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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Azuresun" data-source="post: 8406138" data-attributes="member: 7022312">1: At least one clear reason in the setting for PC groups to form, and clear objectives for them to pursue once they do form. There are a lot of RPG's that kind of forget to do this! Scion springs to mind, where I read the books and thought "This is cool, what the hell do I do with it?"2: Adversaries who can challenge the PC's, but are not genre-savvy and entrenched in the setting to the point where they become unassailable. There are a lot of settings where the authors get a bit too carried away with writing their villains, and forget to provide any way by which a small band of quirky, individually powerful adventurers could plausibly be a threat to them, and forget that any "bad guy" nation or culture is also probably going to be ridden with corruption, political infighting and inefficiency. In the Demon: The Fallen RPG, the Earthbound are an example of how to do this well--they have much more raw power than the PC, but also outstanding weaknesses (they're immobile, and heavily dependant on their cultists to enact their will in the world). 3: Factions. Eberron and Fading Suns are two of my favourite settings, and both of them feature a large number of factions. And for almost all of those factions, it's entirely plausible that I could come up with both a hero and villain from it--two different Avestite characters could be a zealous bigot out to burn the impure, and a beacon of pure faith standing strong against the dark forces that wish to obliterate humankind.4: There are things that need fixing, but the setting is not doomed. That's an important distinction. For example, Warhammer 40K is a very dark setting overall, but the PC's can still win meaningful victories on a smaller scale. Wraith: The Oblivion tips too far into the "Why bother?" side for me, when Oblivion has infinite soldiers and resources and nearly everyone on the not-Oblivion side is a raging jackass at best. And Blue Rose leans a little too far in the other direction, where there's a scarcity of villains and most of them are clustered up together in the designated Bad Guy Land.5: More importantly than getting a census of the world, I want to know what it's like to live there. The 5e Eberron book did this magnificently, to the point where I consider it the best incarnation of the setting so far. Things like rolling to see how a random village has been scarred by the war, or to see what sort of intrigue or zany scheme my gnome character is tangled up in are more useful to setting the tone of a place than pages of dry statistics. I like how the Wildemount book included adventure hooks for each location. And in another setting book I read, I really liked how they provided generic types of characters that you might meet in a certain location--characters like "Ill-Mannered Old Money", "Braggart Mercenary", "Worldly Priest". And so on.6: Make non-humans feel non-human. This is a bit of a pet peeve of mine--dwarves and elves should not feel mundane. They should be getting different reactions from a human and have some way that they don't quite think or act like humans do. 7: No metaplot.</blockquote>

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