here's a gulf of distinction between the World & the Setting. The world is the theater & the setting is the stage - that's the best way of thinking about it for me. The setting is the focal area where the story will play out...
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Oh, Hello. You caught me inventing a fake history. Not fake, that's not true. In scholarly historical circles you say something is ahistorical instead of wrong or false. Like most realms of study scholars of history understand that Fundamentally all anyone knows is what someone told them. Sure 1492, important stuff happened. And how do we know? Well, people wrote it down & we read what they wrote. More documents supporting the story tend to make it seem more true but nobody alive saw these things happen, we're relying on everyone who came before's reports on the matters of the day. Sure, an abundance of documentary evidence makes the past real-ish. But there's a lot of documentation about what the X-Men were doing in 1990. A Lot. Indeed the deeds of the X-Men are more thoroughly documented than the deeds of Caesar or Christ. That's weird right? Historians, scholars of any kind will come to realize this sort of thing when they make these studies & they become less & less comfortable saying something is wrong or false. It's more true to say - it's just not participating in the same conversation. It's ancient aliens, it's young earth creationism. It's not the same conversation, it's not wrong -it's Ahistorical.
Maybe too much of an aside, I studied history pretty earnestly at college. Twice actually. Publishing in academia requires research - reading what the people in the past had to say. Publishing in fiction means being able to make up your sources. I choose make up my own Every. Time. My intention here is to explain how I do that.
The theater is the world, the setting is the stage. It's what you shine a light on & where the action happens, but if the theater can't support it, can't draw an audience, doesn't have the permits, the plumbing , the foundation - there's no stage. I like this metaphor a lot because it also accounts for the stage alone, the impromptu the, repertory & the improvisational. You meet me on the street & ask nicely (I accept drinks) I'll run a session for you. This is what I like to do & I'm ready to do it. If you want breezy & quick I got that, if you want intense & storied I can do that, am doing that. The game can take a lot of forms narratively & I excel at one of these above others, but it's still my craft & I'm still pretty capable even on a bad day.
What I like is the long term campaign. It's best when the setting is deeply impacted by player choices - never by apocalyptic struggles. I have some problems with the nature of contemporary campaign design. I have a lot of problems with it that I'll get into another day. Today I'll get into how to build the theater & how it connects to the stage.
First, context. You gotta make some. That's the cosmology. It's fun to start there - with how the universe came to be. How did people get here & so on. It's fun to start there but if that's where you start be ready to revise often. You'll be addressing the disconnect between game rules, whatever game you run, and the escalating, heightened improvisational storytelling you'll be doing at the table - you'll be changing your cosmology a lot - or you'll be presenting unfair & alienating difficulties for your players. If you have a Vampire King of tremendous power that governs a realm of horror and you want to have a 3rd Edition Paladin roll into that adventure, you may not have the kind of time you were hoping to. I'm explicitly now calling out Ravenloft for making no fucking sense. I'm not opposed to the creators or the setting by any means. I bet they had wonderful sessions that made them want to codify the whole thing, write some books. That's my guess about it, about all the settings. Ravenloft just glares at me because as a player (who helped slay Tiamat one time in 3.5) I go Dragons>Gods>Demons>Vampires in order of challenge. Dragons are the best ones -it's right in the name! Not to say anything's wrong with a horror game - it's just that a horror setting is far from bulletproof & horror requires credulous characters who recklessly stumble directly into trouble. If you are a player in a horror game have your character constantly say things like "I'm not scared of some stupid house! & There's no such things as Vampires!" If you all go in like pros, checking your magic swords for bloodstains & your enchanted armor for defects & your WIZARD for wizardry - the game is not a horror game, it's an adventure game focusing on monster-hunts. This is tough to articulate maybe & I don't mean to bully Ravenloft, but to me it's always the best example of the mechanics fighting the setting.
You want the mechanics to compliment the setting. Remember that.
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I have Jaibel as the place where D&D type things happen in my creation. I want to build the setting to accommodate the specific weirdness of the system. Absurd quantities of precious metals, common languages, lots of flying & teleportation, lots of mind control & so on. It's pretty impossible to have a subtle D&D setting. Good & evil are always on the table. These are Fun. But they don't often correspond to the world in your mind. You can't be precious here, whatever final boss or superdungeon you make, the players will break it casually with some suite of abilities from a splatbook you couldn't be bothered to read or the off-label use of a spell you never thought much about. You've got to roll with this The players will do what they do & you've got to be ready.
