I've always liked the Wizards Presents: Worlds and Monsters quote in the ramp-up to 4e that detailed setting assumptions and conceits. Now, I don't like 4e, never did, and never really played it. But... I've read a number of their fluffier sourcebooks and found them adequate, and often even quite clever. Often more so than what preceded them. I've done this before, years ago, and probably my answers will be very similar to what I did back in 2018 or whenever it was that I did it last, but I think it's nice to review and "fisk" the list every so often and compare it to my own conceits and assumptions.
The World Is More Fantastic: D&D cultures should blend real-world cultures and fantastic elements, not merely elements of medieval and Renaissance Europe. It's okay for D&D environments to have no realistic analog.
While I don't disagree with any of the words said here, in reality I'm not sure how this is something that can be done effectively. Most D&D settings give vague nods to real world cultures in most respects, because it's easier to ground the audience in the familiar, and purity spiraling into an anthropological treatise about a fake culture isn't usually very fun (I'm looking at you M.A.R. Barker; yes, Tekumel was too weird to be anything other than gratuitous.) Also, in reality, in D&D at least, "different than real world cultures" tends to mean reflecting some kind of hippy woke dystopia presented as if it were utopian with a superficial fantasy twist.
My mantra would be; sure—add some fantasy to your cultures, but unless you have a real compelling reason—and if you think you do, take a step back and second and even third guess it before determining that it really is a compelling reason—familiar should trump non-familiar.
The World Is Ancient: Empires rise and empires crumble, leaving few places that have not been touched by their grandeur. Ruin, time, and natural forces eventually claim all, leaving the D&D world rich with places of adventure and mystery. Ancient civilizations and their knowledge survive in legends, magic items, and the ruins they left behind, but chaos and darkness inevitably follow an empire's collapse. Each new realm must carve its own place out of the world rather than build on the efforts of past civilizations.
This is more an excuse to have dungeons than anything else, I suspect. It's also got a very Old World feel to it, which isn't exactly the Old Night way (it's as much inspired by the American Frontier and the Old West as by Medievalist fantasy.) That said, things like Indian graveyards and other superstitious stuff leftover from past peoples are definitely part of that tradition, and require ancient peoples who are gone.
Also, I like the Lovecraftian and Howardian idea of ancient cultures and secret histories that are monstrous or otherwise horror-tinged. I mean, that's the original sword & sorcery model, even though D&D never really embraced it too cleanly—ironically, my dissatisfaction with how well D&D embraces this trope from its own source material is part of my disconnect with how to play D&D which led to Old Night in the first place.
The World Is Mysterious: Wild, uncontrolled regions abound and cover most of the world. City-states of various races dot the darkness, bastions in the wilderness and amid the ruins of the past. Some of these settlements are "points of light" where adventurers can expect peaceful relations, but many more are dangerous. No one race lords over the world, and vast kingdoms are rare. People know the area they live in well, and they've heard stories of other places from merchants and travelers, but few really understand what's beyond the mountains or in the depth of the great forest unless they've been there personally.
And then, of course, I add the supernatural and monstrous horror elements.
Monsters Exist All Over: Most monsters of the world are as natural as bears or horses are on Earth, and monsters are everywhere, both in civilized sections and in the wilderness. Griffon riders patrol the skies over dwarf cities, behemoth beasts carry merchants' goods long distances, yuan-ti have an empire a few hundred miles from a human kingdom, and efreet in their City of Brass appear in the mountains suddenly like Brigadoon emerging from the mists.
Yes and no. Mostly no. I don't ever want any monsters, or for that matter almost any of the fantastic elements (other than the PC races, which are kinda sorta fantastic, I guess) to be routine. But the PCs, being extraordinary, encounter them much more often than normal people. The PCs are like Mulder and Scully; they're hip deep in monsters and magic, but "normal" people might not even believe in the existence of monsters. Most do, but not from personal experience; rather because they're superstitious.
I actually like the idea that is common to "modern" urban fantasy that the world itself is pretty mundane, and is more or less what you expect it to be, but there is a "secret" world of fantasy overlaid on top of that which the PCs interact with but which most other people don't even know of at all. Maybe the Dresden Files in a fantasy world is a good model, as much so as Supernatural or The X-Files, which is what I usually refer to.
