The Campaign Builder's Guild

so, i've decided to put my "fatebound" project (www.thecbg.org/e107_plugins/forum/forum_viewtopic.php?15444) on hold for a little while. i was using the marco to micro approach and got caught up with the wind and water currents and how thy would affect weather and temperature over my continents. it's going on the back burner until i go home & bring back my copy of the old tsr 2nd edition ad&d "world builder's guidebook". i love that thing. and i'm hoping it'll get me past my "creators block".

speaking of creators block, i have a question for the group. something that i'm struggling with a little bit. when you are designing a setting or campaign world, how concious are you about the types of adventures that will happen there? i've tried my hand at writing fiction and creating graphic novels and i'm terrible at it. i acan come up with all these great background ideas and histories, but can't think of a main conflict to save my life. that's why i decided to do an rpg setting in the first place - because the players and gm will come up with the storylines. or so i thought.

as the campaing setting designer, i have to set the tone of theose stories and push people in the right direction. so i have to have SOME idea about a main conflict. just today i came up with another great (in my opinion) idea for a setting and want to flesh it out. but as soon as the spark hit it was almost extinguished when the logical part of my brain said "yeah, that's great, but what do the characters DO smartguy?" does anyone else have trouble with this, and if so what do you do to get around it?

Some setting i design are designed at least initially for a particular campaign story. But usually i'll just set up the areas of interest/plot hooks and /political/religious conflicts between nations.

I have a similar problem, except that I often get cut off before that by the simple problem of running out of ideas for a setting.  Adventures always look easy when you read them pre-published, but when I try to think them up myself I just don't know what to do.  I can come up with starting ideas, but after that I have no idea where they'd go.

Quote from: HyveMyndso, i've decided to put my "fatebound" project (www.thecbg.org/e107_plugins/forum/forum_viewtopic.php?15444) on hold for a little while. i was using the marco to micro approach and got caught up with the wind and water currents and how thy would affect weather and temperature over my continents. it's going on the back burner until i go home & bring back my copy of the old tsr 2nd edition ad&d "world builder's guidebook". i love that thing. and i'm hoping it'll get me past my "creators block".

speaking of creators block, i have a question for the group. something that i'm struggling with a little bit. when you are designing a setting or campaign world, how concious are you about the types of adventures that will happen there? i've tried my hand at writing fiction and creating graphic novels and i'm terrible at it. i acan come up with all these great background ideas and histories, but can't think of a main conflict to save my life. that's why i decided to do an rpg setting in the first place - because the players and gm will come up with the storylines. or so i thought.

as the campaing setting designer, i have to set the tone of theose stories and push people in the right direction. so i have to have SOME idea about a main conflict. just today i came up with another great (in my opinion) idea for a setting and want to flesh it out. but as soon as the spark hit it was almost extinguished when the logical part of my brain said "yeah, that's great, but what do the characters DO smartguy?" does anyone else have trouble with this, and if so what do you do to get around it?

honestly, the method you have is very functional. i pay little- when any- attention to the adventures that could be run in Xiluh when im building it. a campaign setting itself should be able to function almost independantly of any current conflict. when looking for sources of conflict, i only really deal with ones from the past, then try to figure out how the story would play out.

It can be difficult sometimes to set up a world for lots of good conflicts, especially if you want to write stories in it. My best advice is don't concern yourself with what adventures could take place in your world, and just build it until you're satisfied with the amount of content. Make sure you leave tons of cool hooks for adventures and conflicts - radical organizations, psycho wizards, holy crusades, haunted forests hiding long lost secrets, etc. - but don't worry too much about setting these into motion. A lot of events that you do throw out can and should happen around the players as well.

Something I've learned about major conflicts: it's often more epic if the players ultimately cause the conflicts they have to solve. If the players hunt down a hobgoblin sorcerer and end up slaying him inside a corrupted temple, spilling his blood on symbols carved into the floor that once played a part in a ritual that only required the blood of a living creature to finish, a terrible creature or curse could be unleashed upon the land, and then it seems only right that the players would want to set things right once they realize what's happened. It can be much more elaborate than that, of course, but...

Unlike many of the others to have posted in this thread, I do keep adventure ideas in mind when making my settings. So much so in fact, that many of the affiliations, relations between power groups, and fantastic locations that I write about, actually spring from adventure ideas (rather than the other way around).

