Dungeons & Dragons campaign settings

• 1. Introduction

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  Dungeons & Dragons does not have one world. It has dozens. From the sunscorched wastes of Athas to the guild-controlled city-planet of Ravnica, from the gothic horror of Barovia to the hollow interior of a living world called Mystara, the game has produced an astonishing catalogue of places that exist only as text, maps, and the collective imagination of the people who play there. The Forgotten Realms, created by author and game designer Ed Greenwood as his personal campaign and later detailed in a long series of articles in Dragon Magazine, became the most popular of all these settings from the late 1980s onward. Sean Patrick Fannon, author of The Fantasy Roleplaying Gamer's Bible, described it as "may be the most widely played-in game setting in RPG history." But the Realms is only one door in a very long hallway. What drives people to need so many different worlds? What does it mean that a game about imagination still wants someone else to do the world-building for you? And how did a hobby pastime produce fictional geographies that now anchor novels, video games, and some of the most-watched streaming series on the internet?

• 2. Where It All Began

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  Dave Arneson built the first D&D campaign setting in 1971, before D&D itself existed. He called it Blackmoor, and he ran it using the Chainmail rules set during personal games with friends. That pre-dates the publication of Dungeons & Dragons and also pre-dates Gary Gygax's own setting, Greyhawk. When the D&D Blackmoor supplement finally appeared in 1975, it gave that original campaign an official home.

  Gygax's Greyhawk took a different path. It started as a dungeon and then grew outward into a continent called Oerik and eventually a whole world named Oerth. Gygax's own gaming partners contributed characters that ended up living in that world. The first official edition of the Greyhawk campaign appeared in 1980, though sections had already surfaced in magazine articles before that. Greyhawk was darker in tone than what many later settings would attempt, closer to sword-and-sorcery than high fantasy, with a world described as gradually descending into savagery and perpetually on the edge of war.

  The game's 3rd edition made Greyhawk its default setting, using deities from it as examples in the core rulebooks. The 5th edition adventure Ghosts of Saltmarsh returned to those same lands decades later. Then, in the 2024 revised edition of the 5th edition rules, Greyhawk was incorporated directly into the Dungeon Master's Guide as a customizable default, a recognition that Gygax's original world still anchors the game after more than four decades.

• 3. The Forgotten Realms

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  Ed Greenwood's Forgotten Realms arrived as a published setting in 1987 with TSR's original Forgotten Realms Campaign Set, and it placed its primary focus on Faerûn, a region loosely modeled on the Eurasian continent. The world's planet is named Abeir-Toril, and it is shared by humans, dwarves, elves, goblins, orcs, dragons, and a wide range of other peoples. Technologically, the world resembles pre-industrial Earth of the 13th or 14th century, though magic fills in the gaps where technology would otherwise be.

  The setting expanded well beyond Faerûn. The Underdark sits underground, ruled by evil elves. Maztica parallels pre-Columbian Mesoamerica. Kara-Tur draws from mythical East and Southeast Asia, and within it the sprawling empire of Shou Lung, inspired by historical China, stands as arguably the largest single nation in the entire Realms. Al-Qadim, inspired by Arabian mythology and the Thousand and One Nights, occupies the southern border of the Faerûn continent, populated by genies, elemental wizards, and holy assassins.

  The 4th edition of D&D rewrote the Forgotten Realms dramatically. A cataclysm caused the previously divided worlds of Abeir and Toril to collide, reshuffling the geography. In 2014, the 5th edition restored the older layout. That same edition made the Realms the default backdrop for most of its published adventures, and it is home to the Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, and Neverwinter Nights video game series, as well as characters like Drizzt Do'Urden and Elminster who have become recognizable far beyond the game.

