5 DnD Settings You Might Not Have Heard About

The topic of this post is quite explicitly stolen from Ben Milton's excellent video with a similar title (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4F67RFcW6E&t=4s). His version is more fun, better produced, and better thought-through than mine; but I'm lazy, so here we are.

If D&D is at its best – its very best, its primal best – when it involves players genuinely discovering the unknown, and DMs being spurred to real creative endeavour, then the world a game is set in is important. If every element of that world is predictable, then there is no discovery for the players, and the only creative impetus for the DM is one of rebellion against the staid world.

So here are five settings for you to get stuck into that will, I think, give players journeys of discovery and give DMs plenty to chew on. All five are nominally designed for old-school versions of D&D, chiefly versions of Basic/Expert (“B/X”) and 1^st Edition AD&D; though you can fairly easily port a lot of that across to 5^th Edition, it may be worth your while to get the free PDFs of B/X Essentials (https://www.drivethrurpg.com/browse/pub/5606/Necrotic-Gnome/subcategory/28663/B-X-Essentials) and work from there.

(Yes, often the best setting is the one you design yourself. There's your caveat. But some poor uncreative types like me find the work of others a great aid.)

#1 – Hill Cantons by Chris Kutalik

Have you witnessed the pilgrimage of the Soldier Bears? Do you dare deal with the otherworldly Eld, those dreadful half-Eldar-half-David-Bowie fashion victims? And will you sell your loot to Fraza the Curio Dealer, who is entirely honest – good for pricing your goods, bad when his deep-seated racism has cause to emerge?

The Hill Cantons (available from Hydra Cooperative, https://www.drivethrurpg.com/browse/pub/7124/Hydra-Cooperative?term=hydra+&test_epoch=0) is an acid fantasy setting designed for Labyrinth Lord. In the published range there are currently three books (Slumbering Ursine Dunes, Fever-Dreaming Marlinko, and Misty Isles of the Eld) and two cosmology PDFs. There's another one – the excellently-named What Ho, Frog Demons – coming soon (I think the art was fixed over the summer). What's so good about the Hill Cantons?

It's funny. The world will make both DM and players laugh. Everything is memorable, shot in technicolour. The locations are great – how about a crashed dimensional organic sailing barge made of gold full of religious ghouls? The NPCs are vivid – see Fraza above. The “monsters” are distinctive – do you even know what a Reverse Centaur is?

It's a world that's inspired me. I made a level of a dungeon set in this world, and it's about the most anarchically funny thing I've written. Twice players have assiduously sought out a hexagonal metal coin to activate the canopied table they found in the first level of the dungeon – and then laughing realization has dawned on them as a display lights up on the canopy, a drawer slides out with a disc and two flat-bottomed hand-tools, and the table begins to hum.

#2 – Veins of the Earth (and Deep Carbon Observatory) by Patrick Stuart

Veins of the Earth is the Underdark rebooted, turned into a mythic underworld. It's available in PDF at Drivethrurpg, and the printed version (a beautiful hardback) is available at a slightly above-the-odds price at Amazon. The book contains a lot of practical ideas and notes for running games in the Underdark, especially focussed round things like climbing, encumbrance in closed spaces, and generating caves as you go, but the “setting” is chiefly defined for me by the array of monsters and adventuring ideas.

Currency consists of light. Want to buy something? Away with your surface gold! That'll be 20 lumes, please – that is, 20 hours worth of light, in whatever combination of oil, torches, and phosphorescent fungus you like. Oh, initiative rolls are limited to those who carry light – those who are in the pool share that initiative. Everyone else is at initiative 0.

There are impossibly noble, chivalrous travelling knights who are also sentient humanoid trilobites. They cannot speak. There are sinister pseudo-humans with great knots in their stomach, offering fantastic loans at unconscionable prices, constantly seeking their “lost” children. The duergar are rebuilt as the model of an efficient work ethic, to the point of society-wide sociopathy.

