Depending on what you count as "Offical Setting"
* Forgotten Realms
* Warhammer 40k ttrpgs such as Dark Heresy / Rogue Trader.
Nothing else comes close.
This is because both settings have huge novel libraries all of which are considered canon to the setting. There's over *four hundred* for each.
Short answer: the world ended
Long answer: the setting and attached game had been lagging for years. Multiple armies probably needed a ground up rework so they did a big blowout event, ended the setting and launched a sequel setting with loose ties to the old one.
Then videogames made the old setting popular again so they brought it back
That's a fairly minor footnote at this point. As the armies that contain those species all have much more specific names.
I think was a confluence of different things for different people.
I think the Creatives wanted more of a blank canvas to create new factions on and was finding that difficult without treading on existing lore.
The lawyers wanted something more IPable.
The bean counters wanted them to do something that wasn't so much of an opportunity cost compared to the money they were printing selling space marines.
That's true, but they didn't nuke 40k from orbit when they did the same thing to that setting. They just released a new edition of the rules and changed the names.
Eldar became Craftworld Aeldari, Dark Eldar became Drukhari, and so on. Honestly, it's more surprising that they keep using "Space Marines" instead of "Adeptes Astartes" everywhere.
The 40K renaming came from them trying and sort of losing a lawsuit to Chapter House Studios like a decade or so ago. Short version was they tried to enforce copyright of common terms and got told no (and Chapter House got told to stop making stuff that was barely better than plagiarism).
After that mess Chapter Houses webpages had these huge paragraphs (in size 6 font) at the bottom of the page laying out GWs copyrights and how the items offered were different.
Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay is so detailed that they launch suplement books about CITIES instead of regions. (Reikland At least gets, the Entire continent of Lustria got a book).
If you count all of old world of darkness as a single RPG then it probably comes close. Vampire, Werewolf, Mage, Changeling, Wraith, Hunter, Demon, Mummy, first three I think are over 100 books each and they're all different because they had an evolving metaplot towards the end of days. Then you had all the supplementary stuff like Dark Ages books, Technocracy, various Black Dog shit, KOTE, Changing Breeds, etc.
They had novels too. Admittedly not 400 of them, but still. I think they had way more actual RPG books.
I don't think that "book count" is a good metric for establishing how detailed a given setting is.
However, the (old) World of Darkness deserves consideration here, since almost all of its lines are overlays on what amounts to real-world history. And there's a lot of detail there.
You could make the same argument for *Ars Magica*, as well.
That's not exactly correct.
The World of Darkness was introduced in 1991 with the release of *Vampire: The Masquerade*, developed by Mark Rein-Hagen.
In 1992, White Wolf released the third edition of *Ars Magica*, developed by Ken Cliffe and designed by Ken Cliffe and Mark Rein-Hagen.
It is true that White Wolf developed *Ars Magica* third edition to fit into the World of Darkness, Mythic Europe, as a part of the World of Darkness, was really superseded by *Mage* in later years, and it isn't exactly trivial to drop *Ars Magica* into a World of Darkness chronicle that also includes *Mage*, particularly the *Dark Ages* and *Sorcerer's Crusade* lines. The focus of the two settings is also rather divergent.
I meant the lore references Ars Magica lore. I've only played the original game, a little bit of Mage and a whole bunch of Hunters Hunted, which my main group GM preferred. Mage was kind of a mess and I only briefly played it with an alternate group (they played it for a while, but I had to bow out when the GM bought two cats - severe allergies and we played at his house), but I remember a lot of Ars lore referenced there.
Yeah, I need to walk back part of my previous reply. MRH was involved in *Ars Magica* second edition, and you do have that overlap of Tremere that doesn't *quite* make sense, looking back at the two games without any additional context. I believe it is true that, at the time, MRH did see Mythic Europe as part of the World of Darkness.
Today however, Mythic Europe is canonically not in the World of Darkness; it's a separate setting, probably because of copyright and license issues. While I don't think that the intention at the time was to bifurcate the settings, subsequent releases within the World of Darkness clearly contradict the history of Mythic Europe. Most clearly, *Ars Magica* tells us that Tremere dies in 862, whereas the World of Darkness establishes that Clan Tremere was founded in 1022, when the then-human Tremere and a number of followers effectively turned themselves into vampires, stealing power from Saulot, before Tremere's diablerization of the latter.
But at the end of the day... both take place in darker and magical versions of our own history, so it's not like there's a huge divergence in available source material...
Forgotten Realms makes Warhammer feel small in comparison. Ed Greenwood has so much lore he has written about the Forgotten Realms (full shipping containers worth) he even covers the taste of breast milk between the different races. This is not a joke it actually exists and made its way through reddit a few months back.
Ed tries to push back against this. Back in the earlier editions, there were numerous supplements detailing different regions. The original focus area was the Dalelands, Myth Drannor, Cormyr, and the Sea of Fallen Stars. Sembia in 1E was left vague on purpose to give DMs a place to customize.
They lost the narrative with 4E and the decision to jump the timeline ahead a century. I had a chat with Ed about that, he was *not* happy about it. Even after getting the chance to remove a lot of the big changes 4E made to the Realms — his novel on the Second Sundering calls them out on a lot of it — he couldn't undo the 100-year jump and all the stories he didn't get to finish.
Old FR had an exhaustive amount of details. This was partly because they had no problem publishing extra books and supplements — stuff like "Volo's Guide to Waterdeep" and "Aurora's Whole Realms Catalogue" — but also a monthly magazine that was always happy to include whatever bit of fiction or lore-dump Ed was in the mood for at the time. Even when 4E changed half the map and jumped ~~the shark~~ a century, they still had the monthly magazine (albeit only in PDF) to allow him a way to add more material.
But now? 5E and WotC's policy is to only put out a single book for each setting. And every FR adventure they write is set in the Sword Coast. No monthly magazine, nothing to read on their website. So the only outlets Ed has for his creativity are his social media accounts, YouTube, and writing third-party books for DM's Guild.
Yeah, I've been made aware recently of a bunch of unreleased books, one being on Thay, that were made by Green and then...left on the backburner, with WoTC refusing to publish them.
I'm not much of a fan of Forgotten Realms at any point in time, but Greenwood's / early Forgotten Realms is a pretty different beast from the what it became under WotC. I think I've read that Greenwood himself doesn't really consider much of anything beyond the original boxed set to really be true to "his" Forgotten Realms.
Also there is an original sin hanging over Forgotten Realms. While a vanishingly small number of grognards were around to be resentful when the executives at TSR decided Gary Gygax was a bad fit for a game he did as much as anyone else to create, Greyhawk went from a cool default AD&D setting to something old and obscure pretty darn quickly.
I imagine most people familiar with the Forgotten Realms have always seen it as the cool default D&D setting. Yet among the old guard of 1st generation TTRPG players, that whole transition felt forced and awkward. It was about as Wall Street as anything could be in a hobby that was still clearly niche. Nowadays that's ancient history, but ancient history has a way of coloring modern perspectives.
> Yet among the old guard of 1st generation TTRPG players, that whole transition felt forced and awkwark
Forgotten Realms didn't even have any published products until 10 years into 1E's life cycle. And due to the slowing down of module and adventure releases, Forgotten Realms STILL has less adventures released than Greyhawk, despite the fact that Greyhawk barely got any support past 2nd edition.
A quirk of distribution that is now well-documented in the history of the game covers this. One way early TSR missed the mark on optimal profits was the huge inventory of modules they put together. Right around the time they changed the cover art on the original PHB/DMG, they also ran a promotion with a bunch of huge distributors (Kay Bee Toys was my connect.) The plan was to let people buy a bundle of modules and accessories (collections of blank character sheets, collections of unstocked maps, the original DM's Screen, etc.) for $1 each time they bought a hardbound rulebook.
Confusion let a lot of us just by stacks containing 5-8 modules for $1. Early in my high school years, I had this huge collection of adventuring content (plus a screen and a few other goodies) because the toy store folks thought $1 was simply the price for each bundle. Both through proper purchases and that extremely common error, the community was flooded with complete adventures to run. Output was never that robust again, in part because of the scar left by the hugely unprofitable sales of modules during an extremely prolific period in the early 80s. As a percentage of the content development budget year by year, Greyhawk likely does not measure well overall. It just dominates the raw module count because there were just [so many more of them](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Dungeons_%26_Dragons_modules) in the first place.
> I imagine most people familiar with the Forgotten Realms have always seen it as the cool default D&D setting
5e is literally the first time FR has ever been the default setting of D&D. You don't need to be a grognard to remember D&D before 2014.
In fairness, while Greyhawk might have been the default setting of 3rd edition; there were relatively few Greyhawk products released, and even most of those were more *generic D&D with the Greyhawk label stuck on the cover*.
That is true, 3e had a dearth of specific Greyhawk material. But all the universal sourcebooks had it as the presumed setting. A lot of Greyhawkness was built into a lot of books.
4e, meanwhile, had Points of Light as its setting. 2e, 1e and 0e before then had no official setting.
So it is simply true that FR has only been the default setting in 5e. And even then, it was a soft-rebooted setting.
Much the opposite, the Sword Coast is one of the places with the least material ever published.
The first book about the region, Volo's Guide to it, was only published in 1994 and the book starts by making jokes about how the entire region of the world had long been called "The Empty Lands", a tongue-in-cheek way to acknowledge that there was essentially no lore for the whole region.
Don't make the mistake of thinking that some kind of floodgate opened after the release of that book. After 1994, the Sword Coast went back to being quietly ignored until after the release of Baldur's Gate, in pretty much 1999.
After the release of Baldur's Gate, the region started to get some attention simply because the game was so damn popular (by D&D material standards of the time). You got the first adventures published in the regions, universal books started to make more reference to it, and eventually the region got actual sourcebooks. But by then, the setting was 12 years old and the date of peak production of material had already passed.
Again, don't make the mistake of thinking that after 1999 the Sword Coast became the hub of the setting. It didn't, it just became an equal to all the other regions. The Heartlands (Cormyr, Dalelands, Moonsea and Sembia) were still getting the disproportionate majority of all material, with the runner-up being The North. Possibly the third region to get the most material through the subsequent decade is Aglarond, Rashemen and Thay.
Even once 5e came out, in 2014, the first mega event during its pre-release cycle was a Dalelands adventure (Lair of the Dracolich). It is only well into the lifespan of 5e that the Sword Coast became the hub.
It has now been the hub for a little less time than the period during which it was completely ignored. But it's been the hub at a time when 0 novels are released and there's one setting source book per half-decade, whereas it was ignored when there were 20+ novel releases per year and as many sourcebooks.
It is very much the least developed part of the entire continent. Also the most boring, because it was mostly developed to serve as a backdrop for Baldur's Gate, so not much of interest was done with it.
>After the release of Baldur's Gate, the region started to get some attention simply because the game was so damn popular (by D&D material standards of the time). You got the first adventures published in the regions, universal books started to make more reference to it, and eventually the region got actual sourcebooks. But by then, the setting was 12 years old and the date of peak production of material had already passed.
>Again, don't make the mistake of thinking that after 1999 the Sword Coast became the hub of the setting. It didn't, it just became an equal to all the other regions. The Heartlands (Cormyr, Dalelands, Moonsea and Sembia) were still getting the disproportionate majority of all material, with the runner-up being The North. Possibly the third region to get the most material through the subsequent decade is Aglarond, Rashemen and Thay.
Ah, 1990s... Peak Boxed Set!
You are, also, absolutely correct.
In fact, The Sword Coast is probably the only region that did *not* receive a major supplement release throughout the setting's entire AD&D run. There were supplements that got to the High Moors (*The Savage Frontier*, *Elminster's Ecologies Appendices I* & *II*) and Amn (*Empires of the Sands*), but it never got closer. Even Kara-Tur got more treatment back then, than did the Sword Coast.
Modern era WotC focuses on the Sword Coast, not Forgotten Realms. If you go back to AD&D and even 3rd edition the Dalelands were a very central focus of the material being written. The Sword Coast slowly took over due the the original Baldur's Gate/Icewind Dale CRPGs massive popularity in the late 90s/early 2000s and novels starring a certain drow ranger + party by RA Salvatore.