Readiness means that you know Everything about the setting. Knowing Everything about a setting is the difference beween you and god. I know it's a tired kind of insult, "you just want to play god blahblah blee." Shut the fuck up. It's fun & creative. There's nothing wrong with that. You know everything about the setting because you built it. From deeper than the ground up to higher than the atmosphere - you've built the world & know what will happen in it.
Early in the hobby I ran into a bunch of this: "Uh, no, you can't go that way, uh... the walls are adamantium, that's off the map!" This can be handled with grace or with stupefied rage. It can go a lot of ways when a starter DM is challenged on their creation. If they made something they're proud of & they're insecure about their abilities, they can get defensive & weird. "Your characters all die. The end!" If they're a little older you don't see that rage & insecurity, but you do see the pleading look - "Please go on the adventure." It's endlessly amusing to me to read old Shadowrun mods. Have you ever looked at these? There's a section at the start where the cybermage characters are offered a job. It has its own heading in the book, there's a whole in-universe lingo for it. The Meet, Mr. Johnson. It's the inciting incident of all the missions. And the next section heading is something like: What if the players don't take the job? That cracks me up every time. Imagine spending 20 bucks on a book, studying it, prepping it, having your people come to the table & they're just. "Nah, this doesn't sound like something we want to do." Uh? Well... It's not that you can't DM your way out of the scenario, it's just funny that there's a choose your own adventure style tombstone built into the mod. The mission is over award no nuyen or karma. It should also say flip the table & go home - these assholes don't deserve you. I'm laughing as I write this, I hope you're enjoying it too. I am not calling out other makers for their methods. This is all new. A brand new medium we're inventing as we go. There aren't (many) wrong ways to do it. True story, in like middle school I knew kids who were playing their own variant of that one game that's all initials & is super specifically gross. I was perturbed not to be invited. Just because I Really Like This Thing We Do Together. To be fair I think it really helped those kids to work out some things. They're doing okay as regular joes last I heard, which wasn't what they were like as troubled teens.
The players will run all over your invention & the key to enduring that is Robust World Building. I've been on that tip for a while now & it's suited me. The worldbuilding always engages me. It's just - you have to understand that Worldbuilding & Setting are different. So, thesis out of the way - here's the difference & how you go about building a setting.
Previously I was on about Jaibel, the great continent. It's got some subsidiary lands that I think are ripe for exposition. The continent is a little bit star-shaped. It's got spokes, so I can even just roll d12 & choose which o'clock I want to start building on. I don't need to randomize. I pick a landmass & get to work.
First, names. Names are useful distinctions, they're the noise you can make that means a thing. I land on Pallaria - it sounds like a luxury jewelry brand to me - which is a good place to start with your fantasy setting. Deeper into it I'll get more gritty - but The Pallarian Subcontinent sounds to me like a cool place where interesting stuff happens. One word on names. I personally don't take a prescriptivist stance in how people pronounce the words I make up. When players pronounce it differently than I do in my head - that adds verisimilitude for me. Oh, they have a regional accent, that's how they say it. Apparently you can tell a lot about a person's geographic origin based on how they say Nevada or Utah - that's a little detail you wouldn't commonly think about writing into your setting - but. But, the admix of players at the table making a story creates detail for you.
Pallaria is gonna be good. I can feel it Let's figure it out.
So I just wrote Jaibel - it's the divided land, a big mountain with some subcontinents attached at the edges. Geographic divisions are what allow cultures to grow & differentiate & I want that, a lot of variety. I think I'll make Pallaria kind of Jaibel jr. Its the smaller subcontinent which also has interior geographical divisions. The rain shadow of a mountain range double the size of the Himalayas is probably going to mean a lot of rain & flooding. I land deep, steep & somewhat isolated river valleys. Here I can actually play with the ideas that Jaibel is based on - cultural isolation, the flourishing of weirder ideas that never took off in the real world. But in Pallaria, it's small enough that I can have these isolates interacting, if just a bit. They can play off of each other's distinctions. There can be conflict. You need that for your stories...
So I spend some time mapping it out & land on an adequate starting place. I have to figure out what kinds of things happen here.