This has become the default Underdark for my Haughty Fantasy games. I carry plenty of stuff over from other sources, of course – this is DIY DnD – but the idea of an alien, disturbing underworld is key.

I mention the standalone adventure Deep Carbon Observatory as well because it explicitly connects to a Veins-like Underdark, and the same brooding sense of sorrow intermixed with tear-inducing wonder runs throughout.

Also, the author can write.

“A spider that walks across your outstretched hand might tell itself a tale of what you are. It does not know. There are veins beneath the skin it takes to be the whole. The world you think you know is nothing but a shell, a thin carapace over the skin of the, deeper, unbound world below.

You have existed, up to this point, on the illusion of a plane, bordered by mountains, rivers, seas or the politics of maps, and this life has been a lie. Its borders are made up, its seas are gateways, its mountains are cradles of deep life. There is no plane. You were raised within a history running

back through recorded time, written in ink, carved in stone, scooped from clay, hidden in songs. Your primal myths are an eyeblink of the memory of that place. Your history is a candle burning out.

The real world, the deeper, more true world, is bordered only by light above and fire below, and perhaps not even by that.”

#3 – Dolmenwood by Matthew Norman and Greg Gorgonmilk

Do you like Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell? What about Neil Gaiman? This is that. Currently published in 8 'zines – Wormskin #1-8, available in PDF and POD on DrivethruRPG – and in an adventure, The Weird That Befell Drigbolton, there's a campaign book coming soon. The zines are nice artefacts, and full of gameable material – though there's flavourful detail, the text is also as terse as it needs to be. Cross-referencing across 'zines is a little awkward, but not impossible. It's worth it.

The Dolmenwood is a mythic forest which can slot into your fantasy setting or into late medieval/early modern England or wherever else, really. It's full of alien and dangerous fae, strange forest glades, strange and wondrous magic treasures, civilised yet sadistic goatmen, and country bumpkins who know more than they're telling you. There are also sentient badger wizards, so...

The “monsters” are distinctive (e.g., Neutral-aligned undead people who are flocks of ravens but mostly just like collecting weird stuff), and as in all the best settings, you can talk to them all, pretty much. The old-school style leans a lot on interaction with NPCs, because combat is very dangerous (cf Combat as War vs Combat as Sport), and this setting builds very intentionally towards that. I can't think of a single forced combat across the 'zines, even in the two-issue dungeon (The Abbey of St Clewd).

The setting also is generally successful in walking a fine line over “weird stuff”. The setting is full of weird stuff, and bounds into that dark fantasy horror territory sometimes, but always with a profound sympathy for actual people. It's not gratuitous. This is rare, and important; and it's the sort of quality that translates at the table, when the DM is sensitive to it.

#4 – Against the Wicked City by Joseph Manola

None of this is formally published, which is a pity; it's all on Joseph's blog. The upside to the lack of books is that it's all free! You can find the collated information here: http://udan-adan.blogspot.com/p/against-wicked-city.html.

Joseph's own simmary:

“ATWC is a fantasy role-playing game about adventurers struggling to free a city from tyranny and corruption. It’s about other things too – there’s a whole world out there, containing everything from underwater cities of green glass to killer robots built by insane toad-men – but the core idea is right there in the title. There’s a great city. This city has fallen into wickedness. It’s up to you to set the people free.

In terms of its thematic underpinnings, ATWC is a game of romantic clockpunk fantasy with a setting inspired by early modern central Asia.”

The most important word in there for me is “romantic”, which Joseph defines thus:

“Romantic, insofar as this is fundamentally a game about love and hope and courage and our capacity to triumph over corruption. The Wicked City is a horrible, horrible place, and horrible, horrible things are done there; but ATWC does not assume that the struggle against such horror and evil is necessarily a hopeless one, and my expectation is that any long-running ATWC campaign will end with the liberation of the Wicked City from the bondage of evil which afflicts it.
As written, this is not a cynical game; but it is a game which is enormously sceptical of the redemptive power of violence. (That's why I'm running it with OSR D&D, which ensures that violence is usually a terrible idea!) The evil of the Wicked City cannot simply be stabbed until it falls over and dies; defeating it will require the ability to connect with and unite a whole variety of people and communities, all of them more-or-less damaged and mistrustful, and this in turn will ultimately be possible only through an effort of empathy. (There may also be quite a lot of stabbing along the way, though.) If you think all that sounds like feelgood hippie bullshit, then please feel free to run it as a grimy horrorshow in which evil always triumphs, or as a straightforward tale of national salvation through heroic bloodshed; but the assumption, throughout, has been that this is really a game about love.”

