Best-Written Campaign Setting?

[Mordar]

Here's a list of the ones I found particularly engaging - does that mean "best written"? I suppose if the intent was to engage me, then yes!

• Shadowrun (as many have mentioned) coupled with Earthdawn (spoiler alert?);
• Original World of Darkness including the 2nd edition VtM and WtA;
• Deadlands.

I didn't include these others that I really liked that are based off other established properties because it is hard for me to separate the game side from the established fiction side:

• Call of C'thulhu;
• Stormbringer;
• Middle Earth Role Playing.

In a special category are L5R, Mutant Chronicles, WHFRP and the Dark Millennium stuff - I think that might be slightly backwards (was WHFRP contemporaneous with WHFB?) for one...but these were settings that engaged me as CCG and wargames first, and then RPGs. And yes, I know Mutant Chronicles isn't particularly well written from objective points of view...but it successfully engaged my interest.

Eldan: Yes, by the way, the L5R CCG did influence the RPG, sometimes in meta-ways (winning CCG-based events or special fanbase engagement events got you the opportunity to influence/insert things in the RPG books).

- M

[Quertus]

when I do get to play characters I find myself putting as much work and research into their backstories as I would an entire campaign arc.

Then I try to do that kind of thing in, say, Pathfinder. Ok, my character was enslaved and sold to a Cheliax noble.

Who?

I dunno. Unless I were to pore over the various adventure paths, there's, like, two or three named ones, ever.

Fine, guess I'll pick this guy, who exists only to be executed for treason in a later adventure path. Fine.

Then I'm liberated by a resistance group.

Which?

Even though the sourcebook says there's a lot of them, the only one they ever go into any detail about is the Silver Ravens, which is on the exact opposite side of the country from me. Guess I'll just make one up then.

And it goes on, me just making up these things a lot.

This is the big reason why my characters are "not from around here". I do the world-building to have settings; it doesn't feel like a chore (for me) to answer all those questions.

OTOH, "doing research" is pretty antithetical to my being.

Think about it: I could do all this work, and end up with a small piece of someone else's setting, that I'll likely never use again, or more richness to my own setting(s), that I'll use forever.

Also, everything i learn through boring research is something that I cannot have the joy of learning for the first time in character.

Lastly, if the GM has a rich world with things to learn, and (for simplicity) say that I learn 1 in 20 of them to make a character. It should be very little difference for the GM to show me 20 vs 19.

So, if the GM has the skills to let a character Explore the world, it's about the same for the GM¹, more fun for me as a player, and more valuable to me as a GM, Wins all around!

¹ a little more work at times, but balanced by characters who experience Wonder at the Mundane. Most GMs IME appreciate getting more out of the same content, and those with their own custom settings should, IMO, appreciate the setting being viewed with fresh eyes. YMMV.

[Telok]

So, if the GM has the skills to let a character Explore the world, it's about the same for the GM¹, more fun for me as a player, fresh eyes.

Big if. Big big if. As a GM its something I try to do. As a player... I've had maybe two GMs in 30 years capable of it, sometimes, maybe 75% of the time at best. Good when it happens tho.

[farothel]

To clarify, I know it's an RPG too, I'm just not sure if the card game tournaments influenced the RPG setting.

Yes, they did. Our current L5R GM used to judge L5R card tournaments years ago, and at the end depending on who won, they could choose something for their clan from a large list of items (if I recall correctly). And all those tournaments all over the world then made the RPG setting.

In fact, at one point they had made a typo on some of the cards, having some with Horiuchi instead of Iuchi, so they made that a small Unicorn family just to keep the card game and RPG consistent.

[Azuresun]

Then we'll just have to agree to disagree then. I've had enough "feature not bug" talk thrown at me for a lifetime.

Sorry, didn't mean to come across as picking a fight. I do like both settings (and I love the tools Exalted laid out in 1e to make your own corner of the setting), and I can understand why someone might like Exalted more.