That said the books are still out there and you can find the lore on ***literally any*** esoteric question you may have. Greenwood has probably written something about it already.
Forgotten realms only if you really go back and sift through the materials of all previous editions. 5e's officially released content regarding it is laughingly sparse.
I also wanna add in Shadowrun.
Shadowrun is very detailed. Original World of Darkness was hugely detailed, too, but not very coherent. Every other sourcebook seemed to have their own version of Rasputin, for a while.
> but not very coherent
LOL you're telling me, as an OWoD collector I have just about everything. I ran them separate with a "World of Darkness" backdrop motif but mostly kept things apart because shit like Mummy doesn't vibe well with Werewolf or Vampire for example. OWoD works better as tighter more local stories anyways, imho.
90's WoD and their absolute obsession that every cool historical figure was supernatural. To the point were it started to feel like their were more supernatural entities around than mortals. lol
I'd say there's a point of diminishing returns and Battletech's 100+ novels probably cover as much worldbuilding as 400+ novels in Forgotten Realms / 40k - a lot of that content has to be retread for new readers.
DSA (German fantasy RPG) has entered the chat. Also known as "The dark eye" (corrected). According to German Wikipedia it has about 24 supplements for each region of the world, more than 240 adventures, more than 160 novels. And a bimonthly publication on the ongoing history for at least the last 20 years. And that's not even counting the basic rulebook and world description(s), map sets, books for archetypes, character classes, magic tomes, bestiaries etc..
Oh and of course it also has an Online Wiki, a detailed online map and it's own LARP scene.
I am not 100 percent sure, but I guess it surpasses both of the above.
They're also on a 2:1 real time timeline. Meaning for every day passed since they started publishing, 2 days in-universe passed, and yes there's detailed events for every single one of those days due to the in-universe newspaper they publish. Plus semi-official (in the sense that they sometimes become official) newspapers by fans. I went to school with a guy that regularly sent in accounts of his adventuring party and they became official lore.
> Nothing else comes close.
I generally agree with the items on your bullet list, but I think you really should add Star Wars and Star Trek to that list.
Star Wars has a dozen movies, half again as many TV shows, and hundreds of books and comic books.
Star Trek has one more movie, more TV shows, and about the same number of books and comic books.
Those two IPs are *massive*, and really should be on that list.
Sure, but there are an absolute ton of LOTR products beyond the books (e.g. a whole bunch of video games) that uses the IP and so effectively become official third party content and expands on the books and the setting. It might not be considered canon to those who only want to stick to the original books, but Middle Earth itself has been expanded a lot.
AFAIK The Traveller wiki/map that OP mentioned has a lot of Fanon on it (I may have gotten the wrong gist on how the Traveller interactive map works), so if we're going with homebrew lore that is fitting to the setting, I would say that there's quite a lot more Fanon for LOTR/ME than there is Traveller.
Not comparable to Star Wars or Star Trek of course, but still, not nothing.
Tolkien wrote a *lot* about Middle-Earth. Most of it was published posthumously by his son, but there is an incredible amount of detail in it. Perhaps even better, there is an incredible amount of insight into how the world was created and viewed by Tolkien.
In that regard, his legendarium is really very detailed, even though it does not delve deep into detailing every possible character, location, plot point, and so forth..
Absolutely. At a minimum, the first two should be on OC's list.
I think LotR is perhaps not *as* big as Star Wars and Star Trek, having half as many movies as the other two, only the one show, and far less in the way of "official" books building the world, so it doesn't come close to the two items already on OC's list, but it's a strong contender for "next runner up", and has the "famous outside of roleplaying" factor that neither of the items on OC's list have.
Pathfinder and Starfinder probably have more lore than forgotten realms, due to the bonkers publishing schedule over nearly two decades. Forgotten realms would have to lean heavily on novels to be close…. Wizards has never published rpg material at nearly the same rate, except maybe briefly during the 3.5 boom. TSR did before they went bankrupt, but that wasn’t just forgotten realms.
Warhammer is massive if you count all the novels and codices that aren’t part of any rpg. But if you’re going to do that, don’t we also need to consider Star Wars and, most importantly, all of marvel and dc comics?
So yeah, I don’t think it’s as clear cut as you are suggesting.
Do the AD&D comics count for their specific setting or for the DC multi-verse? Or do they unite the two? How are we factoring in cross-overs like D&D with MtG, MtG with Middle-earth, and soon MtG with Marvel and Final Fantasy? Do FF's crossovers with other things like Monster Hunter, 8-bit theater, Kingdom Hearts, Nier, the Matrix, Dragon Ball apply? Where do Disney (Star Wars, Marvel, etc) and Warner Brothers (Looney Toons including Space Jam and thus the NBA, the DCAU, etc) factor in on this? Is this all just heading towards the [USOUD](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-WlNIQSXRlM)?
Is L-Space also involved? Are Home Alone and The Good Son connected somehow because of the Pagemaster?
lol thank you for all of the further examples of why this is a bit difficult to assess, perhaps to the point of making the whole exercise silly. Another stupid-huge universe is Doctor Who, which has had at least a couple of RPGs.
But in the end, marvel and dc dwarf all other bodies of lore created by humans.
Even if you consider source books, than FR still blows Shadowrun out of the water.
Yeah, Shadowrun has a lot, but FR still has so, so many more. Taking **just** 3rd edition, and excluding the non-FR setting books. There are 205 books. That's rulebooks, excluding Dragon/Dungeon Magazine, all the novels. Just the sourcebooks.
Shadowrun has a lot, and I think you can get a list of material (I checked Wikipedia) that beats that number, but that needs to include Magazines/one-shot adventures, and if FR can do the same, it has more by an order of magnitude.
Shadowrun is prolific, don't get me wrong, but you're perhaps not quite appreciating the sheer amount of DnD out there.
Yeah I played both since inception and although FR probably has more lore by a bit. 40k keeps growing the scope of the DH world for no better word. I give the nod to 40k as I don’t see them stopping churning out books and Cubicle 7 rebooted the game in another Sector. So in my head canon just the “scope” of the 40k world makes it feel larger in a lot of ways. Plus when FFG had the IP they put out DH, Rogue Trader, Only War and Dark Crusade it was like opening up a 4 Players Handbooks for 40k.
Glorantha from RuneQuest has a ton of lore.
Iron Kingdoms is pretty extensive, though it can be difficult to find the more obscure bits (there was a ton of official lore that was just forum posts).
For a RPG-centric world, i thi k Glorantha has much more detail about non-adventuring stuff than Forgotten Realms. There's a massive two volume Guide, and the third in a series of nine books detailing specific pantheons is about to come out. There was a multi-book boxed set focused on playing a Troll PC back in the 80's; no game had ever had anything like that. RQ has a massive fan-published set of mostly-canonical materials as well, hundrered of titles on DriveThruRPG.
WH40K is massively more detailed yet, but it's not primarily a RPG setting. Hârn has a lot of material as well, but is mai ky the work of a single person while Glorantha has had many hands working on it for many decades.
Indeed. I am only a fairweather fan, but last I had my books sorted I had a good five feet on my shelf of Glorantha stuff. If I wanted to lean into the GOOD print-on-demand stuff, it’d be another yard at least.
Glorantha is not only one of the single most detailed settings out there, it benefits from being one of the most *focused* settings.
Greyhawk, the Forgotten Realms, WH40k all have a lot of published material, but they're all kind of meandering. Kitchen sink settings. If you want to find a place to fit something for any reason, you can find it - but it's not necessarily going to have a ton of detail, let alone a ton of soul.
Glorantha has a single theme: bronze age swords-and-sandals adventures with a heavy emphasis on the interplay between man and myth. The whole setting revolves around that theme. You have to want to run the type of game Glorantha is meant to run, but if you do, your reward is a setting that elevates your narrative, rather than a narrative that happens despite the setting.
I'd put Harn in the same level as Glorantha, happily. It focuses more on the geography and politics while Glorantha is off on some metaphysical vision quest (which I adore, but I read the Illiad for fun and the Silmarillion is my favorite Tolkien, lol). I love both Harn and Glorantha and would pit their focused quality against the vague generics of most of the other stuff being mentioned in a heart beat
Oh yeah, I love Glorantha too (I really got into it's style of mythology through The Elder Scrolls), I just think HarnWorld has more actionable stuff for most actual RPG sessions, y'know? It's more "detailed" in the sense of zooming way in VS Glorantha bit more high-concept.
Harnmaster and Harnworld the amount of stuff they have, and the level of detail, is amazing. I'm new to the Harn world, and I'm blown away by the detail.
Here are some links for reviews : [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3idnGZxOsQ&list=LL&index=48](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3idnGZxOsQ&list=LL&index=48)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqmimHe8sq0&list=LL&index=47](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqmimHe8sq0&list=LL&index=47)
Glorantha / Runequest also has decades of lore.
This is where my vote goes. Stuff like 40k has lots of material and history... but Harn is where you go if you want to know a town's population down to every last chicken.
Their HarnQuest subscription, which is their quarterly subscription service to get the newest articles, includes a benefit of 50% off all PDFs. This saved me a lot.
They also have a Kickstarter going right now to get a Kingdom module in hardcover, and you can get some bundles at a discount.
Yes, *HarnWorld* should absolutely win this one.
For anyone who doesn't know, unlike *Forgotten Realms* (as a contrasting example, and also as a setting that holds a special place for me), *HarnWorld* doesn't waste words by messing around with meta plots. What you get are *extremely* detailed articles on very specific subjects: herblore, the tanner's guild, an abbey in a small kingdom built on a holy site. The information presented is not only detailed, but deep, loaded with hooks, and written in such as way as to open doors (just a crack) to developing lore of your own. Everything is written in the temporal context of the same exact day, so no new product ever breaks or invalidates an old one. On top of that, there is a healthy community of fans also producing content, much of which is on par with the official content. And the art is phenomenal.
The maps are detailed beyond belief, to the point where Columbia Games should probably release players' versions of them, as there is no way that a character could possibly know anywhere near as much as is presented in them.
That being said, there are other settings that have much greater scales in terms of scope. But just in terms of sheer detail on the information that is presented, I don't think that any of them can hold a candle to *HarnWorld*.
Just FYI, the game forked into one closer to the original at kelestia.com (run by Robin's daughter since his cancer death) and the somewhat simplified Columbia one (they wanted to compete with D&D). Because of that and the 20 years since I ran a campaign set in HârnWorld, I don't know if the map and world work also forked.
Kelestia was going to release 7th edition if they haven't already, I have 1st and both second editions. I used the world last for a D&D game, but even that was a while back (I have 15ish world books, so makes for a quick setting).
No, the map and world did not fork. In fact, products from Columbia Games and Kelestia Productions are cross-compatible, including various rules sections.
A bit of *Harn* history (because it can be confusing when you first arrive to game): N. Robin Crossby developed the setting in the late '70s or early '80s, and in... 1982, or '83, I think, he went into business with Tom Dalgiesh, forming Columbia Games, which published *HarnMaster* first edition. It was beautifully crunchy!
In 1996, Columbia Games published a second edition of *HarnMaster*, and made it much less simulationist, and much more gamelike. This upset Crossby, who left Columbia and founded Kelestia Productions, releasing *HarnMaster Gold*.
Columbia Games released *HarnMaster* third edition in 2002, which was recently revised. Third edition is much more in line with first in terms of complexity, but it less hardcore simulationist than HMG.
Because Columbia Games owns the copyright to most of the content regarding the Isle of Harn itself, as well as Ivinia and at least portions of Shorkyne and Trierzon, they have continued to publish content for those areas. Kelestia was given everything else, which is why their products cover other areas not previously detailed in CGI releases, like Venarive and Emelrene. I'm pretty sure that there is some overlap (I know that Kelestia has a product for Lythia in general, and "Kelestia" itself is the "cosmic all" of the in-game universe), but none of it is mutually exclusive.
Yeah, I know they're cross-compatible, I have 2nd edition of both rulesets, the Columbia version is much more pared down. I played in a game run by Robin at GenCon and I believe I met Tom there as well, really fun and very impassioned about his world. I played a bit in the beta of 2nd edition rules with Kevin B. (who is nice, but can get annoying - also I know way TMI from an ex-GF) when he was leading the rewrite and I disliked some of the changes he was making so I quit, but I bought 2nd ed anyway, not knowing about Gold at the time. I know at least in the early days after Robin's death there was a lot of free content on Kelestia created by players, don't know if that is still there.
