How are published settings designed?

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I know that several forum members are in the Rpg industry and I was wondering how official campaign settings are designed? What elements do you elaborate on? Do you flesh out whole cosmologies or focus on smaller regions. I'm sure there isn't a formula for it, but was wondering what you put in when making a campaign setting.
 
I'm not a published designer, but this book of essays by game designers was quite enlightening. I have written bibles before, for tv/radio, and there's a fair amount of overlap when it comes to common approaches to world-building.

 
I know that several forum members are in the Rpg industry and I was wondering how official campaign settings are designed? What elements do you elaborate on? Do you flesh out whole cosmologies or focus on smaller regions. I'm sure there isn't a formula for it, but was wondering what you put in when making a campaign setting.
Is this just a campaign setting or does it include rules on how to play, etc.?
 
I know that several forum members are in the Rpg industry and I was wondering how official campaign settings are designed? What elements do you elaborate on? Do you flesh out whole cosmologies or focus on smaller regions. I'm sure there isn't a formula for it, but was wondering what you put in when making a campaign setting.
I wrote a couple of posts on the topic.

How to Make a Fantasy Sandbox

What it took to publish Blackmarsh

Introducing Blackmarsh

That vague setting behind Blackmarsh and Points of Lights
 
For me, it's a case of what the GM needs to know as opposed to the players. After I have the initial concept of course.

But it doesn't really matter if it's long or short. So long as the GM has just enough reference to fill in the blanks. You can also sill this with supplemental material later on as well.
 
Here's a longer answer based on my experience, and after 35 years of buying and reading settings.

I've written a lot of (unpublished) setting stuff, hundreds of thousands of words over the years, and I'm on version n+1 of my (mostly) system neutral fantasy setting. What I've learned from writing and reading is that fluff needs to be useful, usable and impactful at the table. 3000 word essays on the 50 million year history of your campaign world can and should be a simple timeline or diagram, if it even needs to be there at all. Generational family trees and biographical write ups for noble houses and characters the PCs will never see or meet is a waste of time. No one's going to care about the whys and the ways the three main religions have branched into 12 churches over the last 500 years; they'll only care about the end result of stuff and how it does or doesn't affect their characters.

And if something doesn't have the potential to directly impact the players, then it goes. All that kinda material is the bread-and-butter that goes in a bible for a novel/film/TV-show. But I think the best (i.e. most playable) setting material avoids this authorial wank-trap.

Give the players the bare bones of the setting, preferably in bullet points, and make sure they know the cultural touchstones (I hate saying IPs) you're working from. Just enough detail so they know the surface differences between your world and Forgotten Realms D&D, or Star Wars, or whatever. The job of the players on the first go-round at a setting is to make characters that kinda-sorta fit.

Then the heart of the project is to give the GM enough high-value material that they can start putting the meat on those bones in play, from the first session on. IME lots of little details and cool shit add up to a better and more immersive experience than enormous buckets of lore that players and GMs are likely to drown in.

Also, no one likes fiction. All game fiction is bad fiction and if you put it in your gamebook, I don't care if you're Greg Stolze or even China Mieville; it's going to suck, and more importantly, suck away valuable word-count.
 
Here's a longer answer based on my experience, and after 35 years of buying and reading settings.

I've written a lot of (unpublished) setting stuff, hundreds of thousands of words over the years, and I'm on version n+1 of my (mostly) system neutral fantasy setting. What I've learned from writing and reading is that fluff needs to be useful, usable and impactful at the table. 3000 word essays on the 50 million year history of your campaign world can and should be a simple timeline or diagram, if it even needs to be there at all. Generational family trees and biographical write ups for noble houses and characters the PCs will never see or meet is a waste of time. No one's going to care about the whys and the ways the three main religions have branched into 12 churches over the last 500 years; they'll only care about the end result of stuff and how it does or doesn't affect their characters.

And if something doesn't have the potential to directly impact the players, then it goes. All that kinda material is the bread-and-butter that goes in a bible for a novel/film/TV-show. But I think the best (i.e. most playable) setting material avoids this authorial wank-trap.

Give the players the bare bones of the setting, preferably in bullet points, and make sure they know the cultural touchstones (I hate saying IPs) you're working from. Just enough detail so they know the surface differences between your world and Forgotten Realms D&D, or Star Wars, or whatever. The job of the players on the first go-round at a setting is to make characters that kinda-sorta fit.

