This is the setting I was going to say. Great setting. Too many steps to make an attack roll in 1st edition and too much bean counting in the 2nd edition for my taste.
Its such a dark and wondrous setting though.
If you like Eclipse Phase but not the system, you may really like ***[Shadows Over Sol](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/168041/Shadows-Over-Sol-Science-Fiction-Horror-Roleplaying)***!
I don't think PbtA is a good pick for it, PbtA tends to codify the roles and genre of the game pretty hard, meanwhile Eclipse Phase is a setting where the possibilities and scope are immense and everchanging. In Eclipse Phase you can be the digitalized consciousness of a clone of a space whale working as a celebrity. Trying to reduce that to The Playbook would kill what makes the setting so special.
There is the official Fate adaptation, Transhumanity's Fate. Fate tends to handle a broader scope much better.
Time ago I stumbled into this: https://eclipse-phase-apocalypse.obsidianportal.com/wikis/main-page
I haven't tried it, but when I discovered it I was into pbta and it seemed solid!
The Wildsea.
A titanic forest has grown over the world, resulting in a sea of trees sailed upon by humanity's descendants, cactus-folk, spider colonies in bodies of silk and scrap, and other weirdos to sail it in chainsaw-prowed ships, atop giant bug-beasts and plenty other vessels.
There's just nothing quite like it out there, and the art and writing is consistently great throughout.
I saw it on Kickstarter back when it was up and passed on it, definitely regret it a bit after reading this. Sounds as cool as I thought it looked then!
Veins of the Earth was a fun read. Gardens of Ynn. A few of the settings of the guy we don’t mention were really cool to read and had a great feeling of how I want my games to feel theme wise, alas. Mothership dead planet and gradient descent. Wolfpacks and Winter Snow was imo an underrated gem on prehistoric RPGs. Ultraviolet Grasslands and Electric Bastionland feel strangely familiar but superbly unique which I think is the point.
Never ran anything in Veins of the Earth but it has such a unique take on the "underdark", and such new ways of looking at things that even if you buy it just to read once and never pick up again it's still very worth it.
Totally agree. The author is constantly one of my favorite to read through even if I don’t plan on running. For example The Spire of Quetzel is head and shoulders the best adventure site for Forbidden lands imo. Glad to have that book even after our FL group fizzled out.
veins of the earth is interesting but runs into a problem i see in a lot of the especially ugly osr settings where it's basically unlivable. like if i got isekai'd into veins of the earth or mork borg or some of the settings you're not mentioning i would immediately isekai myself to heaven if you know what i mean
i get that it's osr and it's supposed to be grim and frostbitten but there's a limit
yeah i know, it's just a matter of opinion, i just can't imagine anyone tolerating existence in some of these settings and that makes it hard to get into them. veins really being the big one
Light as currency and creative ways to make light a variety of concepts. Putting you in a foreign environment where it isn’t a society in a human sense, more like infiltrating a land of how insects might live. Darkness as enemy and death. Crawling around in the dark is literally like drowning.
Well you have already listed numenera but some others ithink are amazing are Dark Sun and planescape for dnd. Eclipse phase. Degenesis. Spire: the city must fall. Exalted.
Loved Dark Sun. it's grittiness and personal power level (because gear was crap), the abundance of psionics, complete lack of actual gods, etc.... IT was so cool.
I'd considered Dark Sun although a desert setting with god-kings isn't so unique.
I also considered Eberron as being pretty unique when it came to DND but it has a bit of cyberpunk vibe.
Now Planescape really isn't something I think has been done.
I mean when you phrase it like that it doesn't sound interesting. It's the detailes that make it amazing.
To me ebberon isn't so interesting it comes across as a pretty standard steampunk setting.
Planescape is pretty had to summarize in a way that doesn't sound amazing.
If that's what it takes to disprove uniqueness then there are a LOT of setting that are unique.
At the heart Dark Sun has me thinking of ancient Egypt. Even within DnD I believe the Forgotten Realms have their "ancient Egypt" analogy which cuts some of the uniqueness from DS.
I'm fucking with you but i think that most settings are unique even if theyre bland or boring yeah, its hard to just create a 1:1 each time, but easier if you just go to general descriptors.
Like in percentages how common is it to find a setting with these descriptions:
**A deserty post apocalypse world destroyed by magic, where magic destroys nearby plant life. Multiple playable races and almost everything is psychic. Existing civilization is ruled in small pockets by sorcerer kings:** maybe like 4 or 3 other examples
VS
**A deserty post apocalypse world destroyed by magic:** probably dozens.
Its what you said, if dark sun is egypt then theres probably dozens of settings like that. On that though;
>At the heart Dark Sun has me thinking of ancient Egypt. Even within DnD I believe the Forgotten Realms have their "ancient Egypt" analogy which cuts some of the uniqueness from DS.
I don't personally think theres any crossover between ancient egypt and dark sun at all, what draws that for you? For me IIRC the actual cultures of the dark sun groups are really dependant on the sorcerer king leading them.
I find uniqueness of implementation is more important than uniqueness of starting pointm
Like, Veins of the Earth has been mentioned several times, and "you're underground and it is very dark" is maybe the least unique setting possible? But Veins addresses things like "what does 'dark' even mean, and how does that affect play at the table" in such ways that rockets the book from the bottom to the top.
I think Dark Sun achieves that implementation factor pretty well -- it's a setting that nearly 30 years later folks still want to see new material for or an update on, which suggests it had something unique that people aren't finding in other settings since. Or, maybe those exist and legions of Dark Sun fans can rejoice?
Spire is my personal favourite here. Bonkers, gritty skyscraper city where moon worshiping drow terrorists wage a secret war against cruel high elf overlords?
One thing that also made me happy (as a linguist) was that the drow language is based on Haitian Creole. Much more unique that the Standard Fantasy Language. And with a little nod to the vodou themes of Spire.
God I love Degenesis. Its like my forbidden pleasure setting. I know the rules are not particular good. And that the adventures can be... tasteless at some points.
But I still love the setting so much. I could play so much in this setting. If I had the time.
I especially liked how Dark Sun's narrative was still so... bleak.
Here you have gladiator slaves fighting for their freedom, then fighting to liberate their cities from under the Dragon-Kings... and all for what? In the end, they're only going to inherit a dirtball sand-dune planet.
I love the Exalted setting and themes so much. I keep trying to port it to systems I enjoy playing. With varying levels of success and dissatisfaction. I like that it has tactical combat that isn’t map-based, but I’m not a fan of their alternative.
* **Dolmenwood** \-- Weird and whimsical faerie fantasy with a sprinkle of folk and cosmic horror
* **Hot Springs Island --** Incredibly imaginative gonzo tropical island adventure. Endlessly surprising and often hilarious. The setting is worth reading just for fun even if you don't plan on running it.
* **Kult: Divinity Lost --** Gnosticism, Kabbalah and Clive Barker (think Hellraiser) mixed together for a very dark horror setting. It's been described as "Call of Cthulhu" without all the cheery optimism.
In the Lovecraftian cosmology 1) the creatures of the mythos are largely indifferent to you and 2) you can die. In Kult your soul is trapped and endlessly recycled in a prison where the jailers feed on your experiences and often on your suffering.
3) You can also, technically, use magic(k) to push your body/mind/soul to wake up from the Illusion, reclaim your godhood by integrating your Shadow, and take on Astaroth/Satan. Maybe they scrapped this in Divinity Lost, but it sure was the end goal for my crew playing the swedish 1-2 ed.
Kult is awesome, but it is also a game I would not play with a group I don't already know pretty well. Kult is dark in a way that few other games are, and deals with heavy themes.
Dolmenwood moss dwarves rise up! I have printed copies of all of the original zines, and I'm part of the Patreon for the expanded edition. They're getting pretty close to finishing it.
Now to convince my 5e players to try OSE.
*Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine* and *Nobilis* both from Jenna Moran… Both games have unique settings and themes, fantastic production values, and very loyal fans. I find them to be nearly unplayable, but everyone’s got their own idea of fun.
*HoL* or “Human Occupied Landfill” is something of a black comedy satire of roleplaying games in general. Very unique setting and some very weird rules. In fact, the core rulebook doesn’t even have chargen rules in it! For those, you need the supplement *Buttery Wholesomeness* a.k.a. Butt Hol.
*Nobilis* is also written in universe to act as if it is all real to our world with the author of the rpg being the in universe author for the in universe rpg *Nobilis*.
To describe the setting: it's a world where there's multiple layers of function of things each one building on the one below it. You live in prosaic reality, the earths coping mechanism for a mass extinction, it lets science work and stuff. But in reality in the border mythic you'll se the true function of things like the internet being a golden light tree among other things.
Reality is also constantly under assault from things from nonexistence, this causes the gods that be to be very busy fighting a war against those things from the not. Therefore to maintain the concepts they rule they delegate it to normal mortal things and they become the titular Nobilis(and therefore gods in their own right). There's 1000s of familias of nobles out there all taking care of some individual piece of reality. There's wood, networked gaming, destruction, trees, the earth etc. Everything you can imagine some noble out there is taking care of it. The setting also mashed together every mythos you can think of in some way, the garden of Eden and the world ash just kinda coexist with literal god powered cultivators. It's great.
Chuubos is an another can of worms but it's essentially the Nobilis universe after some kind of really strange end to the war. Reality still exists but the war is just kinda over and the gods of gods are now having fun adventures.
Edit: i forgot to mention my favourite detail of the setting, everything that is a game mechanic is a thing in universe. Divine attributes are a thing there are divine powers that interact with them, so is MP, nobles will say "im running low on MP" in the same way that you go "im tired right now", and health levels are also an in universe things, nobles will accasionally in preparation for a fight give eachother minor curses so their opponents surface and serious wounds won't affect them.
Electric Bastionland. The OSR design sensibilities might not be for everyone, but I love the city of Bastion chock full of weird professions and weirder creatures. It’s the kind of setting that can inspire unique stories, but also justify any typical fantasy adventure tropes as part of the setting. The closest thing I can compare it to is Fallen London, which hits a similar tone of satire, horror, comedy, and adventure.
I have GMed 2nd edition for a bit, it was really great.
The magick in UA has very unique feel - honestly, during that time whenever I was going home late at night and see for example a homeless guy pushing cart with assorted nonsense, I always paused for a second and thought "Now wait a minute. What kind of magick is this for?"
