Role-Playing Game 'Verse

A world straight out of a Role Playing Game, without actually being an RPG itself — sometimes without even being a game. Some are adaptations of either computer RPGs or tabletop RPGs. Others were created independently, inspired by these games and their cultural ancestors.

Will use some, if not most, of the Role-Playing Game Terms, but how many obviously depends on the writers.

Often set in The Time of Myths or Medieval European Fantasy with any technology being Lost Technology or perhaps Schizo Tech. Compare RPG Mechanics 'Verse, when the characters themselves are aware of game mechanics. Also compare Sudden Videogame Moment.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• .hack A franchise where characters literally get sucked into online roleplaying games.
• BASToF Lemon is another anime where real people get literally transported into a game.
• KonoSuba A boy dies and a goddess reincarnates him into a fantasy world like the games he loves so much.
• Fairy Tail. Guilds? Check. Mission board? Check. Stat improving armor sets? Check. Expansion Pack World? Oh yeah.
• Rune Soldier Louie takes place in Forcelia, the world created for Lodoss. The main cast is comprised of stock rpg archetypes: Louie is supposed to be the mage, but tends to serve as their "fighter" instead. Jeanie is the group's swordswoman, Merrill is the thief, and Melissa is the Staff Chick. They spend much of the series in search of old ruins in hopes of finding treasure to line their pockets. But, in classic rpg fashion, a bigger plot gradually unfolds for our heroes.
• The first Alternate Universe in Magical Shopping Arcade Abenobashi was a spoof of the Role Playing Game Verse.
• In Magic Knight Rayearth, the world of Cephiro is a lot like the typical fantasy world in roleplaying games. Fuu repeatedly even comments about how much Cephiro is like an RPG. It makes the twist at the end of the story's first half—that the princess who needs to be saved actually summoned the Magic Knights to Cephiro in order to kill her—hit even harder.
• Beet the Vandel Buster takes this a little further than most, with direct references to level grinding and all Busters having their level emblazoned on their chests in roman numerals. Vandals also have a similar system, but this is a slightly more organic 'star' system, where they're rated on the number of crystals implanted into them.
• Persona 4: The Animation keeps the date-change and character-stats screens from the actual game, giving it this feel.

Comic Books

• Rat Queens is a Deconstructive Parody of stories set in D&D-type universes, concentrating on just how annoying adventurers would be to "ordinary" citizens.
• Black Moon Chronicles: The books start with a nobody called Wismerhill going on a journey and adding more friends to his party while facing various perils that are thrown in their way. It helps to explain a lot of what happens when you know that the series was inspired by one of Froideval's old Dungeons & Dragons campaigns, and that he worked on AD&D for TSR in The '80s.

Comic Strips

• Nodwick, set in a 2nd edition AD&D generic fantasy setting (though not without its twists). The strip started out being a mixture of this and RPG Mechanics 'Verse (depending entirely on what would be funnier for the strip of the day) before evolving fully into this for its print-based Story Arc.

Fan Works

• Paradoxus:
  • The plot is set up in a way that roughly resembles your typical World of Warcraft expansion pack storyline, just with an interdimensional flair. One of the Burning Legion's leaders starts wreaking havoc and can only be stopped by the conjoint effort of several peoples who ally. The key players are powerful characters who slowly unravel the mystery and own powerful artifacts, belong to a distinguished lineage, or both. There are several targets to kill, mooks that only elite characters can defeat, and a vast world to explore (with the corresponding fast methods of transportation).
  • In the third chapter, as Bloom is traveling through the Eastern Kingdoms, she notices several people approaching her asking for favors, i.e., the In-Universe equivalent of quests. She ignores them in favor of focusing on returning home and is puzzled by this behavior.
• Vow of Nudity, being a Dungeons & Dragons fanfiction, uses game mechanics like character stats, experience points and dicerolls to determine when characters succeed or fail at what they attempt, but the characters themselves aren't aware of this facet of their existence.

Films — Live-Action

• The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring is an Unbuilt Trope. The book series itself predates role-playing games like D&D and in fact codified many High Fantasy tropes. However, after the Fellowship is formed and before it is disbanded, the plot and characters would fit right into an RPG verse: a party that includes a wizard, an elf, a dwarf, a knight, and a ranger set out on a dangerous journey to destroy an Artifact of Doom, facing many typical genre perils like monsters, bands of orcs, and evil sorcerers trying to thwart their progress. The second and third films avert this, being closer to epic war movies.

