You have two sentences to give your best description of your DnD campaign setting. What are they?

You have two sentences to give your best description of your DnD campaign setting. What are they?

Good god and bad god fought over the world. Good god died and got most of the mortals to love it while bad god got knocked out after the fight.

The Academy of ... Higher Arcane Learning is where folks who can't afford private schooling go to learn how to be highly irresponsible with the forces of magic.

It's really fucking cold. Go find out why it's so fucking cold.

Wizards did everything wrong, blasted the whole world to a dusty, sandy, swampy hole. Everyone's an imperialist; so let's be pirates.

Necromancers abused Gate spells and tore the world apart. Order god and his construct followers rebuilt it; sending prisoners to investigate ruins and close remaining Gates.

Generic world but got broken in fucking pieces floating in astral so hard it now has 500 flavors of subversions and reconstructions

I'm not running D&D right now, but I'll throw in the setting my group's rocking these days:
Take Cowboy Bebop-like, "John Woo Space Opera" setting and add in the lightest bit of classic myths and folklore that pretty much nobody in the setting believes in if they aren't 'practitioners'. FTL travel is used by punching through 'subspace,' which is literally the fae realm of dreams and madness.

So basically, Hellboy in space.

One destroyed starting town later we learn the bugbear's and orc's gods teamed-up. Selune herself has tasked us with being bad enough dudes to stop this shit despite being vastly outgunned.

I've got a few:
>Elvish nationalists are making the countryside go to shit. Thieves' guilds are making the cities go to shit.

>The hobgoblins are back, and boy are they pissed that their empire was toppled. Undead hordes, ogreish knights, orcish kidnappers, kobold military juntas, shady merchants, and rapacious fae plague the world elsewhere.

>Time is falling apart and neither the bureaucrats nor the scholars are doing anything about it. If that wasn't bad enough, the elementalists are listening to trance music in the street at 3 AM again.

>There are too many guilds, unions, and orders to count, and they all keep stepping on each others' toes. Pick a faction.

A long time ago a wizard fucked up an entire island continent. Now people live there

Trapped in a maze city. Escape or ascend, your choice.

It's Forgotten Realms. But we were too cheap for the Sword Coast book so it's not.

I've got repeater muskets, iron-scarred orcs, bronze plate armour, leyships and sacrophysics. But it is mostly medieval fantasy if you want.

A system of offices to provide work others don't want to or can't take care of to mercenaries has caused the city state societies that have them to thrive. The gods don't really care much, except a few, and one cares too much about the world and caused a cataclysm because it wasn't fitting their design anymore.

You thought you were in the wild west but you're really in Horizon Zero Dawn.

Not DnD but... it takes place in a strangereal esque modern fantasy world where the east is filled with roided out monsters and great resources and there's a sort of huge gold rush heading towards the east to get in on those sweet resource rich places. The massive upheaval of frontiersmen causes a lot of destabilization, mercenaries are common and border skirmishes occur a lot, anything far enough east is entirely unowned land, so there's periods where towns and other communities are the law of the land. Bandits run wild out there along with the aforementioned monsters. Far enough west there's lots of racism as western humans don't take kindly to all the non-humans stemming from being assblasted about losing a war about 700 years ago, despite the fact they essentially got to keep all their winnings anyways. But the world is slowly turning into a better place as things calm down and the eastern people accept each other regardless of race.

I realize I was too retarded to read "two sentences" whoops, that's my fault.

Basically, what if you had Chrono Trigger, but if instead of time, it was a world layered like Russian nesting dolls. Then you either have high-fantasy adventure in weird and alien environments, or fantasy wars in political climates ranging from 'fucked up' to 'Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together'.

I'm down for something like that, sounds sweet.

Loosely interpreted Forgotten Realms is the best Forgotten Realms anyway.

>sacrophysics
I'm scared and not sure I want to know.

Why is this limited to d&d? D&d will always feel like d&d no matter what you do to it, and as a result has limited worldbuilding potential.

When magic wanes, civilisation is pushed back into fortified, coastal cities.
But when rumors of powerful relics sequestered in ruins spread to the cities, an adventuring rush starts.

