What IS a Campaign Setting, Anyway?

There’s always been some point of distinction between rules and campaign setting in RPGs. It’s rarely completely separated; sure, there’s GURPS and its ilk, and they will in theory let you run a game in any setting with the same rules, but I’ve never really felt comfortable with those. I like the concept that the character sheet is like a dashboard, and it has buttons and levers on it, and those buttons and levers when activated do a thing, and that thing sets the tone for what happens in the game.

So if your character sheet is mostly numeric combat options, then the natural tendency is toward a combat-heavy game. If it centres the information-gathering skills and abilities of the character, then those are the things that get used. If the stuff there is textual, like aspects in Fate, then you tend automatically toward a wordy, discursive game. So far, so good, and all of that is setting neutral. But when the combat options are “Sword of Lightning +2” and “Whip of Thievery”, that’s a different game from “Chernokov Laser” and “Hacker Glove”. If the skills include “Arcana” and “Religion”, that’s very different from “Current Affairs” and “Tradecraft”. And so on.

But let’s leave that aside, and assume we’re playing a fantasy game, and lets say it’s D&D because that’s easy. What material do you need to have before you (the player) are playing in the Forgotten Realms? What material does the GM need for that? My current argument is that the player doesn’t really need anything; they can turn up to the table with a level one fighter or rogue and pretty much go straight in. Someone playing a cleric probably needs to know a bit about the gods in the setting (although honestly, in 5E the domains do so much of the heavy lifting that someone can turn up going “I’m playing a Life domain Cleric”, and not really be concerned much with the actual deity). Even wizards and druids can be pretty setting agnostic.

So how much does the GM need? I can’t run a game in the Forgotten Realms or Greyhawk, I feel, because I don’t know enough about the setting. I can run a Planescape game with very little material on hand, though, partly due to knowing the bits of that setting better, and partly due to it being more open. Spelljammer is even more so. And there’s an argument to be made that if you set your game somewhere slightly obscure in Faerun, namecheck Waterdeep as the nearest big city, say that Elminster passed through a few decades ago, and that there are issues with the Zhentarim - well, you’re not not playing in the Realms, right?

(It bears noting here that I once had a player turn up with a very detailed drow elf character, and I explained how drow worked in that campaign, being uncomfortable with the dark-skinned-matriarchal-therefore-evil stuff, and then discovered that he had listened to exactly zero of that and was intent on playing Drizzt Do’Urden with the serial numbers more muddied up than rubbed off. Sometimes the Realms are all someone knows.)

But there are still plenty of settings sold every day; books that contain the geography and history of the setting, as well as a bunch of species, subclasses, backgrounds, spells, magical items and monsters specific to that milieu. There are usually some illustrations, and almost always a map. How much of that is necessary?

To counter my own argument above, a game that uses only the most generic classes and is set in Nowhereville, Faerun, is going to be moderately dull. Alright, the Realms are very much generic fantasyland anyway, but there are things that belong there and few other places. The Spellfire sorcerer, the Purple Dragon knight fighter, and a few other details like that, plus the absolutely magic-soaked one-apocalypse-every-century-or-so nature of the place do give it a flavour. Crooked Moon, currently in a bit of a tussle with Planescape as to which of them gets the top billing as my favourite published setting, has loads of specific stuff like this. Think Ravenloft with a strong dose of Appalachian folklore, a bit of Over the Garden Wall, and maybe something of Seanan McGuire’s Wayward Children series about it. Planescape will eventually win, but I do commend Crooked Moon to your attention.

I’m currently in the process of putting together a couple of new settings, and thinking about a third. One I’m constructing with Nina for our own entertainment, and thus far it consists entirely of in-world documents of various kinds, with deliberately chosen influences from Robert Holdstock’s Mythago Wood, Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea, and Worlds Beyond Number’s Umora. Another, curently labelled “Riverlands”, is for a relatively casual sort of campaign which is a bit T. Kingfisher-y, and maybe a touch Studio Ghibli, and definitely has input from Crooked Moon. And the third, which I am trying to hold off on, because I do want player input, will be for the campaign after Heliomar, of which the only thing I know is that it’ll be multiplanar in a Planescape/Spelljammer/Amber/Moorcock’s Multiverse kind of way.

The image above is from Riverlands, and it’s how I’m doing all the out-of-session world-establishing stuff there. A lot of the enjoyment of that game is player discovery of the world, so I’m happier not not to have had a complete setting document to pass out to begin, and these diegetic scraps and pages are a fun way to help that along.

I do have a partially written document entitled “Utterbaum: The Campaign Setting”, although I need to get in and work on some of the mechanics there, and it’s probably better in some cases to wait until the campaign I’m running in it is over. Handing over a very specific warlock subclass to some of my best beta readers when that’s the big bad they’re dealing with seems like it’d take the wind out of the sails a bit. So far, the contents of that - and I mean the headlines, I’ve detailed precious few of these - include some subclasses (Storm Paladin, Library Wizards, Cultist Warlocks and Priests), a few backgrounds, a list of gods and their domains and attitudes, a few organisations, some history and geography of the setting, a few spells (some a bit overpowered, for reasons), and a bunch of monsters.

But the thing which is interesting me right now is that very little of that exists outside of my head - it’s not even roughed out in my notes, in an awful lot of cases - and yet the campaign is running, and has been for years, and the players can tell you about it in some detail. Clearly the written version is not necessary.

What details do you need in a campaign setting? What’s the minimum? What’s overkill?