Has anyone noticed that these images are actually larger than shown? Or that the sun has been dipping lower in each one?

It’s not easy making a completely fresh start. This series examines the process of creating a new campaign in detail.

Last time, I went through the development process of taking ideas and some indications of direction and welding them together into a campaign plan. Now it’s time to think about the game world…

I am a big believer in the game setting being a platform for the execution of adventures, rather than adventures being compromised to fit into a game setting. In the past I’ve run adventures whose sole purpose was to change the game world – temporarily or semi-permanently – into whatever it was that I needed for another adventure somewhere downstream of that watershed. This not only makes your adventures better – more interesting, more fun – but it helps to keep the game environment dynamic and less static. For that reason, campaign creation for me starts with the adventures and then builds the right world around the requirements for those adventures.

The campaign planning approach that’s been taken has involved a cross-indexing of common elements, and some may have thought that this was a rather work-heavy approach to take. If all that were to come out of it were the campaign plan, I would agree – there are easier ways to create that – but this is where I reap the benefits of that investment in time and organization.

The Onion

Actually, I’m not so much building a game world at this point as I am building a game world development plan to partner the campaign plan. Game world development is like an onion, each layer inward more detailed and developed that the one that wraps around it, with the location of the initial adventure at the very heart of the onion.

So I build up an initial picture of the innermost layer, build a layer outside of that to contain the immediate context, build another layer outside of that, and so on.

The innermost layer or layers are defined by the requirements of the first adventure, the second layer or group of layers are defined by the requirements of the innermost layer and of the second adventure, and so on.

The Eleven Questions

Each layer consists of the answers to eleven questions during the development process, with the eleventh being shucked off in the course of that process.

I’m going to start by looking at each of the categories so that we’re all on the same page.

1. Where?

What sort of place is it? What’s the tone? How does the location have to fit into the adventure? What sort of location will contribute to the adventure? What sort of place will the antagonist for that first adventure come from, and is that going to be the same sort of place that the PCs are going to come from? How close are the various Primary Races – Elves, Dwarves, etc – homelands going to be to the place of the first adventure? These are the sort of questions that run through my head when first thinking about the initial setting for a campaign, and they all boil down to “Where do I want the adventures to start”?

2. When?

Historical accuracy is usually the first thing to go by the board when designing an RPG Campaign, but in many ways that’s cutting off your nose to spite your face. If you can model your campaign setting on a historical basis, you get massive amounts of background material free of charge. Even if it is my expectation to distort the historical foundations to include non-period weapons and armor and the pseudo-medievalism built into both D&D and Pathfinder, it can still save hundreds of hours of development work (current and future) to at least start from a historical model. And that means pinning the foundations to a historical time and place, and usually a set of events.

The other part of the question applies to the game setting. What’s going on? What’s just happened? How long ago? What’s everyone expecting to happen next? Obviously, this is second because the first answer can provide at least the foundations of a lot of this information.

3. Who?

Who are the notables, and why are they notable? What to the main NPCs for the first adventure have to say about the game setting in which the adventure is to begin? Who’s at home, and who’s a visiting out-of-towner? Who are the PCs, and what are their relationships with the setting of the initial adventure (if known)?

Nobody exists in isolation. We are all shaped by our environment, and even more by the environments of our youth. At the same time, there are environments in which we feel at home. Getting information on these aspects of the PCs can make integrating them into the campaign much easier and more robust, and can also help develop the setting by telling you what you need to integrate into the game world.

4. Distinctiveness

Everywhere has something that makes it distinct. It might be a Wonder, or a Monument, or a Festival, but it will have something. And just as characters can have signature moves, and are cheated if they don’t get to wheel them out from time to time, so the adventure location will feel plastic and cheap if that essential bit of color doesn’t make an appearance “on stage” in the first adventure.

But this is the first adventure that we’re talking about, a situation that’s automatically overloaded already, and simply can’t tolerate anything that doesn’t add to the quality and fun of that starting point. Setting aside arguments based on the “local color” automatically adding depth and credibility to the campaign as a whole – they do, especially if this specific setting within the game world is to be the platform for more than one adventure, but never mind that – there is an argument in favor of using that oddity, eccentricity, or distinctiveness to further the main plot, or bring in an element symbolic of the theme, or some such. To make it do a little more of the heavy lifting that ties background and adventure together, in other words.

