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Message: <blockquote data-quote="roguerouge" data-source="post: 4523176" data-attributes="member: 13855">1. Settings without attached adventures. Adventures help bring settings alive and demonstrate the flavor of the setting. Without them, settings are like reading the encyclopedia. Example: if I'm going to run Nyambe's setting, I need help. I don't know African mythology, spirituality, and culture. I need you to help me bring it alive by using adventures to showcase how these pieces fit together. I need there to be a section on various African name styles. I need a starter village/hunter-gatherer group to help me get a sense of how this new construction of family works to shape identity. The one first level module that I've found doesn't cut it. There needs to be several for me to make use of a setting. 2. There needs to be a hook. If your setting hasn't sold me by the end of the setting teaser, it's not going to be something that I'm going to spend several years DMing, because likely it has no cohesion and it will be impossible to entice players. Think about the first words that you'd use to describe the best known settings out there: Environmental Apocalypse (Dark Sun); The Gods and Dragons Are Returning (Dragonlance); a Nightmare World (Ravenloft); Steampunk Meets Pulp (Ebberon); High Fantasy (Greyhawk, Forgotten Realms); Extraplanar Wackiness (Planescape).3. It helps if there is a signature monster or antagonist. Nothing sold me on Paizo's world more than their re-imagined goblins. Those nasty, funny, and vicious little gremlins were another insight into what the creators are trying to do with their realm and what drama you can concoct. Think of the drow, of Strahd, in this light.4. And leave parts of the map "unwritten." For the vast majority of the world's history we didn't know every culture on it; there are still parts of the ocean's deeps we haven't explored. Give DMs a place to have PCs go on exploration adventures of an undiscovered country. Or, if you must "fill in" the map, at least make it such that some cultures are unaware of other cultures. You have to know about a place to think to scry a place.</blockquote>

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