Creating a Campaign Setting

[Trasilor]

Note this is in 3.5...

Looking for a bit of advice when designing a campaign setting.

For those of you who have successfully designed a setting (not to be confused with a homebrew system), what steps did you take when creating your world?

Did you start big and work inward? Or did you start small and work you out?

Do you know of any good resources/references for creating your campaign world?

Any thoughts would be helpful as I find myself with writers block :smallannoyed:.

[WeaselGuy]

I designed the actual world the my wife DMs for our group. When I started working on it, I had the thought that the whole continent should be divided based on race, class and sex. I had the thought that, for example, in the southeast, near a little bit of coast and forest, there should be a bit or oriental theme going on, with it's country capital being the center of rogues, ninjas, fighters and overall sneaky stabby sort of characters, and racially populated by mostly Elves and Halflings. Both sexes are predominant for the classes there. Across the southern plains, there lies the religious center of the continent, where knights, paladins, clerics etc train and proselytize. In this country, something like 95% of the classes are made up of males of all races. The local females (mostly human), if they wish to adventure, usually travel to the northwest to become masters of arcane, or to the east, to become rogues and the like.

After doing that process for most of the races and classes, I then figures out which areas exported which products, and that determined a loose economy for the whole continent.

My wife has since changed a few aspects of the setting, but overall it has played well over the past few months.

For what its worth, the uses donjon.com (I think) for shop inventories and stuff like that.

[RedMage125]

I started with a plan for a storyline that I wanted to run, and sort of created the geography that I needed, mapping out progressively larger areas as I fleshed out the story, and eventually in-between sessions once I started running it. Now, I initially was just going to run in this world as a one-time thing and then switch to Forgotten Realms, because I liked FR a lot, so I used FR's pantheon. By the time the players were level 5, I had most of the main continent mapped out. And also by that time, I had started filling in so many more details about this world, details that were'nt even relevant to the story I was running, that I realized I had my own setting now. I ditched the FR pantheon and made my own gods (that took awhile).

I finished that storyline (ran the players from levels 1-18 over 3 years of college), and now I run almost all my games in my setting.

[afroakuma]

I think the first thing to do is identify why you want to create a setting. What's the thing you want to express with this setting that you can't get out of another?

Both approaches work, both have been done, but you need to figure out why you want the setting and what will work for your purpose. Do you want it for an upcoming game? Start with the broad strokes and fill in as needed.

Think of the adventuring party. Who's in it? Wizards? Barbarians? Monks? Psions? What creative elements are you choosing to support or promote?

Where do they go? What do they do there? What sort of enemies do they face?

[Nibbens]

I think the first thing to do is identify why you want to create a setting. What's the thing you want to express with this setting that you can't get out of another?

This!
For mine, I asked my players what they wanted to see in a D&D campaign, got a good working consensus based the main city off of that. Created Geography next, and tried to place cities/towns/hamlets and individual dwellings in likely places. Follow that with starting to create a story (based off of player desires) and add in my geography and dwellings as needed.
Then add details and personalities to NPCs and cities themselves.
... not quite sure if this is "outside in" or "inside out" type of planning. lol.

[Trasilor]

Thanks for the input.

For me, the setting is something I wanted b/c no setting ever felt right.

Currently I have broad strokes as to what I wand the world to look like and then I fill in the details as needed.

I think my next step is to talk to the current PCs to find out what they are looking for.

Again thanks for the insight