In Defense of Fantasy Kitchen Sink Settings

In Defense of Fantasy Kitchen Sink Settings

GURPS is a very setting-dependent system. The setting and the game’s premise define what options are available to characters from the myriad provided by the books. This is why there is no generic “GURPS game” even though “generic” is in the name of the system, and this is also why it can be difficult to provide any character-building advice unless a lot of context is given. GURPS has many different published setting books with different levels of depth and detail – some have multiple books written about them, and some are merely paragraph-long elevator pitches in the midst of text. However, GURPS is a generic and universal system and hence can be used to play in any setting, be it something you came up with or something published for another system. GURPS Adaptations has a lot of good info on how to adapt other settings.

With this part out of the way to make it GURPS-related, I would like to rant, and I’m sure that I’ll get called a lowlife scum and a feces connoisseur for my tastes. I like the so-called “kitchen sink” settings, such as Forgotten Realms and Golarion. I know that it’s very popular to hate and dunk on them, but I find some arguments used against them puzzling and nonsensical.

First of all, what is a kitchen sink setting? Some would say that it’s a setting where “anything goes,” a setting for which you can make a character without even knowing much about it. Such settings tend to be very expansive and have a huge number of character options. You know, all the 60 elven subraces, 50 dwarven subraces, 100 classes, and all that stuff that people like to meme about. One could make a distinction between two classes of kitchen sink settings: ones that are limited to a single genre and ones that are not. As an example of a single-genre kitchen sink setting, I’d name Forgotten Realms, which is a fantasy setting. (Although, it’s actually arguable.) As an example of a non-genre-limited kitchen sink setting, I’d name GURPS Infinite Worlds.

I’m going to be talking mostly about the single-genre fantasy kitchen sink settings. Boy, that sounded like just a bunch of buzzwords, didn’t it? I’ll start with what I consider the stupidest complaint but one that I remember seeing often in the past – the “theme park argument.” I remember people bashing Pathfinder’s Golarion, claiming that it’s dumb and unrealistic that, for example, you cross the border between Taldor and Qadira and suddenly the “Byzantine theme park” is replaced with a “Persia theme park.” But isn’t that what borders are for? Different nations have different cultures and the difference between the neighbors can be drastic in the real world too. That’s why they aren’t a single nation after all. How come when one crosses the border between China and India, he suddenly sees the switch from a “China theme park” to an “India theme park?”

Another complaint I’ve seen is that diversity of races, cultures, traditions, and options is unrealistic. I mean the actual diversity, not diversity in the woke sense. “Why do you need 5 different human cultures in the world? Why are there 3 elven subraces? Why do you need demons and devils? This makes no sense!” To me, the opposite is unrealistic. When the world is a single homogenous monoculture, it feels off. It’s like saying “Why do we need Spanish, Italian, British, French, Greek, Serbian cultures? That’s stupid and unrealistic, why can’t we can have a single European monoculture?”

I believe that these complaints may have just been worded badly, and the essence of the complaints is the lack of internal consistency of the setting. A setting that isn’t internally consistent can be difficult to immerse yourself in.

Another reason I believe people like to complain about this stuff is the inability to differentiate between the setting scope and game scope. This is kind of similar to why some people dislike GURPS – they believe that they have to use everything. Let me demonstrate this on an example. When people hear “Forgotten Realms,” most probably think about the Faerun subcontinent specifically, but the Forgotten Realms are much more than that. If we zoom out, we’ll find other continents and regions – Kara-Tur, Zakhara, Maztica, and even some stuff that was only mentioned in the novels. Zooming out further, we get seven other planets of Realmspace. Zooming out further, we get all the other Crystal Spheres that contain worlds described in other D&D setting books, and even our Earth. Zoom out further, and you get the multitude of other planes of existence. If you zoom out even further, you get the entire MtG multiverse that canonically has very tenuous connections to the D&D one. I still think that this was a very… questionable decision.

The point I’m trying to make is that while this entire D&D meta-setting is enormous, and yes, you technically have access to hundreds of races, cultures, and other character options, you don’t need all of them for your game. Sure, if your game is set on the islands of Wa in Kara-Tur, technically speaking, a warforged from Eberron could make his way there, but why would any sane GM allow such an inappropriate character unless there is a compelling in-universe reason for that? Even my own setting documents have hundreds of different races and dozens of spellcasting traditions and other character options, but once you zoom in on the place where the game will take place, only a handful of them matter. When I setup a game, I just give the players the list of options appropriate for this specific game, and it’s usually one or two human cultures and maybe one or two other races, and a couple of spellcasting traditions and martial arts. I’ve never had a party full of tieflings, dragonborn, and catfolks of different colors that you see in memes. Well, I actually did allow a catfolk character in a D&D game once that was quite inappropriate for the game, but we all made mistakes in the past.

In conclusion, I have to reiterate that a good “kitchen sink” setting still has to be internally consistent, and you have to be able to limit the scope of options as a GM. If consistency is achieved, an expansive and diverse setting feels much more believable to me. I think fantasy kitchen sinks get a lot of undeserved flak. To me, settings like Forgotten Realms, feel very “lived in”. My own setting is huge, but only few parts of it have been explored in detail, but I still have many years of life ahead of me to enjoy playing, writing, and complaining on the Internet.