[Quertus]

Big if. Big big if. As a GM its something I try to do. As a player... I've had maybe two GMs in 30 years capable of it, sometimes, maybe 75% of the time at best. Good when it happens tho.

Ah, sadness. I was hoping that my experiences in that regard were atypical. Thanks for reminding me to appreciate what GMs do well.

[TalonOfAnathrax]

One campaign setting I found really good was Eclipse Phase. It's an absolutely crazy setting in which basic, fundamental realities of real-life society are thrown out the window, and yet the writers did an excellent job of making it feel real and understandable. The adventures and short stories really help, too.
I used to read the splatbooks just for the lore and place descriptions. It was always creative without feeling impossible to play in.
Second Edition > First Edition, if only because the rules better match the setting now.

[Yora]

I am coming around more and more to the idea that a good campaign setting primarily has to serve a function as the stage and context of a campaign, rather than being rich in content and style in itself. Too many settings seem to want to be fiction in themselves first, with the aspect of being a tool for GMs often being forgotten in the process.
You can always heap on more and more creative details, but the practical considerations of running adventures must come first if it is supposed to be a campaign setting.

[Actana]

I am coming around more and more to the idea that a good campaign setting primarily has to serve a function as the stage and context of a campaign, rather than being rich in content and style in itself. Too many settings seem to want to be fiction in themselves first, with the aspect of being a tool for GMs often being forgotten in the process.
You can always heap on more and more creative details, but the practical considerations of running adventures must come first if it is supposed to be a campaign setting.

Agreed, and this is why my nominee for best written campaign setting is, surprisingly I guess, the Neverwinter Campaign Setting for D&D 4e. It's a very low key book that doesn't get mentioned often, but it presents a very good campaign setting full of thematic character choices, plotlines and inspiration. It doesn't give all the answers and leaves enough blanks for a GM to do their own thing, and is primarily made to be an adventure location. It's limited in scope (only levels 1-10) and knows what it's doing, and does a fantastic job at interconnecting several plotlines so you can run the setting several times and still have different hooks to go through.

[Azuresun]

I am coming around more and more to the idea that a good campaign setting primarily has to serve a function as the stage and context of a campaign, rather than being rich in content and style in itself. Too many settings seem to want to be fiction in themselves first, with the aspect of being a tool for GMs often being forgotten in the process.
You can always heap on more and more creative details, but the practical considerations of running adventures must come first if it is supposed to be a campaign setting.

Definitely. There's quite a few that make me thing "well, this would be a good novel, but no idea what sort of game I'd run here".

I think a good yardstick is to look at the antagonists of the setting--a common mistake is that authors get too invested in them, and make them too entrenched, self-aware and powerful to ever be defeated by those uppity player characters. It comes across as the authors slapping themselves on the back about the fact that they read the Evil Overlord list, while forgetting the the entire point of setting up bad guys in the first place is so that PC's can beat them.

[Milodiah]

Honestly for the most part I could give a rat's ass about the BBEGs of most of these settings, except for their impact on the world around them. I pretty much never intend for my players to be going after any particular major villain at the start of my games, because I know that unless I TELL them that's what they should be doing they're almost guaranteed to pick something else. And why should I tell them what to do? Its their game, I'm just running it.

And besides, it feels counterproductive to focus so much on creating something that's designed to be targeted for destruction. You're building in a set-in-stone climax for your campaign arc, which feels strange to me. Unless you do the stereotypical "I lied this is the New Evil-er Evil Guy That Was In Charge The Whole Time" trope, there's not going to be much that's as big to the players. You'll be sorting out the aftermath, I guess, which is interesting to me personally, but its hardly Adventuring with a capital A which is the "norm".

But I guess thats just a matter of personal preference. I've never been one to consider a campaign as something to be "completed", then everyone says "wow what fun time for the next one". To me it's something to be enjoyed until people desire something else.

