Dungeons and Dragons is a game of fantasy roleplaying. The core rules of D&D support games of epic heroes who slay hideous monsters in the face of overwhelming odds, and claim the loot that they guard as a reward. Some D&D adventures take place in dungeons like Princes of the Apocalypse. Some see you exploring a sandbox environment in search of hidden locations or secret artifacts while completing quests and meeting new characters and creatures, like Tomb of Annihilation or Curse of Strahd. Others still have a single overarching plot that spans a vast swathe of land, throwing you into an epic quest like in Tyranny of Dragons or Storm King’s Thunder.
D&D has lots of variation within its niche, but there are nevertheless plenty of stories that don’t work in the fantasy genre of D&D. Many settings actively adapt D&D to other genres. Curse of Strahd and the Ravenloft setting presents a world of Gothic Horror, and presents new items, creatures, and characters to sell the idea of being in a malevolent world. Tomb of Annihilation adds a new game mechanic—the Death Curse—to increase the game’s lethality and grittiness. The upcoming Eberron: Rising from the Last War setting book is sure to be filled with lots of new mechanics, items, creatures, and characters that alter basic expectations of D&D to suit its post-war, pulp-fiction, arcane-noir setting.
If the professionals can do it in their games, so can you. How can you adapt the post-apocalyptic genre to D&D? Or the western? Or the courtroom drama? How far can you bend D&D before it breaks—and before you would be better off just finding another game system entirely? The line is different for everyone, but here’s how you can start adapting other genres into D&D.
Adapt the Genre, Don’t Adapt D&D
The first trick is the most important one—and it’s a matter of perspective. Note that I said “adapting other genres into D&D” and not “adapting D&D into other genres.” The distinction here is important. The game mechanics of D&D suit several very specific moods, feelings, and genres, and trying to change the engine of the game too much for a homebrew campaign is a fool’s errand. Adding a new rules system on top of D&D’s existing mechanical framework is fairly easy—and stripping one rules system or a handful of mechanical bits (like certain races or classes) is easy enough, too. But once you start changing dice systems, or integral mechanics like hit points or spell slots to suit the genre of story you want to tell, you’re far better off playing a different roleplaying game. There are hundreds, maybe even thousands, of roleplaying games out there—don’t torture yourself trying to fit a square peg into a D&D-shaped hole.
Adapting a genre into D&D, however, is less involved. It requires a lighter touch. Instead of bending D&D’s tropes to fit the genre, you bend the genre’s tropes to fit D&D. In Eberron, for example, the hardboiled detectives and intrepid explorers that slink through the streets of Sharn or creep through the jungles of Xen’drik don’t carry revolvers—they carry wands of magic missiles. You get to keep the genre tropes of the Sam Spade-style private eye, the Indiana Jones-like archaeologist adventurer, and so forth, but they’ve been flavored by the trappings of D&D, and thus fit smoothly into a D&D game.
As with all the advice to follow, this rule is a far-reaching generalization. If you think that breaking this rule will help make your game, your setting, or your adventure better, then go for it! These constraints will help you get a good, basic, and fun game—but like all other rules in D&D, these rules are made to be broken.
Adapt Iconic Genres
What’s something that all the popular D&D genre adaptations have in common? Well, I’m sure you can find a lot of commonalities if you break things down to their smallest parts, but there’s one shared trait that stands out to me in particular: all of these settings use immensely popular movies or novels as touchstones. The original Eberron Campaign Setting for third edition D&D even has a list of movies that were vital to the setting’s creation, including Brotherhood of the Wolf, Casablanca, The Maltese Falcon, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and a handful of others. Ravenloft wears its gothic influence on its sleeve, with Strahd standing in for Count Dracula, and other Ravenloft adventures leaning on classic Universal monster movies like Frankenstein, and Hammer horror films.
All of these cultural touchstones give these genre-focused settings an instant elevator pitch. “It’s like Lord of the Rings meets Dracula,” for Ravenloft. “It’s like Conan plus Indiana Jones plus every Humphrey Bogart movie” for Eberron. Don’t worry about feeling like you’re being unoriginal—being too original can make it hard for your players to find a foothold. If your players are able to instantly summon archetypal characters or memetic moments from your genre of choice, they can play into the strengths of your setting without floundering about in confusion. This can make your game instantly high energy and exciting from the very first session.
Some classic genres to adapt into D&D include:
- Classical Mythology, such as the myths of Ancient Greece, Ancient Egypt, feudal Japan, medieval China, much of pre-Christian Europe, Africa, Asia, the Americas—really, any culture that has mythology or folklore that predates the modern day! These tales are filled with heroes, monsters, and trickster spirits and gods that actively meddle in the affairs of mortals. If you’re playing with people for whom these myths are important cultural touchstones, make sure you’re not being disrespectful in your portrayals.
