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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Calico_Jack73" data-source="post: 1440251" data-attributes="member: 14403">Normally I use a commercially published campaign setting.  Skip down to #3 if you are doing the same.1) I get a rough idea for a theme for my campaign world.  The theme is what is important more than anything else as it will be what sets it apart from other worlds.  As an example, think of the Forgotten Realms and Greyhawk.  Nothing really sets them apart, they are the vanilla flavor of campaign settings.  Now look at Midnight, Scarred Lands, and Ravenloft.  They all have an overlying theme to the setting.  In Midnight the campaign centers around the PCs as members of a resistance against a dark god that has conquered the world.  In Scarred Lands the world is recovering from a RECENT war between the gods and the titans (Elven characters may even have lived through it).  Ravenloft has an overlying gothic horror theme but I have just as much fun running a survival horror campaign with it.  I can't emphasise how important this is.  In the Forgotten Realms if the party destroyed a nearby goblin encampment they'd be lauded as heros by the locals.  In Midnight they'd probably be run out of town or betrayed.  In that setting a Legate (priest of the dark god) accompanied by a Orcish patrol would soon arrive to find out what happened and would destroy the town for the trouble that was caused by the party.  Two different consequences to the same situtation based upon the theme of the campaign setting.2) I then map out the local area where the campaign is going to start.  The rest of the world isn't important because in all liklihood the players (if they are from that local area) don't know much about the outside world except for rumors they have heard.  Expand your map as you go, that way you aren't constrained by geography that you've previously come up with.3) You may find this funny but I sit down and watch TV and not just Sci-Fi/Fantasy types of shows.  CSI, 24, and Law & Order all have great plots that you can use.  If terrorists are trying to release a biological agent in a city you can do the same thing in your campaign setting with the players trying to stop a demonic plague from being released.  Take the main plot line and twist it to fit your setting.  Don't railroad by providing only one method of success (what was on the TV show), just use the main plot to define your point of conflict and let the players come up with their own way to thwart it.4) Once I have an "Overplot" I'll then work out the important NPC's and Villans.  I also give some thought to likely tactics and jot them down so my villans fight intelligently.  I then print out a spreadsheet with 100 names on it that I can quickly use to assign names to minor NPC's.  I use EBON (Everchanging Book of Names) for this.Hope this all helped!<a href="http://ebon.uni.cc/" target="_blank">Link for the Everchanging Book of Names</a></blockquote>

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