What are the problems with a small campaign world?

[Trekkin]

Is there a limit, in world-building, below which a world just feels too small to be useful for a wide range of stories? Is there a lower limit of people, or perhaps of space?

I suppose, in a larger sense, I'm wondering how a world changes if someone can walk from one end of it to another in a day, or if the total population is only six figures.

Related to that, how does one make a campaign world feel bigger without adding more physical space or more people?

[Zale]

Oddly enough, This (http://www.undefined.net/1/0/)was the first thing I thought of.

Eventually, the story ends up on a sort of little island on a infinite plane. No one really runs off into the endless nothing, so the island is pretty much the world. You could probably get from one end to another without much effort. There's plenty of story fit onto that small area..

If this applies to roleplays or anything at all is anyone's guess.

[Yora]

I would guess it depends mostly on what the setting is meant for.

[Toy Killer]

I had a pretty long running campaign that all resided within a small city, essentially the plane was being enveloped by the plane of shadow, so the city itself was planeshifted, to what was supposed to be an alternative material plane, but the spell was botched and ended up in the ethereal plane.

A lot more intrigue, less exploring. But for what it's worth, it was the only game where people remembered the NPC names and organizations I think I've ever run. during the first secession, the players corrected each other when they would say 'the guard guys' because they were connected directly to them, and such, and since, they all knew the names of the important factions.

[Tzi]

Geography can be a big one, for example your on an island, or a small chain of islands with no practical means of going anywhere.

In a sense the actual world is as big as any typical planet would be and probably populated with as many people, but the players live, sleep and quest in a geographically small part of it and have no practical means or reason to go anywhere else.

[Trog]

Is there a limit, in world-building, below which a world just feels too small to be useful for a wide range of stories? Is there a lower limit of people, or perhaps of space?

I suppose, in a larger sense, I'm wondering how a world changes if someone can walk from one end of it to another in a day, or if the total population is only six figures.

Related to that, how does one make a campaign world feel bigger without adding more physical space or more people?

A good question. The answer is, I think, is "it depends."

You talk of a "wide range of stories." How many? Of what nature? If you know the stories ahead of time it can help to get a sense of scope and size of the world you will need. If you are telling the tales of a small band of adventurers in a country full of minor dangers and it's set in a low to mid-magic world then that gives you one set of paramaters. If you are making a high level campaign with epic magic that can span space and time you may even need more than one plane!

But, of course, even in a universe there are only so many stories you have the time to tell with your gaming group in, say, the course of the year. Even if you planned to use this setting once a week for a whole year you only have so many hours of story and setting to get to. Planning further out can prepare you for the next year, I suppose, if you still want to adventure there. Every group has its attention span limits. But others might find learning more about the world to increase their enjoyment of playing in it. Oftentimes that doesn't so much involve expanding the world's boundaries and adding more map to the edges of where they had been before so much as it involves filling in the areas they have not been to before in the same continents they adventured in before.

Adding a level of complexity to your setting can introduce a whole other level of society to explore. For a setting I made for, originally, a one-off adventure I created a few iconic nations and the story I told revolved around those who worked for those nations and what they wanted. Then, when the adventure was over, to my surprise, the other DM in my group wanted to use it and build upon it for his adventure. He added in power groups that didn't exist in my original setting, adding a new level of complexity to it and defining his adventure in different terms and with different power players in the same setting. It deepened the setting rather than broadening it. Using this technique can get you to squeeze out a lot more mileage out of the regions you have already created as a backdrop to your story.

There's always some new story to be told in the events of someone who wasn't in the story before but who lives in that world. Adding new adventures helping out (or defeating) others who live in a setting can add a lot.

So even if you create an entire universe, you can only attend to so many details within it. Mining those details for in-session enrichment of the setting makes sure that the work you put into it gets its proper use and maximum impact at the gaming table, slowly revealing new aspect of a setting as events unfold, rather like reading a book.

If you pick up a fantasy book and begin to read you, as the reader, can only experience the setting in a linear fashion, moving from ignorance of things into a better understanding of how the setting works as events unfold. This is precisely how your gaming group will experience them - one session at a time. Though in gaming they get to chose which page to jump to instead of being bound to experience it in a linear fashion. But it still only unfolds one session at a time. So as a DM creating a world you can begin with broad brush stroke and rely on those as you begin to fill in relevant details. In one adventure in the setting you might detail certain portions of your broad brush strokes. In yet another adventure you can fill in totally different areas or revisit areas you filled in before and discover new levels of detail that you add on to create something more. Developing a setting is organic and unless you are planning to publish said setting you need not develop every tree, rock, and individual within it ahead of time, so to speak. There is always time in between sessions and between adventures to figure out a new way to use what you have made already.

The Dragonlance setting of Krynn is a perfect example. Originally set around the adventure of the War of the Lance, the books that follow those three add all kinds of detail and story to the existing setting by introducing new times, people, and events, and detailed places that were not altogether relevant to the original story.

So, er, in summary I find it best to create something a little bigger than you need, pick a smaller portion of that and use that as the setting you show to you players. Detail further still portions of that the relate to your adventure, roughing in surrounding areas as needed to cover yourself if players stray into broad brush territory. Layer detail if you return to an area you have already detailed and enjoy filling in the as of yet undetailed broad brush stroke areas in new adventures and with new NPCs.

[TARDIS]

So, er, in summary I find it best to create something a little bigger than you need, pick a smaller portion of that and use that as the setting you show to you players. Detail further still portions of that the relate to your adventure, roughing in surrounding areas as needed to cover yourself if players stray into broad brush territory. Layer detail if you return to an area you have already detailed and enjoy filling in the as of yet undetailed broad brush stroke areas in new adventures and with new NPCs.