- Cosmic Horror, such as the works of H.P. Lovecraft and the broader Cthulhu Mythos. This genre has been heavily explored in RPGs—and even in D&D! Check out the Star Spawn and the Elder Evils included in Mordenkainen’s Tome of Foes.
- Fairy Tales, such as the works of the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, L. Frank Baum’s Land of Oz series, or the lighthearted folkloric fantasy feel of The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien—not to be confused with the more epic feeling of The Lord of the Rings. Using fey creatures and the Feywild and Shadowfell of D&D lore to make them actual fairy tales could be fun, but isn’t required.
- Medieval Politics and Intrigue, such as Game of Thrones, or the actual historical War of the Roses. This genre often calls for restrictions to be placed upon magic, which is the eternal bugaboo of D&D setting adaptations. More on this later.
- Office Comedy, like The Office or Parks and Recreation. This one might seem tremendously hard to adapt to D&D, but Acquisitions Incorporated managed to meld these two disparate genres with aplomb.
- Post-Apocalyptic, which is a very broad genre indeed. Some post-apocalypses are pessimistic and brutal, such as D&D’s own Dark Sun setting, while some worlds are optimistic and hopeful, like the world of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. The genre has been so popular in recent years that almost everyone is familiar with at least one bona fide piece of post-apocalyptic media.
- Superhero, like the comics and films of Marvel and DC. At high levels, most D&D characters are practically superheroes already! What would superheroes look like in a medieval fantasy setting?
- Spy Thriller, like James Bond or Mission Impossible. How does the D&D fantasy genre change if stealth and subterfuge are always the main goal, and epic battles of blade and spell are rare?
- Westerns, such as The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly, Once Upon a Time in the West, or any film that depicts the modern mythology of the American West.
There are no shortage of genres that can be adapted into D&D. What are some other genres you’ve used to inspire your D&D games?
Find Points of Commonality
Where does your favorite genre intersect with D&D? If I were to create a Western-inspired D&D setting, I would identify a few main points of overlap: rag-tag parties (such as in The Magnificent Seven), a dangerous wilderness filled with bandits and interspersed with small towns, and legends of hidden treasure (such as in Treasure of the Sierra Madre). I would start with these three points, as they’re the first things that popped into my head. There are plenty more points of intersection that will occur to me while designing the setting, but we want to get designing as quickly as possible.
Try to play fast and loose with your design, especially at first. Once you have a point of commonality between your favored genre and D&D, figure out how the two genres are different within that space. For instance, D&D’s wilderness is often filled with monsters as well as bandits. What D&D monsters have an Old West feel, and how could you modify existing D&D monsters to make them feel at home in a fantastical version of the Old West? Jot down ideas, but don’t be afraid to toss them if you think of something more interesting. Since new genre intersections and ideas will hit you during this time, try to bounce around as much as possible. Just getting a few notes on paper will help you discover the broad strokes of your genre mashup better than digging too deep into one topic.
This should feel like popcorn popping; first a few ideas pop up, then a storm of new ideas explode, then it simmers down. Once the ideas have slowed, start digging in. What excites you about these ideas? Do any of them fundamentally change the D&D experience? Do those changes require additions to the D&D rules, or subtractions? And do any of these changes cascade outwards, rippling into other points of genre-mixing? For instance, if you replace pistols and rifles are replaced with magic wands and magic staves, are there other gunpowder or combustion inventions that need reworking, like trains and railways?
Limit Restrictions
Once you start thinking about intersections between the D&D fantasy genre and your new genre of choice, I all but guarantee that you’ll notice a lot of things in D&D that don’t blend well with your new genre. D&D’s unique system of magic and the ubiquity of its magic items is almost certainly going to be a point of friction between these two genres. I highly encourage you to not restrict your players’ access to magic or its magic items to preserve a sense of grittiness or realism in your setting, or to core D&D features like its races or classes.
Restricting a single race, class, or spell is one thing, but removing huge chunks of these systems will inevitably harm your game. One vital aspect of the D&D fantasy genre is its heroic tone, and almost all of the classes, races, and spells in D&D are geared towards creating larger-than-life characters that accomplish impossible feats of strength and skill. All of D&D’s sub-systems work in tandem to create that feeling. You can tone that heroic feeling down incrementally, perhaps by making human the only playable race, limiting spellcasters to only playing wizards and druids, or by using the variant Healing rules in the Dungeon Master’s Guide, but they only change part of the picture. Toning D&D all the way down from “heroic” to “gritty” requires so much customization on your part that you would honestly be better off playing a different game entirely.
