How do you design your campaign setting?

[nedjer]

id players' preferred styles of play, set out some flavour to look over and listen to what kinds of crime, butt to be kicked, commerce, politics, intrigue . . . the players talk about.

 

[Lanefan]

Though it does make me think that there's a difference between designing a setting for the purpose of showcasing a conflict, or designing settings as primary and devising conflicts to showcase the setting. Dark Sun and Midnight aren't about carousing, because the settings are built to set up basic ongoing conflicts for survival. On the other hand, Al-Qadim's built to deliver an Arabian Fantasy experience, so its conflicts are designed to showcase Arabian Fantasy. That's probably something to keep in mind as part of any discussion about the setting design process.

Truth be told, that's deeper than I ever analyze it when building a world.

That said, the first big campaign I ran was supposed to be built around a war and it really didn't come off well at all; so I'm more than willing to allow you're on to something here.

Lanefan

 

[Starfox]

That can be quite interesting, sure! And sometimes the settings are implied-pessimistic, or at least implied-cynical; the "penal colony in a dungeon" campaign didn't have a lot of leisure time and expensive taverns. It can be very engaging and challenging when your victories are measured in how little ground you give up, rather than how much ground you gain.

It is also a lovely example of when you construct the setting around the story you're about to tell.

 

[Terath Ninir]

First, I get out my copy of the 2e World Builder's Guidebook by Richard Baker. Yes, 2e. It never fails to get my ideas flowing.

Second, I think about what I want. I want the PCs to be able to move between lots of different areas and do lots of different adventures easily. I'm kinda flaky, frankly, and I get bored with a single setting or type of adventure pretty quickly.

Third, I think about what my players want. One player is my 8 year old son. The others play in the same Exalted game I do. So the adventurers are going to be light on the intrigue, moderate on the plot, and heavy on the hack and slash. 8 year olds like killing things. Exalted does many things, but it doesn't let you just trash enemies left and right.

With those things in hand, I let my imagination run wild.

 

[The Shaman]

So, how do you design your homebrew campaign settings?

In the beginning, my settings were 'the dungeon' and the immediate environs - the Temple of the Frog in Blackmoor, El Dorado County in Boot Hill, and the Warden in Matamorphosis Alpha strongly influenced how I saw roleplaying game settings.

Later I began to take a more top-down approach, starting with the world as a whole and drilling down to a starting point for the adventurers.

Now I tend to start with as much setting as I feel I need to run the game I'm running. For my Flashing Blades campaign that meant starting with Paris and a few other cities and working my way out to the whole of France, with notes on the rest of Europe and the New World. For Boot Hill, it's still El Dorado County, with the understanding that it sits in "The Territory," a vaguely defined 'somewhere in the Southwest' locale. For my Top Secret campaign, it's like a spy movie - different cities, secret bases, and so forth. For the megadungeon project I toy with from time to time but will likely never seriously attempt to develop, it's the dungeon, a town, and the environs, again with some notes on what lies beyond the hinterland. For the Traveller game I ran awhile back, it was one subsector in the Third Imperium, with extensive notes on the larger sector.

What do you look for in published settings? - to run whole or piecemeal to your homebrew?

If I like a published setting, I run it more-or-less whole - then again, I tend to pick settings that provide opportunities to extensively personalize them, like Charted Space for Traveller, El Dorado County for Boot Hill, the Warden for Metamorphosis Alpha or the Wilderlands for D&D. I use other settings for inspiration, but I don't lift chunks from them and plop them into a homebrew setting.

What makes a fun campaign setting for you? - As a DM? - As a Player?

I think settings benefit from diversity. I want geographical diversity - deep oceans, shallow seas, soaring mountains, sweeping plains, trackless forests, sweltering jungles. I want cultural diversity - this is one of the reasons I tend to like real-world settings more than any other, because few fictional settings even attempt to come close to the real world. I want metaphysical diversity - gods and magic and monsters and a world that reflects all of this.

