Taking 20 Podcast - Ep 271 - Setting and Tone

Episode Date: March 8, 2026

In this episode we continue the “setting expectations” series, hopefully helping to stop mismatched expectations from derailing your TTRPG campaign! GMs, this episode is packed with practical advice for designing and effectively communicating your game's Tone and Setting.    #rpg #ttrpg #dnd #pathfinder #gmtips #playertips #tabletop #tone #setting #expectations Resources: Buy Me a Coffee! - ko-fi.com/taking20podcast www.taking20podcast.com  Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/taking20podcast  Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/taking20podcast  Bluesky - https://bsky.app/profile/taking20podcast.bsky.social

This week on the Taking 20 podcast. Setting and tone are independent. That same setting in a high fantasy game could still be a remote mansion, but instead of like a creepy, steadily growing dread, you give the PCs a sense of heroism as they exercise haunt after haunt. Thank you for listening to the Taking 20 podcast, episode 271, giving DM some advice on setting and aligning campaign tone and setting. I want to thank this week's sponsor, Limbo.

Someone stole my limbo bar. I mean, how low can you go? First off, I want to give a huge thank you to Grumpy Geek, who very generously donated $50 to the podcast. Thank you so much for helping to cover a sizable chunk of our 2026 expenses and just in time for me to have to pay Podbean for hosting this year. You've made multiple donations to the podcast, and I cannot thank you enough.

Please, by the way, keep writing me and let me know how your games are going. I love interacting with listeners like you and love to find out how your gaming life is going. Speaking of which, do you have any topics you'd like to hear me discuss or questions you'd like to answer or maybe issues I can help you with? If so, please send me ideas or contacts on the socials. Links are in the description or email me, feedback at taking20 podcast.com or you could message me on my coffee, K-O-F-I-com slash taking 20 podcast. I did get a couple of requests this week asking about tabletop RPG news, so here's a couple of things that happened recently in the TTRP world.

First off, some interesting news, D&D Beyond has changed its naming convention, and now it's calling the 2024 version of the D&D rule set 5.5E. It's undergone name changes throughout the years. It was one D&D and then the 2024 rule set and then the new rule set. and a lot of us just called it 5.5E because, well, we're lazy, to be perfectly honest. And we remember when the 3.5E rule set came out for D&D third edition. Granted, this name change is only on one website, but that site is run by Wizards of the Coast. It's unclear if this is going to be the naming convention going forward, but I kind of hope that it is.

I've been playing D&D in some form or fashion since about 1988, 82, 83, somewhere in there, and I've seen rules such come and go. Wizards of the Coast, honestly, they dropped the ball when it came to marketing this new rule set. Thanks to Stranger Things and Critical Role and other groups, they had more D&D brand recognition than ever before. They tried to revoke the open gaming license, tried to make their own virtual tabletop,

which has since been scrapped, and honestly tried to cater way too much to us old fogies that played the game. They tried to remake Spell Jammer for crying out loud, and they tried to move the rules into, 5E, and let's face it, the original rules weren't that good to begin with. Don't get me wrong, D&D is and probably will be, the 800-pound gorilla in the tabletop RPG room for the foreseeable future, but it feels like they could have done more, been more, made wiser choices these past few years. There were and are very smart people working there, and I hope they can write the ship,

but in the meantime, at least we know what to call the new version. But in positive news, Wizards did release their roadmap for upcoming books, one for a Ravenloft campaign setting and Arcana unleashed with new spells and spellcasting options coming out in the first half of this year. Later on in the year, there's supposed to be a book called Steel and Skill, the Complete Fighters Field Guide, and it sounds like it's going to be a lot like the old Fighters Handbook was for older editions. That book had a lot of new subclasses and equipment for fighters, and that actually sounds like a really interesting release because I love anything that gives Marshall characters more options.