It’s much easier to alter the tone of your game by adding genre elements to it. Eberron achieves this by adding new races, new magic items, the Dragonmark system unique to the setting, and myriad other rules additions or variants. While you should be careful of adding too much to your new D&D-ified genre, it’s often easier to get players up to speed on additive house rules than subtractive ones. It’s more fun to tell a player, “Here’s a new spell you can learn that’s unique to this world,” rather than stopping them in the midst of casting a spell that they forgot was banned, for instance. If you really want magic to be rare and mystical in your setting, or run a "low-magic" world like the world of A Song of Ice and Fire, consider making all of the magic-using NPCs a maximum of, for instance, 5th-level. In time, the player characters will become the most powerful magic-users in the world—but they'll have to do it all on their own. There are no libraries of epic magic or wise mentors to guide them in their journey; they're in uncharted territory, and must face all the unknown dangers inherent to it. This is much more interesting and fun than arbitrarily restricting your magic-using player characters' growth.
And More?
There are countless guidelines and suggestions for how to adapt your favorite genre into D&D. If you want to adapt a D&D adventure into another genre or setting, some adventures even come with guides for doing just that, such as the “Adapting to Other Worlds” appendix in Princes of the Apocalypse.
What other tips do you have for people trying to blend genres with D&D? Have you created a D&D setting with its own unique blend of genres?
James Haeck is the lead writer for D&D Beyond, the co-author of Waterdeep: Dragon Heist and the Critical Role Tal'Dorei Campaign Setting, a member of the Guild Adepts, and a freelance writer for Wizards of the Coast, the D&D Adventurers League, and other RPG companies. He lives in Seattle, Washington with his partner Hannah and their animal companions Mei and Marzipan. You can find him wasting time on Twitter at @jamesjhaeck.
@GIJoeBob Thanks! Looks great. I can't wait to dig into this idea more.
I'd love to play a modern or superhero setting but I have no idea how to go about adapting weapons and/or super powers.
The idea I'm using for my campaign is that a covert war in a fantasy world has spilled over into ours, and only a handful of people know about magic. The party is recruited because they've tried training people on our side to fight monsters, but they're never very good at it.
So they bring an established party into our world, figuring it saves on training; there's just the 'fish out of water' aspect to deal with after that, which is half the fun!
I'm working on a gritty, low magic, real world alt-history campaign set during the Renaissance, with lots of Feywild stuff. I'm going for an epic feel, kind of a long series of fetch quests like Culhwch and Olwen and other Arthurian stories mixed with the Odyssey, The Faerie Queene, and other folklore and myths. The players will be working for an archfey, using fey portals to fast-travel but also making themselves targets for monsters who might try to follow them out. I've been pulling on ideas from the AD&D historical sourcebooks, but one of my main inspirations has been Rick Riordan's novels; even though my plot isn't really mythology-centric and player character's won't necessarily be demigods, I'm borrowing a lot because Rick is really good at combining an epic quest plotline with a real-world setting. The Mist is one thing I'm totally stealing.
It's been really interesting deciding which genre elements to adapt to D&D and which D&D elements to adapt to the genre. I'm definitely going with some optional rules to make things a bit grittier/more realistic, and using some other homebrew rules from Critical Role and Dael Kingsmill, but I think for the most part I don't need to change the mechanics so much as I need to add my own flavour/mechanics. Ex: I was anguishing about trying to be realistic with languages but also wanting my players to not have to use spells/items to communicate, because D&D tends to assume there's a Common language. I decided to just give them a fey boon that lets them know a new language and change it when they take a long rest. So they don't know every language, but they can "learn" the language of wherever they're going if they have a day to prepare. Another ex: Instead of saying, "you can't play a wizard" or "you can't have more than X wizard levels" because magic is very rare and there wouldn't be anywhere to learn it, I made up a secret wizard society whose bureaucracy players will have to deal with if they want to get training or spell scrolls. And who will definitely send fiends after members who go rogue. Conflict!
Way back in the day, Gygax penned "Sturmgeschutz and Sorcerers". I believe the original iteration was in The Strategic Review, the precursor to Dragon magazine. Luckily enough, it was re-printed in the first Dragon Annual. Poor German SS unit ends up in a battle with all kinds of beasties and never really stood a chance. It really opened my eyes to the possibilities of being able to design a setting that wasn't run-of-the-mill D&D...way back in 1976.