If I'm honest, reading that almost makes me cry. You can keep your stylish storygames with complex and intelligent mechanics for navigating teenage romance; I'll take my six boring ability scores and a random assortment of items, because, out on the steppes of the Wicked City, “this is really a game about love”. Magnificent.

The copious rules material supports that, by the way. You start with five classes available to players: the Fighter (the only person who's much good at combat, and who can automatically bust down any normal door); the Scholar (who knows any mundane fact required of her); the Traveller (who never gets lost); the Trickster (who is a bit of a rogue but can also charm his way into any party he wants); and the Noncombatant (who enemies always ignore til after they've smashed someone on the head with a vase, and who can nearly always escape imprisonment). You don't start with wizards and clerics. You start with classes that are 1) all just great at something – automatic successes at the thing they're expert at; 2) modelled towards social interaction and lateral problem-solving. Each class also has equipment tables, which you roll on to see what you get. Two examples from the d6 table for the Scholar:

*Clockworker's gear: Sturdy leather work clothes (treat as heavy leathers, +3 AC), locked box full of delicate tools, another locked box containing a half-finished machine that you're currently tinkering with, pocket watch, 3d6x10 sp.

*Historian's gear: Comfortable travelling coat (treat as leather jacket, +1 AC), 1d3 books, 1d6 tiny but intriguing ancient artifacts, locked box containing in-progress historical manuscript, charcoal for sketching, paper and ink, 3d6x10 sp.

No starting weapons for the scholar (other classes are slightly better off). Their equipment load, instead, all creates stories and hijinx. The clockworker's delicate tools have all sorts of uses. So does the pocket watch. And you need to complete that machine. The historian has charcoal and weird artifacts, and wants to find out stuff to finish their book. This is great. Proper D&D stories well up from a guy with no real combat ability and a random assortment of starting items.

There are other classes. Players unlock them. By becoming their friends. Want to be a Disciple of the Word, shouting words of divine power in service of your god? How about a Brass Man, a clockwork person following the semi-mythical Cogwheel Sage? Befriend them. Serve their needs, aid them in their hour of trial. This is a story about love.

The monsters are weird and inspired by Central Asian mythology. There are loads of tables to generate content on, including frankly the best, most sensitive presentation of religion in an RPG I've seen. There are two adventures – one is a dungeon environment which very much plays to the strengths of the setting, one is an investigation adventure. I've run both, they're both good. And all of this is free.

#5 – Ultraviolet Grasslands by Luke Rejec

Currently available as a limited overview document on DriveThru and for Patreon supporters of Luka Rejec (https://www.patreon.com/wizardthieffighter/posts). It's heading to Kickstarter. Luka does art for the Hill Cantons books, but he's also a marvellously creative writer. I haven't got UVG to the table yet, but I've loved reading it. This is Luka's summary:

“The Ultraviolet Grasslands (UVG) is a rules-light rpg pointcrawl module inspired by psychedelic heavy metal, the Dying Earth genre, and Oregon Trail games. It takes a group of ‘heroes’ into the depths of a vast and mythic steppe filled with the detritus of time and space and fuzzy riffs.”

Or again:

“A world begins when it emerges from the mists of time. So it is with the civilizations of the Rainbowlands, which mark their count from when the Long Ago ended and the Now began.

The Rainbowlanders are the humans of a later era, undisputed masters of the fertile lands around the Circle Sea, dwellers in the Eye of Creation. They come in many shapes, colors, creeds, and faiths. They pile unkempt technology and misremembered lore together into a teetering whole. They rule the settled lands under their polychrome deities of ill-repute.

