Sounds like your campaign and the campaign setting are working hand in glove, and that’s the big secret to successfully using one. Trying to run a wild west campaign with the same setting wouldn’t work half as well.

Things I didn’t have to make include: 4 regions divided into 10 provinces with their regional capitals, 8 gods divided into 2 pantheons, 8 types of magic controlled by a single college, and 4 races.

That leaves me lots of time to work in Game-of-thrones style politics, as all of these factions scheme and backstab, looking to come out on top as the rulers of the empire. So far I have 50 NPC’s, I’ll probably have 100 by the time the game starts and then make another 50-100 by the time the game ends.

This has left me so much free time that I’m already detailing my next game for next year :)

@Philo: Management of the disbursement of information to players within a campaign is one of the most difficult aspects of the GMing art to master, and it’s one that I’m still learning to handle myself, so your point is fair comment. However, it remains only a potential problem and one capable of solution, so it might be going too far to judge the alternative to be a benefit just for avoiding it. That’s a little like saying that giving players free will concerning their character’s options might cause trouble, so it’s better to railroad them – a position that I doubt anyone would support.

There is, however, some middle ground between the two extremes, and that’s the territory considered in the section on making the campaign setting your own. Making the basics of a setting known in advance to the PCs while altering enough of the details that the PCs are not all experts on the game setting before setting foot out their front doors is, in many ways, an optimum compromise, at least in this respect.

BTW, the same principle can be applied to other aspects of the rulebook as well; I have once run a campaign in which the Monster Manual was an in-game encyclopedia of wildlife that may or may not be encountered, of reliability ranging from excellent to related to the truth only by association. The only sure way to know what any given creature was capable of was to encounter it. In general, the more exotic and unusual the creature was, the less reliable the entry concerning it would be. That puts it on a par with some of those wonderful books of ‘exotic animals’ from the 1800s, which is where I got the idea.