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.

Take Fritz Leiber, author of the Fafhrd and Grey Mouser stories. Over a period of time in a series of letters, he and a colleague spun together a few ideas for the protagonists, a few other characters, some places in the world of Nehwon and from there he took it to generate stories that became his greatest legacy. As he would write he would weave in a detail of a person, place or event for color, and over time some became fleshed out, some were just flavor that set the tone and were potential that could have happened, but adventure never led the pair there.

Ideally, that's how I want to run this game. I have some ideas about places, situations in the world, and a few characters and antagonists and factions. Things will come to us over time. I might just have a name of a place, or what it looks like, or a couple pictures that I have saved that fill out a mood or what it should look like, and some day it might become more to me and become a location that is more important over time. Players might become interested in an idea, or someone suggests something or asks about something that I hadn't considered, and it may turn out that yes, such a thing may exist if you look.

The world isn't born fully-formed. We're shaping it through play and those parts that are important will make themselves known over time. We will discover it together, over time.