Now, to get to the episode proper, this week is the second part of a rather impromptu series I'm calling Setting Expectations. My goal with this episode is to give my beloved GMs out there some practical advice for designing and effectively communicating setting and tone to your players. This is critical because making sure that the players in GM have similar expectations for the campaign sets the stage for a much better shared experience around the table. But I got all excited and I'm thrown around terms like tone and setting without really defining them and telling you what the hell I'm talking about.

What am I talking about? Piece of shit out of me. I'm just a big goofy moron. But seriously, I do need to define what these are. Otherwise, why the hell have an episode about it? I mean, I'm supposed to impart at least a little RPG knowledge. Right? Right, Jeremy?

Yeah, right. So stop talking to yourself, dumbass, and talk to the nice listeners. So in RPGs, let's call the tone the... the vibe of the game, the emotions the game will impart. It's how the game makes you and the players feel while in the game at the table, whether physical table or virtual. Is the game tense, or is it focused on the fun? Is it action-heavy? Is it role-play focused? Is it grim dark or is it kind of light-hearted comedy? Does it feel like a pulp hero fantasy or is it gritty and realistic and down in the dirt? Game systems have a

tone that they tend to excel at. For example, most D&D games tend to be high fantasy and action-oriented because the game system is largely built around a high-fantasy, heroic, action-focused game. It doesn't mean that you can't run a gritty resource management grim-dark campaign with D&D, but it might require a little more work by the GM to build game subsystems that maybe aren't pre-built for you and maybe even don't exist yet. Compare that to, say, Call of Cthulhu or C-O-Cathol. for short to know I'm not going to shorten COC to cock, even though I just did. Every version of cock I've ever played, no, I can't do that. Every version of Call of Cthulhu that I've ever played, it's three of them now, by the way.

They are all eerie and grim, dark affairs where loss is inevitable. It's just a question of when and how bad it's going to be. It's built on the concept of a death spiral where your character is going to get caught in these bad, maybe even world. ending events. Generally, your character is going to go insane or die, but can you complete your mission and close the door to the Great Beyond before you do? That's the heroic part of those stories. Even if you win, quote unquote, and your party are all heroes,

it'll probably be a Pyrrhic victory at best. It might even cost you your life or even worse, your mind. A good movie comparison for Call of Cthulhu, I think, is The Mist, which if you've ever seen the movie or read the short story, there's an overarching threat that is so big, so incomprehensible, that it's hard to see how a happy ending could ever be had. I haven't talked enough about Call of Cthulhu, by the way, and I need to have an episode or two to sing the praises of that game system.

Gosh, I'll probably come out later this year, so be on the lookout for that. Meanwhile, something like Shadow Run has a cyberpunky film noir feel. I love the phrase high-tech low-life to describe these games. Most people lead, honestly, of really rough existence in the shadow-run game system. Net running or crime are methods by which your characters can improve their lives. Corporations control large aspects of everybody's life, and they're run by elves or even dragons that can take two-legged forms. Instead of gold pieces, by the way, the dragons are hoarding credits or information or companies

to display their power. Shadow Run has this tone of inevitability that makes you feel like the entire system is stacked against you. That's why you're on this heist or this assassination or property recovery. There's a little bit of high fantasy in there and that there's these magical creatures

like trolls and orcs and dwarves and they're all crammed in a futuristic city all trying to survive. There's economic disparity with some living in million yen apartments while others crammed into dilapidated favelas barely eking out a meager existence. However, there are opportunities to score some yen, get a powerful patron, or become a regular mercenary for one of these corporations,

or maybe just find a dark corner of the net to start amassing a powerful tech empire of your own. The cyberpunk tone, by the way, is very similar in that it's futuristic, corporation-controlled, but it's darker than Shadow Run is. It loses the entire high fantasy feeling and really embraces the horror of a world dominated by corporations. People with these powerful augmentations that make them superhuman, moving faster than bullets, jumping from street to the roof of an apartment building, or they can shoot a gnats eyelash off from a block away. While in Shadow Run, it feels like there's a slim chance for a happy ending,

cyberpunk is different in that there's a saying, there are no happy endings in Night City. Those augmentations that make you stronger, faster, more capable, gradually rob you of your humanity. And the more you get chromed up, as they call it, the less you can empathize with other people. And you start displaying signs of, I think, what could be classified as a disassociative disorder,

seeing biological life as weaker and inferior and unworthy of any value whatsoever. It's a perpetual trade-off that you're weighing, You're better, but you're losing your humanity. No matter how much you chrome up, no matter how many credits you earn, the tone is different in that any hope that you may have in the cyberpunk world is fleeting. Cyberpunk, like Call of Cthulhu, is brutal, but in cyberpunk, there's an option to burn bright before you, as the video game soundtrack says so well, fade away.