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One country, I'm going to import my current ongoing beer & pretzels session, the one with the old Grognards. That's a drinking table - so inconsistencies will come up, the Grognards will tend to accept & roll with it. But you get a sense of where there are faults in your creation based on the at-the-table retcons & revisions you're throwing down. You make the canon as you go. The world is built only after the campaign is complete. That's the dirty truth of it. The big obvious secret. It's a good starting place, I include some things that I've kicked around for years now, my personal retinue of tropes. The Crafts Faith, the conflicts between emergent & declining social classes, the subversion of tropes (In that campaign the PCs are tricked into bringing about the end of the world in the first few sessions & then spend the rest of the game figuring out how to stop it), the effulgence of life. It's a fine campaign. Very D&D. It's run in a kind of Black-Forest & Alps locale so that fits pretty well - I put it in the Zanimic Valley. More on the Zanimic Valley later. Moving up the coastline northeast there's a big forest & then a big, big river valley. I concieve of it as a kind of everglades meets the amazon. A perpetual flow of water that teems with life.
I want it to be a culture with seasons based on rain not weather & an immense population. A big & heavily settled place akin to the Yangtze in its development (not the contemporary Yangtze though). I can see it. The sky here. It's so high, so dense & heavy it doesn't seem a distant thing, it overwhelms the world it sits on. The valley is broad, the sounds of frogs & crickets is constant, people are everywhere, the land is always under cultivation, the population is spread densely all throughout. You walk a mile in this land & you'll be have taken half a day wading through mud. I can see the roads, they're important, given the climate & the landscape. They're raised up, like levees & covered over with planks, they're a work of engineering & effort, maybe the great works that the place is known for.
What else is it known for? Here's what I've learned about the place - you can follow along as decisions are made.
It's heavily populated, densely populated.
It's a regularly flooded plain with abundant agriculture, maybe the most abundant.
It's hard to get around.
For this to be an actual country, with its own currency & customs the thing it will need is a powerful central authority. How come?
There's too many people, they'll divide up into smaller sodalities, they'll get into conflicts without a steady hand to provide administrative tasks.
The water is too dangerous a double-edged sword. It can make the land prosperous but it can flood all the time too, it can wipe everyone out if it's not managed. For that we're looking at a king. (Don't worry, it'll get less Confucian. Not much less, but less).
Then there's the roads. The river is the main mode of travel but roads are still important. Especially if they're doing double-duty as water management & administrative tools.
Does that seem boring to you? To think about? I can see how it might. But then the players may want to access a certain city without anyone knowing. You may have to improvise at the table. Okay, what do you know? There's water management as an important thing for rulers. Maybe in the guarded king's palace there's a secret map of the hidden water infrastructure. Or of the water's flow, maybe the players want to breach a dam to attack their enemies? These are options now on the table that you'll be able to call on at need.
See, we know why there's a country there. Countries don't need that much reason to be. They need some amount of geographic isolation & some people to live in it. Their rulers need a reason to be, their social structures need a reason to be. So you have to immediately think about the things people want or need their leadership to accomplish. Players (in my country) frequently forget that laws are a fetish of the modern era, evidence & policing are new.
Now lets look at those features of life that the leadership won't be providing. These are the interstices where the players will be able to flourish, where the action is.
I remove laws & law enforcement immediately - not purely from my own distaste for same, but also because - well? I'm going with an absolute style monarch. Law & right are going to be assured by reputational status, social acclaim & access to authority. Arbitrary? Sure, but it creates a milieu.
Borders? Military? Well. Let's look at the borders. The ocean, the mountains, the mountains some more & then this great big forest. Well, what about that forest. The other places may be easy to defend & control, but a forest is porous as all hell.
I skipped that realm (realm's the word I use to be even more generic than country). This is a fantasy setting & its D&D - for D&D. There's a lot of talking animals in D&D. There's mechanically, the potential to have many, many more of those than appear in most of the settings in which I've played. I make that forest the Nameless Kingdom. It's the terrifying anti-people police state of the sapient animals. Give it a little think & you'll probably understand why sapient animals might make a hostile hermit kingdom stridently opposed to people. I think in the history I'll have some examples of especially brutal conflicts between the smart animals of the forest & the people who've tried to settle there.
What else is left out? Money? Nah, the king will issue coins. Let's add that to his responsibilities.
Religious practice? How does the state admin that? Does it? Maybe I'll do some god-emperor style moves. Make the king the object of religious veneration. Could be okay, there are other religions in-setting that are pretty well developed, I can build religious strife as a motivating feature, a conflict asking for players.
Maybe. Let me think some more. Let me work out some history - build more context.
The defining event on the Jaibellic continent has to be the fall of Ulta. This is a D&D optimized setting so it needs an underground country & it needs buried horrors. It doesn't hurt to have the fall of an important state as the boundary by which time is measured. The Fall of Ulta. That's a big division, something that I can hang a lot of material from.
This has been a lot. There's lots more to say on this topic, but I'm going to pause & get to making more than documenting the process. Return soon for the rest.
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