This story is not their story. This story begins at the edge of their world, at the Left End of the Right Road. At the westernmost outpost of humanity, the Violet City. Bastion against the hordes, entrepôt to the exotic sunset lands, and last port of civilization before the trackless steppe studded with the detritus of the Long Ago.

The last glimmer of the Rainbow before the skinblistering glow of the Ultraviolet Grasslands.”

So you travel long distances, possibly in futuristic RVs. You go to weird, confusing locales. You salvage ancient technology and try to piece together the past. You meet, uh, interesting people and try not to go slightly mad from the interaction.

On the Catlords of the Violet City: “The Purple God(dess), divinity of magic, and most prominent deity of the Violet City has a fondness for cats. Indeed, cats are the rulers of the Purple Land, running it through their doting human servants.”

The Porcelain Princes are “Not-quite-liches who seek immortality by spreading their vital cognitive essence among several bodies linked by real-time glandular psyche-to-psyche links. Customarily, they each polybody entity uses the same porcelain masks for every one of its drones.”

There are some great light rules for running your caravans on their long journeys – simple ways of dealing with rations and so forth. The locations are fascinating. How about the Grass Colossus?

“Crossing a last purple ridge, the wide vale promised respite from the harsh grassland. Trees dotted the courses of two rivers, and at their juncture prehistoric ramparts of pitted ceramic, traces of pre-wizard spell-arms on their ancient shellac surface.

Inside, on one of two hillocks, a great wicker-man of woven grasses, vines and thorn bushes. Shamans of many clans make their meets here, teach their memory chants, and welcome the clan mothers once a year for the festivals of the Circle of Grass.”

Which is as much of a proof as you'll need to know that some of the best writers of fantasy today are creating elfgames on the internet.

How Do I Start A Campaign?

So, you have somehow found friends, bought dice, and been tasked with running a D&D campaign. How do you start running a campaign? Well, the first step is having some kind of campaign in mind. There's a number of questions you'll need to answer: what edition of D&D, what genre of play, etc, etc. I don't want to answer those questions; that's on you. What I want to talk about here is about building a world to run a campaign in. There are three meta-options for you to consider.

META-OPTION 1: THE NEW TOLKIEN, OR TOP-DOWN CREATION

So, you can create languages from the bottom up, plan the geography of an entire world, create a fantastic Sanderson-esque magic system. That's good, and that's fun – though, of course, most of the fun to be had there will be by you, the DM, not your players. Most of the stuff you make will never transfer to your players. That's fine, just be aware your impulse to Play Tolkien is as much a way of you spending your own time as it is preparing a game for others to play.

META-OPTION 2: SMALL BEGINNINGS, OR BOTTOM-UP CREATION

Or you can create a little town and a couple of places for players to explore – there's a ruined Elf Tower (...New Mexiccoooo...) in the hills, strange tunnels carved out of onyx underneath the town, and nomadic boarmen crossing the plains nearby. Which empire is this part of? Who knows. In the marketplace, there's a birdmess-spattered statue of some old hero; who is it? We'll work that out later. Where are the boarmen going? Follow them to find out! This is a fairly simple way to start a campaign – sketch out a few “safe” locations and a few “dangerous” locations, drop the characters in it one way or another, give the players some rumours about the local area, and let them at it. Make more up as you go.

META-OPTION 3: PLUNDER THE BOOKS, OR THE MASH-UP

Probably actually the most common form of campaign; use a book or books published by others. Change it where you want to. Maybe glue bits from different books together (not literally, really damages the resale value). An example: I'm about to start running a game set in Chult, in the Forgotten Realms, using Chris Perkins' Tomb of Annihilation as a basis for it. But there's a number of issues with that book; some of them have to do with the expectations of a campaign (which I've changed), but some have to do with it being an exploration campaign with nowhere near enough locales. So I've added the two official-ish supplements to that, The Tortle Package and The Lost Kenku; but I've also thrown in James Raggi's Tower of the Stargazer, Kiel Chenier's Blood in the Chocolate, Ken Hite's Qelong, and a bunch of unofficial ToA supplements from the DM's Guild. Some of that stuff will need adaptation, for sure, but that's fine. Even the ToA supplements will be hacked to fit my version of Chult and my campaign needs; I don't need linear adventures, for instance. I need lots of adventure locations and dynamic environments, because that empowers player choice.

