What makes a good campaign world?

[steenan]

Setting traits that I see as fun are similar to these listed by OP.

Most importantly, the game world should be inspiring. That means:
- many conflicts, only part of them violent
- many unusual details
- some general information, without listing every town and NPC, specifying demographics etc.
- interesting races and cultures

While it's not absolutely necessary, in most cases the setting should be consistent:
- if there is magic, it should be taken into account in economy, law enforcement, military, architecture
- if player characters are more powerful than other people, there should be in-game explanation why it is so
- if there are powerful monsters and NPCs, chance of encountering one shouldn't depend on PC power
- there shouldn't be an assumption that things of old were greater, better, more powerful and more important than the present ones; if they were, it should be explained why
- everything that is not extremely magical or completely artificial should have resonable ecology and, if intelligent, culture
- there absolutely shouldn't be similar cultures and similar behaviors described positively in one place and negatively in other (usually because the author preferred one race or organization od profession over other).

 

[Rel]

I'm not (quite) arrogant enough to suggest that it'll have anything like universal appeal. But I think that, based on the criterial listed, my campaign setting (for 4e) is on that the OP would like.

http://www.enworld.org/forum/genera...homebrew-setting-ill-use-d-d-4th-edition.html

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

I've been pondering these issues ever since I began developing Urbis. In addition to the issues mentioned above, here is another one which I consider to be fairly important:

It must be digestible.

I like lots of detail in a setting. I thrive on detail. But the average gaming group consists of five or six people, and all of them need to understand the basics of a setting before they can start playing. And not everyone has time to read through 100 or more pages of setting material.

It's easy for the kind of "generic fantasy" settings that D&D exemplifies. Almost everyone has played in the Forgotten Realms or similar settings, and knows all the basic tropes and cliches that go with them. Elves live in the forest, dwarves in the mountains, wizards are mysterious, kings rule over feudal realms, and so on. You don't need to learn much more material to start gaming, especially if you start out in the traditional remote hamlet.

Other settings are much more difficult to digest. This is one of the downsides of settings like Tekumel - no matter how awesome they are, they require massive amounts of information to digest before the players can start making their characters, and thus they remain niche products despite their cult status. The same is true of too many other settings which have fantastic ideas, yet contain too many new concepts to make them easy to run for the typical gaming group.

Urbis started out with some fairly significant changes to the "standard" fantasy worlds - the move away from the typical medieval, feudal paradigm to a far more "modern" mindset and society (not to mention all those enormous city-states everywhere). I compensated by using lots of other, very familiar elements - not only am I using all the "standard" D&D races (complete with many of their associated tropes in recognizable form), but I'm also deliberately and blatantly stealing from real world geography, cultures, and history (I even provide the references in many cases). My hope that there will be enough familiar mixed in with the alien that players only need a short amount of time to familiarize themselves with the core setting concepts. Did I succeed in this?

You tell me.

 

[Silvercat Moonpaw]

For me how much I like a setting mostly depends on two factors: how serious it takes itself and how isolated it feels.

I loathe the insistence on "realism" or "versimilitude" over something that would be just plain interesting. (Also I just hate it when people go on about how their setting is based off being "realistic".) Stuff that doesn't make sense is in some ways what make a fictional universe "real" to me because I realize it isn't mine.
I also hate seriousness because it means people decide that to have conflict they have to put in war or intrigue or something like those. I'm not interested in a lot of killing and backstabbing, there isn't any challenge in it and there was never any fun to begin with.

Isolated means I like settings with a lot of possibility for continuous influences from far away, a lot of communication and travel between locations. And it should all be relatively fast. Otherwise wherever you are starts to feel claustrophobic.

 

[AnthonyRoberson]

What makes a campaign world playable and fun? For me, it depends, since I have different expectations from different campaign styles and settings. but I suppose the following list captures what makes me enjoy a campaign setting:

-A theme. Not a big fan of highly detailed, in depth settings, with no theme or angle.
-Memorable details and history. Details are important, and logical history is too. But when the details are bogged down by names that are difficult to remember and the history lacks a central narrative, I find I get lost.
-Cool and unusual vistas. D&D is fantasy, and I want to use my imagination. I love strange locations that make the world interesting.
-Believable religion. Personally I don't much care for the way D&D has handled its pantheons. There almost always just a list of gods that govern different areas of interest, but are not tied to place. Also, if you are going to have pantheons, you should have multiple pantheons worshiped by different cultures, in my view. I don't jus want different gods, I want different religions-- clearly hard to do in a fantasy setting where the gods still interact with the population.
-Believable and diverse political structures.
-Conflict. If there isn't conflict in the world, it is pretty hard to stay interested.

Good points here! I have just started a news series on my blog where I am designing a campaign setting from scratch. I will definitely take these points into account.

 

[ProfessorPain]

Good points here! I have just started a news series on my blog where I am designing a campaign setting from scratch. I will definitely take these points into account.

