The new official D&D Campaign Setting book has been announced – and it is part of the Critical Role campaign world! The Explorer’s Guide to Wildemount is its name, and I know almost nothing about it, except that a lot of people that I have a lot of respect for worked on it. So, it’s likely to be very good.

That said, I probably won’t use it. Buy it? Sure! But run campaigns set there? That seems unlikely, as I’ve been running games set in the World of Greyhawk for the past twenty years, and I don’t expect to change that.

That said, elements of the book may creep into my game. We’ll see. You see – and here’s a little secret – our campaign settings are full of stuff we’ve pilfered from other settings.

Even my beloved World of Greyhawk in its published version isn’t immune to this. If you examine the map, you’ll find a place called Blackmoor… but a place called Blackmoor also exists in the Known World (Mystara)… and it predates both of those because that was Dave Arneson’s personal campaign setting. It had nothing to do with Greyhawk, but it got placed on the map just the same. Maure Castle was originally from Robert J. Kuntz’s Kalibruhn setting. Places not originally of Greyhawk found a place on the Greyhawk map.

I’ve run adventures that were explicitly placed in Greyhawk. The Temple of Elemental Evil. Against the Giants. Aerie of the Slave Lords. But then I’ve also adapted material written for other settings. Sons of Gruumsh, which was set in the Forgotten Realms. Sly Flourish’s Fantastic Adventures. The cosmology of my world has changed as I’ve seen stuff I’ve really liked from other sources. The Demiplane of Shadow is now full of Shadow Elves from Courts of the Shadow Fey – that was for Kobold Press’s Midgard Campaign Setting.

It doesn’t just have to be adventures, either. You can steal monsters, locations, spells, characters – anything you like. And then rename or reshape it for your game.

That’s my World of Greyhawk campaign, a Frankenstein’s Monster of lovingly assembled parts from material that inspired me. It’s fun when some of my borrowings turned up later in official material. So, I placed the Isle of Dread from the Known World in Greyhawk; a couple of years later, I discovered that Dragon Magazine did the same thing!

It’s not a kitchen sink setting, however. There are loads of things I don’t allow in the campaign. Instead, it’s a carefully curated list of whatever I felt worked best to enhance my version of Greyhawk.

Although my primary way of engaging with other settings is to steal bits for my main campaign, another way is to play short campaigns in those worlds. So, you run a short series of adventures set in Eberron, then move to Ravnica, then explore Midgard, and then the Lost Lands. Instead of settling down to exploring the intricacies of one setting, you go for a range of different experiences and discover exactly how different games of Dungeons & Dragons can be.

Of course, this is easier when the setting already has a short campaign adventure. Eberron originally came out with three adventures back in 3E – four once you included the one in the core rulebook – and that was a nice campaign to give you the feel of the setting. We had a good time with that. I think that the new series being released for Eberron may be a bit too long, but there’s the Embers of the Last War campaign which goes for only twelve sessions. (Only!)

How long’s too long? No idea! Depends on what you’re looking for. Sometimes a single session is enough. Sometimes, it’s too much! Ask your group what they want!

However, just because a new campaign setting gets released doesn’t mean you have to engage with it. There’s quite enough in D&D at the moment to keep me occupied for the rest of my life. Due to when I started the game, the main worlds I know about are Greyhawk, the Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance – and that last far less than someone like Cam Banks, who is the person I’d turn to if I had any Dragonlance-related question. I know Eberron sort of well, but when it comes to places like Mystara, Birthright or Darksun, I have only vague ideas what happens there.

Heck, I’ve had copies of the Midgard and the Tal’Dorei books sitting on my shelves for over a year and I haven’t managed to read them yet! I’m likely to discover a lot of interesting things to incorporate into my games when I eventually get around to doing so, but it’s not like my time isn’t pressed enough already. (I’m currently on an exploration of our world’s history, which I guess is examining the greatest campaign setting of all! It’s certainly giving me lots of ideas for my games!)

It’s worth noting that campaign settings get varying levels of support. Some get a single book and that’s it. Others get reams of information. For the latter, see the Forgotten Realms. Exactly how much attention you pay to this is up to you. There a significant amount of Greyhawk material I don’t use, instead substituting my own ideas. The advantage of lots of material is that you’ve always got a source for new ideas made for the setting. The disadvantage is when players say, “that’s not in the books!”, but such can be made into an advantage – they can help you with facts about the setting when you need them, without wasting precious time looking them up. Or you can get your players to accept that perhaps, just perhaps, not all they read was accurate!

Whether you play exclusively in one setting, hop around several, or just ignore any published settings and create your own material, there is no “correct” approach. If you and your friends are having fun, you’re doing it right. I’ve never felt much of an urge to create my own setting from scratch – unlike my brother, who spent quite a lot of time doing so when we were kids – but I don’t know how much you’d recognise my version of the World of Greyhawk!

We’ve got a new setting coming. It’s an opportunity – not only to expand on our own experiences, but also to introduce new players to the game. If someone starts off D&D because they want to explore Wildemount and then joins my game and realises that my World of Greyhawk game is incredibly fun – then we’re much the richer.