[Psyren]

The more I read Ravenloft the more I get into it. You can do all kinds of horror tropes there, from bog-standard Castlevania gothic horror in Barovia, to Lovecraftian cosmic horror in Bluetspur, to the Mummy in Har'Akir, evil circus in The Carnival, zombie apocalypse in Falkovnia, Frankensteiny/flesh-stitiching in Lamordia, slasher/predator horror in Valachan, murder mysteries and many more. Best of all, the Mists/Powers can just suck in a party from anywhere, so you have a ready excuse for just dropping the players there out of nowhere.

[Azuresun]

Honestly for the most part I could give a rat's ass about the BBEGs of most of these settings, except for their impact on the world around them. I pretty much never intend for my players to be going after any particular major villain at the start of my games, because I know that unless I TELL them that's what they should be doing they're almost guaranteed to pick something else. And why should I tell them what to do? Its their game, I'm just running it.

And besides, it feels counterproductive to focus so much on creating something that's designed to be targeted for destruction. You're building in a set-in-stone climax for your campaign arc, which feels strange to me. Unless you do the stereotypical "I lied this is the New Evil-er Evil Guy That Was In Charge The Whole Time" trope, there's not going to be much that's as big to the players. You'll be sorting out the aftermath, I guess, which is interesting to me personally, but its hardly Adventuring with a capital A which is the "norm".

But I guess thats just a matter of personal preference. I've never been one to consider a campaign as something to be "completed", then everyone says "wow what fun time for the next one". To me it's something to be enjoyed until people desire something else.

It's not just about directly beating them up, but it is a good tell-tale of what the designers see the role of the PC's in the setting being.

Aberrant is a good example of how to do this badly. The big hitters of the setting are designed to be out of the grasp of anything a PC could do to them, including one whose power is almost literally "you lose times infinity" and a notorious module where if you try and intervene in a fight between bootleg Superman and Dr Manhattan, they just automatically just flick you out of the way.

They are designed that way because they are there to keep the story on track to where the metaplot says it has to go, no matter if the PC's want it to go somewhere else. Do you want to prevent the brewing war? Expose corruption in the big superhero organisation? Ascend to being the number one supervillain? The assumed mode of play is that you can't, because these people are gatekeeping it and they have bigger numbers than you'll ever get.

Of course, this can be ignored for any given campaign, but it's still very telling about designer intent. It's a setting that fights against the PC's being the coolest people in the story.

By contrast, I think Demon: The Fallen does it really well. The Earthbound are tremendously powerful adversaries, but they also have very clear limits that PC's can exploit so that they don't get squashed right out of the gate--they can't physically move, they need the worship from their cults to keep them active.

[Quertus]

Definitely. There's quite a few that make me thing "well, this would be a good novel, but no idea what sort of game I'd run here".

I usually have trouble with the opposite: “this is a cool setting, but I already know exactly what one game anyone would ever run here.”

they are there to keep the story on track to where the metaplot says it has to go, no matter if the PC's want it to go somewhere else.

It's a setting that fights against the PC's being the coolest people in the story.

Yeah, looks like you get (a different version of) what I’m talking about.

[Vahnavoi]

Re: metaplot:

Mos of the issues with metaplot come from approaching the whole thing from a publisher to consumer paradigm, where the game designer makes whatever and the end user buys it as a complete product, with little to no feedback from the actual games played being given to the publisher.

To make it work, the paradigm needs to be closer to programmer to beta tester (etc.), where the designer is getting constantly getting feedback from actual play of the end users. Because this set-up doesn't scale all that well without help from communication technology, the most succesful large scale examples exist in the realm of videogames. On a smaller scale, such as a convention campaign or live-action roleplay meant to include dozens to a few hundred people, it can and has been done.

One of the simpler ways you can do this, which I've implemented on tabletop and various Dark Souls-type videogames I observe to have also implemented, is to allow players to leave in-character messages to future players of the same module, adventure or campaign. Some Lamentations of the Flame Princess modules, such as redone Death Frost Doom and Book of Antitheses, have a framework set up for this, in the vein of multiple worlds theory mused about by Quertus. F.ex. of one group of players draws a map of a location, the next group can use it. In a linear time campaign, of course, you can also allow for actions of one group to leave a mark in the campaign world - so the next group will find some doors broken, some treasure looted, maybe drawings on the wall, dead bodies of unlucky player characters etc.. If you have another game master doing the same thing with the same module, you can occasionally exchange notes.

