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Message: <blockquote data-quote="GreatLemur" data-source="post: 3424156" data-attributes="member: 28553">See, it's the "fully flesh out" that has you going wrong, there.  Obviously, those of us who aren't getting paid to do this stuff can't put the same work into it that the pros do.  Fortunately, we don't need to.  Unlike the pros, we only need to build what we'll actually use.I think it's quite acceptable--and quite easy--to start with a the assumption of a "generic" world, or with a general concept outlined and written up for the players, and then flesh it out as you play.  Somebody wants to play a Truenamer?  Okay, now it's time to figure out where Truenamers fit in the campaign world.  The player can help.  If nobody's interested in playing a Gnome--and the DM doesn't have a need for them somewhere--then they probably don't exist.No need to write a whole Forgotten Realms boxed set's worth of information.  Just give yourself a place for things to happen, and give your players enough hooks and flavor to get them interested.  Here, let me give it a go:"The main country has kind of an Indian-style culture with a theologically-justified caste system, but really stern, Soviet brutalist architecture and a religion focused on ancestor worship instead of gods.  All the PCs will be technically 'human', but you can use the mechanics for half-elves and half-orcs to represent distant fey and goblinoid heritage (but only in really low-caste characters), and ethnically they can be really varied and even weird (this is the center of a big empire, and the various castes are actually descended from families that cam from all over the continent).  Look up Indian and generally south-Asian stuff for the general sound of your names.  The whole culture is very low-arcane-magic, so no Bards or Wizards.  Sorcerers are okay for those with fey blood, though.  We can talk about non-core arcane classes, but don't get your hopes up.  Clerics and other divine types use magic by chanelling the spirits of their ancestors, so there aren't any specific deities.  Just come up with an ancestor and pick some domains based on his personality, occupation, legend, etc.  We won't be using psionics, but I might have an idea for incarnum.  Talk to me about that if you're interested.  Outside the boundaries of civilization, there are tribes of savage fey and goblinoids (which are actually just two actual species, each coming in a variety of varied and chaotic forms), who fight each other openly and kind of harass the dominant humans.  The biggest threat that you're aware of right now would be a rival human nation who's building an army of war automatons (they're much more into arcane magic than your people).  They actually hate the fey and goblinoids more than you guys, though.  Also, there's an extremely advanced and mysterious civilization of Locathah in the ocean east of your nation, but they pretty much keep to themselves, historically."That's off the top of my head, and extremely sketchy and disorganized, but I could put together a reasonably well-developed writeup over a weekend, complete with placenames and a vague map.  It'd be just a couple pages, but players ain't generally gonna want to read a whole textbook's work of background detail, anyway.</blockquote>

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