Then the heart of the project is to give the GM enough high-value material that they can start putting the meat on those bones in play, from the first session on. IME lots of little details and cool shit add up to a better and more immersive experience than enormous buckets of lore that players and GMs are likely to drown in.

Also, no one likes fiction. All game fiction is bad fiction and if you put it in your gamebook, I don't care if you're Greg Stolze or even China Mieville; it's going to suck, and more importantly, suck away valuable word-count.

Seriously, I hate overly long details on campaign settings dealing with trivial data that's likely never coming up during play, specially if I don't even have a hook or basic familiarity with the world through other sources, such as movies, novels or TV series. What I need to know most is 1) what is the world even about? What's the underlying theme or "point" of it? 2) What is the setting-specific info on character creation and relevant details (character races, setting-specific skills, items, etc.)? And 3) Where do I start? What are some of things characters are expected/can hope to do or accomplish in this world? GIMME some campaign hooks and adventure seeds based on this world.

Minute details about every geographic region, city and noble family in the world isn't gonna help me if I don't know WTF to do with it. And unless those noble families or whatever are central to the world somehow, or have a strong stake on a particular geographic region, I probably don't even want to know.
 
I use different approaches depending on what I am trying to do.

I usually start with a cosmology, and work from there. I like having that as a foundation. The rest is very dependent not he kinds of campaigns I want the game to run and how I expect people will be using the campaign material.

One technique I use a lot is tracing the movement of people & language and growth of cultures over time. So sometimes I start with a landmass, and mark where all the different groups start out (sometimes just represented as different color dots). So that I have a sense of how language has spread and how cultures develop. Usually I will do anywhere from 8 to 16 sheets charting different periods (say every couple of hundred years or so). This doesn't usually make its way into the book but its useful to me so I have something to reference when I am working on the setting.

I think the biggest thing you consider when doing a published setting is you really need to know clearly how you expect the setting to be used and what kinds of adventures are viable. I also like to think in terms of there being a lot of potential hooks and seeds of conflict. I am not as worried about things like whether there are an overabundance of details or whether things are more broad sketch (I can see value in both approaches and like that both exist). What does bother me though is if a setting feels like it was a good read but I can't even begin to imagine how to run it as a campaign. I don't think there is any one true way here. My favorite settings were probably Ravenloft and HARN, and those are pretty different. I also really loved the TORG setting. Another I quite liked, though it isn't a serious game, is OG (OG didn't strictly have a detailed setting but it had a concept that clicked for me right away as a setting). Those were all games, the moment I read, I had a pretty quick sense of how I wanted to use them.
 
One technique I use a lot is tracing the movement of people & language and growth of cultures over time. So sometimes I start with a landmass, and mark where all the different groups start out (sometimes just represented as different color dots). So that I have a sense of how language has spread and how cultures develop. Usually I will do anywhere from 8 to 16 sheets charting different periods (say every couple of hundred years or so). This doesn't usually make its way into the book but its useful to me so I have something to reference when I am working on the setting.
I think that's exactly the kind of thing I was trying to get at with my "what goes in the bible" vs "what goes in the published product" jumble earlier on.
 
I think that's exactly the kind of thing I was trying to get at with my "what goes in the bible" vs "what goes in the published product" jumble earlier on.

I think this is going to vary a lot by project. Obviously there is plenty that you will not need to have in the setting. I rarely put anything like those movements of peoples charts in a game book. But I wouldn't object to another designer doing so (it might help me as a GM if I am planning a dungeon built around something extremely ancient for instance: and being a history geek I love historical atlases so maps like that could be inspiring for me). In one book I did put the evolution of the setting over time (without my peoples pre-history maps) and there reason for that was the history section was divided into Eras, which I felt were hard to visually follow without a map to guide the GM to understand what was important about each era's political landscape (i.e. in this era things were broken up into kingdoms, in this one it was a unified empire, etc). Generally though, there is a lot of material below the surface that doesn't need to be a setting book

Also a lot of that is going to depend on how much room you have too (if it is a 100 page book versus a 500 page book)
 
Is this just a campaign setting or does it include rules on how to play, etc.?
See, I'm kinda curious about both. General setting design is interesting, but I'm also curious about peoples experiences with fitting in new mechanics into established systems. Like how Dark Sun made Psionics more wide spread in D&D.
Sweden. Now. A young, maverick chef takes on the old, decadent, restuarant establishment seeking to usher a culinary revolution. Also, catgirls! And mechas!