[Mordar]

The more I read Ravenloft the more I get into it. You can do all kinds of horror tropes there, from bog-standard Castlevania gothic horror in Barovia, to Lovecraftian cosmic horror in Bluetspur, to the Mummy in Har'Akir, evil circus in The Carnival, zombie apocalypse in Falkovnia, Frankensteiny/flesh-stitiching in Lamordia, slasher/predator horror in Valachan, murder mysteries and many more. Best of all, the Mists/Powers can just suck in a party from anywhere, so you have a ready excuse for just dropping the players there out of nowhere.

I wasn't a Dark Sun fan (more by timing and lack of exposure - have no basis for opinion on it), but I was really a Ravenloft fan from the very beginning. Bought Ravenloft material even when there wasn't a twinge of interest in playing (A)D&D anymore simply because of the enjoyable imaginative experiences I had, and the non-game fun of reading the material. In my opinion, a very clever way of accommodating exactly what you lay out above...don't have to worry about integrating these different sub-genres of horror, don't have to worry about consistency issues...just make good use of the available bridges and off you go.

- M

[Psyren]

I wasn't a Dark Sun fan (more by timing and lack of exposure - have no basis for opinion on it), but I was really a Ravenloft fan from the very beginning. Bought Ravenloft material even when there wasn't a twinge of interest in playing (A)D&D anymore simply because of the enjoyable imaginative experiences I had, and the non-game fun of reading the material. In my opinion, a very clever way of accommodating exactly what you lay out above...don't have to worry about integrating these different sub-genres of horror, don't have to worry about consistency issues...just make good use of the available bridges and off you go.

- M

Hilariously, you can do Dark Sun in Ravenloft too Hazlan is more or less a miniature Athas, seasoned with some Dune spice and a few teaspoons of Thay, Anauroch and Cyre.

[Lord Torath]

And Kalidnay was officially a domain in Ravenloft that originated on Athas. The sorcerer king and high templar swapped genders somewhere in canon there, but it's still official.

[adso]

For me, Eberron is the setting where the mechanics of D&D seemed to have actually informed the structure of the world and so the characters seem to fit into the world better than in most other settings. Plus the lack of uber-powerful good NPCs help make what the players do actually important at all levels of play, which players tend to appreciate. With 5e obviously the setting has needed to adapt the mechanics similar to other settings, but it's still less of a stark contrast than you'll find elsewhere. Plus, the level of content and depth that is available with the published books and Keith Baker's blog/podcast are very impressive. I pretty much don't run games outside of Eberron anymore and don't really intend to do so in the near future; almost any story I want to tell fits into Eberron at least as well as it would elsewhere.

[thorr-kan]

<SNIP!>...almost any story I want to tell fits into Eberron at least as well as it would elsewhere.

That's an excellent observation: the type of game you enjoy informs the setting(s) that pique your interest.

[Psyren]

That's how I feel about Golarion - I can do pretty much any subgenre or recreation there, from high fantasy to science fantasy to horror fantasy to pulp to mystery etc.

[The Glyphstone]

The vitrolic responses that Numeria and its sci-fi Sufficiently Advanced Technology always seems to provoke baffles me a little in that regard. Literally anything else in the massive kitchen sink that is Golarion is mostly tolerated, but not robots.

[Psyren]

I mean, you can do science fantasy without Numeria if that place is objectionable. Instead of robots and aliens, you can do utopian genetics with Hermea, mutants and guns with Alkenstar/The Mana Wastes, or even go to other planets in Golarion's solar system like Castrovel via the Elfgates / Starstone if a spaceship feels out of place.

Hell, you could warp a PF party into Starfinder (or at least Starfinder's setting) without too much work.