Equally, others might suggest that this is excessive and dilutes the overt relevance of what the defining feature of this particular community is already bringing to the table. Furthermore, ramming a theme down the player’s throats rarely goes over all that well, smacking of a GM who is overly consumed with his own cleverness. Subtlety is far better than overt cleverness.

This is a subtle debate that isn’t going to get resolved anytime soon, but I can clue people in regarding the rule of thumb that I always employ in considering issues like this.

“The relevance of a symbol should equal or exceed the anticipated presence of the symbol by the smallest amount possible.”

i.e. If this setting is only to be used for this particular adventure, then go ahead and make it’s self-designated claim-to-fame relevant to the plot. If it is not, then don’t shortchange its long-term value as a reference point and touchstone for the locality just to make life easier in the short-term unless you have no other choice. Making it emblematic of the entire campaign theme can easily be too heavy-handed an approach, so unless the setting is going to be relevant for pretty much the whole campaign and not just one part of it, don’t overburden it, either. Instead, focus on using it to define the community first, and leave the symbolism to one side.

This isn’t a universal rule; there can be exceptions. But unless you have a darned good reason for doing something else, it’s a better starting point. Choose the defining elements of your initial setting accordingly.

5. Neighbors

You can’t choose your neighbors any more than you can choose your family. The same is true of communities. And yet, who the neighbors are says something more general about who you are; the mere fact that you have both chosen to exist in this particular time and place makes a statement about both that arises from the commonalities when viewed in context.

It might be a statement about lifestyle, or about economics, or about geography, or history. The larger the scale, the more the latter two influences matter. The smaller the scale, the more significant the first two will be.

Some neighbors will be friends, or friendly rivals, capable of setting aside the rivalry for mutual benefit; others will be subordinate to the community that is centrally in question, or vice versa; and a few may be enemies and serious rivals, often because they are more alike than they like to admit and because there is only room enough for one of them to prosper under the current society or its assumptions. Some examples:

• To an outsider like myself, New York City and New Jersey are practically joined at the hip. I’m sure locals within both would be very quick to point at the differences that I’m sure exist, but for all intents and purposes from this distance, you can think of them as being elements of one larger city.
• My home state of New South Wales has a similar relationship with Queensland, though we are slightly more strongly inclined towards friendly rivalry, economically and especially in the arena of sports. Australia shares a similar relationship with New Zealand.
• Neither of those examples will mean very much to my American Readers, though; so a closer example for them might be two of the New England states, like Massachusetts and New Hampshire. While they have their differences, I’m sure, their commonalities largely overwhelm the differences when viewed from any distance.
• Economic rivalries color the relationship between New South Wales and Victoria, our southern neighbor. Again, there are a whole host of similarities – enough that we can step around that rivalry to consider us all collectively “Australians” – but the rivalry is a bit less friendly and a bit more hard-nosed, because we each contain one of Australia’s two biggest cities. Even the philosophies of traffic signals are markedly different. We Sydney-siders view the Melbournian approach to pedestrian traffic signals, for example, as anarchic, a little dangerous, and slightly bumpkin in flavor; they probably see our approach as overly-regimented and authoritarian, differences that extend back as far as the founding of the two cities and Sydney being the first seat of Government when the nation was a colony of England. The truth is that people from NSW react to the over-regimentation by breaking the laws whenever it seems convenient and safe to do so by crossing somewhere other than in the designated pedestrian crossings, and that’s not a huge problem because drivers are half-expecting it; but it becomes dangerous when applied in a Melbourne context because it violates what the Melbourne drivers are conditioned to expect. The Melbourne system works perfectly well for them, because that’s what everyone there is used to – but it’s very hair-raising for those of us who aren’t!
• Canada and the US are more widely separated again; they might come into contact through Ice Hockey, as a consequence of Geography, and through the occasional mutual interest that results, but despite the affability of the relationship, they are too different, divided by the Revolutionary War, to be that close. The mindset is different, for all the similarities between the populations and cultures themselves.
• For me, the ultimate example of neighbors who are enemies and serious rivals are Springfield and Shelbyville from The Simpsons. The rivalry between them for economic and social dominance obscures the overwhelming similarities between the two that we, as viewers, are permitted to observe. It’s like two ski resorts competing for customers!