On to the next project...
The new Culinary Fighting RPG that you never knew you wanted! Start out as a young up and coming dishwasher and rise through the ranks as you destroy the archaic Escoffier kitchen system and the temper-tantrum prone dinosaurs that have kept the culinary industry stagnant for over 100 years!
 
See, I'm kinda curious about both. General setting design is interesting, but I'm also curious about peoples experiences with fitting in new mechanics into established systems. Like how Dark Sun made Psionics more wide spread in D&D.

The new Culinary Fighting RPG that you never knew you wanted! Start out as a young up and coming dishwasher and rise through the ranks as you destroy the archaic Escoffier kitchen system and the temper-tantrum prone dinosaurs that have kept the culinary industry stagnant for over 100 years!


One of my old kung fu teachers was the chef in a Chinese restaurant. He said the way chefs rank each other has huge overlap with the way martial arts experts rank each other.
 
Here's a longer answer based on my experience, and after 35 years of buying and reading settings.

I've written a lot of (unpublished) setting stuff, hundreds of thousands of words over the years, and I'm on version n+1 of my (mostly) system neutral fantasy setting. What I've learned from writing and reading is that fluff needs to be useful, usable and impactful at the table. 3000 word essays on the 50 million year history of your campaign world can and should be a simple timeline or diagram, if it even needs to be there at all. Generational family trees and biographical write ups for noble houses and characters the PCs will never see or meet is a waste of time. No one's going to care about the whys and the ways the three main religions have branched into 12 churches over the last 500 years; they'll only care about the end result of stuff and how it does or doesn't affect their characters.

And if something doesn't have the potential to directly impact the players, then it goes. All that kinda material is the bread-and-butter that goes in a bible for a novel/film/TV-show. But I think the best (i.e. most playable) setting material avoids this authorial wank-trap.

Give the players the bare bones of the setting, preferably in bullet points, and make sure they know the cultural touchstones (I hate saying IPs) you're working from. Just enough detail so they know the surface differences between your world and Forgotten Realms D&D, or Star Wars, or whatever. The job of the players on the first go-round at a setting is to make characters that kinda-sorta fit.

Then the heart of the project is to give the GM enough high-value material that they can start putting the meat on those bones in play, from the first session on. IME lots of little details and cool shit add up to a better and more immersive experience than enormous buckets of lore that players and GMs are likely to drown in.

Also, no one likes fiction. All game fiction is bad fiction and if you put it in your gamebook, I don't care if you're Greg Stolze or even China Mieville; it's going to suck, and more importantly, suck away valuable word-count.

Seriously, I hate overly long details on campaign settings dealing with trivial data that's likely never coming up during play, specially if I don't even have a hook or basic familiarity with the world through other sources, such as movies, novels or TV series. What I need to know most is 1) what is the world even about? What's the underlying theme or "point" of it? 2) What is the setting-specific info on character creation and relevant details (character races, setting-specific skills, items, etc.)? And 3) Where do I start? What are some of things characters are expected/can hope to do or accomplish in this world? GIMME some campaign hooks and adventure seeds based on this world.

Minute details about every geographic region, city and noble family in the world isn't gonna help me if I don't know WTF to do with it. And unless those noble families or whatever are central to the world somehow, or have a strong stake on a particular geographic region, I probably don't even want to know.

So much this ^^^^

Headspace is a finite resource, and overdone setting canon takes up headspace without doing anything useful. In fact, I consider too much mid-level lore to be an attractive nuisance, far more enabling of gatekeeping and tedious online wittering about its minutae than of actually informing play.

I kept the history of my current sci-fi setting to a dozen or so key events that explain the universe-as-is and deliberately left the details out. It's better to drive setting canon off the needs of the adventures rather than the other way around. Loads of mid-level canon written in splendid isolation tends to be quite sterile, as well. A universe built for adventuring is also far more likely to feel lived in, as the conceits are built at the level that players actually interact with.
 
See, I'm kinda curious about both. General setting design is interesting, but I'm also curious about peoples experiences with fitting in new mechanics into established systems. Like how Dark Sun made Psionics more wide spread in D&D.