Most excellent piece of advice - you should always be prepaired if the PCs want to try to explore beyond the set area of the campaign that you've laid out so far, but if you manage to pull it off, you can set an entire campaign inside a single large city :smallwink:

It's really not how big the setting is "horizontally" - how long it take to get from point A to point B, but how big it is "vertically" - how deep the setting is, how much time can your players invest in one area. Ptolus was a massive book that included enough plots to level a character from 1-20 and beyond, all set in a single metropolis and the dungeons below, and above, its streets. In that case, the city is big enough that when the players want to explore, they're not thinking about looking over the next hill or heading down the road, but looking into the back alleys and sidestreets.

Now of course there are issues with geography in these cases - the climate is probably going to be largely constant aside from seasonal variations, and you're probably not going to be dealing with towering mountain ranges, sweltering jungles, and frigid arctic wastes, but
if you're okay with having limited geographical flexibility, this should not be a concern at all.

To give you a personal example, I had a campaign that lasted a good eight months that took part in an area about that which you described, centred around the city of Kentdown. This (http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3504/3270525842_a7dc95d999.jpg)was my half-baked DMs map. This (http://dassovietcanuck.deviantart.com/art/Map-Kentdown-119744444?q=gallery%3Adassovietcanuck%2F3701099&qo=41)was my much prettier city map which I gave to the players in a handout. Most of the campaign took place either in Kentdown, or heading out to the various dungeons I marked on the map for a dungeonbusting excursion. The players never even headed to Ringminster, negating the need for a map for that, instead returning to same city over and over again, allowing me to build the depth required in that one city that allowed the setting to feel bigger when they could just hop on a train and be halfway across the country a day later :smallwink:

If your world's population is only in the six figures and the area is only a days hard march, then you really do have to drill down and detail what you've got and make the most of it. Every village or every other farmstead should be able to handle a session's worth of gameplay. But it is very doable, and very rewarding. :smallbiggrin:

[Zap Dynamic]

This is something I've been thinking about for a while. My Blackwood Campaign Setting (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=232675) is a personal example of my attempt to make a small campaign space that is nevertheless rich in content. As you can tell from the map, it's possible to ride a horse from the furthest northern city to the furthest southern city is 2-3 days. Now that the setting is complete and I'm running a campaign in it, I'm finding that it's still staggeringly huge.

A project I want to work on in the future is to create a world that's about as big as in-game Skyrim. In terms of real-world space, the game world of Skyrim is supposedly about 4 miles wide. Think about that for a second. There's an insane amount of content (dungeons, settlements, organizations... in short: adventure) in Skyrim, yet it's only about 4 miles wide.

In-game space can be determined by looking at the length of the game's days. It takes about 24 in-game hours to travel from Riften to Markarth, which theoretically makes the game world 70 some odd miles wide, assuming DnD-esque travel times on foot. That's still not a big space.

I've seen other campaigns and settings take place in large cities, small cities, caves, or even a village and surrounding wilderness. I'm constantly astounded by how much stuff you can fit into a tiny setting without it feeling crowded.

[erictheredd]

Ways to make a campaign world seem bigger:

1) make travel difficult. I will admit, this is an artificial way of legnthing distance, but it works. "Difficult" doesn't necessarily mean slow either. If you have look at the hobbit and the Lord of the rings, The hobbit features a shorter journey, but feels about as long, because of the difficulties that come up (difficulties come up in LOTR, but they have a source, which kind of tones down the feel that its a long trip. once they reach the halfway point, the fellowship moves in large portions of space). If you have to ask the permission of every lord to cross his land, the world gets much larger.

2) more even PC-NPC balance. when you can tear through most villagers, they don't count for as much. every character should count, if not in combat, in some other way. Also, increase the number of factions. Population wise, China has as many inhabitants as europe or africa. but those places feel bigger because we know about all the little groups.

[CarpeGuitarrem]

As previously attested, it's the vertical element that makes a difference: not how much space it takes up on a map, but how deep and involved it is. You could set an entire campaign in a fief. You could set an entire campaign in a city.

To go modern, you could set an entire campaign in a college campus, or at a high school. As long as there's layers and layers to explore, secrets to uncover, adventures to be had, there's a campaign to be built there.

It's not how big the map is; it's how many landmarks exist to explore and blank spaces exist to be filled in.

[the_david]

This might help: http://www222.pair.com/sjohn/blueroom/demog.htm
This is the lazy version: http://www.rpglibrary.org/utils/meddemog/

[VeliciaL]

This might help: http://www222.pair.com/sjohn/blueroom/demog.htm
This is the lazy version: http://www.rpglibrary.org/utils/meddemog/

ZOMG Thank you so much! I'd lost my bookmark to that forever ago and I've been dieing to find it again.

[the_david]

You're welcome.

[moghue]

My friends and I recently had to decide between making our world build realistic or doing it skyrim style where there are just spread out cities and our continents are the size of countries. We are going to go with realistic, but the rest of the group is realizing the amount of work that is going to require. We currently have 3-4 people working on where the 4th is only contributing to small pieces in which we have our own forum for discussion, but the 4th is choosing to keep all of his things off the forum for now.

But I digress...... If you plan to do a cityscape, make it a capital of an unnamed world where there is plenty to keep players going from district to district. The way we play now, we have about 7 cities we play in currently. As long as their are plot devices to go off of, you could play in a small town that is made up of 2 blocks. It would be hard, but you could probably have a few sessions out of it.