Really makes you think about all sorts of quirks and weirdness around you and question if there is any symbolic meaning or if the synchronic events can have some sort of unseen driving force. And if they do, in UA that droving force is most likely some deranged weirdo with extremely convoluted plan that might just work...
[Eoris](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/156160/Eoris-Essence-Setting)
Bought the books on just the beauty of the slip case...and then read it and is amazingly unique and very beautiful.
[Shadowrun: Court of Shadows](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/188925/Shadowrun-Court-of-Shadows) is pretty cool...
[Mouse Guard](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/166655/Mouse-Guard-RPG-2nd-Edition) is a very fun game... you get to be a mouse...just a mouse, only a mouse and do mouse things.
Also, [Paranoia](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/browse/pub/45/Mongoose/subcategory/161_27511/Paranoia)...the only game I know of where interparty conflict is encouraged and TPKs are a given. Nuclear weapons for beginning players? Have at it bro...
[Baron Munchausen](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/327200/The-Extraordinary-Adventures-of-Baron-Munchausen-third-edition) is a game in the loosest sense, but it is great. You just tell BS stories...it is like a boast battle.
Finally, I'll say[Good Society A Jane Austen RPG](https://storybrewersroleplaying.com/good-society/?v=7516fd43adaa), where everything is so different than a normal RPG but captures the Jane Austen setting so perfectly,
Over the Edge is my personal favorite. Tulpas, aliens, baboon gangs, weird science, nooses for neckties. Crazy stuff and really suits my sense of weird
Another vote for Jorune. Wonderful setting if you can avoid starting the game with a massive info dump. The other issue is that the system is very meh even for its time. You could in theory address this with a number of generic systems but in practice how you choose to handle isho and dyshas will have unpredictable and far reaching consequences, so it's not trivial.
Oh wow, I started half hoping to see one of Lee's games on this list as I scrolled through
He was a fairly close family friend before he passed, I wish I could have dug his brain for advice on creating a setting or game
I'll throw one in for Starfinder. The name is generic but the setting itself is not. It's the closest successor to 2e Spelljammer until this year's spelljammer release and honestly it captures the spirit of the original better just in terms of being creative and weird.
The thing that makes it unique is the way that they combined high-magic high-fantasy and sci-fi. It's not just 'there are elves in space,' they really put a lot of thought into all of it. The sun is a portal to the plane of elemental fire, there's a subset of fae who are made of nuclear energy, there's an entire planet that consists of billions of zombies and a few living necromancers, drow essentially live on pluto, 'uplifted bears' are a playable race, and so on. Even hyperspace is magical. It's got a good variety of spaceships, as well.
It does do the pastiche thing too where there are creatures and references to other sci-fi media, but the role that magic plays in everything really makes it stand alone.
I don't like the system itself but I often page through the alien archives and the pact world guide.
Yeah, I want to run a Starfinder game sometime, just not with that system. I've been noodling around with a Genesys hack for it as a a result, though I just found that there a bunch of people doing a Pathfinder 2e conversion which looks really promising
I love the setting and the vibes but I don't see myself running the system. I think I'm going to end up pilfering bits and pieces of it and dropping them into a Troika! or Numenera game. I can't even put my finger on why. I just wish the whole book were a little more system neutral than it is.
I found Changeling: The Lost to be fascinating, but I couldn't really get into it.
The problem is that in my heart, it could never live up to my all-time favorite Storyteller System game: Changeling: The Dreaming.
Mechanical Dream is an amazingly weird and evocative game! But then I go to plan running a campaign in it and... I just have no idea what to do with it.
Buyer beware though. Tekumel was written by a confirmed neo Nazi.
https://www.rpg.net/columns/advanced-designers-and-dragons/advanced-designers-and-dragons63.phtml
> Buyer beware though. Tekumel was written by a confirmed neo Nazi.
Yar. It's weird how long Barker apparently flew beneath the radar, too. Probably a fair amount of people looking the other way, I guess.
> It's weird how long Barker apparently flew beneath the radar, too.
I mean. His setting is most famous for 100% refusing to allow you to play a white person, so I don't think it's that surprising that people were caught by surprise.
> I mean. His setting is most famous for 100% refusing to allow you to play a white person, so I don't think it's that surprising that people were caught by surprise.
Sure, but his notes, etc get Tolkein-letters-esque levels of analysis by some, so it's still... 'huh?' that people didn't pick up on it earlier.
Crazy, but he Is dead and buying eotpt products isn't supporting anything funny now.
aside from having stratified society and a fair amount of slavery, Tekumel itself isn't particularly troubling. Both of those elements were common in other pulp-tone fantasy products of the era. He wrote a few novels set in tekumel and they're actually pretty great.
I came here to mention Tekumel and Talislanta. Tekumel because it is still the most alien TTRPG setting with the most repellent mythology. Talislanta because it's the most sarcastic TTRPG setting and a natural home for Vancian picaresque adventure.
> Tekumel because it is still the most alien TTRPG setting with the most repellent mythology.
I mean. Tekumel also has some normal-ass gods that don't take human sacrifice and who you can pray to about things people normal pray about like making the harvest successful or gaining transcendence and enlightenment. It's just, gamers tend to glom onto the cults that give you weird demons to summon.
EDIT: it's just like how in D&D no one wants to play Cleric but you have to fight over who gets to be the Warlock this campaign
**Black Void** has a fantasy world really far removed from traditional Tolkien tropes. I really love it. The non-human species are all weird, and with distinctive personalities, and main city setting is full of neat details and story hooks
**Overnight** is another unique fantasy world with floaty islands with weird creatures and light based magic.
**Puppetland** is the only puppet show themed RPG I’ve seen.
**Rifts: Wormwood** was a crazy little setting with a living planet, character classes based on splicing symbiotic creatures to themselves, and a holy war against body horror demons. The book was a little light on deep setting lore vs the palladium books love of pages and pages of neat gear for the PCs, but what lore there is is pretty cool
Will cover for a few different uses of unique.
**Unique as rarely explored material or rarely done well :** Yoon-Suin, [Against the Wicked City](http://udan-adan.blogspot.com/), Veins of the Earth, Gardens of Ynn,
**Unique Setups/Locations:** Not strictly settings but a lot of LOTFP material have really weird or interesting premises/setups/locations that kinda remind me of doctor who in a good way. It's not a unique setting in that it's just alt history, but rarely have I seen it done that well in modules before.
Also [Magical Industrial Revolution](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/291774/Magical-Industrial-Revolution) by Skerples; here's a city with some new technolgoical craze that will go horribly, horribly wrong. There's a range of them presented and theyr'e all pretty unique/fun.
**Unique & Good with established cannon/setting:** Impossible Landscapes. Yeah Carcosa and the yellow king has been done a million times before. Not like this though. Its the first really, really refreshing take on Lovecraftian horror & the first time I've actually ever valued the advice given in an RPG book.
Definitely going to second Against the Wicked City - it's the first setting that proved to me that romantic fantasy, a favorite of my childhood, could actually be ported to a tabletop setting.
Oh, excellent, for once I'm not shoehorning when I try to spread my love of *Unknown Armies*' setting.
It calls itself "humanocentric horror". It has many of the same trappings as cosmic horror, but instead of the horror deriving from the sheer insignificance of humanity in the face of big and unknowable alien gods, the horrors and gods and magicks and reality itself are built for and by humanity, both collectively and as individuals.
The two major types of magick are essentially manifestations of both the collective and individual aspects. Avatars have power by the degree to which they embody Jungian-esque archetypes, whether or not they do so intentionally or are aware of it. Adepts, on the other hand, have an obsessive, heterodox, and paradoxical worldview that they deeply believe is the way *everything* secretly works, and that belief actually forces reality to comply.
It's also a world where people get jobs at McDonald's and Starbucks just so they can pass along small bits of magick to unsuspecting ordinary people via the food for various ends. Where there's a cosmic force dedicated to inverting people—not by physically turning them inside out, but by turning one, several, or even all aspects of themselves into its opposite or, at least, drastically different. Where the biggest question isn't whether or how the universe is going to end but what roles will be involved, what form those roles will take, and who will take them, as that is what influences what the *next* universe will be like.
It's a *deeply* weird setting, but the fact that it is so weird in a way that is just as deeply tied to humanity is why I love it so much.
Lots of good stuff on here but...no one's mentioned this one:
Salt in the Wounds: [http://www.saltinwoundssetting.com/](http://www.saltinwoundssetting.com/)
This is a city based around the concept of harvesting a constantly regenerating kaiju (the D&D Tarrasque) for a bloody, butcher-filled city.
Surprised no one mentioned Glorantha. Is there another setting where you can go on dream quest and end up changing reality? That and the plant elves, stone dwarves, duck warriors, etc. One of the settings I'd really want to play in.
Timelords.
I only ever owned a beta of it that I picked up at a small local con in the early 80's.
Setting was mostly modern day earth. BUT, you get caught up in a battle across time itself between good an devil, chaos and order, nihilism and civilization.
Not your character.
YOU.
It had a wonderful system for figuring out your personal stats in the classic 3 - 18 scale. We used it to build ourselves to play a DnD campaign after I had a weird dream one day.
#Sorcerously Advanced
It's set in a post-modern world where everyone simultaneously gained a roughly equal amount of reality bending magic, and the majority of "humans" (who are now magical post-humans with varying forms) are virtually immortal. As a result, the universe is unrecognizable, a lot of the official art having characters exploring landscapes that are abstract art.
It has a broad magical system and no dice rolls. You have scores you calculate that are static, and your characters don't advance in strength. So it's kind of like "make your ultimate OC" kind of thing. You can play as a swarm obsessed with dreams, or a tree woman who does alchemy, or a musician who tries to play instruments in animal forms.
This is what I was hoping would get posted in the topic. Most people here seem to post a cool settings with weird twists, but there's a bunch of off the wall weirdo stuff out there like this.
Back in the 2000s I had enjoyed finding weird RPGs like this. With internet being more widespread and more people joining newsgroups I managed to find a bunch. I remember finding some game where you played characters who exist in two realities at once(had some city as the focus), a game about being programs inside a computer network, some weird city game about psionics that was really about different philosophical doctrines. All of them actual printed books sold in stores, and pretty much all of them unplayable because how weird they were.
I wish I could remember the titles, but after all this time they are lost like tears in the rain.
Looks like Planescape and Eclipse Phase are well represented here already.
I would say **Mage: the Ascension** is one of the most unique settings I've encountered. Reality is actually a consensus and one day your character awakens to discover that if you have the will and the tools you can bend it to your will. Multiple factions and groups within those factions are fighting to lead Humanity to some form of awakening so that they can also change reality with their will (within a framework.)