>I'm scared and not sure I want to know.
That's a first to me. What's scary about the term? Could you share your impressions?

>Sacrophysics
>Only search results I get are Veeky Forums threads

Now I'm curious.

Any system is welcome here, friend. D&D is short for TTRPG. Sort of like how Kleenex is short of Tissue Paper.

>Only search results I get are Veeky Forums threads
Only shared about it here.

>Now I'm curious.
It is how I call the universal laws in my homebrew, but they have to do with gods as much as gravity, and how love and hate are integral for Creation to exist. Reposting what I typed in a "how to justify Underdark?" thread:

1/2

Prana is the primordial element from which all others are made. It is also know as life-force or soulstuff, because souls are self-contained and organized acumulations of prana. Any and all sentient beings have souls*, while animals have proto-souls. Having a soul in the first place demands that something has its own name, making it distinct enough that it may acquire spiritual links with other soul-possessing beings. Such links are called "ley lines", happening whenever one develops feelings of any kind upon something**. Prana flows through ley lines***.

The planet in question qualifies. Known as Ghara by most of its inhabitants, all of which either developed strong feelings upon it. Fondness of one's homeland, hating a war-torn kingdom, wishing to conquer your neighbors' lands, all this makes a ley line ultimately connected to the planet itself. The daily routine of one billion soul-possessing mortals sustains Ghara's Soul, which is further strengthened by being worshipped as a earth-goddess/father-god/Land Spirit by most of them.

Gravity is not an effect of mass, but of prana. Ghara's Soul is the greater concentration of prana other than the Sun. Its cosmic purpose is to make itself suitable for the living of soul-bearing creatures. Its own survival also depends on having souls linked to it.

That's why gravity is uniform throughout the crust: more living space to eventually house soul-bearing beings. Dwarfs are the most common example of this."

2/2
That's why certain asteroids and small planetary bodies have a gravity far greater than their mass, while some desert and dead planets have a pull as weak as the moon and are currently slowly disintegrating.

Theoretically, a nameless and unfeeling being could be free of gravity, but its metaphysical make-up would be so distorted as to make it dangerous. Ghosts such as the death cloud are posited by some scholars as proof of this.

*Except for demons and devils; their cosmical existence is parasitic, feeding upon the prana of existence. They favor souls because those are a concentration of refined prana, but some demons are known to engage in grand-scale draining of prana from the environment itself. Wastes such as the Unquiet Lands are places which never recovered from their invasion 500 years ago.

**This phenomena is also responsible for generating new prana which the ley web conducts into the stars, where it is refined and partially transformed into the other elements. Sunlight is refined prana.

***A soul can be thought of as a single ley line formed into a dense knot, whose arrangement is so unique as to codify the memories, personality and even physical characteristics of the corresponding being. It also takes the place of DNA and is called Pranic Holonogram, or PHG.

There's more stuff, but that enough text unless someone is actually interested.

Dwarves fuck up and make ultron. While a unrelated disease spreads

A vampire got cucked by his brother. Now he seeks to escape the friendzone

The entire plane is the personal playground of an immensely powerful black dragon. A thousand years ago his ex-wife Tiamat locked him out and broke the lock so he can't get back in.

Isn't that just Curse of Strahd?

Dick ass snow elves vs. diverse ethnic groups of humans. Elves want everything to be frozen over, humans would rather they not.

Curse of Strahd is utter shit. Go play any other Ravenloft adventure before it and see the sheer fucking difference in Strahd's presentation.

A fairly generic fantasy realm with an ancient evil soon to be awakened. It's just an ancient senile lich that will be fucking everything up for petty reasons.

The Illuminati is fighting over pieces of the life god's soul while her husband chases after them with a really big baseball bat. Meanwhile the peasants argue about nationalism and steal each others coffee beans.

the creator races kicked eachothers asses, then not!sauron kicked everyones ass, then the eternal heros kicked his ass and became gods, then their followers kicked eachothers ass, then a wizard kicked spaces ass and a bunch of hippy elves stormed through a gate and kicked everyones ass.

now elves are running amok, the dwarves have locked themselves in their holds, the nation states of not europe are panicing and some asshole found a piece of saurons not!ring and started releasing daemons to again kick everyones ass, in the midst of all this a solar comes to the logical conclusion that the world is now worse than hell and the only way to save the mortals is to MURDER THEM ALL.

the only upshot to this is that the PC's could physically not make my current world worse than their previous iterations already did, holy shit last campaign was a mess.

