Campaign Setting - Types of Setting

Types of Setting

The use of the term "world" in describing a campaign setting is loose, at best. Campaign worlds such as the World of Greyhawk detail entire cosmologies and timelines of thousands of years, while the setting of a game such as Deadlands might only describe one nation within a brief segment of alternate history.

There are three primary types of campaign setting:

• The first exists in genre- and setting-specific role-playing games such as Warhammer or World of Darkness which exist specifically within one setting.
• The second type of setting is for games that have multiple settings such as modern Dungeons & Dragons or those that were developed specifically to be independent of setting such as GURPS.
• The final type of setting is developed without being tied to a particular game system. Typically this last sort are developed first as stand-alone works of fiction, which are later adapted to one or more role playing systems such as the Star Wars universe or Middle-earth, though there are a few exceptions of settings which were designed explicitly for role playing gaming, but without a specific system in mind, such as Hârn.

Setting genres have touched on every genre of high-action fictional storytelling from role-playing's roots in fantasy to science fiction in settings such as Traveller to horror in the World of Darkness. Even modern-day spy thriller-oriented settings such as Spycraft have been introduced.

A small number of campaign settings fuse two or more genres in a single game. GURPS Infinite Worlds, for example, the characters play "Infinity Patrol" agents who travel to alternate worlds.