But whichever of these you do, you're going to need to end up with a place for your players to start, for them to adventure in, became heroes/villains of, etc. So whether you want to create the world top-down, bottom-up, or via the mash-up, there is a similar objective in mind. Now, one solution – a version of Meta-Option 3 – is just run your players through a set of published adventures, one after another. You set the scene: “you've been hired to do this...”, and the players function within the game as you've delineated. This is good for pickup play, for quite casual groups, and for very irregularly-scheduled campaigns; people turn up knowing they'll have an adventure. You'll need to pick interesting adventures (hint: don't play Pathfinder Adventure Paths unless you're using Joseph Manola's condensations of them – see his Against The Wicked City blog for more), but this is a perfectly reasonable way to run the game that probably reduces your workload.

But what if you want to emphasize player decisions at the campaign level? What if you want them to be the chief agents of change in a world, the architects of the rising and falling of kingdoms, even? Then you need a world with real choices for the players, even at 1st Level. They need to be able to pick which adventures to go on, and then allowed to determine their own objectives within that adventure location. So if you want to run that sort of campaign, here's what I'd recommend you come up with (by whatever method):

A REASON: This is simple and only matters for the first ten minutes of your first session, really. But why are your characters in the setting? It can be as simple as: this is a place where adventurers come; the characters are adventurers. It might help to establish why the characters are together before starting the game proper, too, to avoid confusion or the negative play habit of one character essentially forming their own party and doing their own thing the whole time.

THE TOWN: Doesn't need to be a town. Could be a yurt village, a strange and rambling inn and wagonhouse, whatever. The essential point is: there is a point of light the adventurers rest in, hear rumours in, may feel inclined to defend. There may be adventure locations in or beneath The Town, and you might have fun encounter tables for them as they spend their downtime there, but the key thing is that this can function as a home base. They're not constantly attacked by dragons when they're there. There are shops or traders or whatever. There are one or two “questgivers”; the weird shaman always wants ingredients from out of the way caves and bogs, and the Peace Chief wants the boarmen scared away from their current path without a proper fight.

DUNGEONS, PLURAL: By dungeon I also mean: bandit camp, strange outlying village, ruined observatory. Places that adventures happen. It can be a simple location with one puzzle or a multi-level, 159-room True Dungeon. A mix of size and type is good. This places are dangerous – hence why only adventurers would dare going – but they shouldn't be unrelentingly hostile, and solely full of combat. Make sure there are potential allies out in the wilderness. At least one baffling, strange, and slightly disturbing location.

A MAP?: Optional, but sometimes helpful for visualization, even outside of a proper hex-or-pointcrawl. Even if it's just a flowchart or set of nodes. The Yurt Village is in the centre, or at one edge; then there's the Puzzle Swamp, the True Dungeon, the Boarmen Stomping Grounds, and the Ruined Obsevatory. As there's a Dark Conspiracy at the Yurt Village, that gives you at least five adventure locations waiting for your players.

RUMOURS: You can just have an NPC hire the PCs to do something, or otherwise incentivize their action. But you might benefit from giving the group two or three “rumours” to start with; this lets them choose what seems most valuable to them. Maybe they start with these three:

“The Peace Chief needs help with the Boarmen, and is willing to reward any who offer aid.”

“She who solves the cog puzzle in the Putrid Swamp is sure to receive great riches...”

“Some say there is no bottom to the Spiral Dungeon, until it meets the Fire Below. But the strange artifacts within are surely of some bygone race.”

With that, I'd say you're more than good to go.