Setting

The setting of a campaign is, in simplest terms, the game world where it takes place. For a historical campaign, the setting might be the court of King Louis XVI, whereas for a superheroes campaign it might be the fictional city of Metropolis, and for a GURPS Fantasy campaign it might be the world of Yrth.

In role-playing games (RPGs), setting is usually presented as an atlas or encyclopedia of the area where the player characters (PCs) are expected to be, with lists of important people the PCs might meet and locations they can explore. The game tries to create a fictional reality and players are expected to create characters to suit it rather than vice versa. More flexible GMs will tweak details of the world to suit the players' character concepts, but the larger and more complete the setting, the more difficult this becomes. On the other hand a deep and well-developed setting such as Tekumel or Glorantha allows the players to feel that their characters are experiencing and exploring something larger than themselves

Many RPG publishers also publish settings for use with their products. These include the Yrth setting for GURPS Fantasy and the World of Greyhawk supplement for Dungeons & Dragons. Many other games include setting and rules in the same book. Examples include Vampire: The Masquerade and Star Wars.

Setting and system are commonly held to be the two halves of an RPG, though this dichotomy is sometimes difficult to apply neatly. Some games, such as D&D and Sorcerer, have no explicit setting, but the rules naturally give rise to a particular kind of game that fails outside of certain settings. Others, like Nobilis, have rules so specific to their setting that they are impossible to use for anything notably different without extensive reworking.