I know this isn't a video game podcast, but the game's Cyberpunk 2077, May have had a rough start when it was released, but it is outstanding now, especially with the Phantom Liberty DLC. No, they're not paying me to promote their product. I just completed the game a lot too long ago, and it really did a good job of capturing the tone of a cyberpunk game. The feeling of being an ant in the server room of history.

Sure, you can cause a little destruction, but it's nearly impossible to change anything big and lasting. All of this to say is that if your group agrees, they want to play Shadow Run or Cyberpunk, they're probably not going to see World through a high fantasy lens. It's dark, less hopeful than D&D is designed to be, at least by default. But, again, just because a game system's designed for a certain type of tone, does it mean you can't change it?

A fun D&D campaign would be one where the PCs are taking on a lumber consortium who controls a remote logging village with an iron fist, paying the workers not in silver pieces but in lumber bucks. that they can only spend at the company store with ludicrously high prices. You don't want to shop there, but there's nowhere else around. As a GM, you could in the campaign describe the absolute control the consortium has over the lives of the commoners, the feeling of hopelessness and tales of the people who tried to change the operation of the city and the lives of the people in it, only to be crushed under the oppressive boot of

the company. It would give a D&D campaign a tone more akin to Shadow Run. Conversely, by the way, you could tell a fun shadow run story about a group sent to save a small community against some outside net runners who are destroying the minds of anyone plugged into the net. That would give a shadow run campaign more of a high fantasy D&D-esque feel. These tones will help set how your players feel in the game. Is there hope of real meaningful change to make the lives of people better? Or are there only victories to be had that you can enjoy for a few weeks? maybe months, years, if you're very lucky until the inevitable shitty norm returns. Or is it like Call of Cthulhu or evil will likely eventually win,

victories will be ephemeral at best and crushed by the overwhelming tide of a force from beyond the stars? Aligning the tonal expectations is critical to your game. I'm running two right now, by the way. One group loves to be the big damn heroes, so it's a Pathfinder game being run as a heroic fantasy. They want to feel like heroes for the nearby town of Otari. They are helpful solving town problems while doing their best to take on whatever the hell is causing all the problems from the lighthouse about an hour away. They're discovering clues and making friends all over town with lots of opportunities to improve

the lives of damn near everyone. Again, they want to feel like big damn heroes, so that's how I'm running the game. God, I miss Firefly. Meanwhile, the other group I'm finishing up a short campaign for are realizing that they are just cogs and much bigger machine. They may score a victory over the crime lord, but to make any real improvements for the NPCs they care about, they have to take on a system that is dead set against change. It's less hopeful, more focused on doing the best that you can for the people that you can and taking pride and satisfaction in that. The tone is darker, but the party is handing out little

small torches of hope, not lighting giant bonfires like the other party can. Okay, all that being said, let's talk practical examples of tone. Here are some tones that you can use in your game to set the overall feel of the campaign. First off, I've talked a lot about it, high fantasy. It's the feel of your traditional Pathfinder, D&D, Starfinder type game. The world is just brimming full of magic items and creatures, and even if people who wielded are rare, everyone knows that magic exists. Players are generally expected to be heroic, and moral arcs tend to be pretty clear and well-defined.

