The Lantern Hall
Painting: an ancient lexicon open on a carved lectern in a dark chapel of books, glowing runes and symbols lifting off its pages like fireflies.
TermTabletop term

Campaign setting

A fictional world packaged for play, with maps, histories, gods and factions that a group can adventure in over many sessions. Published settings such as Greyhawk, the Forgotten Realms and Eberron became franchises that spawned novels and video games.

A fictional world packaged for play, with maps, histories, gods and factions that a group can adventure in over many sessions. Published settings such as Greyhawk, the Forgotten Realms and Eberron became franchises that spawned novels and video games.

Origin

Home campaigns such as Blackmoor and Greyhawk came first; TSR published the World of Greyhawk folio in 1980.

Quick answers

What does "Campaign setting" mean?
A fictional world packaged for play, with maps, histories, gods and factions that a group can adventure in over many sessions. Published settings such as Greyhawk, the Forgotten Realms and Eberron became franchises that spawned novels and video games.
Where does the term "Campaign setting" come from?
Home campaigns such as Blackmoor and Greyhawk came first; TSR published the World of Greyhawk folio in 1980.

Nearby in the archive

World of Greyhawk

Campaign setting1980

Gary Gygax opened his own Greyhawk campaign to the world in 1980: a gazetteer of feuding kingdoms, a vast color map of the Flanaess, and D&D's first official home.

Forgotten Realms

Campaign setting1987

A Canadian librarian's childhood story-world that became Dungeons & Dragons' home address: Waterdeep, Elminster, Drizzt, and the Sword Coast of Baldur's Gate.

Dragonlance

Campaign setting1984

A world built to tell one epic story at once as game modules and novels: Krynn, its three moons of magic, its kender and draconians, and the War of the Lance that made TSR a fiction publisher.

Planescape

Campaign setting1994–1998

TSR's philosophical multiverse: a ring-shaped city of portals ruled by the silent Lady of Pain, where belief can reshape reality and factions argue about the meaning of existence.

Worldbuilding

General term

The craft of inventing an imaginary world's geography, history, cultures, languages and ecology. Tolkien's languages and maps set the modern standard; roleplaying games made worldbuilding a hobby in itself, practiced by every Game Master with a campaign map.

Secondary world

Literature term1939

An invented world with its own consistent laws, which the reader enters imaginatively and believes in while inside. Tolkien contrasted it with the Primary World of real life and argued that making one well is a genuine art.

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