RPGaDay2024 Day 12 - An RPG With Well Supported Campaigns

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As you can probably guess, I'm a fan of many different game systems, and am especially a fan of systems that aren't d20 connected.

However, in the question of what RPGs have the best supported campaigns, I have to go with D&D, both because of the official settings, the official campaigns, and the 3rd party settings and campaigns.

Curse of Strahd / Ravenloft

This is the crown jewel of the 5e universe. Ravenloft has been around since at least the days when I was running games for RPGA at GenCon Milwaukee, which would have been 2e D&D. While I've seen some complaints about the 5e version, it's often from people who ran it, and it feels like everybody has run or played it. (In fact, that's a game that I was playing in immediately before writing this, and the GMs have their own take on the game.)

Something about the setting, characters, situations, and the whole paradigm of the place catches people's imaginations. Whether they arrive for a short time, or start as low level and work their way through an epic conclusion--people feel connected to the dark uncanny valley of the place.

And the setting is a hardcover book with numerous hooks to take the game as long as you wish.

Eberron

More a setting than a campaign, this is the ultimate fan-fic. Originally conceived as part of a contest, this setting and associated stories have long been a favorite among D&D players. The mechanical characters, action points, and unique setting elements capture people's imaginations as well, and lead to a setting that can be filled with content from the first adventure to the last.

Wild Beyond the Witchlight

I love this one because it's so different--a feywild story where the rules and characters are all just a bit stranger and more interesting, and that take you from levels 1-8. We played just a bit of this as part of another game, and I loved the interplay between our normal games, and what this system brought to the table.

Forgotten Realms

Once upon a time, this guy named Ed Greenwood played a game of D&D, then was convinced to make his homebrew game into an official D&D setting product. Definitely a setting, rather than a campaign book, it's been with D&D pretty much from the beginning, and is the background setting of almost all other D&D products, including the video games. There are several settings, but this one has truly stood the test of time

3rd Party

There are almost too many to name, but  Dungeons of Drakkenheim was Kickstarted to great success as a levels 1-13 campaign setting. Call from the Deep, Humblewood, Shadowed Keep on the Borderland, Rise of the Drow, Ruins of Grendleroot, Critical Role's Call of the Netherdeep and many, many others both well known or only show up on the indie sites.

Each of these take the open ruleset of 5e (a whole other blog post that I won't write) and create settings, expanded rulesets and level-ranged adventures that let a GM tell great stories with their players, in almost any D&D-style genre you can imagine, without having to put in as much effort as homebrewing from scratch.

Other games systems have great campaign support, with Pathfinder, Dungeon Crawl Classics, and to a lesser extent Numenera being near the top of that list, but for the sheer amount of different choices and variety of official and 3rd party settings, I have to award this one to 5e D&D.

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