Good is good, bad is bad, and believe me, these two do not like each other. Another tone is action-packed, where it's a fast pace to a game. Ain't nobody got time for extended diplomacy sessions with the drow envoy. It's time to show things the pointy end of the spear. Roll for initiative is your love language of action-packed campaigns with sorts of successes measured in cool cinematic actions in combat or narrow escape from harrowing threats and dangers. A variant of these two, by the way, would be like a pulp adventure. God, these are so fun. They are lighthearted like Indiana Jones or the great movie The Mummy, by the way,

the one with Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weiss, not that garbage that came along later. The focus is the journey and the adventure and the action that happens along that journey, and it's designed to be a thrill ride. Some DMs myself, like a tone that's more akin to a comedy campaign. We sprinkle in jokes and puns and anachronistic references like a bunch of gnomes creating a construction company called Nome Depot or corset shop called Victorians Secret, that type of thing. Comedy campaigns tend to be lighthearted and focus on everybody laughing around the table,

possibly at the expense of realism or gritty. dark tone. On the opposite side is a psychological or existential horror type tone where the enemy isn't an ogre with a glave. The enemy could be your own mind or unseen horrors that exist beyond the world. The characters have received a peek at the true world behind ours and see the spirits that dance and weave among our lives and it is horrific, scarring, and dreadful, and maybe the heroic acts of the party are to keep others from knowing these exist or preventing these things from

contaminating others. Contrast that with a tone of a gothic horror where evil is external to the PCs. Think ancient vampires with crumbling mansions or tragic monsters that are warped versions of something that used to be good, the paladin who now is this ooze-like monster because of the corruption that took him over. Similarly, a grim dark, tone is when everything feels bleak and unforgiving. The line between good and evil was often blurry and maybe even a matter of perspective. Often the PCs have to become monsters to defeat the monsters that they face. No one in grim dark campaigns survives long as a pure paladin of good whose light shines in the darkness because that light is going to get swallowed or maybe even

worse, turned on itself. In grim-dark campaigns, victory may come, but it will have a price associated with it. The darkest of campaigns, the ones that can be described as designed to evoke a feeling of sadness or hopelessness. Resistance is futile. The big bad already rules the day and oppresses any good that may rear its head. Many times these campaigns are full of tragedy and loss, and there is no way to save the world. But maybe, just maybe, there's a way to light a single candle in the infinite darkness of the world for others to carry on and spread it. These aren't the only types of tones that exist, by the way.

My son actually mentioned that there's a lot of anime that's both surreal and bittersweet, charming, and many times the problem isn't solved through violence, but through understanding, forgiveness, and compassion. One piece of advice for my beloved GMs out there is that if there's a certain tone you want to set with your game, even if the game doesn't have it built in, you may need to adjust the mechanics of the game to reinforce that tone. Don't go crazy. Years ago, I built a complete naval combat system for D&D that didn't really have a good one at the time.

It had different jobs on the ship and the roles that the PCs could make and their impact on the combat. it made everyone feel important, but trying it for a few sessions, it was way over complicated and it wasn't fun around the table. The thing to think about, you should look at the mechanics of the game and adjust the way you want them to be.

A very complicated naval combat, no matter how fun it was to design, didn't preserve that light-hearted tone that I was looking for. As another example, I don't know about you, but the vast majority of the games I run don't make the PCs track food or water or maybe even common ammunition. The assumption is that the PCs aren't idiots,

and every time they're in town, they top off their water skin or quiver or stock up on hard tack. I don't find the tracking of that stuff exciting in most games, so I don't do it. And that helps reinforce that lighthearted, fun tone. So the tone is the feeling of the game. Meanwhile, the setting is more of the what and where of it. The setting of the game is where it takes place. How civilized is it? How readily is help available?

What civilizations exist around the game and who's allied with whom? The setting of the game is independent of the tone but can help reinforce it. Now, to explain that, imagine you're running a horror one-shot campaign. Think about where you'd want to put the adventurer and if you want it to be scary and what's going on around it. Let's see, it's a horror one shot, and let's put it in an abandoned mansion. It has big arching ceilings and old creaky doors. The floors are uneven and water stained, or hopefully that's water. What is that dark stain over there?