I usually work with my own system, so I have the luxury of being able to do whatever I want with it for a game (downside of your own system is you have to get people to buy into the system and the setting together, which is harder than if they have a system they already like and you make a setting for it). Usually the setting comes first for me. But there is often a mechanical concept. When we did Sertorius, where the concept was basically everyone is essentially a sort of messianic magic user, the key mechanical concept was we wanted spells you could spam all day long without a problem. But when I made Ogre Gate, it was because I realized the spell system designed for Sertorius would work well for a wuxia campaign (and I had been chasing systems and cobbling together systems for years to run wuxia style games). And sometimes things fit seamlessly when you rework a system, sometimes they are ungainly so you accept this mechanical bit because its very useful but an odd fit, or you rework it to smooth it out for the new setting.

I do like to try to think through the implications of mechanics in a setting. I tend to view settings as thought experiments.
 
Sweden. Now. A young, maverick chef takes on the old, decadent, restuarant establishment seeking to usher a culinary revolution. Also, catgirls! And mechas!

On to the next project...
I think I bought this on itch.io
I thought I was getting a full game but it was only a one page lazer and feelings clone with the words lazers and feelings replaced by Catgirls and Meatballs.
 
For White Wolf and their inheritors, it's "how many supplements can we churn out" as the main design consideration.
 
For White Wolf and their inheritors, it's "how many supplements can we churn out" as the main design consideration.
I wouldn't call it a "design consideration". That suggests they actually built the core with some kind of long-term plan unless you count publishing an unplaytested first draft as your product so you have to release a revised version a year later.

Now, D&D 3.5. There is a game with "how many supplements can we churn out" as the main design consideration.
 
I wouldn't call it a "design consideration". That suggests they actually built the core with some kind of long-term plan unless you count publishing an unplaytested first draft as your product so you have to release a revised version a year later.

I'm not so sure; I really do think all of White Wolf's games (Vampire, Werewolf, etc) were designed with splat book and supplement churn as a design consideration and later I think Exalted certainly was.
 
For White Wolf and their inheritors, it's "how many supplements can we churn out" as the main design consideration.

I feel that if you actually want to make a business out of a role playing game then you're pretty much obliged to do this in order to keep bringing in a revenue stream. For example, Mongoose is getting pretty prolific these days, but they do actually employ a few full time staff and turn enough of a profit to sustain the company for about 15 years so far.

In terms of value to the end-user, one still has to be a little careful. A reputation for just publishing rubbish in quantity is not likely to do good things for sales.
 
I feel that if you actually want to make a business out of a role playing game then you're pretty much obliged to do this in order to keep bringing in a revenue stream. For example, Mongoose is getting pretty prolific these days, but they do actually employ a few full time staff and turn enough of a profit to sustain the company for about 15 years so far.

In terms of value to the end-user, one still has to be a little careful. A reputation for just publishing rubbish in quantity is not likely to do good things for sales.

There is nothing wrong with having a business model to keep afloat. I think few gamers have issues with a company putting out tons of quality supplements. Mainly its when the supplements feel churned out or uninspired that (or when they are kind of stumbling, adding mechanics to the game that slowly break it) that it becomes an issue. Some of my favorite lines had a healthy model of releasing regular supplemental material (the Van Richten books followed a format for sure but added so much to the experience of the setting).

One observation I do have here is I think supplements aimed at the GM are generally healthier for the line than ones aimed at the players. Just in my experience, when you have a genuine splat book model where its clear the players are the customer, one downside of that is it overwhelms GMs (who feel like they have to buy all of them to keep up with the players) and it doesn't give the GM fuel for inspiration (its all mostly on the character side for players).

Personally I prefer models oriented around modules, setting material and tools for the GM (because the person you need to have excited to play, inspired between sessions, etc) in a typical RPG is the GM. You also do want to inspire players, of course. But I don't think the business model should be centered not that
 
I'm not so sure; I really do think all of White Wolf's games (Vampire, Werewolf, etc) were designed with splat book and supplement churn as a design consideration and later I think Exalted certainly was.
You do have a good point there. My comment was overly glib. I was thinking more of the way their lines tended to have less and less actually useful content as they went forward once they got past the splat books.

To piggyback off Brendan's point, they were good at continuing to provide player options, but their setting books were hit or miss, and their adventures were generally terrible.
 
You do have a good point there. My comment was overly glib.

No worries mate; no offense taken. I was being half-jokey half-serious. Obviously extra stuff can be great if it's needed and of high quality but I do think White Wolf set their game world up (eg, clans, castes, etc etc) with a mind to creating quantity of content primarily rather than necessarily quality.
 
well, I have no idea about anyone else, but I start with a map. Then I add topography based on wave patterns and what seem like reasonable tectonic shifts, and ths gives me weather patterns. Then I start building civilizations, generally starting from the largest city and moving outwards. Then I apply cultures and religions. And then I start creating political alliances and fleshing out the ruling class. Add in a few wars and prejudices and maybe some extradimensional incursions.
 
