What makes a good campaign world?

[Fallen Seraph]

Some thing I always take into consideration when building a Setting are:

-Chaos Effect: As in, everything influences the other. I personally dislike settings where all manner of different kinds of magic, monsters, races, etc. exist but there is no interplay really between them, there is no shared legacy or history.
-Mystery: A setting that has nothing to reveal and to seek out is no fun in exploring or seeing what is out there. It also gives room to expand upon as you wish.
-Unique Features: Has something different or unusual about it that sets it apart. Perhaps it is as simple as taking themes, or ideas from other genres and placing them into the setting.
-Theme and Atmosphere: Generally a setting is really simply a building block for adventures/plot so having a theme and atmosphere in that setting to help build these adventures is important.
-Start Small and Build Out: This is more with plot/adventure but it plays a roll in how the setting expands, don't have the whole world laid out but have it unravel as the PCs travel. The game and thus the world is only as large as what the PCs see.
Colour Theme: This one is very particular to me since I am somewhat of a artist. But, I love setting colour themes for a setting. For the world, the people, creatures, objects, etc. I find it helps with building descriptions and players build descriptions for their character. It is also something you find pretty universally in movies and such, for instance... Matrix: Lots of white, black, green, grey, and blues. 300: Lots of black, red, tan, yellows and browns.

 

[Wootz]

Something that interests those playing. In my case that would be fantastic settings, interesting NPCs and all that immersive junk.

 

[Oni]

I've been pondering these issues ever since I began developing Urbis. In addition to the issues mentioned above, here is another one which I consider to be fairly important:

It must be digestible.

I like lots of detail in a setting. I thrive on detail. But the average gaming group consists of five or six people, and all of them need to understand the basics of a setting before they can start playing. And not everyone has time to read through 100 or more pages of setting material.

It's easy for the kind of "generic fantasy" settings that D&D exemplifies. Almost everyone has played in the Forgotten Realms or similar settings, and knows all the basic tropes and cliches that go with them. Elves live in the forest, dwarves in the mountains, wizards are mysterious, kings rule over feudal realms, and so on. You don't need to learn much more material to start gaming, especially if you start out in the traditional remote hamlet.

Other settings are much more difficult to digest. This is one of the downsides of settings like Tekumel - no matter how awesome they are, they require massive amounts of information to digest before the players can start making their characters, and thus they remain niche products despite their cult status. The same is true of too many other settings which have fantastic ideas, yet contain too many new concepts to make them easy to run for the typical gaming group.

I think you're really on to something here. When I read the topic the first thing that popped into my mind was how that the FRCS was my favorite 3e book, everytime I pick it up I want to play there. So I was left to figure out what that meant, do I just have common generic taste or is there something more to it. The thing is, it's just such an easy world to put your mind into and generic though it may be, because of that it's easy to envision all the cool little things, the details. It's digestable on all levels of detail. I think a great setting needs to be easy to get the gist of and at the same time inspire a desire to know more. A good setting needs to be simple enough to makes great window dressing because it's easy to see, but should be intriguing enough to make you want to make it more than window dressing.

I'm not sure if I've added anything to conversation, but yay, there you go.