D&D 5E I'm writing a setting book. What are your preferences?

[Alzrius]

I'm writing a setting book. What are your preferences?

My preferences are redheads, green eyes, and no freckles.

Or did you mean for what's in your book?

 

[Morrus]

If I had known this is the setting that ZEITGEIST takes place in, I'd have bought it to read long ago! That sounds awesome!

We've been talking about it for like nine years!

 

[aco175]

I have to say I'm baffled by the number of people saying "Cover a region in detail and not the whole world," when this is the same board that groans and moans loudly every time there's "yet another adventure on the Sword Coast."

For me, I can not use a book that covers a whole world. My group has had 4 campaigns over the life of 5e and none have left greater Phandalin. I would rather have more knowledge about a smaller region over a little information about 20 regions. Look at FR and all the regions that never get used. I know that a bunch of people would love to play Halrula or Chult, or Kara Tur, but focusing on a single place can get people interested in your setting and then have follow on books on the other regions instead of not using it because it is vague and saying that the DM will need to do too much work.

Maybe lots of people will say that they love the idea of Ber and want to see more, but just as many may think that all these monster races is not for them and could be ok with a PC playing a game coming from there to make it work, but not play a campaign there. If the book has only a few pages- fine. Eventually page count and cost needs to enter the discussion.

 

[Mistwell]

We've been talking about it for like nine years!

Yes, but I've never seen the setting described as the focus like that. The individual adventures, and name, didn't catch my attention the way this particular description did.

 

[NotAYakk]

See, I get the appeal of "read a book about a world". But if I'm playing D&D, I want support for where I'm playing more than I need more places to play in. Or even stuff I can poach, and a shallow description of more parts of the world doesn't provide poachable depth.

 

[Blue]

That's the quick sales pitch. But how much more information do you like when you buy a setting book?

My plan was to present the world three times. First is a 2-page primer on the setting's standout elements. Then there's a 7-page section where each major region gets a page to talk about recent history, ongoing turmoil, and the sorts of characters that might hail from there. Finally we have the, oy, 90-page section where each country has a few pages detailing its history and how those influence modern struggles, a few pages detailing each major city, and sprinkled throughout sidebars with adventure hooks, mysteries, or random bits of whimsy and local color.

Pardon, but I'm short on time and only read the opening - I may be repeating what others have said.

I like the idea of treating it three times, but I would not take it from the same angle with just level of detail begin the differentiation.

I'm down with the two page primer. Make it full of hooks and awesome - something that a player can read and immediately go "I want to adventure HERE" or "my character is from THERE".

But after that my next focus would be the Calls to Adventure. What is dynamic and in play that would attract adventurers. This is vital information for both players and DMs to know. This wouldn't, for instance, talk just about the growing divine between the industrialists and the old guard. Instead it would frame up spark points (literal locations or potential events) where the world can change - preferably at the hands of a plucky band of proactive and bold adventurers.

An encyclopedic reference section I can understand, but build in secrets or better yet tension. Again, it's a useful thing for about ten minutes of play in an average campaign to know imports and exports - but a more useful thing to know that country Y relies on their grain exports and that country Z has been pressuring those. Instead of repetitive lists of population and vital figures, maybe something unique about each culture that the DM can springboard off to make it come alive - or even just flavor an NPC from there.

 

[Eltab]

+1 more for the two-page summary.
4e Dark Sun Campaign Setting started off with "10 Things To Know About The World" and I was moved in a way I had not been when looking at 2e DS adventures / supplements as they were released. DS went from 'desert planet' to a setting I wanted to play in and learn about.

If you want to do an encyclopedic reference, that would probably be another book - like 3e Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting. You won't have much room for the 'about your PC' section.

 

[RangerWickett]

I appreciate the responses, especially since I'm feeling encouraged to maybe trim some of the city politics bits and add more 'here's some dangerous stuff to go get involved in.'

4e Dark Sun Campaign Setting started off with "10 Things To Know About The World"

I actually followed their lead in the Player's Guide for our adventure path back in 2011. Here's a comparable version from the current book.

