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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Aethelstan" data-source="post: 1356792" data-attributes="member: 14304">In my years of playing D&D, I've made the following observations:1. Most campaigns seem to last only a year to a year and a half.  Either groups fall part due to waning interest or the intrusion of real life (new jobs, babies, etc.) or DMs and/or players grow weary of a particular campaign and begin itching to start something new.  Also, due to scheduling conflicts and the like, some groups are luck to get in 12-15 hours of solid gaming a month.2.  Nearly all campaign worlds, both published and homebrew, tend to be quiet large, encompassing whole continents and filled with dozens of cities and a myriad of races and cultures.  FR, Greyhawk, Kalamar (and most of my homebrew settings) are all really big places.The net result of these two factors is that in a given campaign, players explore only a small fraction of a campaign world.  This raises the question:  why are campaign worlds so vast when players most often interact with tiny portions of it?  With published campaign settings, I think designers believe that their worlds must be big in order to convey a sense of “epic-ness” and to convince buyers that they are getting a lot, in terms of quantity, for their money.Likewise, homebrew worlds (my own and others I’ve seen) tend to be at least continent-sized.  The motives of homebrewers may be a bit different, but I think homebrew DMs make big worlds in order to convince players that their new campaign promises near endless possibilities for adventure.  Yet, as with most campaigns, the DM eventually realizes that his players will never set foot in most of his lovingly crafted world.I’ve been mulling over a new campaign setting and have been toying with the idea of radically changing the scale for my next world.  Instead of sprawling and epic, how about small and intimate?  In fact, I’m trying to conceive of the smallest possible world that would still be fun and viable for a “typical” one year, 15+ hour a month campaign.    I’ve come up with the vaguely Planescape-ish idea of a varied landscape (hills. rivers, forests, towns, etc.) roughly fifth miles across all contained within a magical crystal sphere which itself floats within a ethereal “galaxy” of similar “planet” spheres.  The campaign sphere would be populated by four PC races (all non-human, adapted from Arcana Unearthed).  Hostile races living in an underworld beneath the landscape would be the major protagonists.  My hope is that the small size of this world would allow the players to explore a large majority of the campaign setting before the campaign wrapped up.  The all the towns, mountains, ruins, etc. of the world would be more than distant names on a map.   In the course of the campaign, the players would become familiar with them all.  Also, because of the micro size of the setting, players would have it in their power to literally “change the world,” without having to progress to god-like epic (“boo, hiss!”) levels.  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.                                                              Thanks,  Aethelstan</blockquote>

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