So what's YOUR world's 'hook'?

[Ibram]

my Orental Adventures campaing was just that... adventures in the far east... (my excuse to create a series of losely related adventures drawing from my favoret Kung Fu movies).

The campaing before that was based on the ideas of the "Turning of the Age" humanity was emerging from the 1000 year shadow of the long gone Western Empire. It was a time of powerful emerging empires and the death of corrupt old ways.

 

[Insight]

Oh, so it's exactly like Eberron then.

I will ignore this idiotic and assumptive post except to say the following:

a) It was created well before that book came out

b) I do not own and will not purchase Eberron

c) You are a moron

 

[JDowling]

step 1 - humanity screws up
step 2 - gods take one part humanity, one part desolate desert planet; stir
step 3 - gods remove magic from said world; have a good chuckle
step 4 - bake in the sun for a couple thousand years, or until medium brown.
step 5 - play begins
step 6 - magic returns
step 7 - chaos ensues
step 8 - . . . profit?

the general themes tend towards either nihilism, or a line of thought inspired by what I understand the origonal buddhist ideas where. In addition to a hearty serving of "the gods are dead, or perhaps never existed anyway" et cetera.

mix in an over-done "magical catastrophie"/"apoclypse" when magic returns with possible divine interest. add a dash of "man vs. nature", arabian culture, ancient egyptian culture, bronze age technology to taste...

some parts still seem over-done to me, other parts seem entertaining/fresh (at least in their current enviroment).

as to "where" the campaign goes: there are NPCs who have time lines and plots of their own, these plots will go forward. If the PCs act they can alter the course of them, if the PCs act by being inactive well, the plans go ahead on schedule.

I'm hoping by giving the PCs enough background information and engaging them in the world that the setting is all the "hook" that they need to dig deeper and acctually engage my creation instead of me shoving it down their throats

as to if I pass World Creation 101 or not, I have no idea

EDIT: a few typos

 

[Darrin Drader]

I'd love to tell you, but then I'd have to kill you.

I have something cooking in the fire right now that should see print sometime next year.

I'll go wander off all mysterious-like now.

 

[Insight]

I'm not sure everyone is going by the same definitions here, which can either make for enlightening conversation or some frustration - or both!

For the record, I believe 'generic fantasy world' to be one of little imagination or backstory. The "you are all in a bar when suddenly..." starts to a campaign bring this sort of feel to mind. There are variations on this, but I think we have all been through this sort of game at one point or another. Using standards that most gamers can easily identify and deal with is not 'generic' to me, but having a bland flavor, interchangeable with 1,000 other games, would be.

A 'hook' to me is something that makes the campaign world distinct from other campaign worlds. Most published campaign settings have something of a hook to them, whether it is immediately obvious or not. Sure, you could point out that Greyhawk and Forgotten Realms don't have much of a hook. To that, I would say that Greyhawk was the first real setting for D&D and thus doesn't really need a hook. FR's hook for me is that it has representatives of just about every Earth culture found somewhere therein, and that can kind of be a hook.

I think you would want your setting to have a hook of some kind, at least a way for your players to describe your setting in one or two sentences to their friends or new players. It also keeps the setting fresh in their minds while playing, especially for those people who don't game on a weekly basis.

Not statements of fact, merely my opinions on the subject, having created partially or wholly many campaigns settings in the past.

 

[Greg K]

I have been running the same campaign world on and off for several years.

The hook of the first campaign is that long ago several wizards banished a powerful necromancer to another plane. To secure the necromancer's imprisonment, the wizards then bound up much of the land's mana into four watch towers which maintained the spell.
Recently, a young wizard, stumbled upon some old tomes in his masters study and accidently set events in motion that would lead to the necromancer's return. Reports of both plague and the appearance of undead in the Northern Lands resulted in the leaders of several institutions deciding that the watch towers needed to be shut, thus feeing the mana necessary to battle the necromancer and his minions.
The leaders decided that it would be best to send individuals of relatively little power and/or reputation to shut down the watchtowerss, because such individuals had a better chance of not catching the attention of the necromancer and his servants. Thus, the PCs being the best of the masters' apprentices were sent to fullfill the quest.

Campaign 2:
When several individuals help a young druid free his princess from the headmaster of the world's most powerful Wizard's academy, they discover that the headmaster is behind the attempt to release the Necromancer. The young druid and those individuals attempting to aid him band together to take up the quest to open the last watch tower and discover the fate of the first group of heroes who never returned from their attempt to do the same (several members of the first group had moved away).

 

[Barastrondo]

I'm not sure everyone is going by the same definitions here, which can either make for enlightening conversation or some frustration - or both!

Indeed. For one, some people are using "world" and "setting" interchangably. To me, a "setting" can be a world, or a continent, or a group of nations with similar culture, or a single nation, or an archipelago, or a city. I like for my settings to have hooks, oh yes indeed. I don't so much think a world needs a hook (or for that matter, that it's necessary to think of settings on the global scale), unless you're trying to publish it and make money off it; for the purposes of running a game for your friends, it is enough that your world contains many interesting settings within it.

My favorite D&D setting is Al-Qadim — not the Forgotten Realms, with which it was linked (essentially after the fact), but just plain Al-Qadim. I could take or leave the world it's attached to, but Al-Qadim was my idea of a perfect setting, with a great hook and a multiplicity of potential campaigns within it.

 

[Dave Turner]

From an upcoming campaign I'm itching to get going:

The characters come from villages that live on the edge of a vast Sea of Grass which is crisscrossed by nomads on 20' stilts.

 

[Commonblade]

Homebrewed Madness

I started playing DND right as 3.0 came out and my campaign has always been about stopping the apocalypse. I started my first campaign way before the big stuff was supposed to happen. The heroes where rebels in a city state that was conquered by orcs and had never known war. I did the whole resistance movement campaign right out of the box. Well before I knew it, everyone was 12th level and the newbie DM had no idea how to challenge these guys.

We stopped for the summer, lost some players to life. And next semester started a “Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil” campaign with new characters set in the same world. I will give this to running model adventures; if you have never run high-level challenges these things can teach you a lot.

Life once again took its toll on the game group. I ran one short side adventure and tied it in to the main plot for my main players and then ran a reunion game with the characters from the first game. When everything was said and done the groups barely touched the meta plot.

It was at this point that 3.5 came out and everyone was talking about moving over. Myself included. So I advanced the story line to the point of the “meteor” impact.

Had the gods avatars come through bringing armies of Outsiders through three giant planer gates that where literally tearing the planet apart. And then right before impact the world was shunted out of real space and into a Twilight realm. The place where planets go to die. All forms of planer movement are cut off, Divine spells come from the planet or the gods, and if you don’t have a god you become a ghost, because the only way to the planes and your characters final resting place is through them. There is no day or night. Only perpetual twilight.

The main enemy is now the Titans of the Twilight, beings of immense power that can bend the will of other creatures to its cause. Players can be of any (almost) race starting at first level (I have a system). In the end we just let ourselves go wild and have a fun night together.

 

[pogre]

I will ignore this idiotic and assumptive post except to say the following:

a) It was created well before that book came out

b) I do not own and will not purchase Eberron

c) You are a moron

Look Insight, I think most of us understand your reaction, but frankly it's better to ignore a rude post that follows yours. Someone else already admonished the poster for their broad assumptions and rude generalizations. All you do with name calling is raise the stakes.

"You are a moron." is never an appropriate thing to say here.

I'm not the boss, not a mod, just someone who wants to keep this place friendly. The original responder to your post was wrong, but next time let it go - ok?