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.
You are totally entitled to your opinion and I don't mean to say otherwise but maybe wait till the new Eberron book comes out and look into it. I used to have the same mind-frame about technology in a medieval/fantasy world. It just didn't fit nor have any place to exist. But I had an awesome DM who was running an Eberron Campaign that sat down with me one on one and explained some things about it. More so he explained how it could and did work in d&d. He even used real life as an example. Look at history and how far we as a race have come. The impossible has been made possible. Humans cant fly, yet we do anyways. Just not in the sense everyone expects. Because in this world we are taught that everything has to be a certain way. So please if you would be so kind as to oblige a lover of the Eberron Setting and give it another go. My hope is that you may begin to understand the concept and maybe even enjoy it as there is so much it has to offer.
Did anybody mention science fiction? if not than science fiction would be a cool genera. That would probably take a lot of adapting to get that to work or you could just give everybody wands instead of laserguns. Didn't they used to have some space setting in advanced dnd 2E?
I loved the Blackmoor adventures from way back in the D&D Basic days. Exploring a crashed starship while facing robots and laser blasting crew members was incredible fun. During the 2E era, our DM launched us into an extended adventure across the multiverse where we interacted with multiple worlds including a space cruiser and a post-nuke wasteland. Thanks to the pulp adventure days, this is a classic trope. Kudos on keeping alive the tradition
They definitely did in 2e, it was called Spelljammer. Also Fantasy Flight Games released Dragonstar.
I recently just finished running what is sometimes called "The Ithilliad" from second edition for my group that had never played it, (It was the first adventure I'd ever played so many years ago). The three books take you from a city where Mind Flayers have taken over, to a location to dig up an old Nautiloid spaceship , reconstructing a brain module, flying through rainbow space to a distant planet and eventually destroying a Mind Flayer Space Station. I have found that sometimes it's amazing to just throw something at the characters you wouldn't normally see in a normal adventure of high fantasy and merging with some level of "Science Fiction". I didn't have to adapt too much either and hopefully I gave them something they'll remember for ages to come.
I have played spelljammer before but not dragonstar. Is it worth looking into? I could probably modify spelljammer for 5E. I really want wizards of the coast to make a space based campaign setting book or remake spelljammer for 5E. Both would be better.
Gammaworld was a combination of Post apocalyptic and science fiction that came out during AD&D, 2nd edition, and continued into 3.5 I believe, but it was fun to play with my dad.
I just want to say that I run an Ebberon game and what attracts people to the setting, Warforged and wide-magic(high-magic) is not whats keeping me there. The 12 Dragonmarked houses that each run a part of the economy is what keeps me there. When I listen to the Manifest zone, I actually think that I'm running my game wrong. Like I'm not pulling out the potential of Ebberon. The feeling of the world to me is more akin to Firefly or Full Metal Alchemist than lord of the rings or game of thrones.
This is great advice. I've been working on a 5E adaption for Mobile Suit Gundam on my YouTube channel and I debate with my viewers all the time about adding new mechanics and stuff. I have to remind them (and myself) that the best parts of 5E are its simplicity and favorability toward role-playing over realism. I combat critiques like "you can't just use a potion on a mech!" with the idea that you can't use potions on a gaping wound either, but you have to make sacrifices to make the game more enjoyable. I have to try to bend Gundam to fit D&D rather than the other way around.
Also, Eberron is the best. I hardly play any other campaign setting. I can't wait for the book to drop.
Bring back Spelljammer, Dark Sun and Planescape official material setting books, and Wizards will have made my day.
My personal love of low fantasy, and gritty grim darkness, tends to be manifest in my losing interest in my own campaigns around pc level 8. I started rolling dice playing Gameworkshop's Warhammer 40k, learned to DM in White Wolf's World of Darkness. Even playing a high level mage in WoD makes you feel vulnerable as every normal human being is constantly firing counterspell out of their eye holes beholder style. In Warhammer 40k there's always a non zero chance demons eat your soul while casting.
To reconcile my need for magical consequences, and my players desire to experience high level play I've had an idea. What if I let them cast leveled spells more times than they have slots? This seems like a terrible idea, which could have terrible consequences and O'lord do I love me some terrible consequences. I'm thinking a ten percent misfire chance per spell level. An increasing 1d10 percent penalty accruing with each successful extra cast resetting after a long rest.