[LibraryOgre]

Shadowrun, especially 1e and 2e, were excellently written, with the first parts of books being primarily in-universe posts, with online comments (and comments from the moderators about how they cleaned up a bunch of garbage replies, etc.). There were characters there, with personalities and backstories. It was some gorgeous work, a lot of which carried over to Earthdawn, by the same company (where the comments were marginalia, instead of online comments, as befit the setting).

For D&D? Dark Sun was such a lovely, evocative, desolation. While it got tagged with a lot of Mad Max post-apocalypticism, it was really more Barsoomian... a world of ancient empires, crumbled to dust and fighting over scraps.

Some honorable mentions?

Fading Suns.
Legend of the Five Rings was a pastiche Asian setting, but the very brilliance of the Merchant's Guide to Rokugan gets it a nod.
Dragonlance SAGA system... not the AD&D stuff, but the card-based system that came after. The system was largely crap, but it was some great writing.
Kingdoms of Kalamar can be a bit spare, but they put their research in to the physical geography.

[oxybe]

I think Psyren hit why I love both Ravenloft and Eberron:

In practice, they're wonderful theme parks you can get lost in. The former being steeped in a more gothic and brooding horror while the second a buffet of close-ish locales for set-piece adventures fit for Big Darn Heroes.

Also, Ravenloft has some of the best written soucebooks of ADnD IMO. The 8 Van Richten Guides (or the 3 compilation books which are the 8+an unreleased one) of old are the gold standard for monster ecology books, imo. I always keep going back to them for light reading.

[Chronic]

For 5e, there is Odyssey of the dragon lords, a Greek themed setting and campaign that blow out of the water anything official.

For futuristic genre, it's infinity Rpg (a modiphius 2d20 game) that does it. It's based on a tabletop wargame of some renown and the setting was first invented when the founder played pen and paper rpg. It's a realistic and futuristic setting, not utopian and not grim dark either. The fact that it makes sense on a societal, economic and political level while still having many cool futuristic tropes makes it great. You have resurrection altered carbon style, an AI that is working in symbiosis with mankind, 4 meters high armored suits, transhumanism and post humanism and fairly recently: aliens. It's a setting where open war is fairly rare (war in space is very expensive) so most of the warfare is made by elite soldiers equipped with top of the line gear engaged in border skirmishes, industrial espionage and plots to destabilize the opponents in one way or another.

[Asmotherion]

I love the detail of Eberron.

[Archpaladin Zousha]

I've been a big fan of Midnight for a long time now. It's a 3rd Edition D&D setting from Fantasy Flight where the forces of darkness won and dominate the world, with the PCs as some of the last, flickering candles of light waging guerilla war against the minions of Izrador.

I especially like how it reimagined a bunch of fantasy ancestries; having multiple kinds of dwarves, elves, halflings, etc. who could intermingle with each other instead of exclusively with humans (in fact, humans can't have kids with anyone but humans, but dwarves can have kids with gnomes and orcs and elves can have kids with halflings)! It's clear the writers put a lot of thought into the details in it, it's positively dripping with mood, and I really, REALLY wish it'd be revived for 5e or something.

[KorvinStarmast]

Thieves' World: Sanctuary (Robert Asprin, Lynn Abbey, et al) gets a nod from me as a setting I'd like to see more of.
(I read all of the books and the spin offs as they came out).
Unfortunately, while the setting book for 2e is still on my shelf, I seriously doubt that I'll ever have the time to figure out how to morph it into 5e.

[Jarawara]

Thieves' World: Sanctuary (Robert Asprin, Lynn Abbey, et al) gets a nod from me as a setting I'd like to see more of.
(I read all of the books and the spin offs as they came out).
Unfortunately, while the setting book for 2e is still on my shelf, I seriously doubt that I'll ever have the time to figure out how to morph it into 5e.

I agree. Thieves' World has a good, well developed setting, but plenty of room to expand in any direction.

I never got all of the books, and as far as I can tell, no bookseller knows how many there actually are. Korvin, could you list off the whole collection? I have the first 12-ish books of the main series, but I remember seeing a book titled Thieves' World 17, so there must be more.