Fantasy World - Role-playing Games

Role-playing Games

Dungeons & Dragons, the first major role-playing game, has created several detailed and commercially successful fantasy worlds (called "campaign settings"), with established and recognizable characters, locations, histories, and sociologies. The Forgotten Realms is perhaps the most extensively developed of these worlds. These elements of detail can be a large part of what attracts people to RPGs.

Many established fantasy writers have also derided Dungeons and Dragons and the fantasy fiction it has inspired due to its influencing new writers toward reading the Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual instead of studying the original literature and mythology from which modern fantasy literature has sprung.

Due to the fuzzy boundary between fantasy and science fiction, it is similarly difficult to make a hard-and-fast distinction between "fantasy worlds" and planets in science fiction. For example, the worlds of Barsoom, Darkover, Gor, and the Witch World combine elements of both genres.