Roll to Hit by Harry Slater

Author:Harry Slater [Slater, Harry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pen and Sword
Published: 2025-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 11

Across the Multiverse

Like any good story, a roleplaying game isn’t just built on characters, there’s something that underpins them, something that allows their actions to have a deeper meaning. Just like Batman is nothing without Gotham and Star Wars would be found lacking without its galaxy far, far away, the setting of a tabletop roleplaying game is more than just a backdrop for players to mess around on. Different settings have different rules, different enemies, different feels to them, and they can change the way that players interact not just with the world around them, but with each other. Which is why we think it’s time to take a long hard look at some of the settings that make up the multiverse of Dungeons & Dragons. We’ve already crashed into some of them on our journey to get here, so you’ll have to forgive us if we revisit a few things in this chapter – but the best places are always worth dropping into more than just once, as you’re going to find out.

We’d be remiss not to begin with Greyhawk and Blackmoor. As you already know, these were the personal campaign settings of Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson respectively, and as such stand as the basis for everything that followed. That’s not to say that the other settings we’re going to discover were pale imitations, more that Greyhawk and Blackmoor were the progenitors of the rest, acting as doorways into the imaginative possibilities of Dungeons & Dragons. They’re also interesting as they were released almost as afterthoughts. Okay, that’s not quite true, but the lore of the official setting of early D&D wasn’t all that important – if you get a chance to read the very first rulebooks for Dungeons & Dragons, that’s something that becomes abundantly clear. These settings were personal things, places created by Arneson and Gygax for their players to explore, and they sort of expected other Dungeon Masters to do the same – to use their rules to build something out of their own imagination. While we’ve seen plenty of examples of people who did just that – indeed, we’ll see more of them as this chapter goes on – there’s an obvious problem. Namely, that not everyone has the time or the inclination to go about inventing an entire fantastical realm to set their game in. Creating any sort of realm, let alone a living, breathing fantastical one is a pretty epic undertaking, and while you can sort of wing it for a while, eventually your players are going to go somewhere or do something that you hadn’t expected, and that’s going to throw a massive spanner in your world-building works. That’s why official settings are so important – they give a DM more freedom to focus on the actual game, on the storytelling and adventuring that make Dungeons & Dragons so compelling. They also give the players a grounding, a sense of the place they’re going to be exploring that can lead to exciting character choices that might otherwise have been impossible.

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