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

[mhacdebhandia]

IIRC, 'Dungeoncraft' by Ray Winninger demands that every campaign setting have it's point (or points) of distinction, so that it has a hook that will draw the players into the setting.

So, a good hook might be that dwarves have subjugated all other races and rule them with an oppressive totalitarian regime, or that the world consists of islands floating in space, or that dinosaurs still exist, etcetera etcetera.

The campaign I am presently designing (and which will, most likely, never get off the ground) is set on a very large archipelago. The center of civilisation in the region is a large city, founded three centuries past by a group of colonists on a self-imposed exile from the decadent empire across the sea. The main "hook" is the archipelago - similar to the forest-covered world from Ray Winninger's column - but smaller hooks involve minor parts of the setting:

• Most standard D&D races are absent. I'm not sure which races other than humans I'm planning to include, but I know for sure that elves, half-elves, halflings, and half-orcs will be excluded.
• There's a sharp divide between civilisation - which is largely confined to a single, albeit extremely sophisticated and cosmopolitan, city - and the unexplored islands of the archipelago, since the colony is only now at the point where landowners are prepared to invest in the taming of islands outside the original settlement.
• The political culture of the city is a mixture of the assemblies of landowning patrons from the Republic of Rome and the guilds of the late medieval period. If you don't own land, have a landowning patron, or belong to a trades guild of some kind, your social position is shaky indeed. The social order will have a meaningful impact on the campaign - and the Roman-style patronage system makes for handy hooks for the party.

 

[FreeTheSlaves]

• Devils didn't exist, demons are unknown
• The world is 3000 years old and have been nurtured by the gods
• The fallen have broken away from the heavens
• The fallen have become the devils and aim to divvy up the world
• They are wiping out civilizations and god worship
• Once they institute their dominating world order they will alter nature to suit their needs
• The adventure is called the exodus and it involves the flight of peoples
• Essentially the known world will become a place that these immortals will rule supreme - they will call it "Hell"
• If they fail, there is no going back, devils will cease to be a 'race' of immortals
• The PC's are part of a peoples resistance, have 'recruited' the (Rebel) Luna-Solar, are searching for the ultimate weapon (sphere of annihilation) and possess the largely unanalyzed but powerful Coral Horn of the Waves.

 

[mhacdebhandia]

The main "hook" is the archipelago - similar to the forest-covered world from Ray Winninger's column - but smaller hooks involve minor parts of the setting

After that, I left out the most important one:

Religion and divine spellcasting are treated similar to the way they are in Eberron (though I did come up with it before I heard about that setting's take). That is, the question of whether or not the gods themselves grant divine spells - or, in fact, even exist - is unanswered and unanswerable. Neither the gods or their servants (celestial or infernal) will (or, perhaps, can) inform mortals on this issue.

Taking full advantage of the fact that the rules as written allow for clerics who don't worship gods, religions devoted to philosophies or abstractions are on a completely equal footing in my campaign, and in fact increase the ambiguity of the gods by overlapping.

There are religions, for example, which claim their patron deities have dominion over nature - but more than one or two sects of druids are devoted to philosophies which contradict these claims. Meanwhile, there are druidic philosophies which occupy a middle ground, revering Nature as an abstract force but worshipping the deities as a personalised embodiment of that force.

In some ways, this is potentially more important than anything else - if it's something my players want to explore. Even if they largely disregard it, I will be motivating many of my plots with interreligious conflict in one way or another.

 

[Plane Sailing]

Distinct elements?

1. There is only one god, with both good and evil worshippers; spreading out from a theocratic state.

2. Humanocentric. No halflings or gnomes at all, dwarves and elves are so rare to be considered imaginary. Dwarves are like short klingons, elves are renamed Aasimar and elf lords are half-celestials.

3. Most character classes are regional. If you are an x you are probably from y (or maybe z); helps to cement the differences of different regions.

4. It was originally a secret, but the secret is now out as far as the PCs are concerned - the world once belonged to the mind flayers under their dark, many-tentacled god. The god Asura arrived and imprisoned their dark god and exiled them to another plane. The mindflayers want their world back and want to reduce the power of the intruder god and free their own god.

cheers

 

[RPG_Tweaker]

"What is YOUR world's hook?"

A campaign I am currently brewing:

The continent was ravaged 1500 years ago during a war of great nations wielding terrible sorceries. The ruins of ancient cities dot the landscape, overrun by abominations of nature and supernatural emanations.

Small communities struggled to survive famine, disease and vicious beastmen raiders. In the few sustainable or protected areas, civilization slowly recovered. It was a little different this time though; more rough and tumble; more survival of the fittest, and very suspicious of magic. Over the years several nations rose and fell, a few even survived, but most of the populace lives in scattered city-states.

The story begins in the mountainous Northwest region, in the city-state of Klamath. It has enjoyed relative peace for almost 100 years. But a new and strange comet in the sky has brought with it a forbidding sense of doom.

Strange tremors have rocked the lands, driving monsters out of the mountains. Beastmen have begun raiding outposts… and they seem much more organized this time.

In the face of this, the current monarch of Klamath is dying of old age, and his heir is weak and indecisive. The city-state is in the grips of political greed and corruption. An alliance with the dwarves is faltering, and the elves seem uninterested.

Enter the players…

The hook here is that, unbeknownst to the players (until they figure it out), the world is actually Gamma World—or at least a magical bastardization of it, with a hint of steampunk and Spelljammer elements.
• The location is post-apocalyptic Oregon.
• Spellcasters are “mutants”
• Elves are Gren, Faeries are Lil
• The Beastmen are Gnolls/Arks
• And so on...

The campaign will include a war, dealing with a den of Carrins, and a meta-plot involving alien invasion by Mind Flayers.