Creatures Need a Place in the World: Creatures shouldn’t be introduced into a vacuum. Any monster or player character race we make in the game should occupy a unique space in the D&D world. We need to make sure that new creatures have a new and compelling role in the world, in addition to an interesting mechanical purpose.
Sometimes the place in the world is just to be a threat. Not everything needs to be explained (c.f. the watcher in the water in Fellowship of the Ring.) I personally don't find mechanical threats to be all that interesting, but I'm less interested in tactics and mechanics than some players; I'm much more of an artsy-fartsy guy who approaches the game from an author slash method actor stance more than from a wargamer stance or a fantasy world simulationist stance. But I see their point; D&D specifically is chock full of monsters, creatures, or other hazards that have been created simply to be a mechanical threat or resource drain, and yeah—they're boring as all get-out.
Adventurers are Exceptional: The adventurers created by the players are the pioneers, explorers, trailblazers, thrill seekers, and heroes of the D&D world. Although some nonplayer characters might have a class and gain power, they do not necessarily advance as the PCs do, and they exist for a different purpose. Not everyone in the world gains levels like PCs. An NPC might be a veteran of many battles and still not become a 3rd-level fighter; an army of elves is largely made up of nonclassed soldiers.
In more ways that just mechanics. This was something that in the context of the change from 3e to 4e was very important, but which otherwise is kind of a moot point. Yes, PCs don't act like NPCs mechanically. That matters less than the fact the PCs are different than (most) NPCs in a meta sense of the setting.
Magic Is not Everyday, but it Is Natural: No one is superstitious about magic, but neither is the use of magic trivial. Practitioners of magic are as rare as classed fighters. Magic should never cross over into the silly or replicate modern conveniences: We don’t want “magitech” such as arcane elevators and air conditioners, or flying sea serpents to put out fires. At the same time, we don’t want a real-world medieval fear of magic that gets wizards burned at the stake. There might be minor magic that is relatively commonplace; for example, a wealthy farmer might have a magically sharpened plow, but not an animated combine. People might see evidence of magic almost every day, but it’s usually quite minor—a fantastic monster, a visibly answered prayer, a wizard flying by on a griffon—but powerful and experienced practitioners of magic are far from everyday.
I completely disagree with this for Old Night, although I do like it for something more like Eberron Remixed, or whatever. (Which does explicitly have arcane elevators in Sharn, for instance.) Magic is fundamentally unnatural, and that's a key conceit of Old Night; if PCs dabble in it, they're playing with fire, or playing arcane Russian Roulette. They'll probably do so, because that's how PCs tend to roll, but with explicitly Lovecraftian magic, this 4e conceit absolutely doesn't work at all, and I completely reject it.
Plus, a "magically sharpened plow?" How banal. Why even bother?
UPDATE (ed note): I cut out a number of ones that are contextual, i.e., unless you care about specific D&Disms and things that were going on specifically in D&D as opposed to mainstream fantasy or any other game—or even in D&D since, in many ways—they simply don't have any relevance.
One Sun, One Moon: The world assumes what will be most easily accepted by players without imposing unfamiliar calendars and phenomena.
That's a weird label for it. It is true that unfamiliar calendars or other things are more obnoxious and tedious to deal with than they are useful. Even Tolkien used regular days of the week and months of the year, for instance, or familiar-enough coinage. On the other hand, having only one moon is not important to that idea. Plenty of settings have multiple moons, and that is often a useful thing to have happen. Warhammer has Morrslieb, the Chaos Moon, for instance. I've got Grozavest, which has a very unfamiliar phenomena (albeit localized.) There's no reason not to do so, as long as it doesn't replace something banal with something equally banal but unfamiliar, like different names for days of the week, or months of the year.
Fantastic Locations: D&D adventures should take place in fantastic settings—no more 10-by-10 rooms with two orcs. Encounters should occur in areas with interesting threats—from encounter traps that activate every round to hazards that were formerly considered monsters, such as assassin vines or gray ooze.
It's good advice to make encounters more interesting, but honestly the problem was with the paradigm of D&D in the first place. Why were there two orcs in a 10x10 room? Because D&D is a fundamentally stupid game in many ways that has as its premise a fundamentally stupid activity (dungeon crawling.) Eliminate that, and this doesn't matter very much anymore. But it's not just a negative bit of advice; making combat encounters specifically more interesting is something that everyone should think of, in my opinion, and much more frequently.
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