Maybe it's old blood, or, God, maybe even worse. The location of the one shot can reinforce and support the tone that you want to convey to the PCs. It's an isolated mansion on the edge of town that everyone believes to be haunted. The grass around it is either dead or maybe grown to ridiculous heights. But setting and tone are independent. That same setting in a high fantasy game could still be a remote mansion, but instead of like a creepy, steadily growing dread, you give the PCs a sense of heroism as they exercise haunt after haunt,

fighting ghosts and maybe a long animated grandfather clock before solving the creepy puzzle in the basement, finding the unburied heart of the former owner and laying it to rest, cleansing the house of evil. So you can see the same setting can be used with a completely different tone to make a different feel around the table. Meanwhile, that horror tone, the haunted feeling where you're being watched, could also be set on a ship, a derelict spaceship,

in a crowded inn at the crossroads or anywhere else. That same tone that you're looking to strike, a grim dark, action-packed, high fantasy, magic heavy, whatever, can be set in nearly any setting that you can name. The setting describes the environment and helps set expectations about what their characters are going through. Is it set in the devil-worshipping slaving nation of Chelliacs, the lost minds of Fandover, the perilous city of Waterdeep, the industrial areas of Duskville? The location where you set the game can dramatically affect the challenge level and resources available to the PCs. A murder mystery set inside of a large city will be different than one set on a lifeboat.

The setting is really almost a silent partner. The area, the world, the physics of it, what's considered normal versus unusual, the moral compass of the local residents are all potential aspects of the game, and contribute to the fun of the story, at least hopefully they do. But here's where you should consider the tone when describing what the PCs are seeing. Use the setting to evoke the tone. If the tone is paranoia,

don't just tell them the city's dangerous. Describe the way the NPCs stop talking when the players enter a tavern. The strange looks they're getting like the people know they're outsiders and look at you warily. Similarly, if you're setting the tone of a peaceful village, then there are kids playing,

welcoming smiles from the locals and a general joyful and contented mood until the Etton shows up and eats the orphanage or whatever the hell the big twist is. That being said, the setting should not be a straight jacket for your game. You are the DM and can establish a setting to be whatever you want. Obviously, yes, you can craft your own setting from scratch, create the world, the regions, the physics, the gods, the religion, the currency, all of it.

You can pick the area where the adventure will start, the average immoral compass of the people that live there, governmental structures, and everything else. And in so doing, you have complete control over the what and where of the campaign. Alternatively, there are a ton of pre-built settings available to you. Wizards of the Coast publishes a lot of detail about the Sword Coast. Pathfinder is the world of Galerian and the Pact Worlds in Starfinder.

Blades in the dark has Duskvole. Call of Cthulhu has Lovecraft country and a lot of other details have been written by a lot of people smarter than I am. You can read the established campaign book, but you could be disappointed by it. I have a great idea for an adventure, and I'd like this area to be populated by drow instead of lizard folk, or I wish this city was founded by and four halflings, but that's not on page 137 of blah blah blah blah world guide. Here's the great secret, my friend. Those guides are not religious texts.

They're guides, and you can change the setting how are the hell you want to. I promise you, the RPG police are not going to kick in your door for modifying the default campaign setting. You want there to be centaurs there instead of elves? All right, do it. You don't think that spell should be as rare as it's described? Throw it in. You want the end of the last home to also be able to buy and sell mundane gear, then buy Paladin, make it happen. Setting books like Monster Stat blocks and most rules, published names, histories, all of it, can be

modified, disregarded, patched, and used or not at your pleasure. Your game is your game. You can make your version of Feroon or Galerian whatever you want it to be. I think a lot of DMs do themselves a disservice by letting the published setting serve as a straight jacket. It controls the type of game they want to run. They feel like they need to read, memorize, or worse, augment 250 pages of lore, in case somebody asks about it. Oh, gosh, what if I use the wrong name for the tavern and Sandpoint?