Literature

• The somewhat new fantasy sub-genre called LitRPG takes this to the logical conclusion, with characters in universe usually seeing some form of RPG-like mechanics such as levels, health points, et cetera. This is similar to many Isekai light novels' mechanics, which LitRPG is openly inspired by.
• In the early Discworld novels, it's implied that all the goings-on in the story are an RPG-like game played by the gods. At crucial moments, the characters hear the sound of dice being thrown.
• Record of Lodoss War is a direct adaptation of an actual Dungeons & Dragons-like campaign played by its creators back in college. Sword World RPG was made out of the Lodoss setting; the first Lodoss light novel was based on the RPG.
• The fantasy series Guardians of the Flame has the college professor Game Master of a gaming group turn out to be a wizard from a fantasy world that operates under similar rules. He sends his players through once they've reached a certain point in the game to see if they can bring peace to his world (or at least kill the enemy wizard who banished him to our plane).
• Novelizations of Role-Playing Game Settings fall here.
  • Dungeons & Dragons
    • Dragonlance
    • Forgotten Realms
    • Ravenloft
  • Old World of Darkness
    • Inherit The Earth
    • Truth Until Paradox
    • Penny Dreadful
    • Vampire: The Masquerade clan novels and other novels
    • Werewolf: The Apocalypse tribe novels and other novels
    • Mage: The Ascension novels
    • Wraith: The Oblivion novels
    • Changeling: The Dreaming novels
    • Demon: The Fallen novels
    • Mummy: The Resurrection novels
    • Various crossover novels
  • Warhammer 40,000
• The setting of the Malazan Book of the Fallen series was born out of Dungeons & Dragons and GURPS. Its two creators, Steven Erikson and Ian Cameron Esslemont, found the former's structure too restricting and set out to create their own setting using GURPS rules. Most of the series' first volume, Gardens of the Moon, was gamed, as well as — according to Word of God — many key events up to and including the series' finale.
• Record of Lodoss War was based in large part on a Dungeons & Dragons campaign. It's pretty obvious to anyone familiar with the game. Pretty much every character falls squarely within the standard Fighter, Mage, Thief format, along with more subtle things such as Clerics casting spells as prayers (and focusing on Healing Magic and Status Buffs), as opposed to Wizards learning spells out of books.
• Slayers A bunch of characters of different classes go on adventures, learn new skills, & do quests to make money, & sell any loot they find to merchants.
• David Weber's The War Gods series was born out of his personal game.
• The Wandering Inn: The universe in which Erin finds herself mirrors typical fantasy game settings, down to some of the creatures, like gnolls and rock crabs, originating in games such as Dungeons and Dragons and Runescape.

Live-Action TV

• The short-lived series Kindred: The Embraced counts, being a loose adaption of White Wolf's popular roleplaying game Vampire: The Masquerade.

Video Games

• Arc the Lad - the game came before the anime.

Web Comics

• Many webcomics take place in a more or less literal Role Playing Game Verse.
  • Looking for Group
  • The Order of the Stick
  • 8-Bit Theater
  • Goblins: Life Through Their Eyes
  • Weregeek takes this to extremes and has a dozen of individual gaming storylines set in distrinct RPG Verses and running parallel to the Real Life plot.
  • Keychain of Creation
  • Rusty and Co.
  • Friendship is Dragons
  • Our Little Adventure
  • Erfworld is based more on a turn-based strategy game than an RPG, but the strategy game it's based on has lots of RPG-ish mechanics, like individual units "leveling" based on experience. The inhabitants are so aware of game mechanics that it strikes them as odd that Parson (an import from our world) doesn't just innately know that units can't move across "hex boundaries" unless it's their side's "turn".
• MSF High definitely qualifies, though it's not immediately obvious. Switches to the sister trope when characters become Inspired, a specific class.
• Problem Sleuth is both this and an Adventure Game Verse, leaning more heavily towards RPG mechanics in the later half of the series.
  • Homestuck also utilizes many RPG tropes, especially once the game of Sburb starts.
• Cucumber Quest is brimming with Affectionately parodied RPG story tropes. Although RPG game mechanics have not been significantly referenced in-story, the site's character bio page actually assigns RPG stats to each character.
• Amya is based on a tabletop RPG played by the authors, with adjustments to fit the webcomic format. The character sheet mentions character classes, and the comic proper mentions kolyaruts and tanglefoot bags by name.
• morphE is an adaptation of a Mage: The Awakening game and goes out of its way to explain game mechanics in-universe. The end of chapter 2 deals with a character expending all of his mana and needing to be introduced to tass to replenish his supply.
• Tower of God has several different character classes, scouts, close-range fighters, long range fighters, magicians, and a Mission Control character class in which each cast member falls. They do this to have a functional team in their quest to reach the top of the Tower, scaling it floor by floor, in other words level by level. Their equipment and basic skills^note  most characters have frickin' stat cards in the manual are from F to A with a special S Class and decimal sub units (10-1). And once the Regulars reach the top, they get ranked based on how they performed during their ascension. The best thing about it: it takes some time until you notice that due to how the concepts are interwoven with the narrative so that they make sense in-universe and contribute to creating a believable world, rather than present themselves as arbitrary and making sense strictly to the outside observer.
• Crystal Heroes takes place in a stock RPG setting moved to the present technologically and culturally, and the characters do refer to dungeons, bosses, and white and black magic by name, but it stops short of being an RPG Mechanics 'Verse.

Western Animation

• The Dungeons & Dragons (1983) cartoon.
• Wakfu, based on the computer RPG of the same name, takes place in a monster-filled, medieval-ish world inhabited by various fantastic races with different magical abilities.
• The Futurama movie "Bender's Game" takes place partly in Cornwood, the setting to a Dungeons & Dragons game that some of the characters were playing earlier in the movie.
• The world of Adventure Time is so heavily inspired by the classic RPG Dungeons & Dragons that even its own creator has admitted it. The show has presented alignment, class, experience, and gold systems as well as dungeons (being the namesake of an episode), quests, and magical items. Some examples straight out of DnD are the Stoneskin Potion, the frog-gnome-knight, Princess Bubblegum's protective gems, the Dire (Fire) Wolves, the Bag of Holding within Finn's hat, the treasure-vomiting mimics, the slime cube, and the Demon Cat being a Displacement Beast. Several episodes revolve around Finn and Jake exploring the mystical Land of Ooo in search of adventures and those that don't, often start with them just coming out from one of those adventures or charging headfirst into one at the end. Given the characters are very aware of these mechanics, the show hinges on an RPG Mechanics 'Verse.
• The Jumanji cartoon had elements of this, albeit based on a board game rather than a tabletop RPG.
• The Legend of Vox Machina, which is based on the first D&D campaign of Critical Role and as such is brimful of fantastic races, taverns, monsters, overly obstructive doors and the like.

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