Building a campaign setting

 

Welcome back after a long hiatus (nearly 2 years), I have been writing, just not anything blog related.  Life got complicated for a bit and I never made my way back to this.  You may eventually see something on one of those many projects, but it is not this day.

 

 

We are back to talk about setting creation, an inevitability in the life of a game master.  Eventually you will want to put your own imprint on the game you are running, maybe even wanting to have multiple campaigns that share a setting.  This could be because you want less of a kitchen sink setting that what many of the generic rpg settings have, or perhaps it is because you dislike how some specific species is represented.  Regardless of the reason, you feel the need to create your own.  I may eventually do individual blog posts on some of the ideas you should consider.  The order I list things in below is hardly the only way to do this, but I find it is a logical progression.

The first thing you have to figure out is the rough technology level of the setting, even for fantasy rpgs like D&D or pathfinder this can vary significantly from stone age through to the renaissance.  Do you want guns?  How common is worked metal?  While this seems like a minor detail, the technology level of a setting has a huge impact on how it feels.  Are there specific technologies that your setting doesn’t have?  For example maybe horses were never domesticated/don’t exist.  Missing technologies can help make a setting stand out from others.  Maybe different parts of your world have different levels of technology, it certainly happened in the real world and usually did not work out well for the people who had significantly inferior tech.

What historical things are you inspired by?  This can be linked to the technology level but doesn’t have to be.  Maybe you want an ancient roman republic feel, but with medieval technology.  Or perhaps you want the scheming of Italian city states, but in a less technologically advanced era.  Every work of fiction is inspired by aspects of real life and anyone claiming otherwise is lying or not well read enough to know what the inspiration is, often pulled apart and reassembled in different ways than in the real world.  Speaking of Italian city states, they along with ancient greece are the two main things that I used to come up with the Delosian city states in my Gal Hadre setting.

 

 

Next we come to magic.  How common is it?  How easy is it to learn?  How powerful is magic?  How does magic work?  There are many directions you can go with magic, and all of them impact how the setting plays and feels.  Some worlds everyone can use magic to some extent, others magic is incredibly rare or even once existed and is now lost (or at least thought to be), though perhaps items or places of magical power still exist.  How different would Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones feel if every noble had a wizard or five at his court?  

Are humans the only sentients of your world?  If not, are they the only humanoid sentients?  Like with magic the presence or lack of other intelligent species has a significant impact on the feel of the setting.  Many RPGs have a ton of various species your player characters can be, others have only humans but make up for this by having some way of making characters still feel different outside of their class such as with different cultures that grant different bonuses to characters.  In a D&D/pathfinder setting, the available species will make a significant impact on how your setting feels and the characters available to your players.  If you have classic fantasy species you also need to figure out if they have a culture similar to that of more well known fantasy works, or generic rpg settings.  Staying that way is the easy answer, but you probably started down this road because you wanted to change some things, this can be a good way to do that.  

Lastly before we really get down to building things is if there are any particularly unusual aspects to your setting.  Maybe you have something like stargates that connect different parts of your world, or even different worlds entirely.  Or maybe your primary (or a significant secondary) setting isn’t the main material plane at all.  There is no requirement to have something particularly unusual about your setting, it may even be distracting from the things you really want to focus on.  It would almost certainly be the part of the setting that everyone first notices and talks about.

Now that we have nailed down the defining things about the setting we move into starting to actually build the world.  This brings us to a new question, how much of the world are you wanting to build.  There are two classic ways of doing this, bottom up and top down.  Bottom up you start with one location, maybe a border fortress or a town and start to fill things out there and expand outwards.  This is great if you want to do something that will stay in one very confined area, but can be a ton of effort if you want or need to expand out.  Top down starts with a very shallow overview of the entire world (or at least an entire land) and begins to drill down from there.  This has less detail on any individual part of the world but starts with a much clearer picture of the setting and is my preferred way of doing things.

So what do you think are the most important things to consider when creating a new setting?  Do you prefer bottom up or top down development?  Was there something you think I missed that I should have covered?  Let me know.