I feel that if you actually want to make a business out of a role playing game then you're pretty much obliged to do this in order to keep bringing in a revenue stream. For example, Mongoose is getting pretty prolific these days, but they do actually employ a few full time staff and turn enough of a profit to sustain the company for about 15 years so far.

In terms of value to the end-user, one still has to be a little careful. A reputation for just publishing rubbish in quantity is not likely to do good things for sales.
There is the Kevin Crawford model, few but periodic releases of exceptionally high quality. Everyone can see his stats since Spears at Dawn here

 
There is the Kevin Crawford model, few but periodic releases of exceptionally high quality. Everyone can see his stats since Spears at Dawn here

Yeah, you can get by with a slower release schedule if you are a one-man band or close to it. If you want to be what White Wolf was in the '90s though, you need lots of product.
 
As a consumer, I like products that take into account both the typical DM and the typical player. Sure, have some interesting flair, but don't over do it; just enough to get the DM jazzed about running it and giving ideas for conflicts and adventure flows. But the core of the setting should be describable in a page or so because that's about as much as many players are are going to read. Within that page, it needs to give clear ideas of what kinds of characters work well and what things are likely to happen.

That's why the revolutionary chefs idea above works. It paints a picture in a couple of sentences. It's also why things like Tekumel remain obscure - lots of interesting stuff but not enough handles for players.
 
That's why the revolutionary chefs idea above works. It paints a picture in a couple of sentences. It's also why things like Tekumel remain obscure - lots of interesting stuff but not enough handles for players.


I think the original conciet of Tekumel - where players are barbarians from a foreign (implied "Western European") culture that are slowly discoverig the world and culture at the same time as the players, works fine, though does place a large burden on the GM to absorb setting info before play.
 
I think the original conciet of Tekumel - where players are barbarians from a foreign (implied "Western European") culture that are slowly discoverig the world and culture at the same time as the players, works fine, though does place a large burden on the GM to absorb setting info before play.
I think that said "burden" is a requirement...and yes, that's why I tend to play outsiders in games set in unknown places, even if those places are in the modern world.
 
Mongoose is getting pretty prolific these days...
Mongoose still exists? :O I remember back in the day when they had d20 Conan, Traveller, a bunch of Starship Troopers stuff, Runequest with Lankhmar and Elric sourcebooks, and more. I used to go to their message boards all the time to talk about their products. I guess I sort of assumed that they had just faded away. What products are they making now?

EDIT: Found a web page. Looks like mostly Traveller stuff.

2nd EDIT: Managed to log into their forum. Took me a while and had to use the "lost password" function. Looked around and found very little to interest me. Looks like my favorite Mongoose products have mostly gone away. :sad:
 
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Yeah, you can get by with a slower release schedule if you are a one-man band or close to it. If you want to be what White Wolf was in the '90s though, you need lots of product.

True, but then you need more staff, incur more expenses, etc. It's those middle-sized RPG companies that seem to have the roughest go of it sometimes.

A one or two- person outfit with freelance help hired as needed seems much more sustainable and can be done more easily as a side gig. But when things grow to the scale of running a company with employees, a shipping operation, etc, that's where things get tricky, especially for companies that aren't on the Wizards/Paizo level.
 
True, but then you need more staff, incur more expenses, etc. It's those middle-sized RPG companies that seem to have the roughest go of it sometimes.

A one or two- person outfit with freelance help hired as needed seems much more sustainable and can be done more easily as a side gig. But when things grow to the scale of running a company with employees, a shipping operation, etc, that's where things get tricky, especially for companies that aren't on the Wizards/Paizo level.
I agree completely. The companies I've done editing work for are all one person + freelancers to cover art/maps/editing/layout as needed.
 
I know that several forum members are in the Rpg industry and I was wondering how official campaign settings are designed? What elements do you elaborate on? Do you flesh out whole cosmologies or focus on smaller regions. I'm sure there isn't a formula for it, but was wondering what you put in when making a campaign setting.
Generally, I work on fleshing out already-existing settings. That means the setting might already exist only in broad strokes in the core rulebook, and I get the job of focusing on one specific area - usually a city, but sometimes a region - expanding it into its own sourcebook. I could be starting with a few sentences or a few thousand words spread across multiple existing supplements, each containing a single nugget of information.

