Micro-sized Campaign Worlds

[Capellan]

My Company of the Random Encounter game runs entirely within the Duchy of Galiban, a frontier territory which can be crossed in about a week's travel. There's a world beyond that, of course, but it's pretty nebulous: neither the players, nor their characters, know a lot about it.

You can see pretty much everything I've ever written about the setting here (note that this isn't the same link as in my .sig - the latter is the story hour).

Admittedly, the CotRE is an unusual game, and it might not always be possible to get away with so little setting development, but "home town heroes" in a relatively small geographic area actually seems to work pretty well.

 

[d4]

i played in a year-and-a-half long campaign once where we spent 99% of our time within a day's ride of a medium-size city. it was a lot of fun because we got to know that city very well. we knew which shop owners would give us the best deals on various items, we knew which tavern served the best wine, and we had NPC friends throughout the city. we could feel like we had more of an impact on the world because the campaign setting was so self-contained.

 

[kipling]

Yeah, I've set whole campaigns in a single city. Granted, I did name all the continents and name many of the countries but that was because it was a city that had a lot of tourism, so I wanted to be able to name tourists. We did do one short adventure that went to the pass guarding the entrance to another country, and a longish adventure where we went to the southern tip of the island (big island for this city, bigger than Greenland, but not a continent).

But mostly we got to know the various sections of town and some of the political movers. I can run more adventures there; we haven't in any sense exhausted the setting.

 

[Janx]

Worlds generally get big because a number of PC questions get asked:
where's my character from?
what gods does my cleric worship?
Is anybody not from here?
What god does that wierd guy worship?
Where's the nearest town?
Where's the nearest town that actually has crap I want to buy?

Just the where's my character from gets into what races or cultures do you let the players choose, as well as what races and cultures are the NPCs your throwing in. Not everybody can be "from this small town of homlet".

In my game, I ended up making a country for each main PC race, as well as some countries for the monster races (thri-kreen, etc.). I drew my world map, the assigned areas to each country. I kept the low-level monster races (orcs, kobolds, goblins, etc) as raiders/pirates just so I could stuff them into any encounter I wanted.

My game has the PCs serving on a ship that travels from port to port. Thus, the players don't get used to any island, but they do see a lot of areas as the ship patrols the islands.

The result is, I need a world map of minimal detail, and a detailed map for various islands I might use. I can't name a specific island that the elves are from, but I can point to an area on the map and say they own it.

To make matters more fun, the players are all human, and have only been given a fraction of the big map (the sum of all human knowledge).

But, that's how big worlds get created, and why DMs tend to make them.

Janx

 

[Sledge]

I'm thinking you're looking at something like the Magic Kingdom of Landover by Terry Brooks?
Micro should work fine for a while if not too small. Just be careful, even Terry Brooks ended up going outside Landover after a while.

 

[Hand of Evil]

I map in Campaign Cartographer standard size of a campaign map is 600 miles by 800 miles and I have found this to be about the right size for a campaign.

Now why to make it bigger / vaster? The world, just to keep building, adding ideas and thoughts, corrections and adjustments. It is to have the answer to what is in the blank areas of a map, you see the emptiness and you fill it and complete it.

 

[cimbrog]

Aethelstan, I actually have come to agree with you about microcampaigns for the exact same reasons you state. Our current game is set entirely within the boundries of this great map (courtesy of Crooked Staff). Its large enough to roam around in but not so big that more detail than needed is used. When asked what's to the east, we say "A magnificent empire beyond your imagination that hates you." The same answer goes for the west. To the north are the bad guys, of course. And the south? "Halflings. MEAN halflings."

 

[wocky]

I agree with the idea of a small campaign world. I also wondered about playing in the FRCS with no chance to explore but a mere 1% of all it could offer.

Yet, I can come up with two reasons for big campaign settings:

- You need a place to accomodate every type of monster, race and culture. You could say that though some monks exist in your land, they all come from the eastern lands where their sacred scriptures lay. Someone playing a monk will want some details from said lands and... Same thing with dragons (how many dragons can you fit in a single kingdom?), underdark races, etc.

- At high levels, when teleportation facilities become available, and spells that allow you to travel "in style" (overland flight, the 'travel-through-the-plane-of-shadow' type of thing, etc.) the DM will have to make a real effort for players not to peek out of their playpens.

 

[Drakmar]

I am currently in the process of doing up a homebrew. My design concept went something like this.

I want a main protagonist. Orcs, nah, Goblins, nah, Undead, nah. hmm.. Yuan-ti.. yeah. What do I need for them. Swamps. And a town in the swamp. Okay.... how are the Yuan-ti going to be the main baddie. hmm... through trickery/deceit early on... and latter some of the nasties in combat. Tainted ones work well for that.

So.. I then had to work out why there would be a town in a swamp. I went with - to get stuff to make Greek Fire. So.. I need a group that need Greek Fire. So the neighbors need to be an Empire (so I went Roman like)

And so on.

So, to make it believible, my little arena of play grew. now it is an empire with 4 nations butting onto it. I know the political landscape etc. I know why the Yuan-ti are there. I have the major cultures that will be in the town. And how they interent.

It started as a small arena of play. For the players.. it is. Sorta. But if they decide to leave, I know what is around them.

 

[DMScott]

Would a campaign setting this small actually work? Has anyone out there played in or DMed a micro world similar, in size at least, to the one I’m proposing? What worked and what didn’t. Your feedback would be appreciated.

I haven't run a campaign in a world that small, but I have been gradually changing to a small area approach to world building and campaign design over the last five or ten years. Basically, I only map out and detail a small area at a time, and the rest of the world only exists as broad strokes until I need it. It works fine, in my experience, so long as you're willing to build your stories up on the same elements over time, rather than have PCs finish an adventure and then move on.