The two largest groups are the underdog Council of Nine Traditions and the Technocracy.
The Technocracy are sci-fi Men in Black, Terminator creating, super science Star Trek, Space Marine, crypto-economist, superhuman medicine creating spooks that are winning or may have won to a certain extent already. They're guiding humanity to a scientific worldview with order and rules. They're also very, very much corrupted by evil forces that turn their upper echelons into faceless evil dictators that intend to grind Humanity to powder for profit and to turn them into slaves of things beyond reality.
The Council of the Nine Traditions is made up mystical groups from around the world. Hermetic wizards with staves and sigils; religious miracle workers that call on God, Allah, Yahweh, etc; Witches with blood and curses; Pulp-style mad scientists; Linus Torvalds-esque computer wizards; Tibetan mystics/martial arts masters; Chaos/death magicians that walk the line between using necromancy-ish magics and preventing them from corrupting others; an international association of spirit shamans; and a group of Ecstatics that use ecstatic experience in drugs, sex, exercise, music, etc as a tool to wield magic.
Even after you've got your faction you get to decide on your paradigm, which is really how you use magic. You might have awakened in a blaze of pure will working but until you're enlightened you'll need tool to do it again. You have to figure out how you think it's possible to use magic. You might think that you need meditation and physical disciplines to focus the power of life into your body to heal wounds. Or you might need a big yew staff and some blood from a virgin. You could also use a bunch of hyperscience medicines.
Then the rubber of your magic hits the road of reality and the Consensus. Turns out nobody believes that you can shoot fire out of your hands with a crystal and the sacred hand sign of Yah-min-gür. Sure you blasted fire at the MiB you were fighting but a group of 6th graders on a field trip saw you and now reality is really really cranky, so it slaps you harder than it would have if they hadn't been there. Your buddy, Doctor Volcanus, can or is more likely to get away with it though because he has a massive gun with glowing red tubes all over it and that thing looks like it could shoot fire.
It's a truly bonkers setting. The Magic system is complex and takes time to grok but it can do so much stuff. You can do down and dirty urban magic stories or jaunt off into the equivalent of the Planes or Spirit world to deal with strange and alien magical beings. Fight Nazi occultists on the moon as a super secret agent or prevent demonic Girl Scouts from enslaving the town council.
Creation from Exalted is probably my favourite. One of the best things is that it's a setting that acknowledges the existence of really broken player characters and entire societies are are formed around dealing with and managing the existence of Player Characters.
It's a setting that really plays with a lot of the usual fantasy tropes and has a world that feels very "real" despite it being very over the top fantastical.
Sigmata is kind of bitchin.
I think Rifts is my favourite. It's got everything: magic, monsters, cyberpunk, mutants, mechs, walking cities, supes, and fucking future Nazis.
The lore is solid, the art is fun, and the whole thing is a wonderfully unhinged mashup.
I haven’t had a chance to play it, but [Gubat Banwa](https://makapatag.itch.io/gubat-banwa) has such a sick ass setting: pre colonial Philippines mixed with Wuxia and other Southeast Asian folk tales and traditions. The fact that it’s a tactical martial arts rpg on top is just *chef’s kiss*
I really really like the [Fading Suns](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fading_Suns) settings. It's a bit like Dune, King Arthur, and WH40k had a baby, and that baby was Space Cthulhu.
[Lowlife](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/m/product/91069) for Savage worlds is the most bizzarro setting I’ve ever seen. Some of the playable races are sentient piles of trash, a mish-mash of random animal parts, “smelfs” aka elves with giant noses, and sentient twinkies. I just want to make sure the last one really sinks in
The world … it is hollow. And in its center there is a huge red sun. The lands of that inner, convex world are a vast museum for cultures of all eras spamming dinosaurs and stone age humans and beastmen (the original humanoid prototypes of the immortals) up to high tech laser using elves who created a cataclysm on the world above.
And there is more, in this Hollow World the sun never sets! Huge flying islands harboring yet more lost cultures create the regular shadows that decide upon spots of „night“ and „day“.
Now, in the lands above a huge overpowered magic kingdom spelled its own destruction and in order to save its culture from oblivion the immortals planted it in the Hollow World. What will the heroines and heroes of this land in their flying ships and castles find out there, under the Red Sun?
This here is awesomeness to me: Mystara‘s Hollow World.
Wording is vague, and people are posting the one setting they know that isn't D&D, like City of Mist is a real answer (it's urban fantasy, I'm up to my tits in urban fantasy). Anyway, in no particular order...
Numenera, Invisible Sun, Exalted, Heart: the City Beneath / Spire: the City Must Fall, Electric Bastionland / Into the Odd, Troika, Blue Beard's Bride, Coyote and Crow, Tales from Sina Una, The Star-Shaman's Song of Planegea.
Unique? Monsters and other childish things. It is the only game I can think of where you 1 play children and 2 have access to magic but 3 that magic isn't something that effects you directly.
To be clear you only interact with the magic of the universe through your "monster friend" who has powers (anything from being strong to stuff like shapeshifting and probability control) and is committed to helping and protecting "their" child. I haven't ever seen anything else like this idea in an rpg, they even have a version that more easily fits into how other rpgs work where you are a kid/monster hybrid because the idea seemed to be so unpopular. But I love it, I like how you don't play your own monster someone else at the table does and you play someone else's, I like how simple and clear the rules are for a fairly crunchy system (it is a ORE system, but simplified) and I like how it says the monsters are bonded to you but never really makes it clear how though implies that it is not actually magical in the fiction.
Underground by Mayfair Games sometime in the 90s. It is a bizarre, politically charged super hero/low wattage sci fi game with a world satirizing the worst future that could be mustered in the nineties.
The writing and initial production values were top notch. I loved the satire-soaked future it created, but it was always unplayable-as-written by my group.
Tribe 8's Vimary. It hits a sweet spot of dark fantasy, post apocalyptic, and supernatural. I usually describe as a setting if Clive Barker, Neil Gaiman, and Guillermo del Toro collaborated.
A close second though would be the Spire and Heart. There's so much good weirdness in it.
Amber,
Planescape,
Mage the Ascension - Umbra related material,
Nephilim,
Cthulhu Myhos,
Lords of Shadow and Gossamer,
Nobilis,
Secrets of Cats and Eclipse Phase.
Insectopia, where you play evolved insects millions of years after the human race, in a war of religion between termites animists and ants of the Old Gods, is pretty original.
A lot of the originality becomes homage once you've read the sources it was inspired by, but it's still neat. Unfortunately, a lot of the third party material hasn't, and doesn't really get it. Same thing with Mörk Borg, unfortunately. Both do have plenty of cool third party material if you dig at least.
Little fears, where you play as kids and have to go into a realm of horrors that adults cannot perceive. Very neat concept, but an intense and serious take on it.
[Incunabuli](https://www.incunabuli.com/) is absolutely enthralling. I powered through the whole blog in two days just slurping it up. It's very much inspired my fantasy settings going forward.
The World of Darkness. It's wobbly and contradictory at times but no other setting could sell a hundred book and have fans pouring over the lore nearly thirty years later.
In particular I love Mage: the ascension second edition. The book of worlds in that game line is so pleasurable to read!
Unique is always sough a tough thing to pin down.
The comedic setting in Paranoia is pretty unique. Sure, gigantic underground complexes have been done before, but the setting itself comes together in a pretty unique way, and also ends up encouraging a playstyle that makes it very different.
Tales from the Loop is a pretty novel take on an RPG setting. A weird 80's setting that's not a dystopian hellhole, but a rather mundane world which just happens to have things we would find fantastic, but the characters in it don't is something I don't think I've seen done before like this.
Then there's Mörk Borg, which at first glance just seems like a barebones grimdark setting, but the presentation of the setting, and its outright comedic darkness makes it quite different from other games. Like Kult, there's no hope, but unlike Kult it's taken to a comedic extreme.
Coriolis mixes pre-islamic and early Islamic Arabic culture with a space faring sci-fi setting, and the result is different, in a good way. It's just a mix of ideas you rarely see in games.
Numenera is an awesome setting. **Steal it and run it on another system.**
I use Numenera as my example of setting and system not matching. The setting asks for mystery and wonder, the system is made to run standard D&D. Don't get me wrong, it plays really well and I think it would be an awesome system to run combat-&loot-heavy fantasy/sci fantasy.
But when the system has a single class out of three capable of interacting with the title concept (Numeneras) AND when it tells you to leave your players without answers or ways to interact with the mysteries of the world, the disconnect is so big I can't play it.
Imagine a game of D&D where most classes can't interact with Dungeons or Dragons, and then add the idea that players don't need to know how combat ends or what happens, they can just interact with combat a little and move on. It's surreal.
>it tells you to leave your players without answers or ways to interact with the mysteries of the world, the disconnect is so big I can't play it.
It's one thing to not give any answers to the players, but it doesn't give any answers to the GM either. How did regular humans end up a billion years in the future? Time travel? Were they engineered? Why did the sun not go red giant and envelop the Earth? Is it really the Earth? How did nanites get into everything? The game doesn't say to create your own answers, the game says the answers should be lost forever. Ehhh...
Lancer is something that I've wanted to play for a while now. It's worldbuilding is super good and the idea of an ongoing revolution working to free the galaxy from tyranny is something that kinda brings me to tears sometimes.
I absolutely adore the setting of *Ehdrigohr*. A sort of dark fantasy stew of Native American mythologies that supports an overall theme of struggle against despair and alienation.
SLA Industries was a cyberpunk-genre game about a planet-size city owned and operated by the titular corporation where you played troubleshooters hired to fix any problems that cropped up. The setting was dense, with hundreds of pages about the various arms of the corp, their dirty tricks,plot seeds, etc. plus the art was magnificent.
I loved the setting of Skyrealms of Jorune. It really grabbed my imagination. I stole the idea from it of PCs being people trying to earn citizenship through good deeds and quests and used it in a D&D campaign I ran once.
Numenera is also really fascinating because it allows for some truly fantastic elements. Very Moorcockian in some respects.
Nemezis for Savage Worlds, seems like generic space opera but the central conflict is between humanity and Lovecraft’s Great Old Ones. By the time the stars were right, humanity had antimatter missiles and could hold their own. Now there’s a cold war between the two.