I put any info I'm given into bullet points, which then can be sorted into various categories such as internal politics, external relations, locations, legends, personalities, etc. Some of these naturally become their own chapters or fall into set-piece chapters such as history or creatures and lore, then it's all elaborated on. Each setting book usually ends up with some very specific new stuff such as magic items, creatures, spells, adventure hooks for each chapter, and perhaps several small adventure frameworks. If you have any specific questions I'm happy to answer them.

Usually what you know dictates what you elaborate on initially. For example, if your city is located on a river or the coast it's likely to have docks or a harbor, so you elaborate on this, give it a history, a personality, adventure hooks etc. As you flesh it all out, you always keep the history in mind and what might be interesting for the PCs to get up to. It should also be written so the GM can enjoy it and it should have lots of 'stuff' that acts as a trigger for the imagination making it easier for the GM to come up with adventure hooks of their own.
 
For my part, with my publishing history almost all in game settings, while I'm in broad agreement with Jamumu, we obviously can't take any one element and approach and presume it's what all gamers want.

Take timelines, for instance. What *I* want is three pages or thereabouts, tops. I want maybe a single column on the setting's entire history -- because sometimes that decisive battle 500 years ago really does matter to the setting's zeitgeist. Maybe a column or so dealing with the last century, because there are a number of players who want to know what their PCs' parents or grandparents were doing. Half the rest dealing with the last 5-10 years, and the rest dealing with the last year. (Harnworld comes fairly close to this ideal, IMHO.)

And that's it. A dozen pages of thousands of years of trivia matter as much to a group of PCs as it does to us: seriously, how many of you have ever heard of the First Battle of Alashiya or the Andronovo, let alone imagine what material impact they have to us today?

Now yes, they're cheap filler in a gamebook: it takes very little brainpower to come up with "(Date A Whole Freaking Long While Ago): (Bad King Name) of (Bad Country Name) conquered (Poor Sap Country Name) and did Bad Things in his Badness before being assassinated (3d6 months later) by (Plucky Gallant Female Culture Hero), in vengeance for (Bad Things) the (Bad King) committed against (Someone Important To Aforementioned PGFCH)", repeat for ten pages of 10-pt type. But SOME people must get off on them.

The same thing with NPCs. I don't want to see a whole lot of space taken up by top-level movers and shakers, unless you really do think the PCs are going to be dealing exclusively with the Queen, the Chancellor, the Marshal-General of the armed forces and the Matriarch of the White Light religion. It's far more likely that the PCs are going to deal with middle-level movers and shakers; the baron who turns into the group's patron, the senior priest of the neighborhood temple, the confidential agent/mid-level bureaucrat who does a lot of the Queen's dirty work. Obviously, though, there are campaigns where PCs only deal with the top.
 
For my part, with my publishing history almost all in game settings, while I'm in broad agreement with Jamumu, we obviously can't take any one element and approach and presume it's what all gamers want.

Take timelines, for instance. What *I* want is three pages or thereabouts, tops. I want maybe a single column on the setting's entire history -- because sometimes that decisive battle 500 years ago really does matter to the setting's zeitgeist. Maybe a column or so dealing with the last century, because there are a number of players who want to know what their PCs' parents or grandparents were doing. Half the rest dealing with the last 5-10 years, and the rest dealing with the last year. (Harnworld comes fairly close to this ideal, IMHO.)

And that's it. A dozen pages of thousands of years of trivia matter as much to a group of PCs as it does to us: seriously, how many of you have ever heard of the First Battle of Alashiya or the Andronovo, let alone imagine what material impact they have to us today?

Now yes, they're cheap filler in a gamebook: it takes very little brainpower to come up with "(Date A Whole Freaking Long While Ago): (Bad King Name) of (Bad Country Name) conquered (Poor Sap Country Name) and did Bad Things in his Badness before being assassinated (3d6 months later) by (Plucky Gallant Female Culture Hero), in vengeance for (Bad Things) the (Bad King) committed against (Someone Important To Aforementioned PGFCH)", repeat for ten pages of 10-pt type. But SOME people must get off on them.

