Best step by step campaign design advice?

[the Jester]

We've seen them many times over the years; The Campaign Sourcebook and Catacomb Guide, Creative Campaigning, articles in Polyhedron, Dragon, and Dungeon in their turns. But what is the best?

Where do you go for a setting design walkthrough?

All over the place.

The aforementioned CS&CG in one of my favorite 2e books, period, and 2e had a lot of cool books of one kind or another. Dungeoncraft articles are really good, too, and I also remember a great article on a city back in the 1e Dragon period (prolly an issue number in the 70s-90s somewhere) that gave me a wealth of ideas. Hell, there were a lot of great 1e campaign design articles in early Dragon mags.

 

[InVinoVeritas]

Robin's Laws of Good Gamemastering as well ... also kind of hard to find but partially rewritten into DMG II.

Also look for Weather the Cuckoo Likes, also by Robin Laws. Basically, the design philosophy there was:
1. Make something up.
2. When asked about something, answer it immediately.
3. When an inconsistency surfaces as a result... it's not an inconsistency. Add an explanation.

The result might be wacky, but remains plausible, except when it's not.

I also recommend games of Exquisite Cadaver. Basically, only make enough of a world for the next player to run with it, then the next player runs with that, and so on. Soon you have a world that everyone likes, and with plenty of ideas to mine for your next campaign.

As you might guess, I'm a seat-of-the-pants type DM, mostly.

 

[Glyfair]

The Ray Winniger Dungeoncraft articles rocked (and still do rock). They are the best series of world-building articles I have read. I only wish he had kept doing them. That's not to say that Monte and Wolfgang's articles suck. I like them too, but Ray's articles tended to focus more on the world-building pre-game prep side of things, which is what I am most interested in.

The main difference is that Ray's were a step-by-step approach. Once he did it (twice no less), it made more sense for the random topics that Monte & Wolfgang follow.

The only thing I didn't like about Ray's is that he had his way and didn't really cover that there were other good options. Start small and work out isn't the only good way to build a campaign.

 

[KenSeg]

Anyone know of a place where Ray's old articles can be found?

 

[Ry]

Googling dragon magazine ray winniger turns up what looks like a pdf of the text and a webpage with it as well. I don't know if it has his blessing.

 

[Glyfair]

Anyone know of a place where Ray's old articles can be found?

They used to be on the WotC site, before Paizo took over Dragon & Dungeon. Maybe rycanada's links are someone's archives of them.

 

[Mallus]

Step 1: find someone who likes to talk about really nerdy things, say like RPG setting design.

Step 2: find a bar.

Seriously though, I've found the best way to design a setting is to just bounce ideas off of someone who's both enthusiastic and clever, while occassionally jotting things down.