Setting design philosophy

Prepping the setting for gaming can often seem like a cliff you need to climb. You have a lot choices to make that affect things like engagement, tone, amount of prep required, storylines that make sense in such a setting, how much of an outlet it will be for your creativity and just how much plain work it will be to run the setting.

• Some people like to use a pre-made setting with a ton of details planned out for everything and tons of canon. It seems exhausting to me to have to carry the ideas of someone else's world around in my head and be able to pull answers out of my orifices at a moment's notice, so that's out.

• Others like to take a skeletal setting (like, say, Greyhawk, the “Known World” before it was Mystara or The Midlands) and make it their own. While I can see the advantages there and you can repaint and rearrange the furniture, you're still hanging your hat in someone else's house.

• So, that leaves me with homebrewing a world. That's probably the most expansive because then you have to do it all. You have to make all the places, players, connections and history. I see people online who are doing it, bleeding into hundreds or thousands of pages, worrying about things like weather patterns, plate tectonics and detailed world history of places that the players will likely never visit.

None of these are appetizing to me.

However, there's another way.