And one of the players starts reading a published novel and finds my mistake. So, all you have to say is your world's different than the one they just read in the book. But they're both towns named Sandpoint. Yeah, uh-huh. And in the U.S. alone, there are over 30 towns named Franklin. Your book's Sandpoint and my campaign Sandpoint are different. Probably the discussion ends there. And if not, by the way, then that's a separate issue.

of having a problem player who won't buy-in to the game. More about buy-in, by the way, in a future episode. Hope you come back for that. Also, to expand the setting shouldn't be a straightjacket thought, if you're writing your own setting and not using one that's published, don't think for a second that you need to come up with a 50-page description of the town, its inner workings, its government, etc. Make up what you need to, write when you need it, and then write it down.

Now, that being said, let's get to some boiled down tips. First, toned and setting of your games should help drive the mechanics you use in the game. I mentioned earlier that the tone of your campaign may necessitate that resource tracking is important. How much food and water and ammunition or air or something similar to the party have? If that's true, then make sure the setting reinforces the need for that game mechanic. If I were running a post-apocalyptic game or a campaign way out in the wilderness where resources are scarce, then I would make my players keep track of the resources that they buy. But if campaigns in the desert, for example, yeah, you better tell me how much water you're buying from the passing caravan.

If your starship is going into the black, far away from other space stations or settled planets, then yeah, we're tracking fuel. But if I'm running a heroic game where resources are generally assumed to be available, I'm not wasting time tracking that at all. Party headed into a forest, unless it's a bog or a fin where most water is corrupted and undrinkable, I assume you're going to be able to find water somewhere. Yeah, hand wave, that kind of thing. If the tone of the game is supposed to be fun, then most adventuring groups don't enjoy tracking resources down that level. Tracking those resources may add to realism, and if you're running a realistic campaign,

maybe it does make sense. It does slow down the pace, by the way. So every time the party camps, they have a real survival to find water or hunt food. I have a lot more to say on this. I may do a resources tracking episode in the future because there's a lot of ways to handle this and both from a detailed to a completely abstract level. As another example, some games like Call of Cthulhu or Paranoia or Dread,

it makes sense to track a concept known as sanity because it's a resource that's going to be consumed throughout the game. But in D&D, Pathfinder, probably not worth it. The next tip I would say is that your players in DM should all agree to buy into the tone and setting of the game. Nothing's worse than being in a grim, dark, survival-heavy resource tracking game when your character is a druid named Mo D. Lawn or Tim Burr, and you had hoped to be cracking jokes the whole time.

Last tip for this episode. Most campaigns are fairly consistent with their tone, maybe with brief forays into a different one and feel around the table. However, be careful doing that. Abrupt tonal shifts require a delicate touch to avoid player whiplash. or losing their buy-in. If a campaign suddenly pivots from light-hearted, pun-filled antics to a grueling resource-heavy survival horror without warning,

players may feel like the social contract of the table has been breached. This is not what I signed up for. This is not what I agreed to. This is not what I find fun. So if the tone must shift for an extended period of time, foreshadow it, and once it's hinted at, discuss it with your players before the session where you roll it out. This will help keep the tone shift from derailing the players fun.

To summarize, my beloved GMs out there, you need to clearly define and communicate your campaign's tone, which is the emotional vibe, and setting the what and where of the world. Aligning these expectations between the GM and players is vital to a shared positive experience. Use mechanics to reinforce the tone like resource tracking when it makes sense, adjust the setting as you need to, and be cautious with your tonal shifts, which should be foreshadowed and discussed ahead of time. If you do all of that, I'd be willing to bet that you and your players would have fun doing it. Thank you so much for listening to this supersized episode. Good Lord. I'd like to get your feedback either via social media or email,

feedback at taking20podcast.com. Please send me a message and let me know your thoughts on the episode. Tune in next time when thanks to an email question I received, I'm going to continue the Settings Expectations in Promptu series, giving you more tips about session zeros. But before I go, I want to thank this week's sponsor, Limbo. A limbo player walked into my bar, and that means he just lost. This has been episode 271, talking about campaign setting and tone.

My name is Jeremy Shelley, and I hope that your next game is your best game.