Several years back, at the pick of my D&D days, I had been working on rather beefy supplement. It started with new race of Starborn and over the next few years I’ve been adding content into it. It was a big, creative endevour and what I considered a pinacle of my design ability.
I’ve never finished it.
As I look at the major file today, it is 36 pages of text, which would probably translate to 50 or more pages in final editing. I still think there is a lot of juicy stuff in the supplement but it was always lacking in some aspects. I had some free time lately and what I realized was, my approach was wrong from the start.
DnD Supplement vs Setting
This supplement was though to be just that. A supplement. Something that you can take and use anytime in your campaign, whatever the setting. You apply the supplement, new events take place in your world and new stuff is appearing in your setting.
As much fun as it sounds, there is a few major issues with this approach:
- When you have already build the world – you don’t want to suddenly change it.
- If you implement it mid-game, there is almost no need for new races, classess, rules – your players are already playing the game.
- There can be to many inconsistancies with the supplement and your world so you would need to tweak it too much.
In other words, the supplement is a neat idea for a stale game and bored DMs, who need a change. And that’s a very narrow target group. Most of DMs I know have more ideas than time to implement it.
But lately I was bold enough to think about a setting. That’s right, tbe big S!
Creating a setting give me instantly some major benefits.
- I can fix what is broken in D&D.
- The “supplement content” will have less conditional options.
- It will be more coherent.
- Bored DMs can still pick it apart but otherwise it could be use from day one.
- Setting give me platform for creating new things within it.
Obviously the biggest issue with creating the setting is how vast of a project it is. Considering my schedule it is a lifetime work but, the good new is — it doesn’t have to be done to be playable.
Keith Baker’s DnD Setting Philosophy
I consider Eberron to be the best D&D setting. I won’t delve into specifics, but I want to talk about Keith Baker’s design philosophy. Reading his blog and his books one thing is instantly visible – he creates a world with the D&D game system in mind.
The game system informs the setting as much as the other way around.
In effect, we almost have a diegetic mechanics. Since I want to use D&D as a system but still design new setting that will be my approach as well.
Example of Diegetic Setting Design Philosophy
I will look at the piece of mechanics and think “ok, how does it fit in the world I’m building”. Here is a quick example (I’m using the new 2024 D&D version btw.)
We take Cleric class and look what it can do in first 3 levels.
- Cast spells
- Channel Divinity – Divine Spark and Turn Undead
- Diviner Order
So right there we have a lot of choices to make as a setting designer.
- How does the cleric cast a spell
- Where does the power come from – is it gods or something else
- What is channel divinity at it’s core and what it means for the world – e.g. a peron can become a vessel for a god a moment.
- Why all clerics have Turn Undead ability? What if there was a cleric of Death / Undead ?
- How picking Divine Order defines clerics in different cultures and religions – why do all of them pick one or the other.
Answering those and more questions can point you into a direction of a cleric that in the core of it’s mechanical aspects describes the world.
- Clerics cast spells as miracles – they pray for an outcome and it comes thru. This makes it easy for people to believe in gods, however there are clerics that don’t worship any god and still cast those spells – WHAT DOES IT MEAN?
- Channel Divinity is a opening up to specific domain that occupies a physical space throughout the planes.
- Turn Undead is not a divine ability per se, but an aspect of Human Divinity that is hidden within all living creatures thus no matter what Subclass the cleric is, they can still use it.
As you can see, even through this example there is already a lot of ideas that can come through the mechanics. I will be using it a lot to build up this new setting.
Building my setting with you
I’m done with creating a final product and only then releasing it. It takes too much time, it is creatively cruel for someone who does all of the design, writing, art and product setup. Designing the re-worked Ranger class was super fun, but getting it published was a nightmare.
(or this unfinished project which from design point of view is DONE but not pretty enough to be published)
I’m done with that model for now.
The whole process will be done right here and you will see the way I work. I already have a lot of ideas and I want to put it out there, before it becomes this huge pile of text that nobody ever sees.
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