Overview
The Zeitgeist setting is a step away from traditional fantasy. In many parts of the world, day to day existence is much unchanged from how folks lived centuries ago. Fey trickery, prowling monsters, and roaming brigands pose as great a threat as ever. Priests and druids offer guidance, and it’s possible to live all one’s entire years without seeing a steam engine.

This is still a land of magic, but eight key elements set it apart.

Invention, Ideologies, and Inflection Points.
Ironclad industry is reshaping nations, and railroads slice through the wilderness where monsters still roam. Steam and soot darken the skies over cities, whose urban labyrinths seem to have spirits of their own. Fresh frights crawl out of imagination and into the shadows of gaslights, and fiends that the old religions thought they’d banished find novel forms in the new age.

Heroes and scoundrels stroll smoggy streets in top hats and tails, wield pistols or enchanted arcane fusils, and battle over matters of philosophy and geopolitics as often as over treasure and thrones. Groups once lumped together as ‘savage races’ have founded a nation of their own, eager for prosperity and respectability. And while many resist efforts to scientifically categorize magic, academic institutes of sorcerous studies are attracting extravagant investments from nations who fear what arcanotechnological inventions their rivals might bring to bear.

No land on the continent of Lanjyr is static. Every nation and ideology is vying for influence, and your adventures will determine the shape of things to come.

Humans, the Great Nations, and the Great Eclipse.
Humans dominate three of the six great nations of the modern world. Their ascendance in the past two thousand years toppled a mighty elf empire and provoked belief in doomsday millennialism among many dwarves, a belief that proved prescient.

Twenty years ago, the sun and stars vanished for nearly a year, an event called the Great Eclipse. The world was pulled back from the brink of destruction thanks to a group led by the monarch of the nation of Risur. Though one of the great innovators of magical technology, Risur is a nation of old druidic traditions, with close ties to the fey, passed down from the original elf inhabitants to the current human majority. It weathered the Eclipse better than any other country, and its influence helped forestall war in the aftermath.

Elves, the Dreaming, and the Great Malice.
Of the many elvish cultures around the world, Elfaivar created unparalleled magical wonders, with cities that straddled between this world and the Dreaming, a fey plane that is a mirrored reflection of reality. But five centuries ago Elfaivar collapsed when its goddess of womanhood, Srasama, was slain, which caused nearly every woman of that nation to perish. Until recently, this disaster – the Great Malice – had been the most pivotal event in history. Elfaivaran survivors were often abused and demonized as they struggled to keep their people and culture alive, and many withdrew fully into the Dreaming.

At the end of the Great Eclipse, however, a last vestige of Srasama’s power granted a miracle: millions of those same women who had perished in the Malice were restored to life. Though displaced by centuries, their return has heralded an unsteady restoration of Elfaivar to the world stage.

Devas, Deeplings, and Technology.
Srasama died at the climax of a holy war against a faith called the Clergy. The backlash of her fall afflicted two groups and created two races. Mortals present at the site of her death were infused by a sliver of her divinity. Marked by strange geometric lines, they continually reincarnated in the following centuries, and came to be known as devas.

Across the world in the capital city of the Clergy, worshipers were marked by a curse. Given horns and tails, they came to be known as deeplings. (Others call them tieflings or cambions.)

In addition, the land that today forms the nation of Danor was left without magic. Two centuries ago Danor – majority human but led by the descendants of those deeplings – sparked a revolution of industry and mighty science. Magic recently returned to Danor, and today innovators weave together technology and magic into arcanoscience, which is watched warily by those who fear some grand new weapon will precipitate a global war.

Dwarves, Doomsday, and Dogma.
The major dwarven nation, Drakr, was grimly prepared for the doomsday that arrived two decades ago. As they expected, ancient horrors clawed free from glaciers and fell from the black sky. The world was engulfed in deadly cold. But then the world failed to end. A culture dominated by a dour mix of duty and pessimism found a weight suddenly lifted from it. In that void, an explosion of new dogmas spread and competed for adherents.