Welcome to the dungeon. There are no dragons here; they just won't fit.

"What if the world map was wrong? There must be SOMETHING across the ocean..."

Ancient humans are waiting underground for a ritual to be completed. When everything is over they will start fucking shit up.

Elves lost the big war awhile back, current human king was born years after war ended. Previously elf king is now using bad bad magic that's corrupting the whole country and kingboy is freaking out

The heroes have removed the tyrants, their servants and the country's infrastructure. Here's your mop and bucket, get cleaning.

Circus entertainers and workers try to out wit the health inspector paladin order. A civil war is started between the circus after the ringleader and half the workers turn out to be cultists.

THE MOON IS FALLING! FIGHT WITH GIANT ROBOTS!

The surface world got fucked up by evil magic clouds. now try and stop dickish sky empires messing with your only cloud-breaking surface city (or don't)

OH SHIT. The Derpening.

A brutal, primitive, sword-and-sorcery expanse of fantastic cities, sprawling wastes, deep forests, and impossible landscapes. Intended for exciting, less-than-serious, "He-Man"-inspired adventures, the land's greatest myth concerns the reliquaries of a legendary child sorcerer whose wild magic shaped the continent—reliquaries which all suddenly vanished at once from their guarded shrines.

Dragon captured the princess and locked her in his tower. Monsters protect it.

Turns out that simple premises are great for roleplaying. Never had this much fun before.

RIVAL BOY-BANDS.

ON A CRUSADE TO THE HOLY LAND.

It's like if elves, knights and wizards had the tech and aesthetics of the mythical Wild West. The Empire is a bastion of light and civilization in a post-apocalyptic hellhole of supernatural monsters and lost technology.

Please explain

Sun is heating up the world. Human nations fight over food.

I would like to know more

I like these. Could you elaborate, please, anons?

As generic as I could make it. Created to affectionately lampoon fantasy worlds as a whole.

I'm inclined not to take you seriously because your unprompted triggered-ass reaction to the currently most commonly-used title for a remake of the early Ravenloft adventures that people are currently used to.

Or could it be that you just hate 5e?

...

>AAAA nuuuuuuuuu CHeeekiii Breeekiiiiiiiiiiii

Very generic and simple. More playable than Forgotten Realms.
Points of Light is far from spectacular,
but I prefer low-level campaigns to multiversal kitchen sinks.

It has no style. It has no grace.

Elves stirring up magical trouble enough to piss off the big boy human kingdoms and start a war against them. Elves lose and get exiled to fantasy arctic where they stir up more magical trouble and prompt the first human expeditions to arcticland.

It's exactly what it sounds like. The PCs are performers on the tournament circuit - bards, cavaliers, a wizard who specializes in 'special effects' - who were constantly trying to one-up their rivals. Their rivals told their groupies that their next gig would be in the Holy Land, in the capital city currently held by an undead tyrant.

The problem is that the Holy Land is an insanely hostile place. Fortunately, thousands of fans were already flocking there in anticipation. When the PCs brought the church and their Paladins into the fray, it was less 'planning a new gig' and more 'invading the fuck out of the place'.

So there are actually two armies (or two crusades) headed for the undead tyrant's city, each one supporting their respective band, looking to get there first.

It's not D&D, but here goes:

In a world on the brink of war, a half-giant pirate Captain and a fur trader with a spiritually linked bear companion try to eke out a living on the great frontier. The march of industrialization and civilization push tensions between the old world and the new to precarious heights, making life complicated and messy.

No, he's right. There's a lot of changes. For instance, Strahd's bisexual in Curse of Strahd, something that has never come up before. He has a male bride, when the entire focus of his existence is trying to charm this one woman.

Give me something quantifiable, that isn't on the SJW tokenism checklist that can be removed by not drinking Kool-Aid.

Redwall meets pirates of the Caribbean in Not!Australia. Damn nature you scary.