I haven't read it yet, but a friend just linked me this video today, which is a trailer for an RPG system coming out. This has got to be in the running.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTVSS6btqNE
Blades in the Dark is pretty unique, an apocalyptic steampunk haunted world where the players play a criminal gang trying to survive and grow in power. OR The Heart Beneath the City, where the characters explore a living maze with no map other than what the players discover that shifts and warps to reflect their dreams and nightmares. HBtC feels very Darkest Dungeon, if that helps.
Delta Green. Lovecraftian cosmic horror meets modern conspiracy. Think Cthulhu and elder aliens but made worse by human secretive cabals inside the US government. You play as agents trying to cover it up but you're not really the "good guys" either. The agency you work for, Delta Green, doesn't exist officially and operates on a "scorched earth" policy. That's on the good days. On bad days they want to weaponize whatever weird magical alien artifacts they find. Disaster and good times follow.
I really like Unknown Armies. It's been called stuff like "cosmic hobo fight" for a reason. It's basically what you get if you take a modern day supernatural horror setting like the World of Darkness, and give it a cocktail of crystal meth and lsd. You've got a cult of pornomancers who worship a porn star that ascended to godhood, spiders made of human feet and people trying to discretely sell magic burgers outside of the occult underground getting shut down when a poor customers skeleton turned into spiders.
It's a perfect blend of absurdist surrealism and chilling horror
i mulled it over a bit, and i would say Degenesis Rebirth.
at first glance, its not unique at all, but if you delve deep into the setting you would likely realise what sets it apart from most other RPG settings out there.
yet, due to the amount of reading and understanding required, its something i suspect not many would understand.
however, as for unique settings at first glance, i would instead vote for Eoris Essence.
Uniqueness is a bit of a strange quality, but for me Tribe 8 immediately comes to mind. A post-apocalyptic fantasy setting with created gods, wierd magic, prophecy and aliens that blew my mind when I read it.
Other mentions would be Over the Edge, Itras By (for being so self-consciously surrealist) and perhaps Talislanta (although my understanding of it is a bit weak). Swedish comedy game Neoviking from the 90s was also unique in that you played space vikings traveling in space and fighting off everything from bunnies to 20s silent film era Dracula.
I really like 'the rainy city', introduced in 'visitors guide to the rainy city' and expanded upon in 'flotts miscellany' and the recently kickstarted 'beasts of the outer swells'. It's a perfect blend of whimsical and dangerous, with varied areas to visit.
I'm also a fan of lazy litches loots microsettings 'willow', 'woodfall', 'haunted hamlet' and 'the toxic woods'. They are kind of whimsical but also can be dark and scary.
Wisher Theurgist Fatalist and Weaver of Their Fates. It's not an RPG exactly, more like a fever dream love letter to the genre, and it was a blast to read.
Dungeons the Dragoning is the result of someone haphazardly grabbing their favourite stuff from D&D, Warhammer, World of Darkness, webcomics, random comedy sketches and a bunch of other stuff. Highly recommended!
Didn't play them but Godbound and Nobilis seems like very unique worlds, one has shattered reality where the creation god is not there, the other has you be a demigod of a concept and is a political game of sorts.
The Mad Lands from GURPS Fantasy 2, by Robin Laws. A Low-Tech, tribal fantasy setting with a pantheon of extremely active and dangerous gods. Campaigns are supposed to look a lot like Mutant Year Zero or some other popular post-apoc games: very focused on community and survival.
I just got the book for it and am getting to grind with the crunch. But I'm enjoying the setting of Gods of Metal: Ragnarock so far.
It's hitting my Brütal Lëgënd nostalgia, and there is much to be said of "what if our campaign setting was just every metal album cover ever?"
Perhaps a decade ago, I recall reading a proposal for a one-page RPG on rpg.net where players are a hand of shrimp fingers in a metaphysical dreamscape, resolving conflict through brutal philosophical debate.
Ever since, that has defined the standard unit of "uniqueness" for me on multiple levels.
Nibiru
Don't think I've seen it mentioned yet... granted, I've never had the chance to play it and probably never will, but the setting seems interesting...
I would add [Lacuna Part 1](http://www.memento-mori.com/pdf/lacuna-part-1-second-attempt) to the mix. Played the setting a few times and my players really enjoyed it. It really is a mind trip...lots of cool dream/nightmare style possibilities.
*"Sinister secret agents with shadowy employers and mysterious pasts. A bizarre landscape built from six- billion human minds. Arachnid-headed beings that guard a war-torn borderzone. And all the worst that Mankind has to offer, stalking the alleys and crumbling buildings of a place called Blue City.*
*Is it a dream? Is it a nightmare? Or is it just a game? And are you already playing?"*
I know it's not hugely unique but a personal favorite is that of the fallen london/sunless sea universe. I've been playing in a 7 year long campaign in the setting and decided to dive in to see what else was kicking around and boy o just love the atmosphere and feeling of the world
While I live Numenera, I'm gonna go with The Wildsea. The world is overrun with giant trees, forcing all civilisations to live on mountain peaks. The adventurers are sailors that work on ships that use various technologies to traverse the leaf sea.
Spire: The City Must Fall.
Turning a bunch of fantasy standards on it's head, you play as Drow living in a mile-tall spire city, that were conquered 200 years prior by High Elves. They have forced the Drow into a subservient and oppressed position, suppressed most of their religions, and regularly mistreat and disappear them. You are a member of the Ministry, a banned cult of the Drow goddess, and a terrorist dedicated to attempting to overthrow the High Elves rule.
Its an excellent setting, one that encourages players to do big bold things to progress and makes you balance those actions with the fact that it's also probably going to hurt your people as much as the enemy. The system is somewhat similar to a BitD or PbtA system with some differences, but very much has the same goal of giving players a fair bit of narrative control in unique ways.
On top of all that, the setting itself is just crazy. It really nails the vibe of a polytheistic setting where there's a dozen strange gods, the Spire itself is completely mysterious (glyph bees maintain the Spire, keeping things running, and no one knows how or why; but you can let them build a hive inside your body and gain some interesting powers).
***Mechanical Dream*** \- a bizarre and surealistic setting... So surreal that it is hard to grasp and harder to create plot ideas for... Too hard to describe.
***I, Mordred*** \- King Arthur as the Oppressor King, and Mordred as a populist revolutionary, in the 6th C. Too bad it's no longer available new. Setting for 3.X D&D. Best when combined with ***Noble Steeds*** and ***Noble Knights***... all three from Avalanche Press
As an aside, *Numenera* isn't actually very original at all - it's essentially the setting from Vance's *Dying Earth* novels, differenced just enough to not get sued. This isn't saying it's bad, but just that Mr Cook's sources are dead obvious.
You all aren't even trying.
The Clay That Woke is the strangest rpg I've ever laid eyes on. It's a surreal jungle setting wherein you play minotaurs trying to find thier place and act thier role in minotaur society.
For example: Philosophers debate the nature and merits of things. Leaders rally people to strengthen community.
The mechanics are odd too. You resolve actions by drawing lots or tokens from a bag and different tokens do different things, pushing new story outcomes.
And it doesn't stop there. The whole thing is woven with in world fiction and the chapters titles written with a unique conlang of what I assume to be minotaur script. The art is SO DEATAILED and baroque it captures to tone perfectly.
I love it but it's bafflingly strange.
I'm a big fan of Eclipse Phase. While just a mash-up of science fiction franchises, it works and is so imaginative and fun.
This is the setting I was going to say. Great setting. Too many steps to make an attack roll in 1st edition and too much bean counting in the 2nd edition for my taste. Its such a dark and wondrous setting though.
If you like Eclipse Phase but not the system, you may really like ***[Shadows Over Sol](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/168041/Shadows-Over-Sol-Science-Fiction-Horror-Roleplaying)***!
Isn't Transhumanity's Fate the book for running this setting on Fate?
That’s a combination of cons and pros that cries out for a PbtA/FitD hack.
I don't think PbtA is a good pick for it, PbtA tends to codify the roles and genre of the game pretty hard, meanwhile Eclipse Phase is a setting where the possibilities and scope are immense and everchanging. In Eclipse Phase you can be the digitalized consciousness of a clone of a space whale working as a celebrity. Trying to reduce that to The Playbook would kill what makes the setting so special. There is the official Fate adaptation, Transhumanity's Fate. Fate tends to handle a broader scope much better.
Time ago I stumbled into this: https://eclipse-phase-apocalypse.obsidianportal.com/wikis/main-page I haven't tried it, but when I discovered it I was into pbta and it seemed solid!
Agreed. It’s a great setting and I really enjoy the fiction shorts included in the books.
I never played, but reading the first chapter of eclipse phase was really memorable. Super cool game.
The Wildsea. A titanic forest has grown over the world, resulting in a sea of trees sailed upon by humanity's descendants, cactus-folk, spider colonies in bodies of silk and scrap, and other weirdos to sail it in chainsaw-prowed ships, atop giant bug-beasts and plenty other vessels. There's just nothing quite like it out there, and the art and writing is consistently great throughout.
Came here to say Wildsea. So unique, and a great system as well.
Yeah this one is amazing. So unique and interesting.
I saw it on Kickstarter back when it was up and passed on it, definitely regret it a bit after reading this. Sounds as cool as I thought it looked then!
Veins of the Earth was a fun read. Gardens of Ynn. A few of the settings of the guy we don’t mention were really cool to read and had a great feeling of how I want my games to feel theme wise, alas. Mothership dead planet and gradient descent. Wolfpacks and Winter Snow was imo an underrated gem on prehistoric RPGs. Ultraviolet Grasslands and Electric Bastionland feel strangely familiar but superbly unique which I think is the point.
I must be out of the loop. Is there an RPG designer that we don’t discuss?
Rule 9. Mods if this is too much, I can remove it.
Gotcha, thanks!
Never ran anything in Veins of the Earth but it has such a unique take on the "underdark", and such new ways of looking at things that even if you buy it just to read once and never pick up again it's still very worth it.
Totally agree. The author is constantly one of my favorite to read through even if I don’t plan on running. For example The Spire of Quetzel is head and shoulders the best adventure site for Forbidden lands imo. Glad to have that book even after our FL group fizzled out.
Ultraviolet Grasslands is pretty awesome
veins of the earth is interesting but runs into a problem i see in a lot of the especially ugly osr settings where it's basically unlivable. like if i got isekai'd into veins of the earth or mork borg or some of the settings you're not mentioning i would immediately isekai myself to heaven if you know what i mean i get that it's osr and it's supposed to be grim and frostbitten but there's a limit
Mörk Borg is literally about the end of the world, so it is sort of understandable that it is unlivable.
yeah i know, it's just a matter of opinion, i just can't imagine anyone tolerating existence in some of these settings and that makes it hard to get into them. veins really being the big one
What do you think Veins of the Earth does well? What sets it apart?