In deciding who the neighboring communities should be and what they should be like, I always focus on the question of what that relationship says about the community that I’m actually trying to define, then explicitly define one or two subordinate communities (no matter how small those have to be), a rival, and – depending on the community – a population center which dominates this community in some fashion.

6. Authority

In many ways, choosing an authority model is a lot easier than choosing the neighbors for a community! That’s because I always focus the decision on the question of how I want the authorities to react to what the PCs are likely to be doing, and how I want the two to interact. Will the community leadership view the PCs as disruptive? As undermining their authority? As enemies? As a resource to be controlled and exploited? As public benefactors? Decide that, and – by knowing what the first adventure will require the PCs to do, publicly – you define a huge amount of the nature of the government, at least locally.

Some GMs like to start PCs in the capital city of the Kingdom in which PCs take place because the sheer variety within an urban environment makes it more plausible that various individuals would encounter each other and find reasons to band together. With occasional exceptions, I prefer not to do so, because that gives me the later option of having the central authority react differently to however the local authorities will respond to events within the first adventure.

Besides, the smaller the community, the less the overhead in prep work. A word of warning, though – if you are going to have to create a capital city eventually, this can be a false economy!

7. History & Geography

While it’s certainly possible, and some GMs advocate doing so, I very rarely create the history and geography as my starting points for a game setting, or even the local region of a game setting. The line of thinking runs, “Geography dictates settlement and trade, settlement and trade dictate history, and trade and history define community.” That’s certainly how it works in the real world.

All too often, the cart ends up leading the horse from an adventure point of view when this is the approach employed.

Instead, I focus on the elements that I have already listed as items one through six and use them to define my requirements of the geography and history that has resulted in the local community being exactly what I need for the campaign. Then I fill in the blanks.

This sounds like a lot of work, but it’s often some of the greatest fun to be had. You need a river to support the community in the early days, but the presence of the trade route that it creates interferes with later history turning out the way you want it to? Remove the river! Create an incident that shapes the attitudes of the locals. It might be an Earthquake. It might be a community upstream that pollutes the watercourse. It might be a mad wizard who reshapes the landscape, or a dominant political force that decides to dam and redirect the river, and whatever consequences there might be for this community are just too bad. If the benefits of doing so are perceived to outweigh the harm, it doesn’t even have to be an evil government!

Decide what you need, then write in the circumstances that create it.

The biggest problem with this approach is that we are all prone to the occasional failure of logic or memory, and these can be catastrophic when pivotal choices make no sense in later hindsight, simply because you overlooked a more sensible answer. When the Lemon hits the fan, all you can do is pick it up and make lemonade! Or Lemon Meringue pie, or… you get the point.

If, no, When you discover a hole in your logic, assume that there is something more to the story that makes that “more sensible answer” an invalid choice from the point of view of the people making that historical decision at the time. This “something more” can either be something that was contemporary to the period and has no bearing on future events, or it can be some hidden influence that extends to this very day in the game world – which is great if your campaign plan already includes, somewhere down the track, just such a covert element!

I find that Drow are my go-to resource for “patching history” in D&D / Pathfinder campaigns. They are an endless resource in this respect; it doesn’t even have to be all of them, there are plenty of times when one faction might try to gain an advantage by meddling in the affairs of others! This even gives a way to write the “meddling influence” out, if necessary – another House uncovers the activities and feels threatened by the growing power of their rivals, so they do something about it. The needed correction to game history thus becomes just a side-effect of the interminable internal war for dominance amongst the Drow.

Occasionally, there will be a more suitable alternative, but by-and-large, half my problems at least are solved using Drow as my unwitting agents, the other half by everything else put together!

In the Zenith-3 campaign, the go-to solution is often the war between Chaos and Order, whose operatives stalk history trying to bring about conditions amenable to subsequent advantage in that conflict, and messing with the lives of bystanders. I also have Time Travelers like Warcry and a couple of villainous agencies like Demon, and a couple of meddling interstellar Empires, and range of other resources up my sleeve if I need them.

8. Society

Creating a game setting, at any scale, is a bit like building a wall from uneven stones. Do it poorly, and it will collapse; do it right, and each stone dictates the shape of the next. Everything you’ve put together to date gives you a serious head-start on the society that inhabits the local region. Most of the decisions in this area will already have been made by the time you reach this point, it’s often just a matter of putting it into writing.