• 4. Dark Sun and Dark Departures

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  TSR released Dark Sun in 1991 with an explicit intention to break from what the company called conventional medieval fantasy. The setting draws heavily from Frank Herbert's Dune and Edgar Rice Burroughs's Barsoom series. Its world, Athas, was once lush and full of life. Uncontrolled use of defiling magic stripped it of that fertility, leaving behind a desert planet where civilization has contracted into city-states ruled by god-like Sorcerer-Kings.

  Athas inverts many of D&D's usual assumptions. Psionics are as common as magic is in other settings; nearly every humanoid in every race carries some latent psionic ability. Arcane spellcasters, on the other hand, are rare and largely despised, because most of them are defilers who drain the life force from the environment to power their spells. A small minority called preservers work against that tide, trying to sustain life and eventually restore what was lost.

  The races of Athas are equally strange by D&D standards. The Thri-Kreen are mantis people. Half-Giants walk the desert. Elves are nomadic long-distance runners rather than forest dwellers. Halflings are depicted as savage jungle cannibals. The post-apocalyptic texture of the setting and the alien feel of its cultures gave Dark Sun a reputation as one of the most distinct creative departures in the game's history. Its influence extended to later settings that also tried to step outside the generic European medieval fantasy template.

• 5. Worlds Borrowed and Built

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  Dragonlance was the first complete fictional world deliberately produced and marketed as an RPG supplement from the beginning, with novels, role-playing modules, and figurines all planned together before anything reached shelves. Tracy Hickman and his wife Laura created it, with tie-in novels written by Tracy Hickman and Margaret Weis. Its success demonstrated that a fully coordinated fictional world could generate its own commercial ecosystem, and it encouraged other publishers to follow that model.

  Planescape took a different route entirely. Rather than building a single world, it built a setting that crossed the many planes of existence originally developed in the Manual of the Planes. It blended Victorian-era trappings with pseudo-steampunk aesthetics, and it won specific acclaim for the visual work of artist Tony DiTerlizzi. The city of Sigil, the hub of that setting, appeared again in the 3rd edition's Planar Handbook and Epic Level Handbook, in the 4th edition's Dungeon Master's Guide 2, and in the 5th edition Dungeon Master's Guide.

  Eberron came to exist through a fan contest. In 2003, Wizards of the Coast invited fans to propose the most creative new setting, with a publishing contract as the prize. Keith Baker won. His setting launched in 2004, built around pulp action and fantasy noir with steampunk influences. Magic substitutes for technology: fantasy steam trains, airships, and robots are all commonplace. The setting deliberately moved away from the Western European flavor of Greyhawk and the Forgotten Realms, and it remains one of the most distinctive worlds in the game's catalogue.

• 6. When Other Franchises Crossed Over

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  In 1984, TSR released two AD&D Conan modules as licensed tie-ins with Conan the Destroyer, the second Arnold Schwarzenegger film that year. CB1: Conan Unchained! is set in the Vilayet Sea. CB2: Conan Against Darkness! takes place in Aquilonia. A year later, TSR published a standalone Conan Role-Playing Game boxed set using the Marvel Superheroes RPG system. In 1986 came RS1: Red Sonja Unconquered, authored by Anne Gray McCready, set on the Zaporoska River, and licensed from Red Sonja Corp. All three of those AD&D modules share a two-page overview of the Hyborian World and include setting-specific rules adaptations: fear factor, luck points, and quick non-magical healing.

  Wizards of the Coast adapted the Diablo II video game into pen-and-paper form across both AD&D 2nd edition and D&D 3rd edition. Products released between 1999 and 2001 included fast-play games, boxed sets, adventures, miniatures, and a supplement with the subtitle "The Secret Cow Level."

  The planes of Magic: The Gathering came to D&D through a series of free PDF releases called Plane Shift, written by James Wyatt between 2016 and 2018. Six articles appeared in that window: Amonkhet, Dominaria, Innistrad, Ixalan, Kaladesh, and Zendikar. Wyatt himself noted these were unofficial: in 2017, Mike Mearls described the project as "basically a thing James does for fun." But the positive response led to the 2018 publication of Guildmasters' Guide to Ravnica, a full hardcover treatment of the Magic setting that first appeared in 2005. Theros followed in 2020. In 2020, Wizards communications manager Greg Tito confirmed more Magic crossovers would come, noting the substantial overlap between Magic players and D&D players.

