If you've read my fiction blog, Dispatches From Otherworld, you'll know that I'm fascinated with taking fantasy out of its medieval time period. A big part of that is Stephen King's Dark Tower series, which I read over the course of my senior year of high school and freshman year of college (the latter was when the last book came out.)
I was delighted when Dimension 20 did their Unsleeping City game - a D&D game set in a magical version of New York City, where the hidden "Sixth Borough" of Nod and its dream magic leaked into the rest of the city.
A lot of modern-set fantasy does this sort of Magical Realism thing - setting things in our familiar world, but introducing elements of magic. Harry Potter, the massively popular novels written by a disappointingly transphobic author, is probably the best example of what I'd call heightened magical realism, where the magical world is still the core of the story (and not just a metaphor for some other element of the story) but is hidden away to explain why we aren't aware of it.
What I'm interested is, instead, is true fantasy set in a world that is recognizably modern. To make it a full on fantasy world, it needs a couple elements:
It has to have its own history and geography. Admittedly, you can sometimes fudge this - things like His Dark Materials or Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrel are both set in our world, but with alternate histories that make magical elements major elements of that history. But I think it's fun to just invent new histories and people wholecloth.
Naturally, it's also got to have some known supernatural element.
This, to me, is what you need to make it high fantasy.
For D&D purposes, you'll want to have a place for multiple humanoid races, with their own histories informing their place in the world.
But to make it modern, you need a couple other elements:
First, I think you need to have modern technology. Cars, airplanes, phones, firearms, radio, television, and likely computers and internet, are all going to be things that distinguish the setting as a modern one. Notably, the source of that technology does not need to be the same. A perfect example of this is Final Fantasy VII (which, to be honest, is a great example of the entire concept of a modern fantasy setting,) with its Mako-driven economy.
Another element is the use of other forms of government. Now, of course, Republics and Democracies have been around for thousands of years, but fantasy tends toward medieval-style kingdoms. While you can have these sorts of things in a modern setting, consider making them UK-style constitutional monarchies, where the royalty is a figurehead for an otherwise democratic society.
Mind you, things don't have to be great - depending on how pleasant you want your setting to be, you might have totalitarian police states, or, you could engage in a critical eye toward even so-called democratic societies that are plagued by systemic problems and hypocritical failures to live up to their declared ideals.
I'd recommend avoiding any direct correlations. Even with good intentions, literally dehumanizing real-world cultures by representing them with non-human races can be problematic, especially if default humans are clearly based on white westerners (I love you, WoW, but you're super guilty of this.) That being said, there are universal themes to explore regarding the challenges of integrating disparate cultures in a more interconnected world, and with the invented history of a fantasy world, you can do this in a way that deals with it in the abstract.
Generally speaking, I think that a modern D&D world will feel more explored, more mapped out. The sprawl of civilization in the modern age means there's far less "wilderness" than there was in medieval times.
But here, you can take one of the important elements of fantasy - making the setting itself magical.
In our world, there isn't (at least there doesn't seem to be) some powerful, conscious, deliberate entity to the natural world that defends itself. The natural disasters that things like carbon emissions have brought on is more the result of humanity negligently digging away its own environmental support structure for short-term gains. But in a fantasy world, the land itself could be conscious, and the forests and other natural environments might consciously rise up against the sprawl of civilization, like air elementals attacking jetliners for polluting their home.
Civilization itself does not need to be the enemy, though (as a humanist, I'm against that kind of blanket worldview) and you could introduce fiendish manipulators as metaphors for the greed and brutality that we see in modern society.
You don't have to have any real political agenda, of course, to your setting, and simply imagine how magic and technology and modern political philosophy might interact with one another. Is there a government department regulating magic? Are there big-box stores for magic items? Have "monstrous" races integrated into society?
In terms of gameplay, maybe the industrialization of magic has made magic items far easier to come by. Perhaps travel by teleportation circle is something everyone can achieve simply by going to the local "Tele-Port." Perhaps the Lich's phylactery isn't in some ancient ruin, but is hidden in a storage facility off in some other city.
You could choose to make the supernatural elements of the settings very different from typical D&D - maybe focusing on a kind of UFO-like alien menace. But I think you can also have a lot of fun in making it the very same sorts of issues you find in other D&D settings - dragons, demons, undead, and monsters - but just have them appear in a modern context. Imagine the Tarrasque smashing steel-and-glass skyscrapers like the Kaiju that clearly inspired it.
And through this modern context, you might see other planes in a similar context. They've already kind of played with this idea in Baldur's Gate: Descent into Avernus, with the Infernal War Machines, that seem more at home in a Mad Max movie than your typical knights-on-horseback fantasy story.
If you have the time and energy, you could imagine how your setting might have started as a classically medieval setting and then underwent an industrial revolution and political change to transform into this modern version. Don't be afraid, if you do this, for there to have been some massive upheavals to get us here, as that will provide tons of story fuel.
Fame, of course, is an element of stories dating back as long as stories have existed, but the global nature of modern media will also allow you to play games with how famous your player characters get as they achieve greater feats of heroism (or villainy.) That might be great for your Bard or Paladin, but less so for other members of the party. Villains might not simply try to assassinate the heroes as they achieve greater things, but instead perform character assassinations to try to turn the public against them.
Mingling technology and magic can also provide some exciting potential - maybe ghostly spirits can travel via electrical wire, so that a vengeful spirit might pursue them through the internet.
Campaigns in such a setting could take various forms - a long journey might be a road trip (which I guess is what FFXV is - seriously, Final Fantasy has been doing this for a while) and a dark, haunted citadel might be a corporate skyscraper (FFVII) or some heavily-guarded military base.
I think there's a ton of potential in modern fantasy, and D&D is a versatile enough system that you could make it work in such a setting pretty easily.
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