For example, I might have an interesting idea about a piracy adventure, involving ship wrecks along a stormy coastline, lost treasures, and a low-lying sea port regularly ravaged by storms; such a concept might evolve into a place where the locals make the bulk of their income salvaging from the wreckage, which puts them at odds with merchant houses seeking treasure that was supposedly stolen from them.

But maybe that's just me.

-Peace-

I draw a pretty sharp distinction between my role as world/setting designer/writer, and my role as adventure writer/game runner. This dichotomy is played out in terms of procrastination, more than anything else: Crayon the Setting Writer introduces lots of little conflicts that would potentially make good games, and much later on, Crayon the Game Runner chooses one and elaborates on it.

I definitely don't think you need to do it all at once, when writing. Basically, I sketch out a handful of themes, really roughly. For example: A, these ocean trade routes are plaged by pirates, B, these two neighboring countries are on the brink of war, and C, this region has an oppressed lower class. Then, when I'm ready to run a game, I have several ready options-- swashbuckly sea action, war, and revolution-- and I'm ready to really start adding detail to whichever one of those options I pick. But the planning I do as Crayon the Setting Writer and the planning I do as Crayon the Game Runner are entirely different sorts of writing excercises: broad strokes vs. detail work.

I'm also pretty convinced that the idea of a "main conflict" for a campaign world is a dangerous trap. A book or a movie has a main conflict, because it's one story. It's feasable for a DnD game to have a main conflict (but they often grow and branch in a stream-of-consciousness way, and sort of flirt with the idea of main conflict without really sticking to it.) But a campaign world functions as a habitat in which many stories can grow and thrive. A world needs to support many different kinds of conflicts, or it becomes uninteresting when that main conflict is resolved.

As an example, consider a world designed around the "main conflict" of demon invasion. Perhaps its inhabitants all band together, putting aside previous quarrels, to repel the infernal creatures. Perhaps one mortal group makes an unholy deal with the demons, turning traitor on the rest of humankind! Regardless, it looks like we are shaping up for a game full of epic, heroic action... but once the invasion is resolved, we've killed the main conflict of the setting (and thus, the main source of interest.) We need to find a new "main conflict" pretty fast (and continuous introduction of new global catastrophes amounts to continuous reinvention of the setting itself, which is a large amount of work and certain to become tiresome quickly.)

Now, consider that we take our demonic invasion and demote it from "main conflict" to "theme," or "hook." We can still feel its presence, and it still colors the feel of the setting, but it doesn't dominate everything, and it doesn't feel like we are putting all our eggs in one conflict-basket.

For example, maybe the world is in the aftermath of a successful extraplanar invasion, and demons are humanity's new overlords. Then, introduce a number of conflicts underneath the broad umbrella of that tone: perhaps there are anti-demon rebellions, wars between nations (perhaps between demon-controlled nations and "free" nations), maybe even religious conflicts between followers of the "old gods" and priests of the new demon lords. Maybe for some people, the demons have actually improved the quality of life, and things are better than they were before the occupation. Maybe this world has calmed down a lot, and a lot of the usual adventure themes of war, adventure, natural disaster, etc. still take place, just with the unusual quirk that most government positions are held by extraplanar occupiers.

On the other hand, maybe there was no invasion, but the world just happens to lie in a place where the "planar walls" are weak. Maybe a lot of the conflicts mentioned above take place here, but the world is unpredictable because it's fairly commonplace for "dimensional rifts" to open up and barf weird creatures out into our plane. So we have the same ideas of war and poverty and crime and mystery that are always available to us, but we're constantly being forced to see those things in a new light as we observe them through the eyes of these strange and diverse alien creatures that ended up here, and may come from vastly different cultures and have vastly different thought processes.

Either way, we've taken a world defining idea and transformed it from a "conflict" (which may be solved, and thus, undone) into a theme which encompasses and colors many conflicts. I think the latter model is much more useful for a worldbuilder.

To me, finding conflicts I can write into the setting is easy. After all, the real world is rife with conflict - you just need to open any newspapers.

