What does a campaign setting "need"?

[Hand of Evil]

PLOT HOOKS - no matter what your world is like you have to make people interested in it. You have to get the buyers and players to invest into it, call them plot hooks or story line or realism or a good story, the setting has to have the lure to draw.

 

[Zappo]

The most important thing is having a definite style. The WotC setting search guys were right in forcing you to express your world in one sentence. You can have dozens of new races, monsters, PrCs, feats, whatever, and a billion square kilometers of 1:100 maps, but if they are just a mishmash of everything that seems cool, it will never be a great setting. You can have a great setting even with just the core stuff, if you make it work in an original way.

 

[Fenes 3]

When I design a new campaign setting - I don't really create worlds, I merely design regions in my modified Forgotten Realms setting - I usually start with the main culture, taking a historic example, and modify it to fit the campaign and party in question. Maps I take from the atlas, but they are not as important as the culture. I rarely make or take maps for buildings or towns.

Then follow the people and plots. I design webs of linked NPCs and plots, and opportunities for the PCs to enter, adding and modifying as the campaign goes on. Most if not all of them made with an eye for the party that will interact with them. Those plots sometimes ahve ties to the history of the region, which will added as needed.

New races and monsters don't have much importance in my campaigns, so I don't dwell on those much.

When it comes to Gods I only decide which gods will be prominently worshipped, and concentrate on the NPC priests and leaders then.

 

[Lokishadow]

Description

More than anything else, your campaign needs atmosphere. I've been playing D&D since the 1st edition days, nearly 18 years, and the one thing I've learned is that your world has to EXIST. You do this by describing the area the pc's are in in depth, the characters, the "business," or little personality quirks of npc's, and letting the world evolve around the pc's. If the pc's decided not to go after your plot thread with the Moon Rats taking over the Theurgia in the city of Krillibon, and instead went hunting the black dragon in the Grayshire Swamp, then have the campaign evolve appropriately. When (if? it is a dragon) the pc's come back with the dragon's horde, instead of having a nice comfy inn to sleep in and sort their treasure, they have a city full of magically dominated slaves serving the Moon Rats every whim. What to do?

That's how a campaign gets the "flavor" that most D&D campaigns are missing these days. Focus more on character development, personality, and the "reality" of the world than on game mechanics. Let the sorcerer make some sort of a caster level check to sling a fireball when he's out of slots and the moment would be cool, but have some nasty side-effects. Let the rules be flexible. Let the world breathe. And let the players see the impact their actions do or do not have on the world around them.

 

[adwyn]

Name the freakin' world and continent for one!

I remember playing in one friends homebrew and while the group was plane-hopping, we ran across someone from Toril. All right, fine. She begins talking about her world, and Toril, and at that point, I begin talking about where our group comes from - and it's at that point that I ask the DM what people usually call the planet/continent/whatever that we come from. Some sort of name to indicate the place where all the countries and cities and forests lie.

He told me there wasn't one.

While DM'ing I once had a player ask the same question while plane hopping, a rare event IMC. I was stumped, but while I sat there like a deer in the headlights, the player playing the dwarven cleric cuffed the questioning player along the back of the head and bellowed "Home! Its called home you idiot and never forget it" Ever since my campaign world has simply been called home, though we've translated it into numerous campaign languages.

 

[barsoomcore]

Stuff you think is cool.

Nothing is more important. Nothing sucks more than running a campaign and not being excited about it.

Before I start any campaign I make a "Cool List" -- literally a list of things about this campaign setting/idea/concept that I think are cool. Reasons for doing it in the first place. When Barsoom veered off into weird jungle territory, I made such a list. Here it is:

STUFF WE THINK IS COOL

Ant people
Spider people
Snake people
Ruined jungle temples
Caves hidden behind waterfalls
Riding dinosaurs
Jungle traps
Overgrown cities inhabited by savages
Smart irritated trees
Dinosaurs
Power-mad petty tyrants
Loopy priest-kings
Incredibly decadent courts
Slavegirls
Eunuchs
Thrown to crocodiles
Gladiators
Desperate struggles for freedom
Really Big Bugs
Pygmies. Pygmy mummies.
Gongs
Rope cities up in the treetops
Dank caverns carved out of salt formations
Natural caverns
Seedy taverns populated with desperadoes
Raised by dinosaurs?
Nasty poisonous/carnivorous plants
Dinosaur riders who lead dangerous animals away from villages and suchlike. Big heros
Taboo regions guarded by spirits.
Taboo-breaking people. With blue hands.
Shapeshifters. Who recognize Isaac as one of them.
Women warrior cultures who don’t let men hold weapons
Ashen plains
Laughing idols
Rift valleys, canyons, cliffs, caves, mountains
Volcanoes
Carnivorous plants – vines, sundews, flytraps, mobile fungus and other goodies.
Blowguns

