"Cool setting, bro. But what's the hook for the PCs?"

[Aldarc]

But that stuff is irrelevant in most campaigns, especially early. What does it matter who the king of the Great Kingdom or Nyrond is if the bulk of the campaign is going to take place in a half-dozen hexes in Ulek and the Lortmils?

One of my friends had just finished running us through Rise of the Runelords PF1. He wanted to GM a game of the relatively freshly released 5e D&D, but he wanted to run it in a homebrew. I advised him to start small and local, focusing only on the town and the surrounding environs. The two of us brainstormed a simple location: the town of Dragonfall, a town founded on a mound where, according to legend, a hero killed a green dragon. After that point, I let him do the rest. About a week later, he was telling me that he had calculated the number of days, its calendar, the size of the planet, and everything according to the physics. We were barely a month into the game when he burned out, partially due to all his efforts. Our group switched to board games, and I would occasionally GM one-shots. But that became a morality tale for me on the dangers of world-building into too much detail.

 

[Don Durito]

If you're playing in a small area then the big specific setting things you need to know are things that go all the way down.

Say you are in the Eyre valley. If the whole setting is recovering from a magical cataclysmic war then that should affect the valley in some way too. It would feel strange to add it later.

You need the really big picture stuff*, and the really small picture. It's the stuff in the middle that is fairly irrelevant.

*You can get away without this, but if you're trying to do something that's your own and not just a collection of generica then you should give some thought to this.

 

[Haffrung]

Are you familiar with Fourth Edition's Nentir Vale? It matches rather neatly what you say you like best.

Yes, and it’s one of the few settings I feel was scaled for boots-the-ground adventure. I was disappointed 4e was mothballed before the Nentir Vale gazetteer was published. Even the Threats of the Nentire Vale monster book was a more practical and inspiring book for running a campaign than most D&D setting guides.

 

[macd21]

Yes, and it’s one of the few settings I feel was scaled for boots-the-ground adventure. I was disappointed 4e was mothballed before the Nentir Vale gazetteer was published. Even the Threats of the Nentire Vale monster book was a more practical and inspiring book for running a campaign than most D&D setting guides.

That’s really just a matter of taste. The Nentir Vsle was entirely uninspiring for me, whereas Eberron, the Forgotten Realms or Dark Sun provides me with much more inspiring material.

 

[darkbard]

Yes, and it’s one of the few settings I feel was scaled for boots-the-ground adventure. I was disappointed 4e was mothballed before the Nentir Vale gazetteer was published. Even the Threats of the Nentire Vale monster book was a more practical and inspiring book for running a campaign than most D&D setting guides.

Preferring games that lean towards "no myth" settings, the details of MTttNV and Fallcrest in the DMG are more than enough detail for me. But if you're interested in a collection of all bits of lore from across the various 4E product line as they relate to the NV, you can do no better than @Zeromaru X's outstanding fan gazetteer: A Nentir Vale Gazetteer - The Piazza

 

[pemerton]

@Aldarc, that's a provocative OP. It prompts a number of thoughts in me. I'll post some of them!

What makes for a good setting premise as it relates to the PCs? I want a setting to provide genre and tropes. In D&D or comparable FRPGing, that means I need forests (for elves and goblins), mountains (for dwarves and orcs), a city or two (for thieves and barons and merchants), maybe an uncharted desert or a hidden plateau, etc.

I ran a 30-level 4e D&D campaign using the inside gatefold-cover map from the B/X module Night's Dark Terror. I haven't done a precise comparison but it's probably similar in size to the Nentir Vale. And it ticks all the boxes. From mid-paragon a lot of the action took place "off the map" - in the Underdark (where I maintained a simple 1 page sketch map) or on other planes.

My Burning Wheel campaigns (both the one I GM and the one I play in) use the Greyhawk maps. The middle of those maps has Celene for elves, the Lortmils for dwarves, the Pomarj for Orcs, Greyhaw, Dyvers and Hardby as cities, the Bright Desert, pirates along the Wild Coast, etc. It's excellent for tropes.

I don't generally need details of the sort some other posters have mentioned. That can be worked out as required, in play. But some names and places to kick things off are helpful. (In our Prince Valiant game the map of Britain on the inside cover of Pendragon, plus maps of Europe, North Africa and West Asia c 800 CE taken from a historical atlas serve much the same purpose.)