One of the easiest mistakes to make is to try and force the society into a particular mold. This never works out well, and always seems to produce something that’s ill-fitting and uncomfortable. The secret to success in doing so is to have the idea of that mold to start with and build all the other ingredients – from step one onwards – into something that supports and fits the appropriate overall shape. And that’s all about how the society will fit into the first adventure and the broader campaign to follow.

9. Economy

By now you know the people, the geography, the social and political infrastructure, and the history that have brought this population to this point in time. Once again, this all makes the economy relatively easy to put together.

But there’s a problem, one that will probably trigger your first rewrite/expansion of that history, as described above – it makes no sense for a population to ignore a resource if they know it’s there. They won’t wait until it’s convenient for you to start exploiting it, they’ll be in there with chainsaws as soon as your back is turned – or they should be.

It follows that you may need to amend history to reshape the economy from what would naturally have resulted to what you need it to be, Now.

On top of that, money is power – well, influence. An excess of wealth can be a poisonous problem to deal with, and one that can require substantial historical amendment – because the easiest solution is to prevent that excess from accumulating in the first place. Few other approaches, such as Cultural preference (“Maple went out of fashion as a timber”) can last for long enough.

I encountered this problem toward the end of the Orcs and Elves series, detailing additional background for my Fumanor campaign. Whole populations ended up not quite being where I needed them to be, and not quite as dominant or desperate as I had established them to be. They were not in position to put the right economic, military, and social pressure on the Kingdom that came before the Kingdom that came before the current political situation. Some problems were too overt (but had been ignored), some problems were too minor or non-existent. Whole populations were forced to migrate as a result, in the “Decades Of Blood”.

Again, you may need to amend history to reshape the economy from what would naturally have resulted to what you need it to be, Now. In my case, I needed to create – and justify – an “Empire” of Bugbears who would provide the first in a series of dominoes that reshaped the politics and populations of the “wilderness” – just to put the right pieces in place to affect the Human Kingdom in modern times.

10. Oddities?

There’s always a danger in making everything conform and fit together, because reality isn’t like that. An overly-homogenized game world where everything fits neatly into place leaves no room to move. For exactly the same reason that I built some extra flexibility into the campaign plan, I always like to throw an oddity into each of the “significant” communities as something that can assume greater significance later on if needed. An oddity is a person, group, structure, or feature that simply doesn’t fit the neat picture that you’ve created thus far.

It’s important to place these deliberately, cautiously, and with forethought, just to avoid the problems that were discussed under the heading of “Economy” above. You need to be able to contain the influence of the oddity.

• People can make decisive differences at key moments in history.
• Groups can reshape a community over time.
• Structures can alter the way a community is perceived by strangers and invaders, and can reflect deeper influences within a community – whether they are there or not.
• Features can generate trade or be exploited, monkeying directly with the economy.

It doesn’t matter what the oddity is – it can bring you unstuck if you aren’t careful. But you need something.

11. Connections

The final element of defining a layer of the onion is what that layer demands from the layer surrounding it. Nothing exists in isolation. Each of the above categories gets placed into context not only by the other elements, but by the layers both bigger and smaller that surround it. Build a town, and you’re half-way to building a region. Build a region and you’re half-way to building a city. Build a city and you’re halfway to building a nation. Build a nation, and you’re half-way to building a world.

The Development Process

The development process is quite simple. Actually, it’s a lot simpler than it sounds:

1. Make notes for a layer.
2. Make notes for the next layer out. Make sure to incorporate/satisfy any requirements for locations within this layer as dictated by the first adventure.
3. Repeat step 2 until you have gone as far out as needed for adventure number 1, plus at least one layer more.
4. Starting with the innermost layer, add notes to incorporate/satisfy any requirements for locations from the second adventure.
5. Repeat step 4 until you have done all the layers you already have notes on.
6. Make notes for any additional layers needed for adventure number 2.
7. Repeat steps 4-6 for each subsequent adventure in your campaign plan.
8. Each adventure’s prep should include the notes for the location needed for the NEXT adventure. That gives time to get the prep done with some margin for error. If you anticipate an unusually lengthy prep, place the notes two or even three adventures in advance. The idea isn’t that you need to complete transforming these notes for the adventure where they appear, it’s that you need to START then. That means that you should also add relevant “deadline” information to the notes – Start: with Adventure 11, Deadline: for Adventure 13 tells you exactly where you’re at.
9. I make notes from local out, then do write-ups from the outermost in. That’s why the dividing lines in steps 3 and 7 are where they are. This approach organizes the material in the way that’s easiest for assimilation in pre-campaign briefing notes and later reference. However, any information that is not intended to be part of the pre-campaign briefing should be done in the same order as the notes, because that’s the order in which things will most logically come to light in most adventures – facts, then context.

