Al-Qadim
campaign setting for D&D
Al-Qadim is a campaign setting for the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game which was developed by Jeff Grubb with Andria Hayday for TSR, Inc., and was first released in 1992. Al-Qadim uses One Thousand and One Nights as a theme and is set in the land of Zakhara, called the Land of Fate. Thematically, the land of Zakhara is a blend of the historical Muslim Caliphates, the stories of legend, and a wealth of Hollywood cinematic history. Zakhara is a peninsula on the continent of Faerûn in the world of Toril, the locale of the Forgotten Realms campaign setting, although Al-Qadim is designed to stand on its own or be added to any existing campaign setting. The basic campaign setting was divided between two game products: Al-Qadim: Arabian Adventures, a sourcebook describing character creation rules, equipment, and spells unique to the setting, and Al-Qadim: Land of Fate, a boxed set describing the land of Zakhara, with separate sourcebooks for the players and the Dungeon Master.
Publication
The first Al-Qadim product, Arabian Adventures, was released in 1992. Arabian Adventures presents only the basic rules for playing a D&D game set in a general Arabian setting, much like the Oriental Adventures book. The specific details of the setting are dealt with in later publications.
The Al-Qadim setting was designed with a limited scope, and was intended as a two-year project that was extended one more year beyond that because of its popularity.
Shannon Appelcline commented on Al-Qadim's 1992 release as "an Arabic setting that ended up placed in the southern Forgotten Realms.
The public source identifies “Al-Qadim” as campaign setting for D&D. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Al-Qadim, campaign and setting.
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Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 16, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2829261. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1992.
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This entry incorporates text from “Al-Qadim” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.