I'm an over-ambitious creator in need of a world to create. Specifically, I have the habit of making a new world for every campaign I run, and so by the time the game starts I only have a half-developed pantheon, some overarching history and culture points, and even my regular players have to re-learn everything.
I don't have the creative patience to use a published campaign setting: I won't be happy unless it's my own, so I want to make 1-3 campaign settings I can use for the rest of my life, adding to them, exploring cultural and political changes, and just enjoying the game instead of wasting time by starting over and over. So my question is, what do you like in your campaign settings? What makes them pop? What makes you say "I want to play in that," "I want to buy that," or "I want borrow that for my own world"?
And yes, the most important definer of any campaign is the game itself, the Game Master, and the players (you can have sandbox, horror, dungeons, and all sorts of things in the same world, after all,) but there are aspects of the world that color every game put into it, or at least suggest the most appropriate game style, and adjust the way the game is played. What are your favorites?
However, recently I've read Midgard, and the Adventurer Conquerer King RPG system. Midgard has no 'gimmick' other than being well-written, but it's amazing: The pure sense of wonder, the re-connecting of old RPG ideals with their mythological roots, the horrific world that just begs to be adventured in, it's amazing.
Likewise, Adventurer Conquerer King is based on OD&D and rejects a lot of the newer standard setting drappings- Only 3 playable races, (humans, elves, dwarves, expanded to include gnomes, lizardmen, and holy/devilish humans in the Player's Companion) magic-users are rare and magic items are rarer, an easy divide in the world between law (good guys) and chaos (dark gods, dark races like orcs, necromancy, etc.) It's the kind of thing that at first turned me off because it's so basic, but after reading it I loved it. It isn't simple, it's uncluttered: they build a world designed to get you adventuring, not wow you with their creativity, and it worked! They made a world where a single necromancer is a terrible evil, a horde of orcs could threaten civilization, and dungeon delving sounds like an amazing adventure, rather than an exercise in redundant mapping and monster-slaying.
This has made me seriously reconsider how I approach my worlds, and has me conflicted about what exactly I want in a world, what my players want, and what would best serve the game, rather than my own creator's vanity.
For me a setting doesn't pop without echoes of our world. I say echoes not copies, pathfinder does this a little too much for my pallet (Varissia being clearly Gypsie) but if done with finesse an echo gives that touch of familiarity that makes everything more real.
Example: Lets say you want to create an area with an ancient Arabic vibe. The obvious things to do is put them in a dessert and have them run around with scimitars, camels and turbans. Call wizards Viziers and kings Sultans and if you're lazy as a designer you're done- and as a player I roll my eyes at you for being obvious. Displace this culture in a jungle setting and adapt them to that environment add some backstory on why they are in the jungle and what they did to adapt to live there and I'm at the edge of my seat guzzling the kool-aid you offered.
Another element that makes a world pop and is essential are the villians. D&D/Pathfinder sometimes fails at this miserably- best villian ever for me is Magneato, because he thinks he's the [i]good guy./i] Love or hate him his background of laying witness to the holocaust from inside a concentration camp makes him a sympathetic villian and you can understand why he behaves in the zealous fashion he does. Evil has a motive its never just evil to be evil in my worlds. My goblins see themselves as victims of oppression and act spitefully because they are the weak and have been tread upon by the strong. Also, their heads aren't shaped like frakin' footballs.
Not sure if I gave you what you asked for but its the best advice I can give.
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I enjoy large worlds with diverse and conflicting cultures. What I don't like is the entire game world based on a single gimick, culture, or belief system.
The real world has plenty of examples to draw from, as do many works of fiction. Egyption, Greek, Persian, Roman, Tolkien: there is little reason all cannot co-exist in a single fantasy world.
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Verisimilitude.
I'd say focus on one campaign world and work on making it work. This means more then just building pantheons. It means figuring out nuts and bolts like how things in the world effect common stuff.
