Designing a Campaign World

One aspect of the gaming hobby is world creation. This actually stems from a literary tradition started by authors like Tolkien. Tolkien created a rich fantasy world in which to set his story. Other authors have followed suit and you will now rarely find a fantasy story that isn't set in an alternate fantasy world.

The reason for this is because the world can be a story element in itself. In fact the setting can provide a great deal of the story as well as background color.

Dave Arneson was one of the gaming pioneers who took this world building element and moved it into gaming with the development of Blackmoor. Greyhawk and Mystara followed and it became commonplace for game masters to have a fantasy setting to set their games in.

Now a setting could be something as simple as some names for coins, months, towns, kingdoms, and gods or it could be as complex as a long history. One very rich game setting is Battletech. They published several books that were essentially just histories of the various empires. I remember reading these and being incredibly impressed by the depth of the history.

But is it useful to have this depth? Is it really that useful to use a different set of names for coins and gods? I think the question becomes, do these changes in setting actually impact your game? Some obviously do. They are important plot elements in the game. For example, one game might have no elves and forbidden magic that has dire consequences when used. This kind of thing can have a big impact on the story. So big that when you consider a campaign or adventure, you should work those changes in. Gaming is, in part, tellling a story, and the setting can have a major impact, but the setting exists for this impact. That is a key point, the setting exists to serve the story. In many ways games have lost this and game companies have encouraged this separation by pushing defined campaign worlds. Now I am not against the published settings that often have a depth and breadth that a setting made by a single hobbyist can't really compare to. These settings often offer a lot of story ideas, but it helps to hide that fact the the usefulness of a setting is primarily in helping to tell a story.

One thing I want to say about campaign worlds is that little details can also be fun in a game. I remeber during a trip to China I learned about a practice of having a stew that was constantly going with water and new ingredients added, but the pot was never emptied and cleaned out. I adapted this to a game where dwarves did this (instead of Chinese muslims) and it became a whole thing in the game. The dwarf character's family offered them the ancient soup. Later on, when their house was burning they all wanted to save their ancestral soup. Anyway, little campaign world details can be very fun even though they have fairly minor story impact.

Now that I have had a little rant about how the campaign world has to fulfill it's function of adding to the story, I want to take it all back. I think world design can be fun and interesting in and of itself. For example, all those battletech books detailing history would have very little impact on any game, but I thought they were cool. I have also had fun building and detailing campaign worlds. So world design can almost be a separate hobby, but if a world is made to support a game you should remember that the world was made to support the game and details about the world the don't impact the game aren't particularly useful.