I didn't nearly get all this stuff in, but it was a useful reference for me whenever I was dreaming up ideas. I'd just look through the list and go, "Yeah, I want me some of that next game..."

 

[random user]

Oh yeah I guess I should mention that I definately had a "spark" for my campaign world. Something is happening it will lead to something if the PC's don't prevent it. And whether they do or don't it will be an interesting game based on the outcome of their actions. (Right now they don't even know that something is happening.)

I definately agree that it's neat to have the game evolve as it progresses. In my campaign, I never imagined that within the first 5 sessions they would have done something to cause the equivelent of wine coolers and karaoke to be born into the world, and cause a minor innkeeper in a village who I had no plans for to become a major player in the main city because he owns a "hip new tavern with cool new and refreshing drinks and where crowds gather to watch a person sing (often horridly) along with a live band and be encouraged to themselves sing no matter how bad they are."

They now have an ally, a friend, and a base of operations, all because one of my party members was a bard and never had an alcoholic drink before. One of his fellow party members asked the bartender to mix something up that was strong but not bitter, the bard loved it and started singing. The bard also played while other party members sang, they rolled really well and other people gathered around them, fascinated (not as per the bard effect, just as a general reaction). And thus a new fad was born.

Even only 8 sessions in, I can already see how the campaign world could have been very different had the party members done different things.

 

[pdkoning]

Include at least one map of the world.
Gods are a must in my opninion, unless you don't like religion in your game. In the homebrew world I am working on, religion plays an important role.
Races, all depends on the tone and mood of the setting, if it is a fairy tale thingy, add some races. In my setting there are playable Kobolds, Faun, Dryad, en Catth (Catfolk) If you want to have a medieval feel, just humans, if it is sci-fi add some aliens.
Monsters, I think there are already enough monsters, but you can change the frequency and types of monsters, you can for example say that there are no elementals, no devils, but a lot of dire animals. This completely changes the setting and tone.
Add History and Politics. List all important places with their organisations, NPC's. Make some places interesting to visit: ruins, towers, underground cities.
Information about the economy, this adds consistency to the game.
Technology level.
Magic level.
Notes about races and their cultures, tell them for example that Faun like to dance, play panpipes and drink wine, and live in the woodlands.
Legendary items. (Like Excalibur or the Holy Grail)
Last but not least: Cosmology.

 

[tetsujin28]

Not much. I'm not a big setting person...I agree with Ron Edwards, on this one.

But I do like them to do something different: I don't need yet another generic frp background. Mindshadows does this well by emphasizing part of the rules that haven't traditionally gotten much attention (the psionics system). Ravenloft is cool cause it tries to emphasize chills rather than thrills.

And I often dig ones that have ditched the standard D&D non-humans for cooler and weirder things, like the Muls in Dark Sun. One of the things that kills Ravenloft for me is that there's still halflings and elves wandering around. Testament's a great example of something I had to buy.

Of the new settings that are coming out, the most tempting ones are from Green Ronin: SpirosBlaak and The Trojan War.

 

[nopantsyet]

It needs to have a certain, " je ne se quois--" whatever that is.

I think the inhabitants of a world are the key to creating a rich world. I always start with societies and ecologies. Just using core races and monsters, I decide who/what lives where. Each region will have a certain flavor to it, and the inhabitants will be chosen accordingly. I usually pick no more than half a dozen monster types per region unless there's a particular reason a lot of monsters are willing to coexist. I decide which races inhabit the region, whether they are segregated or assimilated, and fit them into the social structures (governments, clans, etc.) that I've chosen for them. Once that's in place, I build around it, adding gods, cosmologies, etc. as they are needed.