• 7. Exandria and the Streaming Era

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  Matthew Mercer created Exandria in 2012 for his personal campaigns. It became the world where the Critical Role web series is set. In 2017, Green Ronin Publishing released Critical Role: Tal'Dorei Campaign Setting, written by Mercer and James Haeck, focused on the continent of Tal'Dorei, where the first Critical Role campaign featuring the adventuring group Vox Machina took place.

  Exandria's first appearance in an official Wizards of the Coast publication came in the 2019 adventure book Baldur's Gate: Descent into Avernus. Then, after roughly a year and a half of collaboration between Mercer and Wizards of the Coast, Exandria officially became part of D&D in 2020 through the release of the Explorer's Guide to Wildemount. That book covers the continent of Wildemount, the setting for Critical Role's second campaign. It also introduces dunamancy, a new magic type focused on manipulating time and space. The Dwendalian Empire within Wildemount was inspired by 15th-century Russia and Prussia; Xhorhas drew from 13th-century Romania; the edges of the continent reflect 14th-century Spain.

  Academic Emily Friedman, writing for the Los Angeles Review of Books, quoted designer and critic Alyssa Visscher's 2021 argument that Exandria "is this D&D gen's Forgotten Realms. It's so many folks' intro setting; a large section of the newer player base knows and is emotionally invested in it." Friedman added her own view: "if Visscher is right (and I believe she is), then Critical Role and other major actual plays are the primary sources today for D&D's narrative and world-building intellectual properties." An updated edition of the Tal'Dorei book, titled Tal'Dorei Campaign Setting Reborn, came from publisher Darrington Press in 2022, moving the timeline twenty years forward to the era of Critical Role's second campaign.

• 8. Mystara and the Worlds Within Worlds

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  Mystara grew from the B and X series adventure modules, tracing back to Tom Moldvay and Lawrence Schick's home campaign played in Kent and Akron, Ohio from 1976 to 1979. That campaign became the default setting for the non-Advanced editions of D&D through the 1980s and 1990s. The world map itself was based on Christopher Scotese's Time-Life map of Jurassic Earth. The setting is notable for its breadth of real-world cultural parallels: the Known World, located in the southeastern corner of the Brun continent, contains analogues of medieval Balkan, French, Scottish, German, Norse, Egyptian, Arabian, Central Asian, Indian, Mongolian, Indigenous North American, and Hawaiian cultures, alongside a variety of dwarvish, halfling, and elvish realms. One empire within Mystara is ruled by one thousand 36th-level magic-users.

  Buried inside Mystara is an entirely separate sub-setting: the Hollow World. Its existence is not generally known to the inhabitants of Mystara's outer surface. The north and south poles are vast curving openings that connect the two surfaces, though the passage between them runs through cold, unlit, stormy, and anti-magic terrain. The Hollow World was originally discovered, in the fiction, by Ka the Preserver, an ancient Immortal who had begun life as a giant carnosaur. He turned the inner surface into a refuge for species on the verge of extinction. Characters who enter from the outer world find that the magic used to preserve the Hollow World's cultural stability severely limits their own spellcasting.

  Mystara also contained the Savage Coast, a 2,000 mile long frontier coastline under a curse called the Red Curse, which mutates and ultimately kills its inhabitants unless they wear the metal cinnabryl in contact with their skin. That sub-setting went through several rebranding cycles: it appeared as X9: The Savage Coast in 1985, was expanded through a Dragon Magazine fiction series by Bruce Heard, became the AD&D 2nd edition Red Steel product line in 1994, and was rebranded again as the Savage Coast Odyssey line in 1996.