People in the real world fight over:

- Resources
- Territory
- Religion & Beliefs
- Politics
- Power

and many more. A fantasy setting simply expands the possibilities of things people can fight over. Are there any unique materials found in the world that are in strong demand? Then you can have resource wars! Are there any two species with widely incompatible ways of life (even differences in reproduction speed can matter, since then one race can "swarm" over the other if not stopped...)? Then you can have conflicts over territory! Religions matter even more in worlds where the divine is demonstrably real. Magic allows for all kinds of new ways of double-crossing your political enemies. And in some worlds, "ultimate power" might be more than just a figure of speech - but how many others do you have to fight to attain it?

And getting the PCs involved in all of this is easy - if one side of a conflict (or both!) thinks it might be useful to have the PCs as allies or patsies, then they will attempt to get them on their side. And this will mean that the PCs also will make enemies at the same time. Alternatively (if the PCs care about such things, at least), the party might simply get involved in a conflict out of moral outrage - and there are many things to be outraged about in most conflicts...

(Incidentally, do you have any examples of your graphic novels online? I love to read such things...)

Quote from: Luminous CrayonAs an example, consider a world designed around the "main conflict" of demon invasion. Perhaps its inhabitants all band together, putting aside previous quarrels, to repel the infernal creatures. Perhaps one mortal group makes an unholy deal with the demons, turning traitor on the rest of humankind! Regardless, it looks like we are shaping up for a game full of epic, heroic action... but once the invasion is resolved, we've killed the main conflict of the setting (and thus, the main source of interest.) We need to find a new "main conflict" pretty fast (and continuous introduction of new global catastrophes amounts to continuous reinvention of the setting itself, which is a large amount of work and certain to become tiresome quickly.)

I respectfully disagree here. The aftermath of a repelled demonic invasion can be as fascinating as the actual invasion itself, if not more so.

After all, even after the demons are gone, the woes of the world are not over. Traditional realms and kingdoms have been disrupted. The survivors will be deeply traumatised. Surviving demons might lurk in the countryside, making long-distance travel unsafe.

In a word, the world has sunk into chaos, even if it is not quite as bad as if the invasion has succeeded. Now the survivors must manage to restore some sense of order. Warlords will arise, who might not be much better than the demons preceding them. Demonic artifacts litter the landscape who have a baneful influence on those who use them - but some people are willing to use them nonetheless for the power they bring. Cults of Demon Worshippers might lurk among the population, and witch hunts against real and imagined collaborators will be frequent. And now that the imminent threat is over, humans will start turning against each other again.


The heroes - presumably the PCs - have thwarted a great evil against impossible odds. But now they must restore some semblance of civilization to a wounded world, which in many ways might be more difficult than slaying the Demon Lord, for this is not a task that can be done by force of arms alone.

So who will be up to that task - and how will they shape the world?

thanks for the replys. reading them has boosted my confidence enough to continue with my projects. i think this whole thing stemmed from the fact that i haven't played a "pen & paper rpg" in more than 10 years. i don't have any perspective of my creations from the player side of things. only the dm.

in literature there are three kinds of conflict; man against himself, man against man, and man against nature. i think it's pretty safe to say that rpg hooks follow the same mold. it just bothers me that my settings tend to be more about the man against nature ones. i guess i shouldn't worry too much though. just create and see where the players go. but as a test or excercise i think i'll purposely make a man against man  conducive setting. one with lots of different powergroups that can interact with each other.

and how did you guys know that my next setting was going to incorperate demons? are you all psychic or something? or maybe you've just been reading my notebooks somehow. speaking of which, have any of you run a sucessful "horror campaign"? i recently obtained a copy of "heros of horror" and was reading through it. there is some good stuff in there. being a fan of edgar allen poe and h.p. lovecraft (and by fan i mean always seeing "things" out of the corner of my eye ever since i read them) i have wanted to do some sort of horror game. i had a copy of the old chaosism inc's "call of chtullu" but (like almost every other game) never actually played it. plus i wanted to do something completely fantastical. it's my next germ of a campaign setting and any advice you couls give would be helpful.

Quote...i had a copy of the old chaosism inc's "call of chtullu" but (like almost every other game) never actually played it. plus i wanted to do something completely fantastical. it's my next germ of a campaign setting and any advice you couls give would be helpful.

Just my opinion here, but this is one of the finest RPG rule systems ever made. If you ever decide to deviate from d20 rules, I cannot say enough good things about this rule-set (When was it printed...1981 I think...yeesh I'm old school).

-Peace-