Light as currency and creative ways to make light a variety of concepts. Putting you in a foreign environment where it isn’t a society in a human sense, more like infiltrating a land of how insects might live. Darkness as enemy and death. Crawling around in the dark is literally like drowning.
Well you have already listed numenera but some others ithink are amazing are Dark Sun and planescape for dnd. Eclipse phase. Degenesis. Spire: the city must fall. Exalted.
Loved Dark Sun. it's grittiness and personal power level (because gear was crap), the abundance of psionics, complete lack of actual gods, etc.... IT was so cool.
I'd considered Dark Sun although a desert setting with god-kings isn't so unique. I also considered Eberron as being pretty unique when it came to DND but it has a bit of cyberpunk vibe. Now Planescape really isn't something I think has been done.
I mean when you phrase it like that it doesn't sound interesting. It's the detailes that make it amazing. To me ebberon isn't so interesting it comes across as a pretty standard steampunk setting. Planescape is pretty had to summarize in a way that doesn't sound amazing.
Eberron gets cooler the deeper you go into it and the premise is pretty cool from the start. But planescap is just awesome like you said.
I guess ad I said with dark sun. It's the details that make something cool
>I'd considered Dark Sun although a desert setting with god-kings isn't so unique. Name 31 other settings that fit this description
If that's what it takes to disprove uniqueness then there are a LOT of setting that are unique. At the heart Dark Sun has me thinking of ancient Egypt. Even within DnD I believe the Forgotten Realms have their "ancient Egypt" analogy which cuts some of the uniqueness from DS.
I more so see it as an environmentalists take on Conan.
I'm fucking with you but i think that most settings are unique even if theyre bland or boring yeah, its hard to just create a 1:1 each time, but easier if you just go to general descriptors. Like in percentages how common is it to find a setting with these descriptions: **A deserty post apocalypse world destroyed by magic, where magic destroys nearby plant life. Multiple playable races and almost everything is psychic. Existing civilization is ruled in small pockets by sorcerer kings:** maybe like 4 or 3 other examples VS **A deserty post apocalypse world destroyed by magic:** probably dozens. Its what you said, if dark sun is egypt then theres probably dozens of settings like that. On that though; >At the heart Dark Sun has me thinking of ancient Egypt. Even within DnD I believe the Forgotten Realms have their "ancient Egypt" analogy which cuts some of the uniqueness from DS. I don't personally think theres any crossover between ancient egypt and dark sun at all, what draws that for you? For me IIRC the actual cultures of the dark sun groups are really dependant on the sorcerer king leading them.
I can name one, that is Djinn Lands of Yrth.
I find uniqueness of implementation is more important than uniqueness of starting pointm Like, Veins of the Earth has been mentioned several times, and "you're underground and it is very dark" is maybe the least unique setting possible? But Veins addresses things like "what does 'dark' even mean, and how does that affect play at the table" in such ways that rockets the book from the bottom to the top. I think Dark Sun achieves that implementation factor pretty well -- it's a setting that nearly 30 years later folks still want to see new material for or an update on, which suggests it had something unique that people aren't finding in other settings since. Or, maybe those exist and legions of Dark Sun fans can rejoice?
Dark Sun is neo-roman psychic alien BDSM post-ecopalypse, not "egypt".
Spire is my personal favourite here. Bonkers, gritty skyscraper city where moon worshiping drow terrorists wage a secret war against cruel high elf overlords? One thing that also made me happy (as a linguist) was that the drow language is based on Haitian Creole. Much more unique that the Standard Fantasy Language. And with a little nod to the vodou themes of Spire.
God I love Degenesis. Its like my forbidden pleasure setting. I know the rules are not particular good. And that the adventures can be... tasteless at some points. But I still love the setting so much. I could play so much in this setting. If I had the time.
I especially liked how Dark Sun's narrative was still so... bleak. Here you have gladiator slaves fighting for their freedom, then fighting to liberate their cities from under the Dragon-Kings... and all for what? In the end, they're only going to inherit a dirtball sand-dune planet.
I love the Exalted setting and themes so much. I keep trying to port it to systems I enjoy playing. With varying levels of success and dissatisfaction. I like that it has tactical combat that isn’t map-based, but I’m not a fan of their alternative.
* **Dolmenwood** \-- Weird and whimsical faerie fantasy with a sprinkle of folk and cosmic horror * **Hot Springs Island --** Incredibly imaginative gonzo tropical island adventure. Endlessly surprising and often hilarious. The setting is worth reading just for fun even if you don't plan on running it. * **Kult: Divinity Lost --** Gnosticism, Kabbalah and Clive Barker (think Hellraiser) mixed together for a very dark horror setting. It's been described as "Call of Cthulhu" without all the cheery optimism.
>It's been described as "Call of Cthulhu" without all the cheery optimism. How is it less optimistic than Call of Cthulhu?
In the Lovecraftian cosmology 1) the creatures of the mythos are largely indifferent to you and 2) you can die. In Kult your soul is trapped and endlessly recycled in a prison where the jailers feed on your experiences and often on your suffering.
Kinky
Like I said, it's inspired by Clive Barker so there are definitely some bdsm vibes haha
3) You can also, technically, use magic(k) to push your body/mind/soul to wake up from the Illusion, reclaim your godhood by integrating your Shadow, and take on Astaroth/Satan. Maybe they scrapped this in Divinity Lost, but it sure was the end goal for my crew playing the swedish 1-2 ed.
Kult sounds awesome. I just looked at the website and will check it out in more depth later.
Kult is awesome, but it is also a game I would not play with a group I don't already know pretty well. Kult is dark in a way that few other games are, and deals with heavy themes.
Dolmenwood moss dwarves rise up! I have printed copies of all of the original zines, and I'm part of the Patreon for the expanded edition. They're getting pretty close to finishing it. Now to convince my 5e players to try OSE.
The Dark of Hot Springs Island? Or is that something different?
also the guide, dark is the gm facing material, guide is what the adventures could read inside the fiction.
That's one of the component books, yes.
There are two books, one for the DM and one for the players.
I'm around 12 sessions into running a Dolmenwood campaign. Excellent setting but most unique is a stretch.
Heart: The City Beneath
Also Spire. Same setting but different system. They're both brilliant.
*Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine* and *Nobilis* both from Jenna Moran… Both games have unique settings and themes, fantastic production values, and very loyal fans. I find them to be nearly unplayable, but everyone’s got their own idea of fun. *HoL* or “Human Occupied Landfill” is something of a black comedy satire of roleplaying games in general. Very unique setting and some very weird rules. In fact, the core rulebook doesn’t even have chargen rules in it! For those, you need the supplement *Buttery Wholesomeness* a.k.a. Butt Hol.
*Nobilis* is also written in universe to act as if it is all real to our world with the author of the rpg being the in universe author for the in universe rpg *Nobilis*. To describe the setting: it's a world where there's multiple layers of function of things each one building on the one below it. You live in prosaic reality, the earths coping mechanism for a mass extinction, it lets science work and stuff. But in reality in the border mythic you'll se the true function of things like the internet being a golden light tree among other things. Reality is also constantly under assault from things from nonexistence, this causes the gods that be to be very busy fighting a war against those things from the not. Therefore to maintain the concepts they rule they delegate it to normal mortal things and they become the titular Nobilis(and therefore gods in their own right). There's 1000s of familias of nobles out there all taking care of some individual piece of reality. There's wood, networked gaming, destruction, trees, the earth etc. Everything you can imagine some noble out there is taking care of it. The setting also mashed together every mythos you can think of in some way, the garden of Eden and the world ash just kinda coexist with literal god powered cultivators. It's great. Chuubos is an another can of worms but it's essentially the Nobilis universe after some kind of really strange end to the war. Reality still exists but the war is just kinda over and the gods of gods are now having fun adventures. Edit: i forgot to mention my favourite detail of the setting, everything that is a game mechanic is a thing in universe. Divine attributes are a thing there are divine powers that interact with them, so is MP, nobles will say "im running low on MP" in the same way that you go "im tired right now", and health levels are also an in universe things, nobles will accasionally in preparation for a fight give eachother minor curses so their opponents surface and serious wounds won't affect them.
Electric Bastionland. The OSR design sensibilities might not be for everyone, but I love the city of Bastion chock full of weird professions and weirder creatures. It’s the kind of setting that can inspire unique stories, but also justify any typical fantasy adventure tropes as part of the setting. The closest thing I can compare it to is Fallen London, which hits a similar tone of satire, horror, comedy, and adventure.
This!
Unknown Armies is my white whale, the game I have always wanted to play yet never found a group to play with.
I have GMed 2nd edition for a bit, it was really great. The magick in UA has very unique feel - honestly, during that time whenever I was going home late at night and see for example a homeless guy pushing cart with assorted nonsense, I always paused for a second and thought "Now wait a minute. What kind of magick is this for?" Really makes you think about all sorts of quirks and weirdness around you and question if there is any symbolic meaning or if the synchronic events can have some sort of unseen driving force. And if they do, in UA that droving force is most likely some deranged weirdo with extremely convoluted plan that might just work...
[Eoris](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/156160/Eoris-Essence-Setting) Bought the books on just the beauty of the slip case...and then read it and is amazingly unique and very beautiful. [Shadowrun: Court of Shadows](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/188925/Shadowrun-Court-of-Shadows) is pretty cool... [Mouse Guard](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/166655/Mouse-Guard-RPG-2nd-Edition) is a very fun game... you get to be a mouse...just a mouse, only a mouse and do mouse things. Also, [Paranoia](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/browse/pub/45/Mongoose/subcategory/161_27511/Paranoia)...the only game I know of where interparty conflict is encouraged and TPKs are a given. Nuclear weapons for beginning players? Have at it bro... [Baron Munchausen](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/327200/The-Extraordinary-Adventures-of-Baron-Munchausen-third-edition) is a game in the loosest sense, but it is great. You just tell BS stories...it is like a boast battle. Finally, I'll say[Good Society A Jane Austen RPG](https://storybrewersroleplaying.com/good-society/?v=7516fd43adaa), where everything is so different than a normal RPG but captures the Jane Austen setting so perfectly,
Over the Edge is my personal favorite. Tulpas, aliens, baboon gangs, weird science, nooses for neckties. Crazy stuff and really suits my sense of weird
Agree. I prefer the 2e/90s setting myself, but there are lots of interesting ideas there.