My homebrew evolved out of the desire to have a progenitor race that survived a post-apocalyptic war with machines. I was influenced by the original Terminator, I'll admit. A few thousand humans survived, but at great cost to them and the world. Unable to reproduce at a rate that would expand their population, they set about trying to alter their own DNA and the DNA of the creatures around them as well as an evolving, if far too primitive orc race. Long story short, most sentient races were created by these progenitors in a quest to fix their own DNA.
Oh, and I had machines before Eberron, but admit that I was more than happy when that world came out and I could use the warforged as a basis for my own machines. The progenitors were shaken to their core when some of their progeny started uncovering and awakening the machines....
I'm currently preparing to run a post-apocalyptic, Breath of the Wild -esque setting that wipes the board of many of the iconic fantasy races: humans, elves, dwarves, gnomes, halflings. The big mystery of the setting, in the style of the Dwemer in the Elder Scrolls series, is where the races went.
I'm so excited for the game because it's post-apocalyptic without being dark and horrible.
Great article as always, James!
I'm running a campaign that was inspired by my binge-watching of the first season of Hill Street Blues, and all my players are part of a for-hire for-justice mercenary crew in a melting-pot society of races that used to hate each other centuries ago.
This reminds me of a campaign I was asked to run a while back, in my homebrew world there is an island nation roughly equivalent to the Brittish isles. It is common knowledge that non elves/fey are not welcome. When we were talking about which sandbox on the map the players wanted to play in, they agreed they wanted to visit this forbidden land. I'd known for a long time what was there, it's a place where the line between the material plane and the feywild is vague at best. I turned to an old RPG Changeling the Dreaming for a lot of reference, and of course some classic literature like that of Michael Moorcock.
I went into it with the understanding, we're playing D&D. And so, when it was time to adapt and steal, I did. But it was going from the reference material to D&D, not the other way around. It's been my mantra since getting into 5th. Adapting from other systems or even older editions of the game isn't terribly difficult. But trying to go the other way around just doesn't work.
I actually working on making one of those
How cosmic. I'm just tonight about to take lost mine of phandelver into my own adventure. Dark tower setting. If you're not familiar, think the Lego movie meets sliders meets quantum leap. The premise is that every fiction franchise is real, in another version of reality. Authors don't make things up, they dream about other dimensions. Theres a big bad that's trying to destroy the fabric of the multiverse, and he's gotten far enough that portals between worlds have opened, and artifacts have shifted to the wrong world. So, this adventure is EVERY setting. The players have to travel the multiverse to stop him.
Dms guild has a setting guide for a Waterdeep of the future, i think 1000 years after dragon heist. Might help
Check out dmsguild. They have a setting guide for Waterdeep several hundred years after dragon heist. Might help
Great article. I think the major point is great that no matter what you do you should preserve the dnd mechanics. Using the dnd framework with a reskin on items is a very powerful way to maintain balance and use the rules everyone knows. You can do a ton with that and still get very creative. If you start having to throw out too much of the dnd rules then you should just move on to a dedicated game setting that was designed and tuned for the specific non dnd setting. Highly recommend GURPS or some other game systems that are more flexible for these purposes. It really comes down to deciding whether you want to play dnd or not? Either play a flavor of dnd or play something else. Dont try to do both or your players will just get confused.
While i do have to agree that mechanics should be taken as is...
i disagree with adapting the setting to the mechanics.
some mechanics for exemples do not fit too well with say far west and the likes.
the reality being that the old west is far more grittier then high magic fantasy can be and thus adapting the hit points to a more injury oriented mchanic is better for old west.
though the question remains, how much you willing to change an edition before you realise you created your own ? well the answer is quite simple... about 10% of it. if you really need to change more then that, then maybe you are doing it wrong.
All that said, 5e is a so versatile that its becoming ridiculous and most new TTRPGs are now taking it to form their newer versions. exemples of those TTRPG that started using advantages and disadvantages. many have started to dumb down as well. i wouldn't even be surprised if pathfinder 2 was dumbed down as well. after all it follows closely the D&D mechanics. being that versatile means you can literally adapt much to it without even doing more. exemple of spelljammer who can literally be played with 5e without even changing a thing. no need for a new book, no need for anything, you just add spell jamming devices to the game and voila, you now have spelljammer. Things like Shadowrun can also easily be adapted to 5e. you only need to make those special gears and voila, you are ready to jump into shadowrun.
but... there is always a but...
classes do not fit in all genres and thats what you need to change if you want another genre.