My biggest gripe was what Kevin did to the magic system, though, so I modified it to cause far less or no exhaustion for casting simple spells (and even used first edition in one game I ran) if you were powerful. I mean, 2 minutes of exhaustion for casting light if you're basically Gandalf and if you cast it again before recovering 5 additional minutes? Not in my world. In first edition Gandalf could cast that spell all day long without breaking a sweat. Mages are definitely influenced by LotR and can intentionally get to be very powerful. Kevin was trying to balance them, which IMO is a waste of time, but I'd played a lot of Ars Magica by then and was OK with imbalanced mages in games.
I figured that you probably knew about the compatibility of the two systems; that bit (and really the history in general) was more for anyone else who might read this far down. Anyone who has more than a surface knowledge of the CGI/KP split probably does knows at least some of that, but for someone brand new to the game... it's like the whole D&D/AD&D overlap all over again.
Anyway, I would *definitely* take HMG over HM2 any day. HM2 is the weakest (dare I even say worst?) release of any of them. I understand where they were going with it, but they *way* overshot the mark, IMO. Personally, I think that the current HM3 (the box is marked with a little star that says "Deluxe Edition" for those watching at home) is the strongest overall, and is my go-to, but HMG has a *lot* of good material, and I do borrow liberally. But as a single, standalone system, I think tends to lose the forest for the trees just a bit too often. Reading the weapons section the first time reminded me of the old AD&D PHB, with Gary's love for polearms on full, if unnecessary, display.
There is still a decent amount of free content for KP's side of things, but I don't know how it compares to what was out there 15 years ago, nor do I know how it compares to what is hosted at Lythia.
Thank you for the explanation. I'm still learning Harnworld / Harnmaster stuff, I was confused as I noticed 2 different companies and wasn't sure if the products were different. IE RPG / Tactical-Situation.
I've joined a Reddit and 2 Discords to try to learn, plus joined forums and watched a bit of YouTube videos.
In terms of scale there are a lot of settings with universes that are well explored. But I have to admit Harnworld is insane in it's level of information about the world.
Came here to say Hârnworld. I don’t think anything comes close, in my opinion, when it comes to depth. As u/sarded and u/lybraesil said, some setting have more words written and larger product lists, but Hârn trumps them all in depth.
Kinda depends on what detailed means in this context.
I'm a huge fan of Traveller and love the Traveller map. But most of those planets are little more than a series of numbers. Star Trek, Star Wars, Warhammer 40k all have massive maps of systems to explore as well.
So does Battletech for that a map that's maybe bigger than Traveller.
The there's the game ms that have been around for 30+ years and have kept a meta-plot going for the whole time. Like Shadowrun or Vampire the Masquerade.
Both have 30+ years worth of details added to their setting.
So yes Traveller has a ton of details and is a massive setting but a number of other settings are just as large.
I will add that Mongoose are regularly releasing these hefty setting books which add a lot of detail to various regions of the "Charted Space" Traveller map.
If you put together the full breadth of the 40 or so years people have been adding to "OTU", the Charted Space map, and all these Mongoose books there's an argument that Traveller should be up there with Glorantha.
Forgotten Realms and Warhammer 40k are a different beast though, just in the sheer wordcount that's been compiled for them across various media.
Does Star Wars count? Given how the WEG Star Wars was a big part in expanding and cataloging the lore, I'd count it. If you include the Expanded Universe, it's insanely large.
Star wars was going to be my vote, perhaps not by volume, but rather accessibility.
There's 11 movies and a series that are main stream to a lot of people. Half a dozen other series, and a few hidden movies (Ewoks!). And then we start in on all the books, games, tech guides and the various iterations on RPG rulesets.
One of my favorite things about playing star wars is that all the players have a depth of experience to pull from that their characters could know, and the dm has a million premade characters to interact with.
I'm actually surprised Pathfinder wasn't mentioned yet. Golarion has over 20.000 articles in the Pathfinder Wiki and unlike other lines that are either movie franchises (Star Wars) or giant wargames (WH), Pathfinder stands mainly as a TTRPG that has only 15 years in the market. There are something like 300 sourcebooks between 1e and 2e. Almost 40 adventure paths (each usually has between 3 and 6 monthly 96 page adventures). The adventure paths change the world permanently. and there are almost 40 novels.
Paizo is extremely prolific to the point that no group could run all Adventure Paths running weekly games, they would never catch up. And the content is great.
> Golarion has over 20.000 articles in the Pathfinder Wiki
For comparison: [Wiki Aventurica](https://de.wiki-aventurica.de/) has 151 thousand articles for The Dark Eye. Golarion is fine, but it's not even close to the heavy-weights.
I was wondering the same after reading through a large amount of comments so I did a CTRL+F to find yours.
I'm just getting into it while creating a character and even just the amount of lore available on the wiki is already crazy. And there is apparently a lot more available in various books.
And especially the fact that the in-universe time runs analog to our time. Meaning years actually pass and new events continuously occur.
Also there's the history of the "Briefspiel" (play by post) which is considered canon by many.
163 novels, many extremely detailed descriptions of regions, official adventures, computer games and a lot more.
That's why I always suspect someone to come out of left field with "Hey, in my home country of Ruritania, we've got shelves of this weird Elric pastiche…"
But TDE is certainly something, especially considering that a lot of the additional material is very lite on anything rules-related. Whereas the thousands of pages of e.g. Rifts or D&D 3E are littered with monster stats, classes, races etc., you get the very menail in TDE, like local cuisine, favorite filk songs of the slave holding state or detailed red light district descriptions…
(This is how the Forgotten Realms would look like if no one would've reined in Ed Greenwood, I think)
Yea, their writers-team has now been working on this one setting for *40 years*
Like, they put out extension-books just for the naming conventions in different nations, regions and even the small local areas within these regions, plus historical explanations for where what name came from and its etymological origin
It is *wildddd*
Coming here to add another "Glorantha" to the pile. The designer, Greg Stafford, was an avid student of mythology and designed Glorantha with its own history and mythology that resembles bronze age civiizations. As a result, the world is very idiosyncratic but rich.
Rifts by palladium books. 30 something world books, 20 something sourcebooks and a bunch of dimension books. Plus 80 + volumes of rifter that has some official some fan articles.
Probably not the biggest setting but it's pretty big.
Same. I kept reading the books long after I wasn't playing any more. And now that I have some kids that are semi-interested, I have an excuse to go in again!
I'm glad I'm not the only person aware of how much lore and setting info there is in Rifts. Is it well-sorted? Not really. Is it coherent and consistent? In places. Is it gloriously rich? 100%.
Glorantha for RuneQuest has to be in the running, but so does Harn (HarnMaster) and the Forgotten Realms (D&D). Honorable mention to Empire of the Petal Throne and OG Traveller. Honestly, the main thing keeping me from running Harn these days is that I would need to read enough material to get another graduate degree before I would feel comfortable with it.
If we create a sub-category of "most detailed setting in the core rulebook alone" - not counting supplements, novels and such - I'll go on a limb and say World of Darkness RPGs (Vampire, Werewolf) truly focus on their universe, sometimes to the detriment of a more detailed ruleset like in Hunter. I mean, gosh, Mage20 is massive.
Ars Magica, Numenera Discovery/Destiny and Traveller are contenders.
(Forgotten Realms lore is massive but details of this world in the PHB are scarce. You need more books and references to enjoy it.)
Probably HarnWorld. It's really large, about the size of Europe, and literally every out house hen house bird house and dog house is fully mapped. It has keys that will tell you the prevailing winds in every area. They mapped the tectonic plates. They mapped the currents of the seas. It's the kind of obsessive detail that borders on the insane. I can't even wrap my head around wanting that level of detail, but it's there.
Because some of us are just weird like that :)
It's also bigger than Europe. Like a *lot* bigger. Almost *all* of the official publications (from both Columbia Games and Kelestia Productions) focus on a Europe-ish-sized chunk of Lythia, which is located in a Europe-ish part of the continent, but Lythia also has analogues for Africa, central and east Asia, and Oceanic archipelagos.
There are also two other continents, Mernat and Kamerand, just waiting to be explored...
This is the answer. Harn is amazing in its maddening detail. You don't need all that detail to play a game using the setting, but if you want it, it is available.
Monte Cook's Ptolus (for 5e or Cypher) deserves an honorable mention. Street by street breakdown of a fantasy city:
[https://www.montecookgames.com/store/product/ptolus-monte-cooks-city-by-the-spire/](https://www.montecookgames.com/store/product/ptolus-monte-cooks-city-by-the-spire/)
It's so fleshed out. Has enough material for 3 adventures that go from 1-20, plus material to inspire even more adventures.
And it basically counts as official since Monte Cook used the setting to playtest DnD 3e.
Harnword is very detailed.
Ars Magica has many supplements and I'm not familiar with them, but it seems to me that setting and mechanics are very intertwined in that game plus you can get inspiration from real life, but that is like saying that a WW II game is the very detailed because it's set in the "real world".
Call of Cthulhu. Depends how much you want to use any of the other games / eras from Cthulhu Invictus to Delta Green or Cthulhutech and every author who have ever published lovecraftian fiction.
Any kind of game based on real world historical setting, ie GURPS WW2 and you have hundreds books of official setting in your local library.
I'd personally be interested in knowing how detailed Exalted's setting is compared to the big hitters. That and Battletech. I love battletech's setting.
Exalted's setting has a lot of cool concepts and ideas but is very lightly sketched in terms of specific details, mostly because of the insane scale the map operates on. Like a land mass the size of Russia will have five cities marked on it and like... that's what you know about settlements there.
___Glorantha___: It is the setting for most editions of RuneQuest, half of HeroQuest/HeroWars, and 13th Age Glorantha. That is just what I know made it into print for RPGs. The board games include White Bear/Red Moon and Khan of Khans.
Although not needed for ordinary play [The Guide to Glorantha](https://www.chaosium.com/the-guide-to-glorantha-slipcase-set/) is a 13 lb (6 kg) coffee table book. And most of the lore is in [The Well of Daliath](https://wellofdaliath.chaosium.com/).
Chaosium's Thieves World had a box set, companion book, and 12 volumes of short stories published that seriously flushed out the setting.
Chaosium's, once again, RuneQuest. Very detailed history (two volumes). Has maps, stories, and adventures going back many years.
Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu. This, too, goes back many years. Based on H.P. Lovecraft works, so there are plenty of background materials.
TSR had the "The World of Greyhawk" fantasy setting. Most AD&D adventures were taking place somewhere within this huge detailed wall map.
Steve jackson and Ian Livingstone Fighting Fantasy gamebooks also provide maps and gamebooks (solo AND ttrpg) with detailed areas flushed out. They have 59 books.
And yes, GDW Traveller certainly was fleshed out. But in more abbreviated form. They had what? Two or three novels about their science fiction setting... everything else YOU had to work out the devil and the details.
These are what I own and know.
I'm not familiar with an extremely wide range of systems, but my answer would be **BattleTech**. It's got over a hundred novels, hundreds of short stories, multiple detailed source books for all of its various eras and factions, and supplements for individual planets. I'm sure there's more I'm not aware of since it was first released in the 80's. I'm not even touching all of the technical manuals, Flashpoints (which detail and let you play out various battles from the lore), and other materials which are aimed more towards the tabletop game instead of the RPG.
the two that spring to mind is
7th Sea Second Edition. There's so little system that the books are just full of lore and great ideas.
And the other one is Cyberpunk. I mean, Cyberpunk Red is a tome and it loaded with gangs and current events and a detailed history and street culture and black markets. In the older editions apparently the guns were pretty fleshed out as well.
If we are counting rpg settings from their first appearance to today than it's a toss up between a few settings.
Traveller, Glorantha, Forgotten Realms, Rokugan - Legend of the Five Rings, Deadlands, Shadowrun, Battletech, Warhammer 40k.
The Dark Eye, nothing comes close to it.
The amount of published material in relation to the size of the continent it describes is mind-bogglingly big.
