On the heels of my post RE: the black trees, I wanted to discuss something helpful I’ve found in creating campaign worlds. If you can find one piece of a campaign setting, some distinguishing, unusual feature, you can add the rest of the details to that and build the setting as a natural extension from that starting point. This is different than just finding a theme. A theme is saying, “I want to do ice pirates in a fantasy setting”. Building off of a set piece is saying, “There is a living, sentient sun whose cruelty is boundless.” With that set piece in mind, you are starting small, but questions will naturally arise. As you answer them, the setting grows.
A sentient sun? What does it do to show its sentience? It broadcasts its commands to the rulers of the planet. It burns those who displease it and fail to show proper respect. How do you appease it? By elaborate sacrifices. Proper worship means sacrificing your firstborn son. Those who refuse this ritual are cast away from the villages, and may only walk the land at night. The sun will excruciate them otherwise. Those who rebel follow the moon –also sentient — and plot and scheme ways to overthrow the sun.
You can go on and on with this line of inquiry, building successive layers of detail. I’ve personally had success with this, as it puts something evocative right at the core of your campaign.
Some guidelines when attempting this method of campaign building.
Think in extremes. If your world is all extremes of black and white, it won’t engage the players. But if your starting point is extreme, that means that the much more sensible scaffolding you build around it will naturally radiate some of that energy. Something extreme at the core will make your world unique.
Think of how people react to your central piece. Then think again. In the sentient sun example above, people react generally in one of two ways: they obey (the majority) and they disobey (the minority). The people who obey are obviously doing so because they don’t wish to live in the dark. They reluctanly make the harsh sacrifices the sun demands. The other people –I’ll call them the moonborn — they are unwilling to make the sacrifices that the sun wishes. We’ve built up this first level of the reactions to the sun’s cruelty, our first layer of cause and effect. Now let’s take it a step further. We have to factions, one ruled by the sun, the other the moon. How do they feel about it each other? What happens when one faction gets what it wants? There is more likely than not kinship between the sun’s followers and the moonborn, but when push comes to shove, the sun’s subjects have to wipe the moonborn out. The only alternatives are living in darkness or being scorched by the sun, none of which this faction would find pleasant.
The moonborn are in an even tougher position. They don’t want to wipe out the followers of the sun, they want to save them from the sun. But they have to fight them, or they’ll get wiped out. If they win, they get to…live in darkness? That is enough to cause some doubt in even the most hardcore rebels.
Keep working the cause-and-effect and the nuances and situation will naturally build itself.
Find the Hooks. As you build up the setting, you will find hooks that make compelling points of entries for PCs. Mark these points as you pass them.
Keeping these three guidelines will help you build powerful settings easily.
A Jack of All Trades ,or if you prefer, an extreme example of multi-classing, Gamefiend, a.k.a Quinn Murphy has been discussing, playing and designing games straight out of the womb. He is the owner and Editor-in-Chief of this site in addition to being an aspiring game designer. As you would assume, he is a huge fan of 4e.
By day he is a technologist.
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Quinn, I’m not even a gamer, but this is so well thought out and well written that it kept my attention all the way through. I used to get credit for being a writer because I wrote for the newspaper, but your skills are MUCH, MUCH better than mine ever were!