Drakran society organizes around philosophical factions, and a broad base supports the current chancellor’s eschatology movement, which instructs people to plan their endings – for life, for governments, for literature, even for relationships. Drakrans credit eschatology for helping survive the end of the world.

Traditionalist clans see the chancellor’s reformist policies as a threat to their power, and so they back other philosophers to splinter his base. One growing faction are those who, in the aftermath of the Great Eclipse, aren’t quite convinced the world didn’t end, and solipsistically doubt reality. A major international crime syndicate called the Kuchnost encourages such pathological skepticism, the better for them to operate on the edges of truth and trust, because if nothing is real, why follow tradition – or even laws?

Savagery, Liberty, and Dragons.
The youngest of the great nations, Ber, shook free in the past two centuries from the yoke of toppled dragon tyrants. Once a chaotic quilt of quarreling ‘monstrous’ races, Ber arose from an unlikely alliance of dragonborn, gnolls, goblins, goliaths, kobolds, lizardfolk, minotaurs, orcs, and others. United by a common devotion to personal liberty, they live in an uneasy peace as their rulers unite the disparate peoples with a shared pride in proving their civility to a doubting world.

A handful of the old dragon tyrants managed to avoid being slain by finding refuge in other countries. And in recent years hitherto unseen fey dragons have lain claim to some of Ber’s more wild frontiers. Their arrival is blamed on the tropezaros, a movement of survivalists and guerrilla warriors who seek to reconnect their modernizing society with the wilds of nature.

Piety and the Planes.
People have always pondered the heavens, but today the hold the night sky has on the world is undeniable.

In Risur, folk prophets called skyseers watch the movements of the stars to foretell the future. More enlightened scholars study the roaming planets to understand how the flow of their energies affects the fundamental nature of reality, while industrialists wonder at the potential riches of those worlds. Elfaivaran cities weave between the real world and the Dreaming. Sailors in the Yerasol Archipelago tell tales of mirages revealing coastlines of other worlds, and though many think them mad, a cadre of Drakran engineers claim they will soon have a vehicle that can fly to other worlds on columns of flame.

But the presence of other planes is most strongly felt in Crisillyir, a human nation whose powerful clergy once kept locked away demons, and whose bishops would frighten sinners by invoking condemned spirits from the Bleak Gate. That realm, a dark mirror of the real world, holds the dead until they pass on to their eternal reward. During the Great Eclipse, however, ancient evils escaped from Clergy prisons, sowing doubt and discord. The once monolithic faith is fracturing into two opposing denominations, each suspicious the other is being corrupted by entities from other worlds.

Heroic Themes and a Crafted Cosmology.
The Zeitgeist campaign setting presents twelve character themes that reinforce the heroic archetypes of the world, such as gunsmiths, spirit mediums, and technologists. In addition to race, class, and background, each character can choose one of these Themes, which grants a bonus feat and suggests a way to hook the character into the setting.

Also, every player should know the minor rules changes caused by the planets that circle in the night sky. For instance, the distant shores of Mavisha, the Mysterious Deep make divination magic less effective on islands. See Chapter Six for these rules.

 

[Weiley31]

So this is the setting that the Patreon is about on here? Sounds killer! Will there be a Kickstarter for the book or is it going straight to Drive-Thru RPG?

 

[RangerWickett]

I believe the plan is after the Mythological Figures Kickstarter, we'll do the layout of the ZEITGEIST setting book and then launch a KS for it in the fall.

The 5e version's Player's Guide is available for free if you're interested in learning about the setting now. ZEITGEIST Adventure Path Player's Guide & Campaign Guide (5th Edition) - EN Publishing | ZEITGEIST Adventure Path | D&D 5th Edition | ZEITGEIST For 5th Edition | DriveThruRPG.com

And the adventure path was originally published for 4e (and Pathfinder). We have a trilogy of print-on-demand hardcovers that compile the thirteen adventures.