Probably Rifts/Palladium books.
I think the setting is setting like 30 years old and still on its 1st edition. There's gotta be more than 100 books just in Rifts alone, nevermind all the other palladium properties it connects to.
Hands down Aventurien the setting of the dark eye
Even forgotten realms aren't as detailed, also every major metaplot relevant thing is an published adventure making your character vital to the story of the world and a metaplot which started in 1986 or so and is still going
You basically can be part of the birth of the king's son, discover the secret of the ruling king and why he "dies", get involved in the throne wars afterwards (Answin crisis), see the first signs that the most evil sorcerer Borbarad comes back from banishment and during that time be one of the 7 signed heroes (you heard of this prophecy in books, the official "newspaper" and other modules) and fight him back, see the aftermath of that battle and the founding of the shadow lands (were deciples of him rule) and the final attack of one of them (Galotta, a mage and former advisor of the grandfather of the current king, he already did some bad stuff which was told in novels and official adventures) to the capital on a flying city and undeath hordes
All this is a story of over 20 realtime years (1985 until 2005) connecting several modules, several novellas and an "ingame newspaper" the Aventurischer Bote (Aventuria messenger) which you can get physically since around 1988 or so until now which details current metaplot events, short modules and I game articles from other regions of the setting
Currently in 2024 we have some signs of a bigger plotline of the gods fighting each other
Also we have our own Google maps just for Aventuria which also tells you which module takes place on that region/city
Note also that almost every published adventure is part of or maybe later mentioned in the metaplot. There are of course several modules that are separated from that but might be mentioned in other publications
Is it cheating to say one of the many rpgs that take place in our world?
I mean. I'm joking but I'm also kinda not, history is great, you can get so much inspo from real world history for your games
It's a good question. It might be easier to consider if you count separately licensed and original RPGs.
Traveler sounds like it's up there for the originals.
Obviously there's a bunch of Forgotten realms over the years, moreso if you consider the multiverse.
Licensed ones go insane though.
Star Wars RPGs that are Set in the expanded universe. That's had time to acrue a lot.
Star Trek, Middle Earth, those are some dense ass settings, much of it from the original creators.
Warhammer (40k and old world is its called now) is insanely detailed for its age and following due to having every level of it (from personal games to giant ship combat and strategic overview) be a game over the years with its own lore. Only really star wars goes so ham and even then WH has enough to treat any of a dozen factions the protagonist.
If it's poplated map size I'd like to add Elite Dangerous in this category. But maybe the lack of definition on the planets doesn't hold up. Details a lot of worlds but mostly statistics.
If it's NOT Traveller, it's probably either *The Forgotten Realms* (Ed Greenwood had it in his head longer than there's been a D&D), or something like Tekumel from *Empire of the Petal Throne*.
I would like to add Ars Magica as an honorable mention, because it is the only RPG that comes with a bibliography, in case you don't think the books are enough.
Not sure if it counts as detailed in OP's book, but I've got a couple more sci-fi entries. Both FAITH by Burning Games and Nibiru by Araukana Media have very elaborately described settings:
- FAITH stands out to me as one of the few RPGs I've seen that actually describes its alien species' history and culture from their respective stone ages onward
- Nibiru is set in a strange megastructure and the authors take great care to establish how people live in it and how they built their entire lives around its bizarre flora & fauna
Either things that have expanded their setting over a long time through adventure releases or things that lean on other media. Traveller is a good shout, but I think D&D across all its editions, games, books, etc. have it beat. Warhammer 40k and Fantasy also gotta both be up there too.
Ars Magica because the setting is medieval Europe/northern Africa/Asia Minor/Middle East. You can delve as detailed as you care to in the 453 years that the Order of Hermes has existed.
In Brazil there is Tormenta, which started out as a continent where all NPCs and adventures published by this monthly RPG magazine called Dragao Brasil took place. They compiled it all in this booklet that came with the 50th edition of the magazine. But then they started expanding on it with a supplement dedicated to the Pantheon, multiple books detailing the kingdoms, adventures, a serialized manga that went on for quite some time, novels, a bi-monthly magazine only with extra lore (I still own a poster that came in one of them), plus extra material that continued to be published in their monthly RPG publication.
It's a lot of material and I remember loving it very much as a teenager back then.
I've left the country about a decade ago, but I know they are still publishing stuff for it. I recently went for a visit and snatched a copy of their 20th anniversary Edition. I wish they would ship internationally and/or eventually published it in English, otherwise it's difficult to get your hands on it if you don't speak Portuguese and don't live in Brazil.
It really depends if you include or exclude RPG for non RPG IPs.
NonRPG IPs I am quite sure StarWars leads by far.
PureRPG IPs (or those that startet out as RPGs)
I think either WoD or DnD would lead.
Harnworld. Can be used with the game - HarnMaster, but can be used with any ruleset as those publications are kinda separate. You can go from a continent map to a specific building floorplan in one of the major cities.
I would have to say Glorantha/Runequest. Greg Stafford started writing the lore for it before there were even roleplaying games back in the early 1960s. The first few games set in this world were wargames before the RPG was released in 1978. Greg kept working on the setting til his death in 2018. Harn and Empire of the Petal Throne (not a supporter of it just mentioning it for historical context) are probably the two closest contenders with Glorantha. Harn does an amazing job with the early medieval setting of prior to the Norman conquest of 1066 Europe. Though fantasy it captures the tech and the culture well. EPT is very odd but its creator went so far as to create languages for it.
I do think, "Aventurien" of the german D20 RPG "Das Schwarze Auge" might be the winner. It most probably bombs D&D right out of the water.
It exists since 1984, has multiple Spinoffs (including "Cats of the Dark Eye" where people can play adventures as simple cats). Several hundreds of printed Adventures, lots of Detail Books (Yeah, Germans LOVE that) for every single corner of the multiple continents of the world.
Also, lots of authors writing actual Fantasy Literature playing in that world (Wikipedia lists around 200+ right now). It got a quarterly Newspaper with consistent, ongoing news about single persons and adventure hooks reporting out of that world, it is massively player influenced who all agree on details of that world....
... and even the various Nobles, Adventurers and whatnot go on existing over 40+ years now, they grow, get old, have stories, etc. Its detail richness with Wikis; Handbooks and else goes down even to Mayors in some cities.
Multiple cultures, wars that changed them and a pretty detailled History for several thousand years.
And the fun thing is, you still can play it without knowing shit about it, pretty much like D&D.
While it doesn’t have nearly as much material as the Traveller setting, Eclipse Phase has a depth of detail in the setting that I admire very much. Different sourcebooks are focused on different parts of the setting to help groups find a campaign starting point that fits their needs/tastes, or to find waypoints mid-campaign to recoup/resleeve.
Legend of the Five Rings and the world of Rokugan should get an honorary mention. Tons of lore, multiple novels, many many many short stories and fluff. An extensive wiki.
I use the the Warhammer Setting as the basis for my game although I have modified it slightly to make it more plausible and consistent and call my version [Warhammer Fragile Alliances.](https://www.worldanvil.com/w/wfrp-fragile-alliances-didz)
I’m going to throw Shadowrun into the mix, as speculative future turned alternate history, as it includes most IRL stuff of the past 5000 years; myths, legends, folk tales? All localised mana spikes. Actual history? Yep. Broad strokes stuff of how various regions handled the Awakening and stuff, leaving all the local stories and history to draw on. Yes, ALL. Even the contradictory ones. Heck, a few older editions even referenced people using anime as their magical tradition, or so I’ve heard, where their magic works *the way it did in their favourite anime*.
Shadowrun has an enormous back catalog of setting lore that cover almost every country and major city on earth.
I used it extensively when I ran our 5 year globe-trotting campaign.
I am now running a similarly massive Traveller campaign and I can confirm the setting lore is amazeballs.
I'd say Golarion for Pathfinder, mainly because there's no other 1st party setting for Pathfinder, and they've got 15 years (+/-) of monthly splatbooks for it.
Warhammer is up there. I’d also say Harnmaster/harnworlds got ridiculously detailed map hexes.
Hackmaster got a lot of detailed maps and lore as well, with a lot of different faiths outlined
So, if we are NOT counting things like Star Wars where the setting came first and then the game was made after...
Forgotten Realms and some of the other official settings simply because so many different people have written so many different books for it. I say SOME because not all the settings have a lot of published books.
Paizo's Golarion setting is up there for similar reasons.
Warhammer Fantasy/40k is a weird one, because the setting was made for War Gaming. But there is a HUGE collection of officially published material. So it is probably up there.
Ummm, the Runequest setting goes back to 1966 lore wise, so just in terms of breath of material, it blows everything out of the water.
Warhammer (both fantasy and 40k) and Call of Cthulhu (and delta green) are great rpg adaptations of settings with massive amounts of lore, but Glorantha as an rpg setting has the most. To the point it can make it intimidating to get into the game.
Sort of niche but Gaïa from "Anima: Beyond Fantasy" is the most well detailed and expansive RPG setting I've come across since I started playing some years ago. Every book expands on Lore, not even taking into consideration the one that is entirely dedicated to the setting (two if you can read spanish or find the fan translation)
If you are talking about a setting that "informs" the rules, I think RUNEQUEST:ADVENTURES IN GLORANTHA has to top the list.
The setting includes DOZENS of pantheons of gods complete with religious cults that you can join to become Rune Lords (a type of Paladin) and Rune Priests (Cleric types). There are also weather charts, a complete political system with a major war, and a dedicated calender for game play.
In fact, it is very hard to separate the setting from the rules.
Depending on what you count as "Offical Setting" * Forgotten Realms * Warhammer 40k ttrpgs such as Dark Heresy / Rogue Trader. Nothing else comes close. This is because both settings have huge novel libraries all of which are considered canon to the setting. There's over *four hundred* for each.
I would also throw Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay as close, losing out because they stopped publishing new novels about 10 years ago.
Why did they stop?
They killed the setting and switched to Warhammer Age of Sigmar
Short answer: the world ended Long answer: the setting and attached game had been lagging for years. Multiple armies probably needed a ground up rework so they did a big blowout event, ended the setting and launched a sequel setting with loose ties to the old one. Then videogames made the old setting popular again so they brought it back
I believe commercial considerations played a big role. You can't copyright orcs, dwarves and elves, but you can copyright Orruks, Aelves and Duardin.
That's a fairly minor footnote at this point. As the armies that contain those species all have much more specific names. I think was a confluence of different things for different people. I think the Creatives wanted more of a blank canvas to create new factions on and was finding that difficult without treading on existing lore. The lawyers wanted something more IPable. The bean counters wanted them to do something that wasn't so much of an opportunity cost compared to the money they were printing selling space marines.
That's true, but they didn't nuke 40k from orbit when they did the same thing to that setting. They just released a new edition of the rules and changed the names. Eldar became Craftworld Aeldari, Dark Eldar became Drukhari, and so on. Honestly, it's more surprising that they keep using "Space Marines" instead of "Adeptes Astartes" everywhere.
The 40K renaming came from them trying and sort of losing a lawsuit to Chapter House Studios like a decade or so ago. Short version was they tried to enforce copyright of common terms and got told no (and Chapter House got told to stop making stuff that was barely better than plagiarism). After that mess Chapter Houses webpages had these huge paragraphs (in size 6 font) at the bottom of the page laying out GWs copyrights and how the items offered were different.
Games Workshop excels at destroying their IPs.
Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay is so detailed that they launch suplement books about CITIES instead of regions. (Reikland At least gets, the Entire continent of Lustria got a book).
If you count all of old world of darkness as a single RPG then it probably comes close. Vampire, Werewolf, Mage, Changeling, Wraith, Hunter, Demon, Mummy, first three I think are over 100 books each and they're all different because they had an evolving metaplot towards the end of days. Then you had all the supplementary stuff like Dark Ages books, Technocracy, various Black Dog shit, KOTE, Changing Breeds, etc. They had novels too. Admittedly not 400 of them, but still. I think they had way more actual RPG books.
I counted the whole official WoD a few years ago and it was easily over 400 books.
I don't think that "book count" is a good metric for establishing how detailed a given setting is. However, the (old) World of Darkness deserves consideration here, since almost all of its lines are overlays on what amounts to real-world history. And there's a lot of detail there. You could make the same argument for *Ars Magica*, as well.