 

[Acid_crash]

A campaign I am currently brewing:

The continent was ravaged 1500 years ago during a war of great nations wielding terrible sorceries. The ruins of ancient cities dot the landscape, overrun by abominations of nature and supernatural emanations.

Small communities struggled to survive famine, disease and vicious beastmen raiders. In the few sustainable or protected areas, civilization slowly recovered. It was a little different this time though; more rough and tumble; more survival of the fittest, and very suspicious of magic. Over the years several nations rose and fell, a few even survived, but most of the populace lives in scattered city-states.

The story begins in the mountainous Northwest region, in the city-state of Klamath. It has enjoyed relative peace for almost 100 years. But a new and strange comet in the sky has brought with it a forbidding sense of doom.

Strange tremors have rocked the lands, driving monsters out of the mountains. Beastmen have begun raiding outposts… and they seem much more organized this time.

In the face of this, the current monarch of Klamath is dying of old age, and his heir is weak and indecisive. The city-state is in the grips of political greed and corruption. An alliance with the dwarves is faltering, and the elves seem uninterested.

Enter the players…

The hook here is that, unbeknownst to the players (until they figure it out), the world is actually Gamma World—or at least a magical bastardization of it, with a hint of steampunk and Spelljammer elements.
• The location is post-apocalyptic Oregon.
• Spellcasters are “mutants”
• Elves are Gren, Faeries are Lil
• The Beastmen are Gnolls/Arks
• And so on...

The campaign will include a war, dealing with a den of Carrins, and a meta-plot involving alien invasion by Mind Flayers.

I had to comment on this one. I think this one is pretty cool, considering that I used to live in Klamath Falls for 8 years and still live in oregon currently (at least until I move to georgia sometime within the next month). I would want to be a player in this game, just to see how the other players react when they figure out that they are playing 1500 hundred years in the future, and that's such a great way to introduce Gamma World without letting the players know that they are playing in it.

 

[mythusmage]

Two Things...

On Oppressive Lawful/Good Theocracies:

The people think it's oppressive. Mostly because it won't let them do what ever they want to.

Ki World Hook

It's science fiction in a fantasy guise.

 

[Evilhalfling]

The World we are playing on evolved as a nonmagical one. All humans were limited to 5th level. There were rumors that elves and dwarves, dragons and magic vanished long ago. Only in one or two places did people still believe in and supposedly practice magic. 200 yrs ago gates opened to a shadow world, a reflection of the orginal and dwarves, elves and halflings entered. The next year nine (and only nine) races of humanoids entered, to continue the war with the demi-humans. Magic came with the opening of the first gates and human kingdoms were shattered by the upheaval.
Much of the land is owned by hordes of gnolls, goblins and Ratmen
humanity clings to the edges, supported by the powerful magaics of dwarf(divine), elf(Arcane) and halfling (psionic)

Cosmology includes -
Celestial Sphere- like an onion
Infernal sphere- like soup
Shadowlands (the decaying world magic &monsters came from)
Dreamlands (similar to etherial - with slow time)

 

[Insight]

One could definitely argue that a Lawful society could be oppressive. Any society with an overabundance of laws can seem oppressive to at least some part of its citizenry. When you combine Lawful with either Evil or Neutral, arguments can be made for oppression. A Lawful Evil society is nearly by definition oppressive, given the Evil part of the equation. A Lawful Neutral society, with its penchant for balance in the favor of the Law, could be oppressive to those who don't agree with the Laws.

Having a Lawful Good society oppress some part of the populace presumes that the populace does not have moral good (and its definition differs as much as does moral evil, so this is open to interpretation for sure) as its standard. That is not necessarily a bad thing - there is nothing to say a society has to match most of those on Earth. Having a tendency towards the moral good defines neither the concepts of society nor civilization.

So, to open up the discussion a bit more, perhaps a society is not based on the moral good (as defined by the campaign setting). A Lawful Good regime in power could definitely oppress such a culture. Even if the regime's intent is good, its methods may not be, and that is where the oppression comes in.

 

[s/LaSH]

Dungeon Damage: High adventure in medieval Europe... but not your Europe. While history is the same, prehistory isn't quite the same, and various ethnic groups have been outright replaced with demihumans. Magic and technology are synonomous, which means magic sucks right now. But the future will be very, very different because of it.



The Twilight: Several million years ago, the Ancients took their solar system and sun apart and built a giant sphere from its remains. They shifted their sun-like servant-gods and their civilisation to the inside of this sphere, which was nearly as large as Mercury's orbit. Later, their civilisation collapsed. Others flourished in its wake - primitive cultures of a thousand genetic or magically-created races, some of which developed great power.

The Twilight Sphere has been united several times since then, by civilisations so advanced you can barely imagine them; they have fallen in time, spawning new races and civilisations which rose anew. This is a world of unimaginable size and age. Every inch of its soil bears artifacts of the past. Every race you meet, no matter how ancient, once gazed upon ruins of a fallen world that still makes them feel young. A continent is a tiny speck upon a tiny speck to the scope of this world.

A one-word hook? Vast.

So I built a sample region called Riftsea. The hook for this region? One upon a time, a happy race of magical insects ruled the land. Four thousand years ago, the Apex Draconis obliterated them with nukes and the power of their leaders, mighty cybernetic dragons. Later, the cyberdragons all died, and things started going downhill for their followers.

That statement influences everything, although the resultant setting is somewhere between the medieval Mediterranean and modern Japan, plus a cross between xenomorphs and angels and some floating continents. The historical demon wars are based on the reincarnation model of the Twilight; basically, there were two big extinction events, and two regions of afterlife developed just to suit them. Then they started coming back.

A hook summary that doesn't really do it justice? Life in the shadow of the extinct Apex Draconis.