Many games include the setting they are intended to be played in. Dungeons & Dragons is the preeminent example, since it has featured multiple settings which can be purchased inde-pendently of the main rulebook, includingForgotten Realms, Eberron, Dragonlance, Greyhawk, Dark Sun, Spelljammer, Al-Qadim, Mystara, Planescape, Ravenloft, and more.
An official setting can be a huge time saver, and it has the advantage that the other players may already be familiar with it—while those who are not can quickly read through the setting book and familiarize themselves with the world. Such settings can also be helpful by offering greater variety within the overall tone of the game. While D&D is generically fantasy, groups can opt to play in the high fantasyForgotten Realms, the romantic fantasy Dragonlance, or the gothic horror ofRavenloft.
There are, however, downsides to playing in an official setting. It may not have the right tone for your campaign, or it might feature people, places, or other elements which would be disruptive to the plot you’ve devised for your campaign. Making significant (or even minor)
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changes to an established game world can also throw off the internal dynamic of the setting or confuse the players.
It’s also possible—especially with experienced groups—that your players aretoo familiar with the setting. They might make undue assumptions about the setting based on their experiences with other GMs, or utilize information their character shouldn’t have access to.
Finally, it can be said that familiarity breeds contempt. If the setting is one your group has used in previous campaigns, your players may feel blasé when confronted with what was intended to be a dramatic reveal. The first time the players encounter the Ancient and Terrible Red Dragon Smaug may be a thrilling and dynamic encounter fraught with tension. The fifth or sixth time, it’s yet another monster with a 26 armor class, 213 hit points, and a challenge rating of 15.
In general, official campaign settings are a shortcut, trading freedom and mystery for familiarity and certainty (and saving more than a little time). While this is innately neither good nor bad, it is important to consider this trade-off when designing a campaign.
Adaptations
The realms of popular fiction provide incredibly fertile ground for RPGs. It is rare to discover a gamer who has never come away from a book or movie desperately wishing to be able to play a game based on it, as evidenced by the sheer number of games which are licensed adaptations of popular fiction. Examples includeConan, Star Wars, Babylon 5, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Doctor Who, superhero games of both the DC and Marvel variety, Call of Cthulhu, The Wheel of Time, Dragonball Z, Lord of the Rings. . . the list goes on, and on (and on). Even Watchmen had an RPG circa 1987.
On a technical level, an adaptation offers many of the same advantages as an official setting, in that the creators have already done much of the work of establishing locations, important factions, and other concepts from the source material. Being able to simply pull up a map rather than creating one yourself, for example, is a huge time-saver.
However, not every work of fiction has been adapted to RPG form, nor does simply having the original property’s trademark on the cover denote quality. This presents an opportunity for the enterprising game master to adapt a work of fiction on their own. It must be noted, of course, that not all works of fiction are equally suitable for adaptation into an RPG setting.
In general, we can divide works of fiction two types: those which are interesting because of the characters, and those which are interesting because of the setting. While character-centric stories are incredibly popular, they don’t necessarily make for particularly interesting game settings. A character-centric story is usually interesting because of the protagonists, their unique abilities or circumstances, and the interplay between the protagonists and antagonists.
One example of this type of story would be Indiana Jones. Indy is a cool character, but remove him from the equation and there’s nothing remaining to distinguish an Indiana Jones RPG from any generic pulp game set in the 1930s. Even if you decide to play as the characters from the movies, that leaves one player as Indiana Jones, and everyone else gets to fight over who plays Sallah and Marcus Brody. Does anyone really want to play as Brody?
Another example would be the sci-fi TV showFirefly. What made the show compelling was not the setting, it was that specific group of characters having that specific series of adventures.
You could choose to play your game as a continuation of the series, with your players in the roles of the cast. But removing that ship and crew from the story doesn’t leave you a lot to work with, setting-wise.
As a thought experiment, try removing the main characters of any given story. Just look at the setting itself and ask yourself what elements of the source material remain to distinguish it from any generic setting within that genre. Without the “chosen one” de jour of the story, you are often left with a fairly flat setting without much to recommend it.
Setting-driven stories, however, are interesting either by virtue of the amazing things which inhabit the setting in general or because the larger backdrop of events is interesting regardless of the protagonists. Examples of this sort of setting include Star Wars, The Matrix, or Avatar:
The Last Airbender. Even removing the protagonists, you still have vivid settings filled with interesting people, places, and things for PCs to interact with.
Stories which fall into this latter category typically make far more interesting roleplaying games than those in the former, although like most things related to RPGs, this is not a hard and fast rule. It may be the case that your players would prefer to play as the stars of the source material rather than their own creations.
In such circumstances a series such as Firefly would be ideal, although there are risks in a campaign of this type. One of the sacred tenets of the RPG is that the player is the ultimate authority on their own character. The player has wide latitude to determine their character’s
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history, ideals, and attitude. When you’re playing as established characters there is a high level of temptation to fall into the “you’re doing it wrong” mindset. Especially when it comes to long running fiction with an an esoteric canon—such asDoctor Who, whose adventures span TV, books, comics, and radio plays produced piecemeal over the course of five decades—players may become frustrated if they feel someone at the table is not doing justice to a character.
You can also run into problems if the established protagonists are of wildly disparate power levels. Especially in fantasy, there is often one character who is selected to wield special or unique powers unavailable to the people of the setting at large. In stories which involve more formal social structures, it may also be the case that one character wields substantially more political power than the others—being a king or a general, for example.
While many narratives center around a group with a distinct leader, giving one player the authority to boss the rest of the group around may lead to conflict—especially if the player in question is inclined to fall back to the position of “My character is in charge, so we’re going to play my way.” An RPG is ultimately a collaboration between equals, and giving one player power or authority above the others can be asking for trouble.
There are, however, many advantages to running in adapted settings. For example, the players are more likely to be familiar with the world and any special concepts put forth by the story before the campaign begins. You rarely need to explain to anyone what a Jedi is, for example. It also means that you have ready access to locations, NPCs, groups, and other material that you don’t need to spend time generating or explaining to the players.
Additionally, the nature of a work of fiction is that there is always a great deal about the world the audience does not know—unlike a campaign setting, which is produced with the intention of being a game. This can work for or against a game master, depending on their desire and ability to fill in the gaps.
On the downside, you should consider that adjusting the backdrop of a specific work of fiction into a setting for serial adventures may create problems of its own. One reason sequels are often poorly received is the difficulty in adapting the story from one with a discrete beginning, middle, and end into one that is ongoing. To get from here to there, you may need to crowbar off the implicit (or explicit) Happily Ever After and alter the setting to accommodate a status quo of never-ending peril.
These problems can often be solved by looking at the work you’re adapting from a different
angle. The next time your group gets revved up on the hot new thing, instead of trying to adapt it whole cloth try examining what elements make it attractive to you.Star Wars might be awesome, but if all that your players really want is to play Jedi, you might be better served by adding Jedi (or their generic equivalents) to your own setting rather than taking on the entireStar Wars canon. By the same measure, playing “honest smugglers” may be easier in a homebrewed universe than undertaking the task of adaptingFirefly to an RPG.
Whatever the case, remember that not all stories work equally well in the RPG format. They need to be conducive to an ensemble cast of protagonists and supportive of ongoing adventures.
Providing a fun and entertaining game is more important than sticking to the storyline presented in the source material. Ideally the two will go together, but if one disrupts the other you may need to either make changes to the story or—if that proves unacceptable to the players—hold off playing that setting entirely.