In my Classic Traveller game most of the worlds are randomly generated (using the relevant mechanical procedure) but they are not fully random in their relationship to one another - some of that has been worked out during play to support the direction of play - and some of their key features have been worked out directly in response to player interest for their PCs: it's because one PC is all about finding alien civilisations, and another is all about learning psionic powers, that currently the PCs are excavating a 2 billion year old alien-constructed psionically-oriented pyramid complex embedded in 4 km of ice. (The fact that there are also psionically inclined xeno-morph-y aliens, on the other hand, is a GM-introduced thing inspired by reading about the new Alien RPG on these boards a year or so ago.)

 

[doctorbadwolf]

But that stuff is irrelevant in most campaigns, especially early. What does it matter who the king of the Great Kingdom or Nyrond is if the bulk of the campaign is going to take place in a half-dozen hexes in Ulek and the Lortmils?

“Most campaigns” that you see, perhaps.

 

[Voadam]

I am a bit boggled that people seem to be claiming the Forgotten Realms does not address anything besides adventure sites and rulers, particularly that it does not address trade. It seems like it has a ton of description and focus at most every level down to window styles and chatting about individual bakeries.

I just looked up the first country listed in the 1e campaign setting to see what is said in there and in the 3e core book about trade in that country.

1e Campaign Setting page 22

Aglarond lies on the northern side of a peninsula jutting out into the eastern end of the Inner Sea. It is a sparsely-inhabited, heavily-wooded realm of few farms and no large cities. Jagged pinnacles of rock stand at its tip, and run along the spine of its lands; to the east, these fall away into vast and treacherous marshes that largely isolate The Simbul's realm from the mainland. Travel in Aglarond is by griffon, ship, or forest trails. It trades lumber, gems, and some copper for glass, iron, cloth goods, and food when freetrading vessels come to port. Aglarond, however, sends out no trading ships of its own.

3e Campaign Setting page 199

Aglarond
Capital: Velprintalar
Population: 1,270,080 (humans 64%, half-elves 30%, elves 5%)
Government: Autocratic (with representative council of advisors)
Religions: Chauntea, the Seldarine, Selûne, Umberlee (disdained), Valkur
Imports: Glass, iron, textiles
Exports: Copper, gems, grain, lumber, wine

The 3e one also has discussions about logging and human elven conflicts about it as well as how some isolated coastal human areas rely upon fishing.

and overall for trade routes see pages 88-89:

 

[Jd Smith1]

I am a bit boggled that people seem to be claiming the Forgotten Realms does not address anything besides adventure sites and rulers, particularly that it does not address trade. It seems like it has a ton of description and focus at most every level down to window styles and chatting about individual bakeries.

I just looked up the first country listed in the 1e campaign setting to see what is said in there and in the 3e core book about trade in that country.

1e Campaign Setting page 22


3e Campaign Setting page 199

The 3e one also has discussions about logging and human elven conflicts about it as well as how some isolated coastal human areas rely upon fishing.

and overall for trade routes see pages 88-89:

True, but that was twenty years and several lore changes ago.

The quality of information has declined since then.

 

[Voadam]

As much as the original Greyhawk folio and its poster map were totemic to my early days of D&D, it was pretty much useless as a campaign setting. If a campaign is supposed to aid the DM in defining and running his world, Greyhawk is at far too large of a scale for be useful in that respect.

Let's say I want to start a campaign in, say, Keoland. The folio entry tells me how many soldiers of various sorts the king of Keoland can raise, some of the goods it trades, and a bit about the demographic makeup of the place. How does that help me actually write an adventure? I still need to create a town or two, the nearby ruins, the dungeons, and come up with all of the factions and threats. The geography is barely sketched out, and the scale of 30 miles per hex means I'll likely play the first 10-15 or so sessions of the campaign in a single hex. As a setting, Greyhawk is far better suited to a nation vs nation wargame than boots-on-the-ground RPG adventures.

I just don't get the practical benefit of campaigns created at such a scale. If the DM still has to do 98 per cent of the work when creating adventures, why not just go the whole distance and make up the campaign from scratch? The only real value of Greyhawk for me was the classic map.

First, the last line of the Keoland entry is "conflict with the Sea Princes continues to plague the realm." so if I was looking for a setting hook to lead into adventure I would start there. Otherwise it is a backdrop that tells you humans, elves, gnomes, and halflings all live together so I would try and go with that generally for NPCs unless I wanted someone specifically to be known as an exotic Stonefist barbarian or Baklunish wizard.

Another way to think of it would be as a way for PCs to root themselves in the world. It gives them some political history to build off of in thinking about their character, perhaps inspiring someone to come up with a reason their dwarf is there, or how rooted their gnome is in a community, whether they saw action against the Sea Princes, or whatever. Knowing they are in Keoland in the World of Greyhawk gives them a frame of reference to riff off of.