I think some referees get a good idea for something, then try to build a setting around it and end up writing themselves into a corner. A diverse environment makes for diverse adventure opportunities. I think a good setting, of any size, should be able to handle exploration, investigation, politics, and feat of derring-do.

What are some examples of great campaign setting design?

Other than the settings I mentioned above, I like Pacific City (from The Nocturnals) for Mutants and Masterminds, the Old World for WFRP, Arthurian England for Pendragon, and Manifest (from Ghostwalk).

 

[AeroDm]

I always intend to design a setting that will be long lasting and can maintain many campaigns without revision, but it rarely happens. Ultimately, during play, I realize that the players crafted characters they genuinely care about and every session expose them to death at my hands. To hold back and not let my world be similarly impacted and threatened at the player's hands feels a bit one-sided. More specifically, the main way by which I can maintain setting integrity and not *have* to remake it is by not letting the plot get so epic that it changes the world. But that seems unfair. The players and DM are, by and large, making the same sacrifice to play D&D--time. They should both risk the same for the same reward--the ability to substantively change the game.

As a result, I try not to design *too* much. Things like cultures, myths, items, etc all port easily from one locale to the next. Most of what I design for a "setting" is the specific plot of a campaign and some new maps and NPCs.

 

[Janx]

Good thread topic.

The last campaign world I built (also a campaign) was a D&D version of Babylon5. However, I followed my same general process.

First, I figured out my core concept. Namely, this was going to be a naval and militaristic campaign. It was also going to follow the human side of things. By requiring everybody to start out with humans and be in the military, it basically gave me a platform for getting them started down the adventure path of what the show was about. I also had to be prepared for them to deviate. I figured, that I should expect that for the first few missions, the party may follow orders, but if things get wierd, they'll go mutiny and become pirates and be prepared to run with that.

Once I have that core nugget of what the game is about (human Navy guys getting involved in big political stuff), I needed a map. I google up whatever current tools are out for random world map generation. I found a fractal generator that gave me a watery world with lots of islands. The ocean represents space, and the islands represent planets.

I then mapped out the main races that would appear. All the PH races got mapped to the show's races (plus a few monster races) and I gave them new names to disguise them for flavor. I made elves be Minbari, dwarves be Narn, and Gnomes be Centauri (which I thought would be a nice unexpected twist). I even did a few portraits for some flavor (easy to do with a light table).

With the map in place, and the races figured out, I then zoomed in on the things that matter. Namely the human island. it figured in the center of the map. I made up a few places, to show where the various classes would train up. I documented the kind of government (a monarchy with a senate). I even took the US Uniform Code of Military Justice and chopped it up, and replaced keywords to build the new law code the military followed just for flavor (took a few hours, but was easy).

I made some notes on the religions, namely the human ones, so I could cover what the clerics could worship.

For wizards, I made the Human's Circle of Magic, an government mandated organization for wizards (humans had no sorcerors). This was analagous to PsiCorp.

At that point, I was mostly set. I hadn't built out any islands specifically,

I decided to set the timeline to before the earth-minbari war, so the players could level up, experience the world pre-war, and have a big climax at the Battle of the Line.

The adventures leading up to the battle of the line were just made up, per what the PCs wanted to do, and what made sense to be happening as missions. My core goal was to get them invested in the PCs and in the outcome of the war.

After the Battle of the Line, I made 5 years pass, and glossed over what happened so they could get to my version of Babylon5, an Island trading and diplomacy post. Where I put all the PCs in charge of various aspects.
And then they played out some aspects of season 1 before external factors killed the campaign.

Getting the time line up to match the show is where I had considerable danger. At that point, I had parallels for PCs to TV characters. Where applicable, I used that to recycle episodes for hooks. I also chopped out a lot, because I wanted their experience to be divergent in some ways.

Over all, the campaign went well, and in reality, I didn't generate a lot of game material. Certainly not more than I needed.