Wild, Wild Post-Apocalyptic Arcadia: Building the Perfect D&D Setting

[Trask]

I think I share your idea of what a fun d&d setting is like, but I think that a lot of what you describe happens in adventures and not the setting. Almost any tolkienesque, gygaxian, medieval fantasy setting can facilitate points of light adventure as long as the adventures and characters are framed to play out as such. As described, most fantasy settings are have ridiculously sparse populations and settlements anyways (seriously, look at a map of the sword coast. Its about as big as New England with less than a dozen actual settlements on the map, its practically a wilderness).

Personally I think setting is largely optional anyways, to capture that feel you're better off creating adventures with that feel and leaving everything else vague ("the kingdom" is over those hills...). But if you want to actually put effort into making a setting that feels like a place where "d&d happens" in my opinion its best to make a loose, relatively stable, backdrop for adventure with lots of vagueness and gaps so you can inject whatever you want into it later. The platonic ideal of this kind of thing is Conan's Hyborian Age, its a continent filled with an ahistorical mishmash of cultures and environments with vague details (Aquilonia (NotFrance) and Nemedia (NotGermany) are the two great rivals, the Picts are stirring on the border, Zamora's king is dominated by an evil sorcerer) and just make D&D happen inbetween these things, just like how Conan regularly gets into all kinds of crazy nonsense without ever caring what Zingara's political structure is like. Zingara is just a place to have dusty frontier adventures in fantasy Iberia and then catch a ship to sail off to the Barachan isles and be a swashbuckling pirate boarding Greek triremes from Argos.

Think of it this way, what would the Wild West be without the context of it being the American frontier? Without knowing it borders Mexico with its vaqueros, or being filled with ex-confederate officers in exile, Apache raiders, Chinese railroad workers, and the iconic cowboy driving cattle for the hungry markets of California and the Midwest? Its something we maybe dont think about, but it makes the largely mythical idea of the Wild West feel real to us. A suitable D&D-land should work in a similar way, just simplified and calibrated for the needs of the game.