i am playing western like game with a group and i had to recreate guns. revolvers. added the injury system to the game. but modified it a bit for i want injuries to happen more often. class wise, i tryed changing them all, making shooter type like archetypes for them. ended up creating an archetype for one of my player. kinda like an artificer but using modern contraption to do spell like abilties that aren't spells. like her Revivification Cables ! literally just a car battery with jumper cables you stick to the person who died. the thing is, they love it, because those contraption are usable by everyone and all have charges into them. charges she must prepare every long rest.
see, western do not work with casters. not in the purest of ways. so why would you keep a wizard if he isn't gonna cast spells in your western game ?
classes and races are what you need to adapt tot he setting, you cannot just keep em, unless your setting is allowing high fantasy and high magic into it.
mine does, our old west is actually just a moden version of my own immortal world. apocalypse did happen, most of the old gods and immortals are gone. still magical things exists and the old races still do too.
but i really don't see a wizard in a true far-west gaming style.
so basically, i think everyone would end up being aranger or a fighter. monk maybe or rogue... but i don't really see any of the caster being used in a far-west game.
thats the 10% of the game i recommend changing if you truly need to use 5e.
Nice
As much as I love D&D, more people should try lesser-known games like Deadlands or one of my personal favorites, Castle Falkenstein. Both offer very cool takes on magic and steampunk, and are lots of fun to play!
Yeah, Lost Mines does convert easily to a Western. In fact, I ran it in standard D&D but described the North to my players as being pretty much a more temperate equivalent to the Wild West. Phandalin in particular fits the bill, in fact the new Essentials set contains further mini-adventures in the area and one is set on a ranch similar to what you describe. Likewise with some of the side treks in PofA.
Anyhow, cool to hear how you made the switch “complete”. Nice work!
This is a really fun topic for me! In fact, with the Pulp and Noir elements in Eberron,... It's a growing, living world, so why not take the next step? After Noir came Pulp, and after Pulp came Masked Heroes. Now, I don't know about you, but Sharn in particular gives me a lot of creative energy relating mostly to the Golden Age and Bronze (not Dark) Age of superheroes, and I've wanted to run (or, ideally, play in since I've not much experience DMing), a Masked Heroes of Sharn ongoing adventure-thing. Let's look at some tropes!
Secrecy and subterfuge, which is a given in Eberron
Crime syndicates, as with The Kingpin, The Foot Clan, House Tarkanan; The Penguin would fit right in with The Boromar Clan
Remnants of warfare; The Mourning, anyone?
Mad scientists performing secret military experiments, much like Merrix d'Cannith or House Vadalis
Two-fisted action, pistols and powers, which is actively encouraged in Eberron, except the gunslingers are wandslingers
Down-to-earth heroes with real lives performing extraordinary acts of valor; The Golden and Bronze Ages share this with Eberron, which I feel would not suit Silver Age designs
Street-brawlers and high-flyers; imagine Spiderman or Daredevil visiting Sharn!
Conspicuous "mutant" powers and the backlash towards 'em: Aberrant Marks, Daelkyr Symbionts, House Vadalis again, Warforged... So many options
Investigative journalists are essentially poorly-payed private investigators with superpowers... no differences here, especially post-War
...I went a little over-the top, but I think you understand where I'm coming from here. The setting seems ripe for some hope-inspiring heroes and it's a stated part of the design intent that the player characters are supposed to rise above the pure-grit Noir and Pulp action to really change the world. Which sounds very much like the post-War Golden Age of Heroes to me. Plus, D&D has the whole "level up" system, which is significantly more appropriate to a superhero power-creep story than to swords-and-sorcery.
If you're not convinced, while I'd expect a party to be as original as possible, thematically speaking, The Avengers are a (like 14th Level) party with an Artillerist, a homebrewed Barbarian, an Aasimar Tempest Cleric, a Battle Master, an Arcane Archer and an Assassin, New York is Sharn, SHIELD is The Twelve or The Shadow Cabinet, Loki calls himself "The Traveller" and is Thor's adopted Changeling brother corrupted by the Dreaming Dark, and Nick Fury wields a crossbow like a bad-ass balor-hugger. Can you imagine anything more badass than someone who hugs balors? No, I didn't think so. Hell, make The Mandarin part of The Aurum and it's already more thematically appropriate than Iron Man 3!
I'm actually running a campaign that is very heavily influenced by the Mass Effect games i.e. impending invasion of Githyanki, make choices to affect who joins your army, etc. and it's been fantastic. It's not truly sci-fi, but there are airships and some very high-level magic to make them happen, and the society is much more unified across the continent like a high-tech, galaxy-spanning civilization. It's been a lot of fun.
Someone has made a really cool campaign setting book called Arkadia that gives you some awesome greek-inspired classes, has some reskinning of existing races/new races to play that are setting appropriate.