I just checked out your blog; top notch. I'm suprised I never saw it before. I agree with your assesment of A World Lit only By Fire. Some other books I would recommend:

The Voices of Morebath
Witchcraft in Medieval Europe
The Bewitching of Anne Gunther
The Cheese and the Worms
Night Battles
The Foundations of Early Modern Europe
Anything by Fernand Braudel, but the Wheels of Commerce has some really in depth treatments of daily life.

 

[JoeGKushner]

A good GM.

I've played several campaigns under several GMs and wouldn't think that the settings were the same based on what the GMs did.

A good GM can take a seed of a fantasy campaign like the old Western Shores from the old Fantasy Hero book and built it into an awesome campaign. A terrible one can bombard you with his version of the Forgotten Realms done right!

 

[AnthonyRoberson]

I just checked out your blog; top notch. I'm suprised I never saw it before. I agree with your assesment of A World Lit only By Fire. Some other books I would recommend:

The Voices of Morebath
Witchcraft in Medieval Europe
The Bewitching of Anne Gunther
The Cheese and the Worms
Night Battles
The Foundations of Early Modern Europe
Anything by Fernand Braudel, but the Wheels of Commerce has some really in depth treatments of daily life.

Thanks for the kind words. I will try and check some of these books out! I hope you will continue to follow my lblog. The next post in the series should go up tomorrow and I will continue to post AT LEAST twice a week (and hopefully more).

 

[Lanefan]

Most importantly, the game world should be inspiring. That means:
- many conflicts, only part of them violent
- many unusual details
- some general information, without listing every town and NPC, specifying demographics etc.
- interesting races and cultures

And one more: it should be mysterious, at least to begin with.

What this means is that information has to trickle out slowly. Don't let the players see a map of the continent until their characters are in a position to see one, for example. That said, some general idea that Gnomes only live in the far south, for example, is also useful.

Something else a good setting has is lots of obviously-different cultures. This is one place FR, for example, really falls short; the humans all seem vaguely similar no matter where they're from. If you're going to have Norse, make 'em Norse, dammit! But have a place for a Greek-like culture, and Celtic, and Egyptian, and Roman, and dark-ages feudal, and tribal barbarian, and far eastern; or variants thereon that suit you. And if the mood suits, do the same for Elves, and Dwarves, and other widespread races...and then put as many of them at war with each other as you can get away with. Wars make for good adventuring.

Why? Because if the mood strikes to run a Norse saga, your setting can handle it. Ditto if you want to get into some Roman political intrigue. Ditto if you want the party to get into some field action with the military. The overall setting needs to have lots of different elements, which (other than the starting area) you then flesh out only if your party's actions take them there.

While it's not absolutely necessary, in most cases the setting should be consistent:
- if there is magic, it should be taken into account in economy, law enforcement, military, architecture
- if player characters are more powerful than other people, there should be in-game explanation why it is so
- if there are powerful monsters and NPCs, chance of encountering one shouldn't depend on PC power
- there shouldn't be an assumption that things of old were greater, better, more powerful and more important than the present ones; if they were, it should be explained why

I pretty much agree up to here.

- everything that is not extremely magical or completely artificial should have resonable ecology and, if intelligent, culture
- there absolutely shouldn't be similar cultures and similar behaviors described positively in one place and negatively in other (usually because the author preferred one race or organization od profession over other).

Overthinking the ecology of monsters can really get in the way of game play. If I want a colony of Giants *here* because it suits a given situation that they be there, then that's exactly where they're going to be, and I don't care very much if there's no real way the land around could feed them. And this is coming from someone who prefers things to make sense where possible.

And as for describing a given culture positively in one place and negatively in another, what's wrong with that provided the base viewpoints are different? An example from my own homebrew world: if I was writing up the Corvite Empire (similar to Romans) then the Corvite Empire would be the best thing going while most other realms and kingdoms would be described pretty much as barbarians. But if I was writing up the Inadar culture (similar to Sumeria, if it had lasted longer) the Corvites would come off looking like boot-grinding invaders with no redeeming qualities at all.

Lanefan

 

[Betote]

A good campaign world, IMO, must have the following:
* Mystery. I specifically want some things not to be discussed on the setting, so that players can have a sense of discovery when they find out about them during an adventure (Drow in Golarion are a good example of this).
* Plots and places. I want to be able to run as many different kinds of adventures as I can. When I read about a CS, I don't want cool stories; I want the possibility of creating cool stories. WW's oWoD is the perfect counter-example of this: they were too busy creating their plots and conspiracies that they forgot to leave space for the PCs in them.
* Ability to change. If my high-level PCs deal with an important NPC or mess with the setting politics, I don't want that intra-game history to be undone by later supplements or novels. That means I prefer static settings to dynamic ones.
* Newbie-friendly. I don't want to spend a whole session explaining the details and quirks of a setting to my players so that they'll be able to play in it. I love Eberron, but it sees a lot less play in our table than I'd like because some players always get lost in the details about dragonmarks, specific items of magic technology, and so on.