A new way of doing campaign settings
I have written lots of rules and am constantly tweaking them. I also have lots of have started ideas for campaign setting some more along than others. Campaing settings can be a tricky mind numbing business. You could write for years and not cover all the detail of just one small area of your setting. Yet mot designers are compelled to create that perfect and enormous setting to place your games in. Why? Has anyone else stopped to ask that question?
Is it not possible to have fun with a small world? Is it not possible to find adventure in small nooks and crannies?
After all it has worked in video games. I think some would regue against my view that video games with small worlds are successful. Maybe some would feel that by limiting physical scope we are limited our stories.
I want to come it world designing another way. I want to creater a small place and do big things with it. BUt how to go about it? I do not know of any models out there in pnp gaming. If some one does, please feel free to let me know.
What follows is a work in progress and is more an example of my ramblings than any true method as I try to sort through the maddness and actually come up with a coherent process. So forgive me.
Here are my thoughts on how to begin. Now first for now I am talking only about limiting the physical scope of the game, and expaning upon what exists within that. So that being said. Keep in mind KISS (in this case Keep It Small, Stupid!) For this I fell what every you think you need to create reduce it drastically, if you think your world needs 20 kingdoms and each should have dozens of towns, for this method you should only have a handful of kingdoms and even less towns.
I think keeping things vague and then expanding upon them is the way to go. Come up with a quick description of each place, no more than a sentence or two and leave it at that for awhile. Add to it as need be later. Perhaps adding a few questions to it to help your mind develop the place may be good too.
So I am going to call my world Nook, to help me remember. It is to be fantasy world, somewhre between a typical rpg fantasy, and a fairy tale. For now I am creating only 2 "kingdoms": Westhaven and the Eastwyldes.
Westhaven is your "good" Kingdom, civilized and just.
The Eastwyldes is not a kingdom exactly. It is an abandoned land, home to barbarians, greenskins, and other monsters. A place where evil reigns. Why is it evil?
Next I am going to sit down and think about 3-5 towns to add to what I have.
Good setting is hard to come by.
Referencing to video games is becoming increasingly popular in the Lab in the past few months, not a bad thing as I'm a avid vgamer as well.
One thing that is up and coming in video games is procedural generation of worlds. Spore set the scene (practically everything was either procedural or player generated) and although it was a god awful game, the technology stands as outstanding. We see it coming into use next week in Borderlands in which most of the enemies and weapons are randomly generated through a set of paramaters. It keeps the game new and exciting and takes a load of the work needed to be done my the company producing said game.
Where am I going with this? I'll tell you where. Why should the setting be up to one man to create, to struggle so hard to make rich and vibrant, when the chances are that the players are going to only see perhaps a small part of it? Why not set out a series of rules that allow for players to generate large amounts of 'content.' I had a game idea awhile ago called Dreamer which I never followed through on. In that the entirety of the game was set in the joint subconscious of the human race, with the players manipulating the very world and setting through their mind. Imagine a game in which the players don't start out as a very unlikely group of wandering heroes, but are Kings, Dukes, Presidents etc. In this they are charged with creating the content of their own Kindom/empire/country, with obvious limitations set out my the rules. Then the Storyteller need only create a few things outside these great nations, something the poses a threat to all the players realms, the players then roleplay the process of defending, inspiring, raising armies, forging alliances and all sorts of intruige within kingdoms they feel very responsible for. If the players can make it there own, then they will feel more strongly about the game.
Not sure where I'm going with this idea, possibly somewhere near tangentville.
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Don't steal... The Government hates competition.
Good Idea
Personally I believe that smaller worlds are funner to play in because it makes the game smaller and develops it more, making the game more immersive and real, rather than each new town just be part of a new plotline or quest. I also believe alderneyvamp gives an interesting point, because traditional RPGs put a little bit too much power (and work) in the GMs hands. It would be fun to see the players create their own worlds rather than just be characters in a premade one.
Great Thoughts
Great thoughts guys, GMs are overworked and under paid. The problem I see with the idea you presented is someone still has to create the engine to randomly determine the world. Not really saving any work on the GM.
