By Jason Campbell with our audience
Today’s topic came from an idea mentioned on Ghostfire Gaming’s Eldritch Lorecast TTRPG podcast/video series, “What is your favorite TTRPG setting, but not including those published by Wizards of the Coast in the 5e era?”
Me First
I asked many friends and colleagues and we got some interesting answers, but first here are my favorites.
The Strange
This game/setting from Monte Cook Games uses the Cypher System, but the setting is the best part. Created by Bruce Cordell, it’s a bit of a multiversal situation, but not like current versions. The Strange is a dark universe under our own which causes “recursion”, a sort of dimension which could be as large as a universe or as small as a single room – whatever is necessary to tell the recursion’s story. Each recursion is built from imagination, they are all built from some sort of fiction – movies, games, books, or some surreal dream someone once had. The Estate is a secret organization which protect the Earth from incursions of forces from these recursions.
But Wait – There’s More!
Here’s contributions from others!
Numenera is still up there in my book as the last new setting that really lit my heart on fire. white wolf’s changeling: the dreaming is another personal darling.
Old Gus
Windermere Fantasy Online
BadHairGaming
- Voidhome
- The Ninth World (Numenera)
- Rifts Earth
- The Sixth World (Shadowrun)
- And some of the old TSR settings that WotC won’t publish, Al’Qadim, Darksun, Maztica, and especially Mystara/Hollow Earth
Qedhup
1 Numenera
2 Alpha Complex – Paranoia
3 Elanehtar – Gods of the Fall
4 Sixth World – Shadow Run
5 Star Wars well among many star wars RPGs lol
Also, of course, the world of Rifts, because I spent a ton of time playing in that universe, mostly the Palladium version.
Spiggs18
My opinions are hard to validate because I tinker with settings and reverse engineer stuff. Predation, for example, I am on session 5 of a campaign and it is good enough to keep me up at night coming up with ideas. But I also changed the future they came from and our game takes place 54 years after the Last Commute to or from the 24th Century, where humanity was forced under water by alien invaders – which happened because they discovered and implemented time travel. The base setting – no sucn future exists, and the game takes place 114 years after the last commute.
Some of the best parts of RIFTs for me was in our premise that the first event the first RIFT opened when the Macross 1 (yes the SDF Macross from Palladium Robotech SpaceFolded.) So the Coalition’s dirty secret was they were “dee-bees” (a derogatory term for Dimensional Beings) and most didn’t even know it. It was exceptional but not “canon”.
When the massive loss of life that created the emergence of Atlantis was “weapons of mass destruction- probably- but no one knows who or why” in published Rifts. In my game, that was Coalition Propaganda.
One of my favorite sci-fi ttrpg settings is Transformers. Man, the story Jim Shooter made for the toyline comics was stellar. It mostly got made into the cartoon and it is adjacent and customizable across a huge legacy of products. But I made in it Palladium before Essence 20 made a real ttrpg.
Charlie
I don’t have a single favorite, but I like many for different reasons. The Strange, because it is reality hopping to any setting. Numenera, because it is just friggin’ amazing and full of possibilities. And, as a GM, you can craft pieces of the world that don’t have to make sense, because that weirdness and unpredictability is built into the setting. Predation because DINOSAURS! And more than that, dinosaur buddies for every PC! Amazing! And make that cybernetic dinosaurs and time warping technology, and that’s just a fantastic world to play around in. I like the setting of World of Darkness, because it allows people to act out the struggle of trying to maintain humanity when the world is designed to peel it from you one atrocity at a time. You can be a flickering light of hope and creativity and magic and nature, railing against the technology and apathy and poison of industrialized everything, turning reality into an ever-accelerating assembly line of self-destruction for profit. And I like the setting of Hulks and Horrors, exploring interstellar space, investigating the toxic ruins of a long-extinct precursor species that achieved more than humans ever could (even with their current alien allies), but still managed to blow apart their civilization ages before humans knew they existed. That scrappy colonizing a techno-wasteland of irradiated alien worlds presents so many fun opportunities for all kinds of stories, big and small.
Attilisk
Numenera. VoidHome. Mothership probably doesn’t qualify as a setting.
Zeus Legion
Numenera and in fact Predation would be my first pick coz of DINOS! The mix and match of prehistoric ambient with technology so advanced that could be called “magic” plus the extra flair of your companion being played by another person in the table brings a lot of amazing interactions. Besides that, I do like post-apocalyptic settings like Gods of the Fall or Blades in the Dark to get out of the “classic” sword & sorcery fluff and get more real with issues like food shortage and small bands power struggles. I know these 2 have different scales as in one you are a godling and in the other you are just a scoundrel living the thug life but both of them just vibe with me coz I feel my decisions matter and have real impact in the short and long term.
Azrael
The Deep from the Gradient Descent module for MotherShip. Traveller’s Third Imperium, “Generic” fantasy OSR style settings – not the high fantasy of the Realms, or Greyhawk. Now the Why… The Deep is a massive orbital android factory, ran by a hostile sentient AI. One who is advanced enough that it’s now warping reality, and is seeking to take over humanity. But its a lot more than the ho hum setup above. Spend too long in the deep and you’ll become convinced YOU are an android, and you’ll never leave. There are factions in there, including the savior of humanity, in a very monstrous form. The building psychosis and stress is what interests me. Plus the androids are now advanced enough that you can only tell the difference between human and android with specialized equipment…. and after death.
The Third Imperium – a massive galactic empire, with hundreds, no thousands of solar systems. https://travellermap.com/ Reasonably hard science. No FTL (Well, FTL that takes the same length of time – 1 week per jump. Mind if you have a Jump 1 ship and a jump 3 ship, the 3 will be 3 times as fast under certain circumstanes). Famous for free trader campaigns (truckers in space). But you can run anything. Decades of information available. I’m presently running a solo Salvage campaign in it, and will likely run a bounty hunter campaign set in the Spinward Marches using the traveller ruleset.
“Generic” OSR rulesets – I don’t like high fantasy. I like the grubby low to mid fantasy. But hopeful, and rather upbeat, not a dire fantasy dystopia. Best exemplified by the Dolmonwood setting, and modules like the Black Wyrm of Brandonford. Also, Ardun Vul – being played through on the podcast 3d6 down the line. It’s a massive, wildly unrealistic if you look too hard megadungeon, with a deep history and incredible factions.
Da Gut
Conclusion
So what do you think? What did we miss that you love? Let us know in the comments!
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