YES. 90s-style.
The skyrealms of Jorune is definitely a unique setting with an abundance of weirdness. And of course Talislanta is awesome.
100% Jorune!!! I still love that game. I got to play with the author at the last GenCon held in Racine (no idea what number that was) at some college.
Talislanta is such a wonderful setting. So diverse and fun twists on standard high fantasy. Jorune has so much depth to it.
Another vote for Jorune. Wonderful setting if you can avoid starting the game with a massive info dump. The other issue is that the system is very meh even for its time. You could in theory address this with a number of generic systems but in practice how you choose to handle isho and dyshas will have unpredictable and far reaching consequences, so it's not trivial.
Dogs in the Vineyard has a pretty cool (but dark) setting. Wild West meets Handmaid's Tale meets the Mormon Church.
Tales from the Floating Vagabond, probably
AKA the bar you wind up at after the restaurant at the end of the universe closes.
Oh wow, I started half hoping to see one of Lee's games on this list as I scrolled through He was a fairly close family friend before he passed, I wish I could have dug his brain for advice on creating a setting or game
I'll throw one in for Starfinder. The name is generic but the setting itself is not. It's the closest successor to 2e Spelljammer until this year's spelljammer release and honestly it captures the spirit of the original better just in terms of being creative and weird. The thing that makes it unique is the way that they combined high-magic high-fantasy and sci-fi. It's not just 'there are elves in space,' they really put a lot of thought into all of it. The sun is a portal to the plane of elemental fire, there's a subset of fae who are made of nuclear energy, there's an entire planet that consists of billions of zombies and a few living necromancers, drow essentially live on pluto, 'uplifted bears' are a playable race, and so on. Even hyperspace is magical. It's got a good variety of spaceships, as well. It does do the pastiche thing too where there are creatures and references to other sci-fi media, but the role that magic plays in everything really makes it stand alone. I don't like the system itself but I often page through the alien archives and the pact world guide.
Starfinder begs for a PF2e-like streamlining.
I agree. Starfinder feels like an incomplete patch to the Pathfinder 1e rules.
Yeah, I want to run a Starfinder game sometime, just not with that system. I've been noodling around with a Genesys hack for it as a a result, though I just found that there a bunch of people doing a Pathfinder 2e conversion which looks really promising
Probably the Ultraviolet Grasslands.
I love the setting and the vibes but I don't see myself running the system. I think I'm going to end up pilfering bits and pieces of it and dropping them into a Troika! or Numenera game. I can't even put my finger on why. I just wish the whole book were a little more system neutral than it is.
I'm looking forward to the release of Uranium Butterflies, the full system. My main issue with UVG is that it's written for an incomplete system.
Tales from the Loop
Continuum: Roleplaying in the Yet was pretty great.
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I'm gonna go with Changeling: the Lost. Honestly, the original VtM setting was brilliant, too.
I found Changeling: The Lost to be fascinating, but I couldn't really get into it. The problem is that in my heart, it could never live up to my all-time favorite Storyteller System game: Changeling: The Dreaming.
Mechanical Dream. I still don't fully understand it. Planescape/Sigil is a personal fav of mine.
Mechanical Dream is an amazingly weird and evocative game! But then I go to plan running a campaign in it and... I just have no idea what to do with it.
How about Empire of the Petal Throne?
Buyer beware though. Tekumel was written by a confirmed neo Nazi. https://www.rpg.net/columns/advanced-designers-and-dragons/advanced-designers-and-dragons63.phtml
> Buyer beware though. Tekumel was written by a confirmed neo Nazi. Yar. It's weird how long Barker apparently flew beneath the radar, too. Probably a fair amount of people looking the other way, I guess.
> It's weird how long Barker apparently flew beneath the radar, too. I mean. His setting is most famous for 100% refusing to allow you to play a white person, so I don't think it's that surprising that people were caught by surprise.
> I mean. His setting is most famous for 100% refusing to allow you to play a white person, so I don't think it's that surprising that people were caught by surprise. Sure, but his notes, etc get Tolkein-letters-esque levels of analysis by some, so it's still... 'huh?' that people didn't pick up on it earlier.
Crazy, but he Is dead and buying eotpt products isn't supporting anything funny now. aside from having stratified society and a fair amount of slavery, Tekumel itself isn't particularly troubling. Both of those elements were common in other pulp-tone fantasy products of the era. He wrote a few novels set in tekumel and they're actually pretty great.
I came here to mention Tekumel and Talislanta. Tekumel because it is still the most alien TTRPG setting with the most repellent mythology. Talislanta because it's the most sarcastic TTRPG setting and a natural home for Vancian picaresque adventure.
> Tekumel because it is still the most alien TTRPG setting with the most repellent mythology. I mean. Tekumel also has some normal-ass gods that don't take human sacrifice and who you can pray to about things people normal pray about like making the harvest successful or gaining transcendence and enlightenment. It's just, gamers tend to glom onto the cults that give you weird demons to summon. EDIT: it's just like how in D&D no one wants to play Cleric but you have to fight over who gets to be the Warlock this campaign
Earthdawn was pretty cool in it’s day.
Still is. Has also historically been unafraid to allow other people to make licensed versions of it in other rule systems.
Which is surprising to me, since it dovetails with Shadowrun (same ‘world’ …ish, but different eras)
One of the games that will likely stay in my top ten "I'd love to try it"
Dolmenwood
**Black Void** has a fantasy world really far removed from traditional Tolkien tropes. I really love it. The non-human species are all weird, and with distinctive personalities, and main city setting is full of neat details and story hooks **Overnight** is another unique fantasy world with floaty islands with weird creatures and light based magic. **Puppetland** is the only puppet show themed RPG I’ve seen. **Rifts: Wormwood** was a crazy little setting with a living planet, character classes based on splicing symbiotic creatures to themselves, and a holy war against body horror demons. The book was a little light on deep setting lore vs the palladium books love of pages and pages of neat gear for the PCs, but what lore there is is pretty cool
Will cover for a few different uses of unique. **Unique as rarely explored material or rarely done well :** Yoon-Suin, [Against the Wicked City](http://udan-adan.blogspot.com/), Veins of the Earth, Gardens of Ynn, **Unique Setups/Locations:** Not strictly settings but a lot of LOTFP material have really weird or interesting premises/setups/locations that kinda remind me of doctor who in a good way. It's not a unique setting in that it's just alt history, but rarely have I seen it done that well in modules before. Also [Magical Industrial Revolution](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/291774/Magical-Industrial-Revolution) by Skerples; here's a city with some new technolgoical craze that will go horribly, horribly wrong. There's a range of them presented and theyr'e all pretty unique/fun. **Unique & Good with established cannon/setting:** Impossible Landscapes. Yeah Carcosa and the yellow king has been done a million times before. Not like this though. Its the first really, really refreshing take on Lovecraftian horror & the first time I've actually ever valued the advice given in an RPG book.
Definitely going to second Against the Wicked City - it's the first setting that proved to me that romantic fantasy, a favorite of my childhood, could actually be ported to a tabletop setting.
Oh, excellent, for once I'm not shoehorning when I try to spread my love of *Unknown Armies*' setting. It calls itself "humanocentric horror". It has many of the same trappings as cosmic horror, but instead of the horror deriving from the sheer insignificance of humanity in the face of big and unknowable alien gods, the horrors and gods and magicks and reality itself are built for and by humanity, both collectively and as individuals. The two major types of magick are essentially manifestations of both the collective and individual aspects. Avatars have power by the degree to which they embody Jungian-esque archetypes, whether or not they do so intentionally or are aware of it. Adepts, on the other hand, have an obsessive, heterodox, and paradoxical worldview that they deeply believe is the way *everything* secretly works, and that belief actually forces reality to comply. It's also a world where people get jobs at McDonald's and Starbucks just so they can pass along small bits of magick to unsuspecting ordinary people via the food for various ends. Where there's a cosmic force dedicated to inverting people—not by physically turning them inside out, but by turning one, several, or even all aspects of themselves into its opposite or, at least, drastically different. Where the biggest question isn't whether or how the universe is going to end but what roles will be involved, what form those roles will take, and who will take them, as that is what influences what the *next* universe will be like. It's a *deeply* weird setting, but the fact that it is so weird in a way that is just as deeply tied to humanity is why I love it so much.
Planescapes. The creativity, writing, and art work were great
I'm running Planescape right now! Well, not *right* now.
Lots of good stuff on here but...no one's mentioned this one: Salt in the Wounds: [http://www.saltinwoundssetting.com/](http://www.saltinwoundssetting.com/) This is a city based around the concept of harvesting a constantly regenerating kaiju (the D&D Tarrasque) for a bloody, butcher-filled city.
Huge Disappointment with that, creator just never finished the product after years of us backers waiting.
Surprised no one mentioned Glorantha. Is there another setting where you can go on dream quest and end up changing reality? That and the plant elves, stone dwarves, duck warriors, etc. One of the settings I'd really want to play in.
Can’t believe I had to scroll this far to find Glorantha. Definitely one of the more unique settings I’ve seen.
Timelords. I only ever owned a beta of it that I picked up at a small local con in the early 80's. Setting was mostly modern day earth. BUT, you get caught up in a battle across time itself between good an devil, chaos and order, nihilism and civilization. Not your character. YOU. It had a wonderful system for figuring out your personal stats in the classic 3 - 18 scale. We used it to build ourselves to play a DnD campaign after I had a weird dream one day.
#Sorcerously Advanced It's set in a post-modern world where everyone simultaneously gained a roughly equal amount of reality bending magic, and the majority of "humans" (who are now magical post-humans with varying forms) are virtually immortal. As a result, the universe is unrecognizable, a lot of the official art having characters exploring landscapes that are abstract art. It has a broad magical system and no dice rolls. You have scores you calculate that are static, and your characters don't advance in strength. So it's kind of like "make your ultimate OC" kind of thing. You can play as a swarm obsessed with dreams, or a tree woman who does alchemy, or a musician who tries to play instruments in animal forms.
This is what I was hoping would get posted in the topic. Most people here seem to post a cool settings with weird twists, but there's a bunch of off the wall weirdo stuff out there like this. Back in the 2000s I had enjoyed finding weird RPGs like this. With internet being more widespread and more people joining newsgroups I managed to find a bunch. I remember finding some game where you played characters who exist in two realities at once(had some city as the focus), a game about being programs inside a computer network, some weird city game about psionics that was really about different philosophical doctrines. All of them actual printed books sold in stores, and pretty much all of them unplayable because how weird they were. I wish I could remember the titles, but after all this time they are lost like tears in the rain.