Establish countries that can actually accomplish things. This is one of my major gripes with Pathfinder and DnD before it, how does the country survive when their army can't handle a single giant or griffon or hippogriff without crapping themselves or needing to call out the entire military. These people have been living in this world longer then the PCs have been around, they /know/ whats out there.
If the nation can't provide the Security need, the people aren't going to be in that nation. There won't /be/ a nation.
Make sure you know how people eat. Know what they care about. Know what they think happens to them when they die.
Also remember, limitation breeds genius. Don't throw everything in willy nilly. Make it make sense. Cut off the edges of the square pegs until they're round if it makes them fit into your world better.
Its better to say no, and point to very clear reasons and rationals then to say yes to everything and end up with a hodge podge that makes no sense.
Another element that makes a world pop and is essential are the villians. D&D/Pathfinder sometimes fails at this miserably- best villian ever for me is Magneato, because he thinks he's the good guy. Love or hate him his background of laying witness to the holocaust from inside a concentration camp makes him a sympathetic villian and you can understand why he behaves in the zealous fashion he does. Evil has a motive its never just evil to be evil in my worlds.
I think Solspiral makes one of the most important points here.
Many fantasy worlds of full of GOOD and EVIL, but that's unrealistic and eventually boring. A really great setting should have people, nations, factions, organizations, and powers who oppose one another, but without being clearly good v evil.
Here are some real world examples:
The USSR & USA during the cold war
Israel & Palestine since 1947
China & Hong Kong
India & Pakistan
USA & Brittan in 1776
Liberals & conservatives (in any political environment)
I find this dynamic is most interesting when 1) everybody's wrong about something and 2) everybody's right about something.
Perhaps one culture oppresses women, while another oppresses men. One allows slavery but with strict laws regulating treatment of slaves, while others outlaw slavery but permit terrible treatment of the poor. Some nations could be religious states, where the tenants of a particular religion are the highest law - for good or ill. Perhaps an orc nation is racist and xenophobic, but is generally a good neighbor, uninterested in attacking anyone who leaves them alone. Or, perhaps an orc nation is the most accepting culture on the planet, willing to accept anyone without prejudice and judge them on merit - but is an aggressive expansionist neighbor.
To me, an important feature of a fantasy RPG world is the monsters - I want to go fight monsters, but I want them to exist for a reason!
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This will probably be unpopular, but I'd be curious to see a world that really treats alignment as less relative. I'm probably too sympathetic to shades of grey in real-world morality, because very few people actively set out to do evil, yet evil gets done every day.
But in a fantasy world, alignments are real. Evil not only exists, but if you're a first level paladin, you can detect it. I've had a GM threaten to fall a paladin, because she attacked a demon that wasn't doing anything wrong, as if a moderate aura of evil was somehow insufficient cause for a holy warrior to attack. Yes, we talked him out of having the paladin fall, but it illustrates the point that moral relativism is part of our reality that it's hard to let go of. Our real lives don't have Chaotic Evil any more than they have Maximized Fireballs.
But our fantasy can.
A city run by paladins where they check your alignment at the gates.
A place where elves and dwarves are still at war because they can't bridge the lawful/chaotic divide. It's good enough for demons and devils, right?
Orcs as anarchists waging all out war on whatever social structure exists.
Coming back to this to demonstrate my points from earlier:
I used the Ancient Egyptians in my homebrew world renamed them Nubians (also from RL) and gave them a focus on both archery skills and a fixation on undeath. This particular culture used the remains of ntheir dead to provide labor and every citizen had an extensive education that included ways to control the undead. They constructed Obelisks to focus their power and when the commoners were too far from an obelisk they could no longer control the specially prepared undead.
This was huge in my world, many cultures found the Nubians offensive and the Nubians as a result were more friendly to "monster" based cultures. The Nubians always wanted to construct Obelisks everywhere because the power of their people depended on this and it would factor into every negotiation (the obelisk was a shrine/temple to Osirus.)