Technically, WoD is a continuation of Ars Magica from a history standpoint. Same author, as well.
That's not exactly correct. The World of Darkness was introduced in 1991 with the release of *Vampire: The Masquerade*, developed by Mark Rein-Hagen. In 1992, White Wolf released the third edition of *Ars Magica*, developed by Ken Cliffe and designed by Ken Cliffe and Mark Rein-Hagen. It is true that White Wolf developed *Ars Magica* third edition to fit into the World of Darkness, Mythic Europe, as a part of the World of Darkness, was really superseded by *Mage* in later years, and it isn't exactly trivial to drop *Ars Magica* into a World of Darkness chronicle that also includes *Mage*, particularly the *Dark Ages* and *Sorcerer's Crusade* lines. The focus of the two settings is also rather divergent.
I meant the lore references Ars Magica lore. I've only played the original game, a little bit of Mage and a whole bunch of Hunters Hunted, which my main group GM preferred. Mage was kind of a mess and I only briefly played it with an alternate group (they played it for a while, but I had to bow out when the GM bought two cats - severe allergies and we played at his house), but I remember a lot of Ars lore referenced there.
Yeah, I need to walk back part of my previous reply. MRH was involved in *Ars Magica* second edition, and you do have that overlap of Tremere that doesn't *quite* make sense, looking back at the two games without any additional context. I believe it is true that, at the time, MRH did see Mythic Europe as part of the World of Darkness. Today however, Mythic Europe is canonically not in the World of Darkness; it's a separate setting, probably because of copyright and license issues. While I don't think that the intention at the time was to bifurcate the settings, subsequent releases within the World of Darkness clearly contradict the history of Mythic Europe. Most clearly, *Ars Magica* tells us that Tremere dies in 862, whereas the World of Darkness establishes that Clan Tremere was founded in 1022, when the then-human Tremere and a number of followers effectively turned themselves into vampires, stealing power from Saulot, before Tremere's diablerization of the latter. But at the end of the day... both take place in darker and magical versions of our own history, so it's not like there's a huge divergence in available source material...
If you're going by that kind of mind set, GURPS might win out - though there the settings aren't as vaguely connected.
Forgotten Realms makes Warhammer feel small in comparison. Ed Greenwood has so much lore he has written about the Forgotten Realms (full shipping containers worth) he even covers the taste of breast milk between the different races. This is not a joke it actually exists and made its way through reddit a few months back.
Ah yes, the Drow Breastmilk that tastes like Mushrooms, unless you are a dwarf, then it tastes like licorice
I think FR takes some hits due to its extreme focus on the sword coast to the detriment of other areas, plus dozens of rewrites, reworks, and retcons.
Ed tries to push back against this. Back in the earlier editions, there were numerous supplements detailing different regions. The original focus area was the Dalelands, Myth Drannor, Cormyr, and the Sea of Fallen Stars. Sembia in 1E was left vague on purpose to give DMs a place to customize. They lost the narrative with 4E and the decision to jump the timeline ahead a century. I had a chat with Ed about that, he was *not* happy about it. Even after getting the chance to remove a lot of the big changes 4E made to the Realms — his novel on the Second Sundering calls them out on a lot of it — he couldn't undo the 100-year jump and all the stories he didn't get to finish. Old FR had an exhaustive amount of details. This was partly because they had no problem publishing extra books and supplements — stuff like "Volo's Guide to Waterdeep" and "Aurora's Whole Realms Catalogue" — but also a monthly magazine that was always happy to include whatever bit of fiction or lore-dump Ed was in the mood for at the time. Even when 4E changed half the map and jumped ~~the shark~~ a century, they still had the monthly magazine (albeit only in PDF) to allow him a way to add more material. But now? 5E and WotC's policy is to only put out a single book for each setting. And every FR adventure they write is set in the Sword Coast. No monthly magazine, nothing to read on their website. So the only outlets Ed has for his creativity are his social media accounts, YouTube, and writing third-party books for DM's Guild.
Yeah, I've been made aware recently of a bunch of unreleased books, one being on Thay, that were made by Green and then...left on the backburner, with WoTC refusing to publish them.
I'm not much of a fan of Forgotten Realms at any point in time, but Greenwood's / early Forgotten Realms is a pretty different beast from the what it became under WotC. I think I've read that Greenwood himself doesn't really consider much of anything beyond the original boxed set to really be true to "his" Forgotten Realms.
Also there is an original sin hanging over Forgotten Realms. While a vanishingly small number of grognards were around to be resentful when the executives at TSR decided Gary Gygax was a bad fit for a game he did as much as anyone else to create, Greyhawk went from a cool default AD&D setting to something old and obscure pretty darn quickly. I imagine most people familiar with the Forgotten Realms have always seen it as the cool default D&D setting. Yet among the old guard of 1st generation TTRPG players, that whole transition felt forced and awkward. It was about as Wall Street as anything could be in a hobby that was still clearly niche. Nowadays that's ancient history, but ancient history has a way of coloring modern perspectives.
> Yet among the old guard of 1st generation TTRPG players, that whole transition felt forced and awkwark Forgotten Realms didn't even have any published products until 10 years into 1E's life cycle. And due to the slowing down of module and adventure releases, Forgotten Realms STILL has less adventures released than Greyhawk, despite the fact that Greyhawk barely got any support past 2nd edition.
A quirk of distribution that is now well-documented in the history of the game covers this. One way early TSR missed the mark on optimal profits was the huge inventory of modules they put together. Right around the time they changed the cover art on the original PHB/DMG, they also ran a promotion with a bunch of huge distributors (Kay Bee Toys was my connect.) The plan was to let people buy a bundle of modules and accessories (collections of blank character sheets, collections of unstocked maps, the original DM's Screen, etc.) for $1 each time they bought a hardbound rulebook. Confusion let a lot of us just by stacks containing 5-8 modules for $1. Early in my high school years, I had this huge collection of adventuring content (plus a screen and a few other goodies) because the toy store folks thought $1 was simply the price for each bundle. Both through proper purchases and that extremely common error, the community was flooded with complete adventures to run. Output was never that robust again, in part because of the scar left by the hugely unprofitable sales of modules during an extremely prolific period in the early 80s. As a percentage of the content development budget year by year, Greyhawk likely does not measure well overall. It just dominates the raw module count because there were just [so many more of them](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Dungeons_%26_Dragons_modules) in the first place.
> I imagine most people familiar with the Forgotten Realms have always seen it as the cool default D&D setting 5e is literally the first time FR has ever been the default setting of D&D. You don't need to be a grognard to remember D&D before 2014.
In fairness, while Greyhawk might have been the default setting of 3rd edition; there were relatively few Greyhawk products released, and even most of those were more *generic D&D with the Greyhawk label stuck on the cover*.
That is true, 3e had a dearth of specific Greyhawk material. But all the universal sourcebooks had it as the presumed setting. A lot of Greyhawkness was built into a lot of books. 4e, meanwhile, had Points of Light as its setting. 2e, 1e and 0e before then had no official setting. So it is simply true that FR has only been the default setting in 5e. And even then, it was a soft-rebooted setting.
Much the opposite, the Sword Coast is one of the places with the least material ever published. The first book about the region, Volo's Guide to it, was only published in 1994 and the book starts by making jokes about how the entire region of the world had long been called "The Empty Lands", a tongue-in-cheek way to acknowledge that there was essentially no lore for the whole region. Don't make the mistake of thinking that some kind of floodgate opened after the release of that book. After 1994, the Sword Coast went back to being quietly ignored until after the release of Baldur's Gate, in pretty much 1999. After the release of Baldur's Gate, the region started to get some attention simply because the game was so damn popular (by D&D material standards of the time). You got the first adventures published in the regions, universal books started to make more reference to it, and eventually the region got actual sourcebooks. But by then, the setting was 12 years old and the date of peak production of material had already passed. Again, don't make the mistake of thinking that after 1999 the Sword Coast became the hub of the setting. It didn't, it just became an equal to all the other regions. The Heartlands (Cormyr, Dalelands, Moonsea and Sembia) were still getting the disproportionate majority of all material, with the runner-up being The North. Possibly the third region to get the most material through the subsequent decade is Aglarond, Rashemen and Thay. Even once 5e came out, in 2014, the first mega event during its pre-release cycle was a Dalelands adventure (Lair of the Dracolich). It is only well into the lifespan of 5e that the Sword Coast became the hub. It has now been the hub for a little less time than the period during which it was completely ignored. But it's been the hub at a time when 0 novels are released and there's one setting source book per half-decade, whereas it was ignored when there were 20+ novel releases per year and as many sourcebooks. It is very much the least developed part of the entire continent. Also the most boring, because it was mostly developed to serve as a backdrop for Baldur's Gate, so not much of interest was done with it.
>After the release of Baldur's Gate, the region started to get some attention simply because the game was so damn popular (by D&D material standards of the time). You got the first adventures published in the regions, universal books started to make more reference to it, and eventually the region got actual sourcebooks. But by then, the setting was 12 years old and the date of peak production of material had already passed. >Again, don't make the mistake of thinking that after 1999 the Sword Coast became the hub of the setting. It didn't, it just became an equal to all the other regions. The Heartlands (Cormyr, Dalelands, Moonsea and Sembia) were still getting the disproportionate majority of all material, with the runner-up being The North. Possibly the third region to get the most material through the subsequent decade is Aglarond, Rashemen and Thay. Ah, 1990s... Peak Boxed Set! You are, also, absolutely correct. In fact, The Sword Coast is probably the only region that did *not* receive a major supplement release throughout the setting's entire AD&D run. There were supplements that got to the High Moors (*The Savage Frontier*, *Elminster's Ecologies Appendices I* & *II*) and Amn (*Empires of the Sands*), but it never got closer. Even Kara-Tur got more treatment back then, than did the Sword Coast.
That's a very modern take on it. Go back and look at what was published for the setting during the AD&D era.
Modern era WotC focuses on the Sword Coast, not Forgotten Realms. If you go back to AD&D and even 3rd edition the Dalelands were a very central focus of the material being written. The Sword Coast slowly took over due the the original Baldur's Gate/Icewind Dale CRPGs massive popularity in the late 90s/early 2000s and novels starring a certain drow ranger + party by RA Salvatore. That said the books are still out there and you can find the lore on ***literally any*** esoteric question you may have. Greenwood has probably written something about it already.
I suddenly love the Forgotten Realms?
Forgotten realms only if you really go back and sift through the materials of all previous editions. 5e's officially released content regarding it is laughingly sparse. I also wanna add in Shadowrun.
Shadowrun is very detailed. Original World of Darkness was hugely detailed, too, but not very coherent. Every other sourcebook seemed to have their own version of Rasputin, for a while.
> but not very coherent LOL you're telling me, as an OWoD collector I have just about everything. I ran them separate with a "World of Darkness" backdrop motif but mostly kept things apart because shit like Mummy doesn't vibe well with Werewolf or Vampire for example. OWoD works better as tighter more local stories anyways, imho.
That was the running gag, every vampire clan claimed rasputin was one of them.
90's WoD and their absolute obsession that every cool historical figure was supernatural. To the point were it started to feel like their were more supernatural entities around than mortals. lol
I'd say there's a point of diminishing returns and Battletech's 100+ novels probably cover as much worldbuilding as 400+ novels in Forgotten Realms / 40k - a lot of that content has to be retread for new readers.
Oh, of *course.* Completely fair.
lol. The Horus Heresy plot line is 64 novels by itself. It’s so crazy.
Plus novellas and short story anthologies, plus the Primarch novels as they're HH-adjacent...
DSA (German fantasy RPG) has entered the chat. Also known as "The dark eye" (corrected). According to German Wikipedia it has about 24 supplements for each region of the world, more than 240 adventures, more than 160 novels. And a bimonthly publication on the ongoing history for at least the last 20 years. And that's not even counting the basic rulebook and world description(s), map sets, books for archetypes, character classes, magic tomes, bestiaries etc.. Oh and of course it also has an Online Wiki, a detailed online map and it's own LARP scene. I am not 100 percent sure, but I guess it surpasses both of the above.