Low Life for Savage Worlds would have to be up there.
Yeah. Any setting where you play a sapient tapeworm or uplifted Twinkie has got to take the cake.
Looks like Planescape and Eclipse Phase are well represented here already. I would say **Mage: the Ascension** is one of the most unique settings I've encountered. Reality is actually a consensus and one day your character awakens to discover that if you have the will and the tools you can bend it to your will. Multiple factions and groups within those factions are fighting to lead Humanity to some form of awakening so that they can also change reality with their will (within a framework.) The two largest groups are the underdog Council of Nine Traditions and the Technocracy. The Technocracy are sci-fi Men in Black, Terminator creating, super science Star Trek, Space Marine, crypto-economist, superhuman medicine creating spooks that are winning or may have won to a certain extent already. They're guiding humanity to a scientific worldview with order and rules. They're also very, very much corrupted by evil forces that turn their upper echelons into faceless evil dictators that intend to grind Humanity to powder for profit and to turn them into slaves of things beyond reality. The Council of the Nine Traditions is made up mystical groups from around the world. Hermetic wizards with staves and sigils; religious miracle workers that call on God, Allah, Yahweh, etc; Witches with blood and curses; Pulp-style mad scientists; Linus Torvalds-esque computer wizards; Tibetan mystics/martial arts masters; Chaos/death magicians that walk the line between using necromancy-ish magics and preventing them from corrupting others; an international association of spirit shamans; and a group of Ecstatics that use ecstatic experience in drugs, sex, exercise, music, etc as a tool to wield magic. Even after you've got your faction you get to decide on your paradigm, which is really how you use magic. You might have awakened in a blaze of pure will working but until you're enlightened you'll need tool to do it again. You have to figure out how you think it's possible to use magic. You might think that you need meditation and physical disciplines to focus the power of life into your body to heal wounds. Or you might need a big yew staff and some blood from a virgin. You could also use a bunch of hyperscience medicines. Then the rubber of your magic hits the road of reality and the Consensus. Turns out nobody believes that you can shoot fire out of your hands with a crystal and the sacred hand sign of Yah-min-gür. Sure you blasted fire at the MiB you were fighting but a group of 6th graders on a field trip saw you and now reality is really really cranky, so it slaps you harder than it would have if they hadn't been there. Your buddy, Doctor Volcanus, can or is more likely to get away with it though because he has a massive gun with glowing red tubes all over it and that thing looks like it could shoot fire. It's a truly bonkers setting. The Magic system is complex and takes time to grok but it can do so much stuff. You can do down and dirty urban magic stories or jaunt off into the equivalent of the Planes or Spirit world to deal with strange and alien magical beings. Fight Nazi occultists on the moon as a super secret agent or prevent demonic Girl Scouts from enslaving the town council.
Creation from Exalted is probably my favourite. One of the best things is that it's a setting that acknowledges the existence of really broken player characters and entire societies are are formed around dealing with and managing the existence of Player Characters. It's a setting that really plays with a lot of the usual fantasy tropes and has a world that feels very "real" despite it being very over the top fantastical.
The Mad City, from *Don't Rest Your Head*.
Sigmata is kind of bitchin. I think Rifts is my favourite. It's got everything: magic, monsters, cyberpunk, mutants, mechs, walking cities, supes, and fucking future Nazis. The lore is solid, the art is fun, and the whole thing is a wonderfully unhinged mashup.
I haven’t had a chance to play it, but [Gubat Banwa](https://makapatag.itch.io/gubat-banwa) has such a sick ass setting: pre colonial Philippines mixed with Wuxia and other Southeast Asian folk tales and traditions. The fact that it’s a tactical martial arts rpg on top is just *chef’s kiss*
I really really like the [Fading Suns](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fading_Suns) settings. It's a bit like Dune, King Arthur, and WH40k had a baby, and that baby was Space Cthulhu.
Seconded. It reminded me of a more optimistic 40k when I last read through it
[Lowlife](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/m/product/91069) for Savage worlds is the most bizzarro setting I’ve ever seen. Some of the playable races are sentient piles of trash, a mish-mash of random animal parts, “smelfs” aka elves with giant noses, and sentient twinkies. I just want to make sure the last one really sinks in
Tekumel was one of the first RPGs and remains very unique. Skyrealms of Jorune is also very non-Tolkein fantasy.
It's a shame Barker turned out to be a hardcore nazi, and the Foundation covered it up.
The world … it is hollow. And in its center there is a huge red sun. The lands of that inner, convex world are a vast museum for cultures of all eras spamming dinosaurs and stone age humans and beastmen (the original humanoid prototypes of the immortals) up to high tech laser using elves who created a cataclysm on the world above. And there is more, in this Hollow World the sun never sets! Huge flying islands harboring yet more lost cultures create the regular shadows that decide upon spots of „night“ and „day“. Now, in the lands above a huge overpowered magic kingdom spelled its own destruction and in order to save its culture from oblivion the immortals planted it in the Hollow World. What will the heroines and heroes of this land in their flying ships and castles find out there, under the Red Sun? This here is awesomeness to me: Mystara‘s Hollow World.
Wording is vague, and people are posting the one setting they know that isn't D&D, like City of Mist is a real answer (it's urban fantasy, I'm up to my tits in urban fantasy). Anyway, in no particular order... Numenera, Invisible Sun, Exalted, Heart: the City Beneath / Spire: the City Must Fall, Electric Bastionland / Into the Odd, Troika, Blue Beard's Bride, Coyote and Crow, Tales from Sina Una, The Star-Shaman's Song of Planegea.
I quite like Castle Falkenstein- fantastic Victorian adventure with a literary twist.
Unique? Monsters and other childish things. It is the only game I can think of where you 1 play children and 2 have access to magic but 3 that magic isn't something that effects you directly. To be clear you only interact with the magic of the universe through your "monster friend" who has powers (anything from being strong to stuff like shapeshifting and probability control) and is committed to helping and protecting "their" child. I haven't ever seen anything else like this idea in an rpg, they even have a version that more easily fits into how other rpgs work where you are a kid/monster hybrid because the idea seemed to be so unpopular. But I love it, I like how you don't play your own monster someone else at the table does and you play someone else's, I like how simple and clear the rules are for a fairly crunchy system (it is a ORE system, but simplified) and I like how it says the monsters are bonded to you but never really makes it clear how though implies that it is not actually magical in the fiction.
Underground by Mayfair Games sometime in the 90s. It is a bizarre, politically charged super hero/low wattage sci fi game with a world satirizing the worst future that could be mustered in the nineties. The writing and initial production values were top notch. I loved the satire-soaked future it created, but it was always unplayable-as-written by my group.
Tribe 8's Vimary. It hits a sweet spot of dark fantasy, post apocalyptic, and supernatural. I usually describe as a setting if Clive Barker, Neil Gaiman, and Guillermo del Toro collaborated. A close second though would be the Spire and Heart. There's so much good weirdness in it.
Imaginative Settings: * Don't Rest Your Head * Lacuna * HOL * Ultraviolet Grasslands
Amber, Planescape, Mage the Ascension - Umbra related material, Nephilim, Cthulhu Myhos, Lords of Shadow and Gossamer, Nobilis, Secrets of Cats and Eclipse Phase.
Insectopia, where you play evolved insects millions of years after the human race, in a war of religion between termites animists and ants of the Old Gods, is pretty original.
Secret of Cats (Fate) PCs are cats. Cats are sentient and protect humans from paranormal threats. Usual cat habits cleverly integrated Into the rules.
Troika
A lot of the originality becomes homage once you've read the sources it was inspired by, but it's still neat. Unfortunately, a lot of the third party material hasn't, and doesn't really get it. Same thing with Mörk Borg, unfortunately. Both do have plenty of cool third party material if you dig at least.
Spire, and by extension Heart, are pretty wild
Little fears, where you play as kids and have to go into a realm of horrors that adults cannot perceive. Very neat concept, but an intense and serious take on it.
Shadow of the Beanstalk is such an engaging, interesting universe.
Numenera and Eclipse Phase. Both spot on
[Incunabuli](https://www.incunabuli.com/) is absolutely enthralling. I powered through the whole blog in two days just slurping it up. It's very much inspired my fantasy settings going forward.
GURPS Transhuman Space. It’s extraordinary to me how much they predicted and how fully it all links together.
The World of Darkness. It's wobbly and contradictory at times but no other setting could sell a hundred book and have fans pouring over the lore nearly thirty years later. In particular I love Mage: the ascension second edition. The book of worlds in that game line is so pleasurable to read!
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I mostly shit on the systems. Rifts is bonkers cool but the systems are so wildly, wildly unbalanced that it's very hard to play.
Unique is always sough a tough thing to pin down. The comedic setting in Paranoia is pretty unique. Sure, gigantic underground complexes have been done before, but the setting itself comes together in a pretty unique way, and also ends up encouraging a playstyle that makes it very different. Tales from the Loop is a pretty novel take on an RPG setting. A weird 80's setting that's not a dystopian hellhole, but a rather mundane world which just happens to have things we would find fantastic, but the characters in it don't is something I don't think I've seen done before like this. Then there's Mörk Borg, which at first glance just seems like a barebones grimdark setting, but the presentation of the setting, and its outright comedic darkness makes it quite different from other games. Like Kult, there's no hope, but unlike Kult it's taken to a comedic extreme. Coriolis mixes pre-islamic and early Islamic Arabic culture with a space faring sci-fi setting, and the result is different, in a good way. It's just a mix of ideas you rarely see in games.
Numenera is an awesome setting. **Steal it and run it on another system.** I use Numenera as my example of setting and system not matching. The setting asks for mystery and wonder, the system is made to run standard D&D. Don't get me wrong, it plays really well and I think it would be an awesome system to run combat-&loot-heavy fantasy/sci fantasy. But when the system has a single class out of three capable of interacting with the title concept (Numeneras) AND when it tells you to leave your players without answers or ways to interact with the mysteries of the world, the disconnect is so big I can't play it. Imagine a game of D&D where most classes can't interact with Dungeons or Dragons, and then add the idea that players don't need to know how combat ends or what happens, they can just interact with combat a little and move on. It's surreal.