Civilisations are falling as colossal monsters that fell from the sky fight among themselves. Also, the Stars are Gods and they hate you.

Party gets ported from crapsack grimdark world to Cheery Acres land. Hardened adventurers know more about villainy than the bad guys and enjoy the vacation.

Was hoping someone would get it

A big evil dragon is coming to destroy the world. What do you mean "Skyrim"?

I mean, you could just customize Strahd to your liking, right?

For my game, Strahd looks less like a stereotypical vampire and more of a Polish noble. People in barovia just think of a goth bloodsucker because he has a simulacrum running around to keep the legend alive while he looks for Irena incognito.

World at the brink of industrialization is heading to an inevitable World war, and by extension the sixth apocalypse. The world is dying and literally falling apart as a result of the dead flooding the underworld.

Steampunk Knights vs Dinosaurs. Special guest HP Lovecraft

Spring and Autumn period China/Asia cultural/ethnic analog set in North/South American continental analogue.

Humans only with Martial Disciple, Psionic and Akashic classes only.

Medieval middle East dessert with city state politics. Can 4 masked agents of an unknown organization heal the sick, free the enslaved and protect the realm?

The game I'm playing in:
Not!Vietnam War with hidden zombie hive mind faction coming in from the north. Break a forgotten god out of his astral prison and maybe save the world.

The game I'm running:
Dresden Files Boston: Don't break the masquerade.

Once a year, everyone dies. Better get your shit in order.

>Happy adventure into the unknown.
>God damnit Frank.

Take a discworld. Then hit it with a giant hammer a few times.

20 years ago, the world got fucked to oblivion by dragons, and most of civilization fell. Now, highwaymen and lowlifes scrap a life by preying on lost riches and xenophobic cities, and the party is the worst of them all.

A bunch of dumbass took drugs from some guy in an alley and became a cult of vampire like creatures. Also some girl has eye powers despite never using them

I AM EVIL, STOP LAUGHING!

Wizard makes magic jet engine and sells it with adventuring party's help. See the world change, have fun, dogfight.

How the fuck does that work? It is a world of nothing but babies?

That honestly sounds adorable.

Long ago, the gods fucked up and the planet went to shit.

Are you a bad enough dude to face the Void Devourerer?

Gods play game of Civ on alien world. They get drunk, forget, and come back as older, more mature gods and act like assholes.

Who would win: a scrawny catboy or four pirates? The answer may surprise you.

Las Vegas, New Orleans, the Caribbean, and Detroit all mixed into one. Halflings are plantation-owning good ol' boys, gnomes are swamp folk and you're gonna steal from all of them.

Elves and orcs came and made it a generic fantasy world. Local goddess didn't like that and screwed it up for everyone else.

Necromancer invents Necromancy so that he can kill Nyarlathotep in a move that absolutely no one is happy about.

A Dungeon God exists, keeping local villages afloat by bringing riches and monsters for adventurers to discover. Each dungeon is actually its own pocket dimension, and the Dungeon God likes to "Maze" up particularly strong, stupid, or asshole adventurers.

Your ancestors used all of the mana in the word in order to survive a prophesied apocalypse that they accidentally created by using all of the mana in the world. It technically worked, but the rest of the world is not happy.

Giant enemy castle mimic is going to start marching into the known world and fuck up yo shit. Go stop it by fucking up it's shit before it learns to run.

A whole edition in the past, not!Power Rangers banded together to save the world from an extradimensional menace--and while incurring heavy losses, they just barely won.

Now, 150 years later, not!SoulCalibur and not!Dark Souls have a baby as the rumour of the "ultimate weapon" becomes the win condition for a war--and a conspiracy that would swallow the entire world once again if it could.

It's fun. There are snacks.

Bionicle?

This might be the single worst one in here. Congratulations.

>Bionicle
Mah nigga

Eldritch beings from the edges of the Far Realm tried to unravel the tapestry that is existence, and the gods were barely able to salvage the material plane. Thousands of years later, forces stir to finish what these beings started and snap the piecemeal tapestry that remains of the Material Plane after it was patched up by the gods.

Everything's fucked and I'm not helping the situation. In fact, my very existence is making things worse.