Example: Wizard wants to squeeze out another fireball. Rolls D100 which gets a result of 45. He shoots he scores. Rolls a d10 resulting in five. His misfire chance for level three spells is now 35%. Next turn attempts to push a haste spell. Rolls d100 results: 32. Suffers an immediate level of exhaustion. (This is strictly an example your pain may vary.)
I think by letting them cast extra spells they're be more likely to opt in knowing they can opt out whenever they like and stand to gain from opting in. I could easily imagine my players opting out for weeks until things get dicey. Then I get to lean in with a solution and watch them taste power or... their own hubris.
I couldn't agree with you more cutter!
Sometimes if you can't get the feel you want in a homebrew campaign in DnD, just remember there are always other systems that may get the specific feel you want from the game
What more can be said ? Add Star Frontier and Gamma World to the list of worlds already mentioned?
I've had some good success running D&D in a fantasy version of Regency England, drawing on the work of Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, Elizabeth Gaskell et al. There's some good room for religious adventures by adapting the Church of England to the Greyhawk pantheon, and there's always the war with France to spice things up.
The biggest obstacle I found was that, as civilization becomes more widespread and governments and civic organizations gain more power, it's more difficult to find reasons for adventurers to be handling problems. Militaries and police forces exist, after all, and isn't it their job to combat threats to public safety? I managed, though a few different tricks, but "why is it the PCs' job to handle this?" is a question that you need to ask before you run a game in a setting with more pervasive government than the medieval default.
Then you will want to check this out for some ideas and inspiration -
"The party stands before the Duke and he gives them a charge: march up the mountain to a nearby kingdom and slay the Arch-Lich who lurks there. The Duke provides the party with maps to the mountain, a summary overview of what they might find (high level henchmen, nasty guards, a dragon chained in the basement) and offers useful magical equipment for the adventure. And God Speed, the Duke tells the party: the Kingdom and its people depend on you. Defeat the Arch-Lich and forever be written into the annals of history!
Off they go into the mists of tale. But this is not a story about the party heading off to grand heroics.
This is the story about the intrepid spies who stole the maps....."
Tailor, Tinker, Soldier, Spy: the Bard as a Spy, Cryptography and the Fantasy Espionage Team
Lost Mines is super easy to convert into a really fun western module! I did it with my group and added four shooter pistols and zweirifles that did four and two attacks before reloading, swapped the mountainous region for desert foothills, and changed the castle to an old fort. Thematically it worked really well, and my players even ended up in the classic high noon showdown followed by a dramatic horse chase shootout to get out of town that was entirely unplanned!
I had Phandalin set up as a wooden frontier town on the edge of a larger abandoned city, with the orcs over the mountains looming over the region as invaders. Additionally, I placed the Red Brands tavern in the basement vault of an abandoned bank with a player piano which worked super well thematically! We didn't run the manor house, but had it ready to go as an old ranch that had been repurposed as a hideout!
The tools I tend to see employed in these case are 1) inefficient bureaucracies 2) understaffed or over stretched policing systems 3) corrupt local officials 4) sudden population loss via war, famine, or disease. I've made an entire campaign out of the party working for a freshly crowned king just to deal with these problems. Read in reverse these problems are that campaigns story arc. Players go to war gain fame, roust corrupt official gaining more fame and the ear of the king, players get knighted to and given rank above local law enforcement, then become the king's own secret police able to react to internal and external threats faster than a scribe can wet quill for a formal request for aid.
My two absolute favorite remixes I've done for D&D were Power Rangers and Superheroes.
For the Power Rangers campaign, I basically just had the players play commoners who could use an action to turn into their "characters." Never did figure out how I wanted to make the Zords work, so we left them out, but I bet I could make something work with the ship rules from Saltmarsh.
Superheroes story was even easier. We just started at 15th level, I gave them a couple of cool magic items, and then I started ripping off plots from Marvel movies, right down to doing different solo sessions for each character before the big team-up session.
It's basically more sci-fi rather than fantasy; Mechanical ships, weapons, vehicles, etc. It does create some general rules and guidelines for interactions of magic in the world. For example, instead of Wizards having a spellbook, they basically have a datapad with their spells in it. It also created its own solar system as well.