Let's try this again...
In a lot of discussions on campaign settings or various facets of.D&D "lore" (cough, Halflings, cough), I see folks focusing a lot on the logical or illogical rules of a fantasy world. How could Halflings societies thrive if they don't interact with other cultures? How could the smithy be a dwarf without there existing large dwarven cities? How could the main city survive without extensive farmlands, and how are those farms not constantly raided by monsters?
I'm always surprised by these issues. I've come to realize it conflicts with a central theme of how I create my homebrew campaign rules:
No aspect of the setting exists if the characters are not interacting with it.
In my campaign settings, I create some very loose ideas about the themes and aspects of the world ("there are vampire tyrants" or "it's all one huge kingdom"). But any specifics are kept undefined unless the characters need them (or unless the players show interest). Though the campaign world looks fleshed out and immersive, behind the characters' backs it's all foggy and insubstantial.
I completely get this - it's an extension of the idea of leaving blank areas on the map to fill in later as required.
But, one thing I've I've learned (sometimes the hard way) is that the hazard with keeping things too foggy and insubstantial is that things in the game world influence other things, and prior knowledge of something's existence may have caused the PCs to have made different decisions in the past than what they did.
For example, at the start of my current campaign there was a big blank area in the map north of what was intended to be the primary adventuring area. Sure enough, before long the PCs went there, so a few towns etc. appeared on the map and that area has since become quite important in the ongoing campaign.
Fortunately, those towns etc. appeared early enough that it didn't matter; but were I to do this now I risk invalidating decisions made ages ago on the assumption there's nothing out that way.
Here's an example of what I mean:
In a recent campaign, one of the characters was a cleric of Arawan, god of death. I made sure Arawan had a presence in the campaign world, but I did not have any other firm truths about religion. (No player showed much interest in religion during character creation, so it didn't get detailed.) During one adventure, the characters came upon a huge turtle in a swamp. I'd decided this was the spirit form of an animal god once worshiped in the valley. The characters were really interested, so after that session I created a pantheon of animal gods. Some were still worshiped, some were forgotten, others were corrupted.
As the campaign went on, one of the players became really invested in these animal gods. He started theorizing that they weren't gods, just powerful beings who had tricked the people of the valley into worshiping them.
Well of course that became the truth!
These animal gods became a very important part of the campaign.
Pantheons are something I always want pretty much nailed down before play begins, in that (thinking meta-game here) if a player wants to run a Cleric it's only fair that said player know what all the options are, and the basics of what's involved with each, when looking to pick a deity to follow during roll-up.
It's only when play moves to a whole new part of the world that I get to dream up new deities for that area.
Meanwhile, other seeds I'd planted for interesting ideas were either ignored by the players, or not interacted with by the characters. I either shelved those ideas, or changed them so they'd come up later. For example, I had a slime-focused dungeon that I modified and leveled up three different times because the characters didn't choose to go into it in the first two locations. It went from a polluted coastal island to an abandoned swamp temple to an ancient alchemy lab. Once the characters explored the alchemy lab, those other potential dungeons ceased to exist.
Where I'd leave those other dungeons out there, waiting for some other group of adventurers - who may or may not be PCs or even have anything else to do with anything - to find and deal with. I mean, hey, you can never have too many dungeons in a setting, right?
Perhaps worth noting here that I
never assume the PCs are the only adventurers in the setting, as such just doesn't make sense in a setting where adventurers need trainers and PCs might need replacing.
So what do you think? How do you run it? Is your campaign setting realized and existing even without character interaction? Or do you only detail what the characters are interested in?
Neither. I detail the areas and things and some people the characters
might interact with, such that if-when they do it's ready to rock and I'm not making it all up on the fly. Further-away things are rough-sketched only, and further-away yet doesn't exist except as maybe the vaguest of ideas in my head.
So, using geography as an example, at the start of the current campaign I had an area well-mapped about the size of Washington-Oregon states combined; and an area less-well mapped that would cover, on Earth, roughly Baja up to the arctic circle N-S and Denver to the west coast E-W. Over time those maps have slowly expanded; the less-well-mapped area now goes way into the southern hemisphere and somewhat farther east and west (particularly north-west) than before, while more and more patches of well-mapped area are appearing as PCs and parties spend time there.
But I've still got well over 3/4 of the world's surface that has yet to be mapped.