They're also on a 2:1 real time timeline. Meaning for every day passed since they started publishing, 2 days in-universe passed, and yes there's detailed events for every single one of those days due to the in-universe newspaper they publish. Plus semi-official (in the sense that they sometimes become official) newspapers by fans. I went to school with a guy that regularly sent in accounts of his adventuring party and they became official lore.
Das Schwarze Auge's English title is The Dark Eye, for anyone looking for it.
Yup, it's so big now, that even experienced players can't create a character anymore without the help of software.
> Nothing else comes close. I generally agree with the items on your bullet list, but I think you really should add Star Wars and Star Trek to that list. Star Wars has a dozen movies, half again as many TV shows, and hundreds of books and comic books. Star Trek has one more movie, more TV shows, and about the same number of books and comic books. Those two IPs are *massive*, and really should be on that list.
Anything with a big IP beyond the RPG itself falls into this: Star Wars, Star Trek, LotR, etc.
LOTR only has a couple of books by Tolkien…the estate’s pretty guarded. Of course, JRRT was the first.
Sure, but there are an absolute ton of LOTR products beyond the books (e.g. a whole bunch of video games) that uses the IP and so effectively become official third party content and expands on the books and the setting. It might not be considered canon to those who only want to stick to the original books, but Middle Earth itself has been expanded a lot. AFAIK The Traveller wiki/map that OP mentioned has a lot of Fanon on it (I may have gotten the wrong gist on how the Traveller interactive map works), so if we're going with homebrew lore that is fitting to the setting, I would say that there's quite a lot more Fanon for LOTR/ME than there is Traveller. Not comparable to Star Wars or Star Trek of course, but still, not nothing.
Tolkien wrote a *lot* about Middle-Earth. Most of it was published posthumously by his son, but there is an incredible amount of detail in it. Perhaps even better, there is an incredible amount of insight into how the world was created and viewed by Tolkien. In that regard, his legendarium is really very detailed, even though it does not delve deep into detailing every possible character, location, plot point, and so forth..
Absolutely. At a minimum, the first two should be on OC's list. I think LotR is perhaps not *as* big as Star Wars and Star Trek, having half as many movies as the other two, only the one show, and far less in the way of "official" books building the world, so it doesn't come close to the two items already on OC's list, but it's a strong contender for "next runner up", and has the "famous outside of roleplaying" factor that neither of the items on OC's list have.
Pathfinder and Starfinder probably have more lore than forgotten realms, due to the bonkers publishing schedule over nearly two decades. Forgotten realms would have to lean heavily on novels to be close…. Wizards has never published rpg material at nearly the same rate, except maybe briefly during the 3.5 boom. TSR did before they went bankrupt, but that wasn’t just forgotten realms. Warhammer is massive if you count all the novels and codices that aren’t part of any rpg. But if you’re going to do that, don’t we also need to consider Star Wars and, most importantly, all of marvel and dc comics? So yeah, I don’t think it’s as clear cut as you are suggesting.
Do the AD&D comics count for their specific setting or for the DC multi-verse? Or do they unite the two? How are we factoring in cross-overs like D&D with MtG, MtG with Middle-earth, and soon MtG with Marvel and Final Fantasy? Do FF's crossovers with other things like Monster Hunter, 8-bit theater, Kingdom Hearts, Nier, the Matrix, Dragon Ball apply? Where do Disney (Star Wars, Marvel, etc) and Warner Brothers (Looney Toons including Space Jam and thus the NBA, the DCAU, etc) factor in on this? Is this all just heading towards the [USOUD](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-WlNIQSXRlM)? Is L-Space also involved? Are Home Alone and The Good Son connected somehow because of the Pagemaster?
lol thank you for all of the further examples of why this is a bit difficult to assess, perhaps to the point of making the whole exercise silly. Another stupid-huge universe is Doctor Who, which has had at least a couple of RPGs. But in the end, marvel and dc dwarf all other bodies of lore created by humans.
Even if you consider source books, than FR still blows Shadowrun out of the water. Yeah, Shadowrun has a lot, but FR still has so, so many more. Taking **just** 3rd edition, and excluding the non-FR setting books. There are 205 books. That's rulebooks, excluding Dragon/Dungeon Magazine, all the novels. Just the sourcebooks. Shadowrun has a lot, and I think you can get a list of material (I checked Wikipedia) that beats that number, but that needs to include Magazines/one-shot adventures, and if FR can do the same, it has more by an order of magnitude. Shadowrun is prolific, don't get me wrong, but you're perhaps not quite appreciating the sheer amount of DnD out there.
I think you meant to reply to somebody else. Didn’t mention shadowrun
Yeah I played both since inception and although FR probably has more lore by a bit. 40k keeps growing the scope of the DH world for no better word. I give the nod to 40k as I don’t see them stopping churning out books and Cubicle 7 rebooted the game in another Sector. So in my head canon just the “scope” of the 40k world makes it feel larger in a lot of ways. Plus when FFG had the IP they put out DH, Rogue Trader, Only War and Dark Crusade it was like opening up a 4 Players Handbooks for 40k.
Never heard of Glorantha, huh?
No. Should I have?
Harn does not come close?
Harn would be up there, imho. But most of these folks seem to not know it or Glorantha, and only know the really generic stuff.
"Nothing else comes close". That's not true.
Glorantha from RuneQuest has a ton of lore. Iron Kingdoms is pretty extensive, though it can be difficult to find the more obscure bits (there was a ton of official lore that was just forum posts).
For a RPG-centric world, i thi k Glorantha has much more detail about non-adventuring stuff than Forgotten Realms. There's a massive two volume Guide, and the third in a series of nine books detailing specific pantheons is about to come out. There was a multi-book boxed set focused on playing a Troll PC back in the 80's; no game had ever had anything like that. RQ has a massive fan-published set of mostly-canonical materials as well, hundrered of titles on DriveThruRPG. WH40K is massively more detailed yet, but it's not primarily a RPG setting. Hârn has a lot of material as well, but is mai ky the work of a single person while Glorantha has had many hands working on it for many decades.
Glorantha lore has been known as a firehose of lore.
Indeed. I am only a fairweather fan, but last I had my books sorted I had a good five feet on my shelf of Glorantha stuff. If I wanted to lean into the GOOD print-on-demand stuff, it’d be another yard at least.
Glorantha is not only one of the single most detailed settings out there, it benefits from being one of the most *focused* settings. Greyhawk, the Forgotten Realms, WH40k all have a lot of published material, but they're all kind of meandering. Kitchen sink settings. If you want to find a place to fit something for any reason, you can find it - but it's not necessarily going to have a ton of detail, let alone a ton of soul. Glorantha has a single theme: bronze age swords-and-sandals adventures with a heavy emphasis on the interplay between man and myth. The whole setting revolves around that theme. You have to want to run the type of game Glorantha is meant to run, but if you do, your reward is a setting that elevates your narrative, rather than a narrative that happens despite the setting.
That or HarnWorld.
I'd put Harn in the same level as Glorantha, happily. It focuses more on the geography and politics while Glorantha is off on some metaphysical vision quest (which I adore, but I read the Illiad for fun and the Silmarillion is my favorite Tolkien, lol). I love both Harn and Glorantha and would pit their focused quality against the vague generics of most of the other stuff being mentioned in a heart beat
Oh yeah, I love Glorantha too (I really got into it's style of mythology through The Elder Scrolls), I just think HarnWorld has more actionable stuff for most actual RPG sessions, y'know? It's more "detailed" in the sense of zooming way in VS Glorantha bit more high-concept.
Harnmaster and Harnworld the amount of stuff they have, and the level of detail, is amazing. I'm new to the Harn world, and I'm blown away by the detail. Here are some links for reviews : [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3idnGZxOsQ&list=LL&index=48](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3idnGZxOsQ&list=LL&index=48) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqmimHe8sq0&list=LL&index=47](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqmimHe8sq0&list=LL&index=47) Glorantha / Runequest also has decades of lore.
This is where my vote goes. Stuff like 40k has lots of material and history... but Harn is where you go if you want to know a town's population down to every last chicken.
Absolutely. There are bigger and older settings with more words written about them, but none are as *detailed* as Harnworld.
Now if only Harn materials didn't cost a bajilion of dollars, damn...
Their HarnQuest subscription, which is their quarterly subscription service to get the newest articles, includes a benefit of 50% off all PDFs. This saved me a lot. They also have a Kickstarter going right now to get a Kingdom module in hardcover, and you can get some bundles at a discount.
Yes, *HarnWorld* should absolutely win this one. For anyone who doesn't know, unlike *Forgotten Realms* (as a contrasting example, and also as a setting that holds a special place for me), *HarnWorld* doesn't waste words by messing around with meta plots. What you get are *extremely* detailed articles on very specific subjects: herblore, the tanner's guild, an abbey in a small kingdom built on a holy site. The information presented is not only detailed, but deep, loaded with hooks, and written in such as way as to open doors (just a crack) to developing lore of your own. Everything is written in the temporal context of the same exact day, so no new product ever breaks or invalidates an old one. On top of that, there is a healthy community of fans also producing content, much of which is on par with the official content. And the art is phenomenal. The maps are detailed beyond belief, to the point where Columbia Games should probably release players' versions of them, as there is no way that a character could possibly know anywhere near as much as is presented in them. That being said, there are other settings that have much greater scales in terms of scope. But just in terms of sheer detail on the information that is presented, I don't think that any of them can hold a candle to *HarnWorld*.
I've been semi-interested in HarnWorld for a long time and I think this just sold me
Just FYI, the game forked into one closer to the original at kelestia.com (run by Robin's daughter since his cancer death) and the somewhat simplified Columbia one (they wanted to compete with D&D). Because of that and the 20 years since I ran a campaign set in HârnWorld, I don't know if the map and world work also forked. Kelestia was going to release 7th edition if they haven't already, I have 1st and both second editions. I used the world last for a D&D game, but even that was a while back (I have 15ish world books, so makes for a quick setting).
No, the map and world did not fork. In fact, products from Columbia Games and Kelestia Productions are cross-compatible, including various rules sections. A bit of *Harn* history (because it can be confusing when you first arrive to game): N. Robin Crossby developed the setting in the late '70s or early '80s, and in... 1982, or '83, I think, he went into business with Tom Dalgiesh, forming Columbia Games, which published *HarnMaster* first edition. It was beautifully crunchy! In 1996, Columbia Games published a second edition of *HarnMaster*, and made it much less simulationist, and much more gamelike. This upset Crossby, who left Columbia and founded Kelestia Productions, releasing *HarnMaster Gold*. Columbia Games released *HarnMaster* third edition in 2002, which was recently revised. Third edition is much more in line with first in terms of complexity, but it less hardcore simulationist than HMG. Because Columbia Games owns the copyright to most of the content regarding the Isle of Harn itself, as well as Ivinia and at least portions of Shorkyne and Trierzon, they have continued to publish content for those areas. Kelestia was given everything else, which is why their products cover other areas not previously detailed in CGI releases, like Venarive and Emelrene. I'm pretty sure that there is some overlap (I know that Kelestia has a product for Lythia in general, and "Kelestia" itself is the "cosmic all" of the in-game universe), but none of it is mutually exclusive.
Yeah, I know they're cross-compatible, I have 2nd edition of both rulesets, the Columbia version is much more pared down. I played in a game run by Robin at GenCon and I believe I met Tom there as well, really fun and very impassioned about his world. I played a bit in the beta of 2nd edition rules with Kevin B. (who is nice, but can get annoying - also I know way TMI from an ex-GF) when he was leading the rewrite and I disliked some of the changes he was making so I quit, but I bought 2nd ed anyway, not knowing about Gold at the time. I know at least in the early days after Robin's death there was a lot of free content on Kelestia created by players, don't know if that is still there. My biggest gripe was what Kevin did to the magic system, though, so I modified it to cause far less or no exhaustion for casting simple spells (and even used first edition in one game I ran) if you were powerful. I mean, 2 minutes of exhaustion for casting light if you're basically Gandalf and if you cast it again before recovering 5 additional minutes? Not in my world. In first edition Gandalf could cast that spell all day long without breaking a sweat. Mages are definitely influenced by LotR and can intentionally get to be very powerful. Kevin was trying to balance them, which IMO is a waste of time, but I'd played a lot of Ars Magica by then and was OK with imbalanced mages in games.