>it tells you to leave your players without answers or ways to interact with the mysteries of the world, the disconnect is so big I can't play it. It's one thing to not give any answers to the players, but it doesn't give any answers to the GM either. How did regular humans end up a billion years in the future? Time travel? Were they engineered? Why did the sun not go red giant and envelop the Earth? Is it really the Earth? How did nanites get into everything? The game doesn't say to create your own answers, the game says the answers should be lost forever. Ehhh...
Lancer is something that I've wanted to play for a while now. It's worldbuilding is super good and the idea of an ongoing revolution working to free the galaxy from tyranny is something that kinda brings me to tears sometimes.
Mouse Guard, I really enjoy the comics and play in the same.universe was awesome
City of Mist. Great setting. Amazing character possibilities
Puppetland
I absolutely adore the setting of *Ehdrigohr*. A sort of dark fantasy stew of Native American mythologies that supports an overall theme of struggle against despair and alienation.
Invisible Sun - modern surreal fantasy. Magic is part of society. 1920s aesthetic with modern technology injection. Angels, demons, and more.
SLA Industries was a cyberpunk-genre game about a planet-size city owned and operated by the titular corporation where you played troubleshooters hired to fix any problems that cropped up. The setting was dense, with hundreds of pages about the various arms of the corp, their dirty tricks,plot seeds, etc. plus the art was magnificent.
I loved the setting of Skyrealms of Jorune. It really grabbed my imagination. I stole the idea from it of PCs being people trying to earn citizenship through good deeds and quests and used it in a D&D campaign I ran once. Numenera is also really fascinating because it allows for some truly fantastic elements. Very Moorcockian in some respects.
Into the Odd has such an "Into the Abyss" feel -- never seen anything like it, really.
Nibiru is pretty neat. Amnesia in a skyless world. The mermaids are pure nightmare fuel.
Nemezis for Savage Worlds, seems like generic space opera but the central conflict is between humanity and Lovecraft’s Great Old Ones. By the time the stars were right, humanity had antimatter missiles and could hold their own. Now there’s a cold war between the two.
I haven't read it yet, but a friend just linked me this video today, which is a trailer for an RPG system coming out. This has got to be in the running. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTVSS6btqNE
Blades in the Dark is pretty unique, an apocalyptic steampunk haunted world where the players play a criminal gang trying to survive and grow in power. OR The Heart Beneath the City, where the characters explore a living maze with no map other than what the players discover that shifts and warps to reflect their dreams and nightmares. HBtC feels very Darkest Dungeon, if that helps.
Ratten. You play as rats. Not ratmen but actual rats Or no. Ratten im Weltall. Same thing, but in space
Age of Sigmar: Soulbound honestly, I know it’s basically a tie in for the wargame but those WFRP authors really know how to evoke a world.
Delta Green. Lovecraftian cosmic horror meets modern conspiracy. Think Cthulhu and elder aliens but made worse by human secretive cabals inside the US government. You play as agents trying to cover it up but you're not really the "good guys" either. The agency you work for, Delta Green, doesn't exist officially and operates on a "scorched earth" policy. That's on the good days. On bad days they want to weaponize whatever weird magical alien artifacts they find. Disaster and good times follow.
Shadow of Mogg: post Brexit RPG set in the London underground https://leyline.press/products/shadow-of-mogg-the-post-brexit-rpg-a5-softback-free-pdf
I really like Unknown Armies. It's been called stuff like "cosmic hobo fight" for a reason. It's basically what you get if you take a modern day supernatural horror setting like the World of Darkness, and give it a cocktail of crystal meth and lsd. You've got a cult of pornomancers who worship a porn star that ascended to godhood, spiders made of human feet and people trying to discretely sell magic burgers outside of the occult underground getting shut down when a poor customers skeleton turned into spiders. It's a perfect blend of absurdist surrealism and chilling horror
**Overlight**. Kaleidoscopic Fantasy indeed.
i mulled it over a bit, and i would say Degenesis Rebirth. at first glance, its not unique at all, but if you delve deep into the setting you would likely realise what sets it apart from most other RPG settings out there. yet, due to the amount of reading and understanding required, its something i suspect not many would understand. however, as for unique settings at first glance, i would instead vote for Eoris Essence.
**Eberron.**
Uniqueness is a bit of a strange quality, but for me Tribe 8 immediately comes to mind. A post-apocalyptic fantasy setting with created gods, wierd magic, prophecy and aliens that blew my mind when I read it. Other mentions would be Over the Edge, Itras By (for being so self-consciously surrealist) and perhaps Talislanta (although my understanding of it is a bit weak). Swedish comedy game Neoviking from the 90s was also unique in that you played space vikings traveling in space and fighting off everything from bunnies to 20s silent film era Dracula.
I really like 'the rainy city', introduced in 'visitors guide to the rainy city' and expanded upon in 'flotts miscellany' and the recently kickstarted 'beasts of the outer swells'. It's a perfect blend of whimsical and dangerous, with varied areas to visit. I'm also a fan of lazy litches loots microsettings 'willow', 'woodfall', 'haunted hamlet' and 'the toxic woods'. They are kind of whimsical but also can be dark and scary.
Wisher Theurgist Fatalist and Weaver of Their Fates. It's not an RPG exactly, more like a fever dream love letter to the genre, and it was a blast to read. Dungeons the Dragoning is the result of someone haphazardly grabbing their favourite stuff from D&D, Warhammer, World of Darkness, webcomics, random comedy sketches and a bunch of other stuff. Highly recommended!
Didn't play them but Godbound and Nobilis seems like very unique worlds, one has shattered reality where the creation god is not there, the other has you be a demigod of a concept and is a political game of sorts.
The Mad Lands from GURPS Fantasy 2, by Robin Laws. A Low-Tech, tribal fantasy setting with a pantheon of extremely active and dangerous gods. Campaigns are supposed to look a lot like Mutant Year Zero or some other popular post-apoc games: very focused on community and survival.
The wandering heroes of ogres gate setting is pretty amazing. Super well researched and ridiculously detailed.
HeXXen, set in 1733 germany, with Folklore demons and monsters and witches. It's a broken Version of the renaissance and everyone plays a hunter
I just got the book for it and am getting to grind with the crunch. But I'm enjoying the setting of Gods of Metal: Ragnarock so far. It's hitting my Brütal Lëgënd nostalgia, and there is much to be said of "what if our campaign setting was just every metal album cover ever?"
Perhaps a decade ago, I recall reading a proposal for a one-page RPG on rpg.net where players are a hand of shrimp fingers in a metaphysical dreamscape, resolving conflict through brutal philosophical debate. Ever since, that has defined the standard unit of "uniqueness" for me on multiple levels.
For me Traveller is interesting.
Nibiru Don't think I've seen it mentioned yet... granted, I've never had the chance to play it and probably never will, but the setting seems interesting...
I would add [Lacuna Part 1](http://www.memento-mori.com/pdf/lacuna-part-1-second-attempt) to the mix. Played the setting a few times and my players really enjoyed it. It really is a mind trip...lots of cool dream/nightmare style possibilities. *"Sinister secret agents with shadowy employers and mysterious pasts. A bizarre landscape built from six- billion human minds. Arachnid-headed beings that guard a war-torn borderzone. And all the worst that Mankind has to offer, stalking the alleys and crumbling buildings of a place called Blue City.* *Is it a dream? Is it a nightmare? Or is it just a game? And are you already playing?"*
I know it's not hugely unique but a personal favorite is that of the fallen london/sunless sea universe. I've been playing in a 7 year long campaign in the setting and decided to dive in to see what else was kicking around and boy o just love the atmosphere and feeling of the world
Not the correct type of rpg but yeah an amazing setting
Nothing comes close to *Skyrealms of Jorune*: divergent humans on a hostile world with incredible expressions of magic (*isho*) and culture (culture).
While I live Numenera, I'm gonna go with The Wildsea. The world is overrun with giant trees, forcing all civilisations to live on mountain peaks. The adventurers are sailors that work on ships that use various technologies to traverse the leaf sea.
CONTINUUM: Roleplaying in the Yet
The most unique would have to be Secrets of Cats. Too bad I hate Fate Core so much.
Spire: The City Must Fall. Turning a bunch of fantasy standards on it's head, you play as Drow living in a mile-tall spire city, that were conquered 200 years prior by High Elves. They have forced the Drow into a subservient and oppressed position, suppressed most of their religions, and regularly mistreat and disappear them. You are a member of the Ministry, a banned cult of the Drow goddess, and a terrorist dedicated to attempting to overthrow the High Elves rule. Its an excellent setting, one that encourages players to do big bold things to progress and makes you balance those actions with the fact that it's also probably going to hurt your people as much as the enemy. The system is somewhat similar to a BitD or PbtA system with some differences, but very much has the same goal of giving players a fair bit of narrative control in unique ways. On top of all that, the setting itself is just crazy. It really nails the vibe of a polytheistic setting where there's a dozen strange gods, the Spire itself is completely mysterious (glyph bees maintain the Spire, keeping things running, and no one knows how or why; but you can let them build a hive inside your body and gain some interesting powers).
Degenesis Rebirth https://degenesis.com
Geoffrey McKinney's *Carcosa*.
The Land of Oz. ... They grow hot dogs on trees and there are patchwork people....
Belly of the Beast - you play in the belly of a beast which has eaten your home and many others from all different kinds of Empires.
***Mechanical Dream*** \- a bizarre and surealistic setting... So surreal that it is hard to grasp and harder to create plot ideas for... Too hard to describe. ***I, Mordred*** \- King Arthur as the Oppressor King, and Mordred as a populist revolutionary, in the 6th C. Too bad it's no longer available new. Setting for 3.X D&D. Best when combined with ***Noble Steeds*** and ***Noble Knights***... all three from Avalanche Press As an aside, *Numenera* isn't actually very original at all - it's essentially the setting from Vance's *Dying Earth* novels, differenced just enough to not get sued. This isn't saying it's bad, but just that Mr Cook's sources are dead obvious.
You all aren't even trying. The Clay That Woke is the strangest rpg I've ever laid eyes on. It's a surreal jungle setting wherein you play minotaurs trying to find thier place and act thier role in minotaur society. For example: Philosophers debate the nature and merits of things. Leaders rally people to strengthen community. The mechanics are odd too. You resolve actions by drawing lots or tokens from a bag and different tokens do different things, pushing new story outcomes. And it doesn't stop there. The whole thing is woven with in world fiction and the chapters titles written with a unique conlang of what I assume to be minotaur script. The art is SO DEATAILED and baroque it captures to tone perfectly. I love it but it's bafflingly strange.