Good morning Gary.
First off I wanted to say I've finally gotten all my questions straight on LA - thanks for guiding me towards the rules forums. I also recently finally got my first copies of C&C books. LA most definitely appeals to me as a player, and I hope to make it down to Lake Geneva for the next Trolls convention. C&C, as I suspected, is everything I've been looking for for years, and so I'm gonna go with it from here on for the games I run - looking forward to purchasing the CZ material soon as well (all this I'm sure will make Peter and the Tolllords feel good).
Which brings me to my questions for the day - having gotten so excited with all this new material I realized I wanted to develop my own campaign setting and world - I've done this once before on a limited basis, but this time I wanted to start from scratch and I got really into it. Having lots of time at home taking care of my wife after surgery certainly prompted this as well. I got inspired, hand-drew a small rough map and then in two days detailed on two poster-boards my main continent and sub-continents. I developed the races, the specific branches of humanity, then the history and religious outlines, now I'm working on brief descriptions of nations and regions. I am tying this to C&C, but trying to make it general enough (no detailed stats) to be used with any system.
So, with apologies for such a lengthy start, here are my questions about your thoughts on developing a campaign setting:
1. Do you think it's a good idea to have at least one nation, region personify "evil" in an overt way (i.e. Iuz), and conversely locate one state that is overtly "good"?
2. My intention is to keep Gods more mystically removed from the setting - rather they created the world, are the source of divine powers, but do not interact, intervene or select "chosen" NPCs to run around delivering deus ex machinas. How directly do you feel divinities should be involved in a campaign setting?
3. The theory I'm preceding with here is that (in my humble opinion) campaign settings are best when they give just enough info to understand the world and its environs, and offer enough regions and lands for the diversity of adventures and encounters without burdening the players or GM's with the need to "reference" or check too much backstory or canon beyond what the GM is running in the campaign. To me this was what your original Greyhawk was about, and since then I've yet to run across a setting that offers that spark of excitement that I got when I first bought the boxed set back in 1982. TSR/WOTC have Metastoried Greyhawk over the years (and I know how you feel on that one) so that it has too much baggage now, Forgotten Realms was always an overpowered, over-deified nightmare to me, Drangonlance is cool, but Weiss's great stories have made it more of a setting for fiction rather than RPG (when I tried to do a campaign my players knew the damn world by heart, HAD to start in Solace, HAD to meet "famous" NPC's, etc.) - hence why I'm making my own.
So the question here with this is how much information do you think it is important to give in developing a world setting? What are the basics that I should cover if I want to offer it to others to play?
Thanks,
John W. Wright
![:]](http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/devious.png "Devious :]")