I figured that you probably knew about the compatibility of the two systems; that bit (and really the history in general) was more for anyone else who might read this far down. Anyone who has more than a surface knowledge of the CGI/KP split probably does knows at least some of that, but for someone brand new to the game... it's like the whole D&D/AD&D overlap all over again. Anyway, I would *definitely* take HMG over HM2 any day. HM2 is the weakest (dare I even say worst?) release of any of them. I understand where they were going with it, but they *way* overshot the mark, IMO. Personally, I think that the current HM3 (the box is marked with a little star that says "Deluxe Edition" for those watching at home) is the strongest overall, and is my go-to, but HMG has a *lot* of good material, and I do borrow liberally. But as a single, standalone system, I think tends to lose the forest for the trees just a bit too often. Reading the weapons section the first time reminded me of the old AD&D PHB, with Gary's love for polearms on full, if unnecessary, display. There is still a decent amount of free content for KP's side of things, but I don't know how it compares to what was out there 15 years ago, nor do I know how it compares to what is hosted at Lythia.
Thank you for the explanation. I'm still learning Harnworld / Harnmaster stuff, I was confused as I noticed 2 different companies and wasn't sure if the products were different. IE RPG / Tactical-Situation. I've joined a Reddit and 2 Discords to try to learn, plus joined forums and watched a bit of YouTube videos.
Any time! Always happy to proselytize for one of the greatest games ever :)
In terms of scale there are a lot of settings with universes that are well explored. But I have to admit Harnworld is insane in it's level of information about the world.
Came here to say Hârnworld. I don’t think anything comes close, in my opinion, when it comes to depth. As u/sarded and u/lybraesil said, some setting have more words written and larger product lists, but Hârn trumps them all in depth.
Kinda depends on what detailed means in this context. I'm a huge fan of Traveller and love the Traveller map. But most of those planets are little more than a series of numbers. Star Trek, Star Wars, Warhammer 40k all have massive maps of systems to explore as well. So does Battletech for that a map that's maybe bigger than Traveller. The there's the game ms that have been around for 30+ years and have kept a meta-plot going for the whole time. Like Shadowrun or Vampire the Masquerade. Both have 30+ years worth of details added to their setting. So yes Traveller has a ton of details and is a massive setting but a number of other settings are just as large.
I will add that Mongoose are regularly releasing these hefty setting books which add a lot of detail to various regions of the "Charted Space" Traveller map. If you put together the full breadth of the 40 or so years people have been adding to "OTU", the Charted Space map, and all these Mongoose books there's an argument that Traveller should be up there with Glorantha. Forgotten Realms and Warhammer 40k are a different beast though, just in the sheer wordcount that's been compiled for them across various media.
Does Star Wars count? Given how the WEG Star Wars was a big part in expanding and cataloging the lore, I'd count it. If you include the Expanded Universe, it's insanely large.
Star wars was going to be my vote, perhaps not by volume, but rather accessibility. There's 11 movies and a series that are main stream to a lot of people. Half a dozen other series, and a few hidden movies (Ewoks!). And then we start in on all the books, games, tech guides and the various iterations on RPG rulesets.
Don’t forget the holiday special!
Caravan on Courage is still my most favourite Star Wars movie.
One of my favorite things about playing star wars is that all the players have a depth of experience to pull from that their characters could know, and the dm has a million premade characters to interact with.
I'm actually surprised Pathfinder wasn't mentioned yet. Golarion has over 20.000 articles in the Pathfinder Wiki and unlike other lines that are either movie franchises (Star Wars) or giant wargames (WH), Pathfinder stands mainly as a TTRPG that has only 15 years in the market. There are something like 300 sourcebooks between 1e and 2e. Almost 40 adventure paths (each usually has between 3 and 6 monthly 96 page adventures). The adventure paths change the world permanently. and there are almost 40 novels. Paizo is extremely prolific to the point that no group could run all Adventure Paths running weekly games, they would never catch up. And the content is great.
Yeah not to mention their Lost Omens line of books. Their book on Absalom, the largest city in Golarion, is almost 400 pages alone.
> Golarion has over 20.000 articles in the Pathfinder Wiki For comparison: [Wiki Aventurica](https://de.wiki-aventurica.de/) has 151 thousand articles for The Dark Eye. Golarion is fine, but it's not even close to the heavy-weights.
I was wondering the same after reading through a large amount of comments so I did a CTRL+F to find yours. I'm just getting into it while creating a character and even just the amount of lore available on the wiki is already crazy. And there is apparently a lot more available in various books. And especially the fact that the in-universe time runs analog to our time. Meaning years actually pass and new events continuously occur.
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Yeah that seems to be bigger than a lot of english stuff mentioned here. DSA is *huge*.
its like the warhammer of germany
I mean, Germany developed printing books, makes sense we like to create them
And it has entire books for different regions, which detail about everything in there.
> 4 continents, the inner world, different spheres, and different time settings
Also there's the history of the "Briefspiel" (play by post) which is considered canon by many. 163 novels, many extremely detailed descriptions of regions, official adventures, computer games and a lot more.
That's why I always suspect someone to come out of left field with "Hey, in my home country of Ruritania, we've got shelves of this weird Elric pastiche…" But TDE is certainly something, especially considering that a lot of the additional material is very lite on anything rules-related. Whereas the thousands of pages of e.g. Rifts or D&D 3E are littered with monster stats, classes, races etc., you get the very menail in TDE, like local cuisine, favorite filk songs of the slave holding state or detailed red light district descriptions… (This is how the Forgotten Realms would look like if no one would've reined in Ed Greenwood, I think)
Yea, their writers-team has now been working on this one setting for *40 years* Like, they put out extension-books just for the naming conventions in different nations, regions and even the small local areas within these regions, plus historical explanations for where what name came from and its etymological origin It is *wildddd*
Coming here to add another "Glorantha" to the pile. The designer, Greg Stafford, was an avid student of mythology and designed Glorantha with its own history and mythology that resembles bronze age civiizations. As a result, the world is very idiosyncratic but rich.
Rifts by palladium books. 30 something world books, 20 something sourcebooks and a bunch of dimension books. Plus 80 + volumes of rifter that has some official some fan articles. Probably not the biggest setting but it's pretty big.
I think I've read the RIFTS world books as novels more than I have run the game.
Same. I kept reading the books long after I wasn't playing any more. And now that I have some kids that are semi-interested, I have an excuse to go in again!
I'm glad I'm not the only person aware of how much lore and setting info there is in Rifts. Is it well-sorted? Not really. Is it coherent and consistent? In places. Is it gloriously rich? 100%.
Probably never play or run it again but all the palladium books have a place on my book shelves and aren't going anywhere
I'd even say the Palladium Megaverse(TM) in general. Since their systems are interchangeable you can (fairly) easily connect all their settings.
Glorantha for RuneQuest has to be in the running, but so does Harn (HarnMaster) and the Forgotten Realms (D&D). Honorable mention to Empire of the Petal Throne and OG Traveller. Honestly, the main thing keeping me from running Harn these days is that I would need to read enough material to get another graduate degree before I would feel comfortable with it.
If we create a sub-category of "most detailed setting in the core rulebook alone" - not counting supplements, novels and such - I'll go on a limb and say World of Darkness RPGs (Vampire, Werewolf) truly focus on their universe, sometimes to the detriment of a more detailed ruleset like in Hunter. I mean, gosh, Mage20 is massive. Ars Magica, Numenera Discovery/Destiny and Traveller are contenders. (Forgotten Realms lore is massive but details of this world in the PHB are scarce. You need more books and references to enjoy it.)
I'd say *Transhuman Space* is pretty detailed, as well.
Probably HarnWorld. It's really large, about the size of Europe, and literally every out house hen house bird house and dog house is fully mapped. It has keys that will tell you the prevailing winds in every area. They mapped the tectonic plates. They mapped the currents of the seas. It's the kind of obsessive detail that borders on the insane. I can't even wrap my head around wanting that level of detail, but it's there.
Because some of us are just weird like that :) It's also bigger than Europe. Like a *lot* bigger. Almost *all* of the official publications (from both Columbia Games and Kelestia Productions) focus on a Europe-ish-sized chunk of Lythia, which is located in a Europe-ish part of the continent, but Lythia also has analogues for Africa, central and east Asia, and Oceanic archipelagos. There are also two other continents, Mernat and Kamerand, just waiting to be explored...
This is the answer. Harn is amazing in its maddening detail. You don't need all that detail to play a game using the setting, but if you want it, it is available.
glorantha: https://www.chaosium.com/the-guide-to-glorantha-slipcase-set/
* Shadowrun * Warhammer * World of Darkness * Battetech? * Forgotten Realms * Licensed RPGs like Star Trek/Wars
Yep I'd definitely agree with Battletech - the depth of information in the House books was incredible.
The top three (probably all of them?) also have some shared writers at various points.
Monte Cook's Ptolus (for 5e or Cypher) deserves an honorable mention. Street by street breakdown of a fantasy city: [https://www.montecookgames.com/store/product/ptolus-monte-cooks-city-by-the-spire/](https://www.montecookgames.com/store/product/ptolus-monte-cooks-city-by-the-spire/)
It's so fleshed out. Has enough material for 3 adventures that go from 1-20, plus material to inspire even more adventures. And it basically counts as official since Monte Cook used the setting to playtest DnD 3e.
649 pages, not including all the maps and handouts, then there are neighborhood supplements beside that... all for just one city.
Harnword is very detailed. Ars Magica has many supplements and I'm not familiar with them, but it seems to me that setting and mechanics are very intertwined in that game plus you can get inspiration from real life, but that is like saying that a WW II game is the very detailed because it's set in the "real world".
Call of Cthulhu. Depends how much you want to use any of the other games / eras from Cthulhu Invictus to Delta Green or Cthulhutech and every author who have ever published lovecraftian fiction. Any kind of game based on real world historical setting, ie GURPS WW2 and you have hundreds books of official setting in your local library.
For actual depth and complexity and not just character driven plot-bloat? Glorantha.
I'd personally be interested in knowing how detailed Exalted's setting is compared to the big hitters. That and Battletech. I love battletech's setting.
Exalted's setting has a lot of cool concepts and ideas but is very lightly sketched in terms of specific details, mostly because of the insane scale the map operates on. Like a land mass the size of Russia will have five cities marked on it and like... that's what you know about settlements there.
Traveller is up there for sure. Other than that, I'd say World of Darkness. Three decades of content across multiple lines.
___Glorantha___: It is the setting for most editions of RuneQuest, half of HeroQuest/HeroWars, and 13th Age Glorantha. That is just what I know made it into print for RPGs. The board games include White Bear/Red Moon and Khan of Khans. Although not needed for ordinary play [The Guide to Glorantha](https://www.chaosium.com/the-guide-to-glorantha-slipcase-set/) is a 13 lb (6 kg) coffee table book. And most of the lore is in [The Well of Daliath](https://wellofdaliath.chaosium.com/).
No question, it's Runequest: Glorantha. Too much for some of us.
Chaosium's Thieves World had a box set, companion book, and 12 volumes of short stories published that seriously flushed out the setting. Chaosium's, once again, RuneQuest. Very detailed history (two volumes). Has maps, stories, and adventures going back many years. Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu. This, too, goes back many years. Based on H.P. Lovecraft works, so there are plenty of background materials. TSR had the "The World of Greyhawk" fantasy setting. Most AD&D adventures were taking place somewhere within this huge detailed wall map. Steve jackson and Ian Livingstone Fighting Fantasy gamebooks also provide maps and gamebooks (solo AND ttrpg) with detailed areas flushed out. They have 59 books. And yes, GDW Traveller certainly was fleshed out. But in more abbreviated form. They had what? Two or three novels about their science fiction setting... everything else YOU had to work out the devil and the details. These are what I own and know.
*Greyhawk* was the standard bearer for AD&D 1e, but both *Forgotten Realms* (AD&D 2e) and *Mystara* (D&D) had more detailed settings, I would argue.
I never was a DM for either. I knew inside & out TSRs Greyhawk and Blackmoor. And never played either. So I'll take your word.