The same thing with NPCs. I don't want to see a whole lot of space taken up by top-level movers and shakers, unless you really do think the PCs are going to be dealing exclusively with the Queen, the Chancellor, the Marshal-General of the armed forces and the Matriarch of the White Light religion. It's far more likely that the PCs are going to deal with middle-level movers and shakers; the baron who turns into the group's patron, the senior priest of the neighborhood temple, the confidential agent/mid-level bureaucrat who does a lot of the Queen's dirty work. Obviously, though, there are campaigns where PCs only deal with the top.
Super long histories and concentrated effort on world leaders are the sort of things I also see repeated often in homebrew settings. Then they run out steam about current events and the starting area. That's why GMs should start small with things in the neighborhood; the big stuff will probably never come up.

Even professionally published settings don't need more than a page on the world beyond a the starting continent (unless you're doing a world travelling campaign).
 
For my part, with my publishing history almost all in game settings, while I'm in broad agreement with Jamumu, we obviously can't take any one element and approach and presume it's what all gamers want.

Take timelines, for instance. What *I* want is three pages or thereabouts, tops. I want maybe a single column on the setting's entire history -- because sometimes that decisive battle 500 years ago really does matter to the setting's zeitgeist. Maybe a column or so dealing with the last century, because there are a number of players who want to know what their PCs' parents or grandparents were doing. Half the rest dealing with the last 5-10 years, and the rest dealing with the last year. (Harnworld comes fairly close to this ideal, IMHO.)

And that's it. A dozen pages of thousands of years of trivia matter as much to a group of PCs as it does to us: seriously, how many of you have ever heard of the First Battle of Alashiya or the Andronovo, let alone imagine what material impact they have to us today?

Now yes, they're cheap filler in a gamebook: it takes very little brainpower to come up with "(Date A Whole Freaking Long While Ago): (Bad King Name) of (Bad Country Name) conquered (Poor Sap Country Name) and did Bad Things in his Badness before being assassinated (3d6 months later) by (Plucky Gallant Female Culture Hero), in vengeance for (Bad Things) the (Bad King) committed against (Someone Important To Aforementioned PGFCH)", repeat for ten pages of 10-pt type. But SOME people must get off on them.

The same thing with NPCs. I don't want to see a whole lot of space taken up by top-level movers and shakers, unless you really do think the PCs are going to be dealing exclusively with the Queen, the Chancellor, the Marshal-General of the armed forces and the Matriarch of the White Light religion. It's far more likely that the PCs are going to deal with middle-level movers and shakers; the baron who turns into the group's patron, the senior priest of the neighborhood temple, the confidential agent/mid-level bureaucrat who does a lot of the Queen's dirty work. Obviously, though, there are campaigns where PCs only deal with the top.
JAMUMU JAMUMU mentioned “bibles”. In my experience there is a strict page count for such documents. One has to choose wisely. Only characters and institutions with whom the PCs can interact should be included.
 
Super long histories and concentrated effort on world leaders are the sort of things I also see repeated often in homebrew settings. Then they run out steam about current events and the starting area. That's why GMs should start small with things in the neighborhood; the big stuff will probably never come up.

Pretty much. From 2003 to 2010, I ran out of the capitol city of one of my world's kingdoms, also the center of one of the great gatherings of wizards, and the HQ of one of my world's major religions. From the start, they were dealing with some bigwigs: Day One they were on the job for a major noble who was an admiral of one of the nation's fleets.

But the first time they ever met any other major provincial overlords was a couple years later, when the party's (by-then master) wizard decided she'd take an apprentice, and the winning candidate was the daughter of one. They never met the King. They never met the Chancellor. They never met anyone else in the Royal Family. They never met any major magnate. They never met the Matriarch of the religion based in the city, nor any of the curia, nor any other major prelate. They never met the head of the army, of the navy, or of the air service, nor the chief field commanders (other than the aforementioned admiral and one legion commander -- her 12-year-old grandson getting snuffed was sorta on their watch, and they attended his funeral). They never dealt with the Royal Wizard, or the Grand Master of the College of Mages, or the Dean of the University. The only key member of the government they had interactions with was the minister of the treasury, and that much only because one of the PCs was dating her grand-niece.

Who did they deal with? There was that admiral, of course. The party wizard was the owner of her family inn, in a blue-collar part of town, and the major thieves' gangs left it alone as long as the family let the thieves use it as a safe house and meeting place ... so they dealt a bit with the district gang boss, who ran the smuggling concession. They dealt with district guard lieutenants, with the head of the gypsy kumpania, with various master wizards, with various minor nobles, with the neighborhood clergy.
 
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