This is an example of both borrowing form the real world and flexible morality. The Nubians were not an evil culture per say but made great villians depending on the party.
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Let your players build the world as they go. Just start off with enough to get going and improv as the players go.
This, in my experience, is a great way to get players invested in the game world.
I was, in the past, too prone to trying to design a world out of whole cloth, only to find that the ideas I found to be way cool didn't really appeal to any of my potential players.
Find out what they want to play, and what sort of cultures *they* find cool (even if you have to simply resort to finding out what sorts of movie or novel or comic book cultures appealed to them, and come up with fantasy analogues that include the 'cool' elements that attracted their attention in the first place).
Some players will want to play traditional members of certain cultures. Others want to play moody outcast loners, and you might find them paradoxically enjoying having societies or cultures designed specifically to be antithetical to their characterization, so that they can RP flouting that culture and its traditions. (Wanting to play a dwarven wizard, for instance, in a world where dwarves shun arcane magic as untrustworthy and suspect, with a culture dominated by clerics, fighters and paladins.)
If each player is encouraged to provide one race, and one nation or culture (neither necessarily having anything to do with each other!), you can then be the quiltmaker, patching together a coherent setting out of the pieces that your players have handed you, knowing that your players will at least have some investment in the setting, since they helped to choose what bits went in the bucket. Allowing the players who suggested a given race or culture to flavor it up a bit, even several sessions in, as new ideas for flavor occur to them, can keep them invested (so long as it doesn't turn into some sort of arms race, with individual players attempting to outcool each other as 'their' pet race or culture develops, although, if such a thing even seems likely, it can be fun to take that meta competitiveness and reflect it in the game setting by having the two races / cultures be in some sort of contentious or fractious relationship...).
This will probably be unpopular, but I'd be curious to see a world that really treats alignment as less relative. . .
Although I posted earlier about having every nation or organization think they're in the right, while also being horrible is some way - I also agree with Nylissa that alignment should carry some serious weight.
The way I've resolved that conflict in homebrew worlds before is to make a distinction between beings which are metaphysically aligned, and beings which are ethically aligned.
Metaphysically aligned being are born or created with an alignment: angels, demons, dragons, inevitables, aberrations, animals, constructs, etc.
Ethically aligned beings are born tabula rasa and take on an alignment based on the choices they make, influenced by culture, experience, circumstance, and personal tendencies: humans, elves, dwarves, halflings, (and in my favorite settings) orcs, kobolds, hobgoblins, giants, humanoids and intelligent denizens of the material plane in general.
One great advantage of this distinction is that it gives the GM options. When you want to give the players a dungeon to trash, fill it with evil outsiders and let them kill everything that moves. But, when you want to give them interesting moral or social dilemmas, have a tribe of orcs raid a halfing villiage - because the halflings salted the orcs' traditional summer pasture land in an effort to drive off the orcs . . .
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I tend to love big, crazy settings where anything can happen and weirdness abounds. That's why Spelljammer and Planescape are my favorite campaign settings, and Golarion is my favorite of all the "Vanilla" D&D settings. And that's also why my campaign setting (Which I'd Love to hear what you think of it so far :ShamelessPlug: :ShamelessPlug:) takes place in a giant dungeon with areas including such places as a lake of acid that doubles as a place of parley, a giant clock tower/library hybrid and a giant artifical-looking mountain based on organized sports and old Nickelodeon game shows. But that's just me.
Glad you liked Midgard, AdamMeyers. As others have mentioned, you don't necessarily have to create the whole world at the beginning. Start with a city or kingdom to be the focus of your campaign. Build out from there. That's essentially what happened with the published world of Midgard. It started with the Free City of Zobeck. Now there's a campaign book.
Btw, if you haven't seen it, Kobold Press just released a book on Worldbuilding that might be up your alley. It has plenty of food for thought within it.