That’s all there is to it. All that work done earlier in the process starts paying off big-time when you reach this stage.

What Has Been, What Is, and What Will Be

As something of a verification/validation stage, I like to synopsize all my work VERY succinctly into three paragraphs, each addressing one of the points in the title of this section.

• “What has been” covers a very very general overview of the history, geography, politics and trade.
• “What is” deals with society, infrastructure, where things are, more politics, and economics.
• “What Will Be” is a little trickier – it doesn’t deal with what actually ‘will be’ because the GM doesn’t want to give away the adventure; instead, it deals with how the locals see the future unfolding. What’s the next big social event for them? What’s the next political event expected to be? What’s their overall opinion of the way things are going? And what will the repercussions be of all of these things?

Final Thoughts

In a D&D / Pathfinder game, there are certain iconic races that have to be dealt with as part of the design of the surrounds. Where are the Elves and what are they like? Where are Dwarves to be found? and so on.

There are also “professions” whose status needs to be considered by the GM. Where do Druids hang out? What’s the religious power structure like? Is it one town, one temple, one God – or one town, one temple, many gods – or one town, no temple, and many, many gods? Or something else? Where are Paladins based? Where’s the center of arcane learning?

I try to build these questions into adventures, and in such a way that they form part of the briefing notes and background for those adventures, so that I’m not giving too much away by briefing a player on them.

At the very least, I will write one paragraph on each of the races available for PCs, and one for each of the major NPC races like Orcs and Dragons, and one for each of the Core Classes, and perhaps one each for selected Prestige Classes. Throw in a paragraph each for most of the major Deities and at least one for their major opposition like Devils and Demons. That gives me a set of briefing/reference papers that I can distribute to the players – so I make sure that there’s nothing in their that isn’t common knowledge, and that there are at least a few things in there that are (at best) only partially correct!

As each player informs me what their PC is going to be in race, class, and general background, I will produce additional notes covering what they know beyond this common foundation. I may correct one or two of the errors, and introduce one or two new ones. I want there to be some contradictions between these when players compare notes! I will also keep a GM’s copy of all of this material, with the degree of falsehood indicated by color coding or some similar mechanism.

And Some Final Food For Thought

To leave you with some food for thought: there are usually 7 or 8 PC races. There are usually another 4 or 5 significant races in a campaign world of immediate relevance. There are about 10 core classes and prestige classes that are worth documenting to the players. There’s at least one religion, and at least one society. Devils, Demons, and Dragons come to three more subjects. If you can get one adventure focusing on each of these, that’s 26-28 adventures before you even really get started! But don’t front-load the entire campaign with a travelogue – it will get dull after a while.

If the players respond favorably to say 1/4 of these, and you can get another three adventures out of each of them, that’s another 21 adventures, bringing the tally up towards the 50 mark! That’s a whole lot of adventuring right then and there – and you STILL haven’t really gotten into the adventure plan!

Let’s say you have 25 adventures in your adventure plan on top of those, and you intend to play once a fortnight – that’s 3 years adventuring even if each adventure requires only a single session of play! If you average two game sessions to an adventure, that’s 6 years worth of play! If you average three – and that’s what I consider a more realistic number, minimum – that’s 9 years worth of fortnightly play!! But four is a still more plausible number, giving twelve years of fortnightly play, or six years of weekly play – or 24 years of once-a-month play!!!!

Determine roughly how many adventures you expect to have in a campaign, multiply by the average number of game sessions, and divide by the number of game sessions you expect to play during a year. That’s how long you have, in years, to develop your next campaign… start compiling ideas now (start with anything you’ve rejected from this campaign), and you’ll never be caught short when the time comes!

With a campaign plan, a game setting that’s been carefully sandboxed and scheduled for just-in-time delivery, you might think that you’re ready to start writing your first adventure and phoning potential players. You aren’t. There are still four big steps to go – this gets you just over the half-way mark. It deals with the essentials – now it’s time to think about all those things that aren’t essential per se, but that have to be there to make the whole world believable, and vital, and interesting!