I have created a game, actually it is probably the most popular that Oversoul Games has done based on that exactly. It is a GMless dungeon crawl. You can play the same module over and over and not get the same results. Believe me it is in constant revision and requires alot of thought to create dungeons for it. Its called Dungeon Plungin' and can be found in the download section at www.oversoul-games.com
I also had thought about some rules variants for Dice Chucker that a rule of say all 6s that player got to create one thing important about the game world.
In the end though I feel there is just too much work involved in creating a campaign setting, and I would like to just simplify it, by simplifying the world itself.
What I have been doing so far
I decided that it would work better for me if I did a map at the same time as writting everything up. A quick plug here, I like using autorealm, it is a free and very good map maker IMO.
Anyway it gives me a visual reference as I go. The write up for this world so far consists of just a list of people, places, and things. For each item I create I add it under the appropriate category. I have been writing one sentence to each item, so far the sentnces either describe the location of the item or something interesting about it. If i think of more I will add another sentence as I go. Each item may include a question I feel important enough to be answered at some point.
I decided I wanted all the usual fantasy playable races, I still want to keep everything small so I did not want a lot of kingdoms for each. I am sticking with my two kingdoms, so I gave three towns to the humans, in Westhaven, the gnomes and halflings each got one and is dependant upon the human kingdom. The dwarves have two independant towns, and the elves have 1 hidden city.
I have so far devoted alot of my time to the actual geography of the world, mostly on the good kingdom, Westhaven half. I have added a few mountains, a few rivers, and a few forests.
So far I am enjoying this process.
A handy tool
This doesn't work too well for developing a setting as a whole, but I find using Flowcharts to be fantastically useful in fleshing out organizations. Having a sheet on hand is fanatastically useful when the players decide to go talk to the palace quartermaster for whatever reason and you have a very small section which shows the name, loyalties and perhaps one roleplaying quirk.
I'm running a hunter game and I've got quite a few of these, one for the Vampires in the City, one for mortal governments/police forces and another for the other hunters. With a few symbols (like a blood drop by the name of the mayor) I can easily reference whether one person is controlled by the vampires and so on.
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Don't steal... The Government hates competition.
Nearly there
Well I feel I am about 75% done with Nook, well as far as the work I intend to do for it. I am going to flesh out a few points, try to work up a few interesting sentences for each location or thing. I could go into great detail about every little thing but is it needed? Is that much detail needed to make a world feel alive? Do you really need to know the age of the mayor of each town to make the world turn?
I am going to put down on paper some of the historical ideas I have had for Nook, again not super detailed but I do want to answer some whys and hows and give a good back drop to everything.
I have come up with several interesting little plot ideas for games, a couple are preludes to a greater save the world type storyline. I am really hesitant to add that. For me save the world is a campaign setting ender. I have a hard time getting into games that do that over and over. How many truly evil villains capable of bring about an end to everything the player characters hold near and dear can there be? Don't get me wrong I love saving the world just as much as anyone else, but I do not want a world I hard on desiging get used for 1 campaign and then get selved.
Not sure of a title for this post.
I think it's important not to put too much detail. It might good for the first game someone runs ever, but after that it becomes restrictive. If players read the setting as well you know that if the Storyteller decides something contrary, then that will be picked up upon. The less rigid a setting the more a storyteller can but his or her own personal stamp upon it.
I vote don't place any world ender bits in. I always find it stupid that the starting PCs get roped into something. Like I find it stupid they send Hobbits to get rid of the ring. Underdogs in real life fail most of the time. Perhaps add some perils to areas, whatever is happening isn't threatening to the whole kingdom or world, but perhaps the PCs likely home towns have problems quite dire to them, but beneath the notice of whatever ruling figure there may be.
Favourite game for me was one in which we all played Kobolds (DnD 3.5) and there was no end of the world stuff going on here, we just had to deal with things like a wolf deciding to take up home in our cave. It was important for us to solve, we felt good when we did and it didn't drag the rest of the world down with us.
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Don't steal... The Government hates competition.
This makes me think of Elder Scrolls.
Didn't they start out small and explode into this enormous, richly detailed world? Fast-forwarding through the series a bit, they turned this tiny little island, Vvardenfell, into one of the most exciting role-playing experiences I've ever had, thick with warring factions, false gods, political intrigue, a lost race, and demon lords.