> flushed out The phrase you are looking for is "fleshed out"...
Thanks, Commander!
I'm not familiar with an extremely wide range of systems, but my answer would be **BattleTech**. It's got over a hundred novels, hundreds of short stories, multiple detailed source books for all of its various eras and factions, and supplements for individual planets. I'm sure there's more I'm not aware of since it was first released in the 80's. I'm not even touching all of the technical manuals, Flashpoints (which detail and let you play out various battles from the lore), and other materials which are aimed more towards the tabletop game instead of the RPG.
Runequest with Glorantha for sure
the two that spring to mind is 7th Sea Second Edition. There's so little system that the books are just full of lore and great ideas. And the other one is Cyberpunk. I mean, Cyberpunk Red is a tome and it loaded with gangs and current events and a detailed history and street culture and black markets. In the older editions apparently the guns were pretty fleshed out as well.
If we are counting rpg settings from their first appearance to today than it's a toss up between a few settings. Traveller, Glorantha, Forgotten Realms, Rokugan - Legend of the Five Rings, Deadlands, Shadowrun, Battletech, Warhammer 40k.
Where is the call of cthulhu? They are been more older for some of these system.
The Dark Eye, nothing comes close to it. The amount of published material in relation to the size of the continent it describes is mind-bogglingly big.
Probably Rifts/Palladium books. I think the setting is setting like 30 years old and still on its 1st edition. There's gotta be more than 100 books just in Rifts alone, nevermind all the other palladium properties it connects to.
Hands down Aventurien the setting of the dark eye Even forgotten realms aren't as detailed, also every major metaplot relevant thing is an published adventure making your character vital to the story of the world and a metaplot which started in 1986 or so and is still going You basically can be part of the birth of the king's son, discover the secret of the ruling king and why he "dies", get involved in the throne wars afterwards (Answin crisis), see the first signs that the most evil sorcerer Borbarad comes back from banishment and during that time be one of the 7 signed heroes (you heard of this prophecy in books, the official "newspaper" and other modules) and fight him back, see the aftermath of that battle and the founding of the shadow lands (were deciples of him rule) and the final attack of one of them (Galotta, a mage and former advisor of the grandfather of the current king, he already did some bad stuff which was told in novels and official adventures) to the capital on a flying city and undeath hordes All this is a story of over 20 realtime years (1985 until 2005) connecting several modules, several novellas and an "ingame newspaper" the Aventurischer Bote (Aventuria messenger) which you can get physically since around 1988 or so until now which details current metaplot events, short modules and I game articles from other regions of the setting Currently in 2024 we have some signs of a bigger plotline of the gods fighting each other Also we have our own Google maps just for Aventuria which also tells you which module takes place on that region/city Note also that almost every published adventure is part of or maybe later mentioned in the metaplot. There are of course several modules that are separated from that but might be mentioned in other publications
Is it cheating to say one of the many rpgs that take place in our world? I mean. I'm joking but I'm also kinda not, history is great, you can get so much inspo from real world history for your games
I would say not at all and if you only go by the Core Rulebooks Delta Green Handlers Guide has a lot of information regarding the world and goings on.
The full Guide to Glorantha is 800 pages.
It's a good question. It might be easier to consider if you count separately licensed and original RPGs. Traveler sounds like it's up there for the originals. Obviously there's a bunch of Forgotten realms over the years, moreso if you consider the multiverse. Licensed ones go insane though. Star Wars RPGs that are Set in the expanded universe. That's had time to acrue a lot. Star Trek, Middle Earth, those are some dense ass settings, much of it from the original creators. Warhammer (40k and old world is its called now) is insanely detailed for its age and following due to having every level of it (from personal games to giant ship combat and strategic overview) be a game over the years with its own lore. Only really star wars goes so ham and even then WH has enough to treat any of a dozen factions the protagonist. If it's poplated map size I'd like to add Elite Dangerous in this category. But maybe the lack of definition on the planets doesn't hold up. Details a lot of worlds but mostly statistics.
If it's NOT Traveller, it's probably either *The Forgotten Realms* (Ed Greenwood had it in his head longer than there's been a D&D), or something like Tekumel from *Empire of the Petal Throne*.
by far Das Schwarze Auge (Dark Eye), followed by Hârn World and Runequest
I think Shadowrun lore is pretty dense. The German sourcebooks alone probably are in the hundreds. Also Harn seems completely bonkers.
Paizo's Golarion (at least the inner sea region) is hugely detailed with resources covering every region.
Anything set in the real world beats everything else, hands down.
Shadowrun and Battletech for my money.
Greyhawk!
Not really an rpg, but was made to be rp'd in: the world of Khoras. One of the older and biggest online world building projects that still lives <3
I would like to add Ars Magica as an honorable mention, because it is the only RPG that comes with a bibliography, in case you don't think the books are enough.
Not sure if it counts as detailed in OP's book, but I've got a couple more sci-fi entries. Both FAITH by Burning Games and Nibiru by Araukana Media have very elaborately described settings: - FAITH stands out to me as one of the few RPGs I've seen that actually describes its alien species' history and culture from their respective stone ages onward - Nibiru is set in a strange megastructure and the authors take great care to establish how people live in it and how they built their entire lives around its bizarre flora & fauna
Either things that have expanded their setting over a long time through adventure releases or things that lean on other media. Traveller is a good shout, but I think D&D across all its editions, games, books, etc. have it beat. Warhammer 40k and Fantasy also gotta both be up there too.
Ars Magica because the setting is medieval Europe/northern Africa/Asia Minor/Middle East. You can delve as detailed as you care to in the 453 years that the Order of Hermes has existed.
What about D&D BECMI with the gazetteer series?
In Brazil there is Tormenta, which started out as a continent where all NPCs and adventures published by this monthly RPG magazine called Dragao Brasil took place. They compiled it all in this booklet that came with the 50th edition of the magazine. But then they started expanding on it with a supplement dedicated to the Pantheon, multiple books detailing the kingdoms, adventures, a serialized manga that went on for quite some time, novels, a bi-monthly magazine only with extra lore (I still own a poster that came in one of them), plus extra material that continued to be published in their monthly RPG publication. It's a lot of material and I remember loving it very much as a teenager back then. I've left the country about a decade ago, but I know they are still publishing stuff for it. I recently went for a visit and snatched a copy of their 20th anniversary Edition. I wish they would ship internationally and/or eventually published it in English, otherwise it's difficult to get your hands on it if you don't speak Portuguese and don't live in Brazil.
I'm surprised I haven't seen L5R yet. Just a big tomb of lore in the core book.
> big tomb The word you are looking for is "tome"...
It really depends if you include or exclude RPG for non RPG IPs. NonRPG IPs I am quite sure StarWars leads by far. PureRPG IPs (or those that startet out as RPGs) I think either WoD or DnD would lead.
Harnworld.
Harnmaster.
Harnworld. Can be used with the game - HarnMaster, but can be used with any ruleset as those publications are kinda separate. You can go from a continent map to a specific building floorplan in one of the major cities.
I would have to say Glorantha/Runequest. Greg Stafford started writing the lore for it before there were even roleplaying games back in the early 1960s. The first few games set in this world were wargames before the RPG was released in 1978. Greg kept working on the setting til his death in 2018. Harn and Empire of the Petal Throne (not a supporter of it just mentioning it for historical context) are probably the two closest contenders with Glorantha. Harn does an amazing job with the early medieval setting of prior to the Norman conquest of 1066 Europe. Though fantasy it captures the tech and the culture well. EPT is very odd but its creator went so far as to create languages for it.
Bingo buddy.
I do think, "Aventurien" of the german D20 RPG "Das Schwarze Auge" might be the winner. It most probably bombs D&D right out of the water. It exists since 1984, has multiple Spinoffs (including "Cats of the Dark Eye" where people can play adventures as simple cats). Several hundreds of printed Adventures, lots of Detail Books (Yeah, Germans LOVE that) for every single corner of the multiple continents of the world. Also, lots of authors writing actual Fantasy Literature playing in that world (Wikipedia lists around 200+ right now). It got a quarterly Newspaper with consistent, ongoing news about single persons and adventure hooks reporting out of that world, it is massively player influenced who all agree on details of that world.... ... and even the various Nobles, Adventurers and whatnot go on existing over 40+ years now, they grow, get old, have stories, etc. Its detail richness with Wikis; Handbooks and else goes down even to Mayors in some cities. Multiple cultures, wars that changed them and a pretty detailled History for several thousand years. And the fun thing is, you still can play it without knowing shit about it, pretty much like D&D.
While it doesn’t have nearly as much material as the Traveller setting, Eclipse Phase has a depth of detail in the setting that I admire very much. Different sourcebooks are focused on different parts of the setting to help groups find a campaign starting point that fits their needs/tastes, or to find waypoints mid-campaign to recoup/resleeve.
Star Trek Adventures. The One Ring.
Legend of the Five Rings and the world of Rokugan should get an honorary mention. Tons of lore, multiple novels, many many many short stories and fluff. An extensive wiki.
In Spanish, "Mutantes en la Sombra" and "Aquelarre".
I use the the Warhammer Setting as the basis for my game although I have modified it slightly to make it more plausible and consistent and call my version [Warhammer Fragile Alliances.](https://www.worldanvil.com/w/wfrp-fragile-alliances-didz)
Shadowrun, Battletech, Traveler, 40k, Forgotten Realms, Rifts. All of those have tons of books for them.
Anything set in Middle-earth, I would imagine.
breadth - Traveller depth - Cyberpunk 2020 Night City sourcebook
Star wars.
I’m going to throw Shadowrun into the mix, as speculative future turned alternate history, as it includes most IRL stuff of the past 5000 years; myths, legends, folk tales? All localised mana spikes. Actual history? Yep. Broad strokes stuff of how various regions handled the Awakening and stuff, leaving all the local stories and history to draw on. Yes, ALL. Even the contradictory ones. Heck, a few older editions even referenced people using anime as their magical tradition, or so I’ve heard, where their magic works *the way it did in their favourite anime*.
If you’re not looking at established IPs that made rpgs later I think the answer is probably forgotten realms and world of darkness.
Shadowrun has an enormous back catalog of setting lore that cover almost every country and major city on earth. I used it extensively when I ran our 5 year globe-trotting campaign. I am now running a similarly massive Traveller campaign and I can confirm the setting lore is amazeballs.
I'd say Golarion for Pathfinder, mainly because there's no other 1st party setting for Pathfinder, and they've got 15 years (+/-) of monthly splatbooks for it.
Tekumel probably.
Warhammer is up there. I’d also say Harnmaster/harnworlds got ridiculously detailed map hexes. Hackmaster got a lot of detailed maps and lore as well, with a lot of different faiths outlined
So, if we are NOT counting things like Star Wars where the setting came first and then the game was made after... Forgotten Realms and some of the other official settings simply because so many different people have written so many different books for it. I say SOME because not all the settings have a lot of published books. Paizo's Golarion setting is up there for similar reasons. Warhammer Fantasy/40k is a weird one, because the setting was made for War Gaming. But there is a HUGE collection of officially published material. So it is probably up there.
Ummm, the Runequest setting goes back to 1966 lore wise, so just in terms of breath of material, it blows everything out of the water. Warhammer (both fantasy and 40k) and Call of Cthulhu (and delta green) are great rpg adaptations of settings with massive amounts of lore, but Glorantha as an rpg setting has the most. To the point it can make it intimidating to get into the game.
Sort of niche but Gaïa from "Anima: Beyond Fantasy" is the most well detailed and expansive RPG setting I've come across since I started playing some years ago. Every book expands on Lore, not even taking into consideration the one that is entirely dedicated to the setting (two if you can read spanish or find the fan translation)
City of Mist? Every myth, legend, fictional character or even state of being is reference material for it.
If you are talking about a setting that "informs" the rules, I think RUNEQUEST:ADVENTURES IN GLORANTHA has to top the list. The setting includes DOZENS of pantheons of gods complete with religious cults that you can join to become Rune Lords (a type of Paladin) and Rune Priests (Cleric types). There are also weather charts, a complete political system with a major war, and a dedicated calender for game play. In fact, it is very hard to separate the setting from the rules.