

I appreciate Golarion for what it is, lots of diversity. Most of the gods are meh in my opinion though I do like Ragathiel, Calistria and their take on Asmodeus.


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I also really like Star Wars Saga!

Radiant Oath

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Eberron is the setting I love.

I like the gods of Greyhawk, especially Vecna. I've imported many of them into my homebrew setting, because I don't care for anything else about Greyhawk.

Golarion is a great setting, too.

I only played Planescape: torment, and read the setting book. I loved Torment, but I don't know how I'd feel about a campaign set there that wasn't tied to the nameless one's story.


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keftiu wrote:
I should also mention; last year, I played a very long session of Microscope (a game about building out the timeline of a world) in order to build a setting for a Beam Saber campaign one of our group was looking to run.

This sounds similar to the Dawn of Worlds game, which is a turn-based world-based game activity. I've often thought about how it would be to create a world from scratch like this and then play in it.

Do you have players who were not involved in the creation of your Microscope game? If so, do you think their play experience is different than a player who was involved in the campaign creation?


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In the past few years, I've become enamored with and fascinated by anti-canon settings. These are published settings with an overall look-and-feel, with proper names and locations. However, most of the specific details of the setting and its locations are deliberately muddy and are for the players and GM to define through play. A common way to flesh them out is for the author to provide a number of random rumor tables, many of which are not consistent with each other, and to let the players and GM decide for themselves what is true for their game.

For me right now, my favorite settings all use the anti-canon principle"

The Ultraviolet Grasslands by Luka Rejec. UVG is a weird science-fantasy setting that owes a whole lot to Heavy Metal magazine and the visual designs of artists like Moebius and Roger Dean. As presented, the core book, The Ultraviolet Grasslands and the Black City is an OSR psychedelic heavy-metal point-crawl setting.

"Old Kalduhr" for the Trophy role-playing game by Jesse Ross. The setting is still mostly implied from the various adventures ("incursions") that have been published for the game, and it's getting the full treatment via the soon-to-be released sourcebook Trophy Loom. (I'll also note that Trophy happens to be my favorite RPG at the moment.)

Electric Bastionland by Cris McDowell. A setting for the Into the Odd neo-OSR RPG, this book presents a sprawling pseudo-Victorian megacity through the lens of those so downtrodden by society that their only hope to escape abject poverty is by becoming adventurers.

All three of these settings paint their worlds in broad strokes, and use various generation tables to set the specific details... which become canon for your specific table when you discover how things work through play.


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I like the meta-genre settings of "Apocalypse World" and "Monster of the Week". They aren't a specific place but they all feel like a distillation of several places with some genre-specific coats of paint.


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Andostre wrote:
keftiu wrote:
I should also mention; last year, I played a very long session of Microscope (a game about building out the timeline of a world) in order to build a setting for a Beam Saber campaign one of our group was looking to run.

This sounds similar to the Dawn of Worlds game, which is a turn-based world-based game activity. I've often thought about how it would be to create a world from scratch like this and then play in it.

Do you have players who were not involved in the creation of your Microscope game? If so, do you think their play experience is different than a player who was involved in the campaign creation?

One of my friends was not in the Microscope game at all, was in my entire campaign, and is now running her own campaign in our setting. She’s doing just fine, I think!

It doesn’t hurt that we document things well, and maintain an internal wiki.


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Saedar wrote:
I like the meta-genre settings of "Apocalypse World" and "Monster of the Week". They aren't a specific place but they all feel like a distillation of several places with some genre-specific coats of paint.

Have you read Dream Askew? It’s sort of a successor to Apocalypse World - being a psychic maelstrom-wracked world of punk weirdos who often wear fetish gear - but is diceless and GMless, and narrows its focus to building a queer community together and telling the stories of its people. It’s really, really amazing.

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