Introduction
Hello there, my lovelies. In this series of posts, I am going outline my process of creating a campaign. From the outset, I believe the most important thing for any campaign is immersion. Once you get your players excited about the setting you created, they will actively engage with the shared world-building and storytelling experience that is a role-playing game.
Just a few points before we continue. The GM ultimately has the most control over the creation of the setting and campaign, but it is only through the players' input that details will deepen, and themes can be discovered in your setting that you didn’t realise were there.
Immersion is a matter of adding details that hint at a much larger world. You don’t need to fill in every last blank, just hint at it and let the player's imagination do the rest. The Souls games do this admirably. Every item in the world contains a terse piece of flavour text that hints at a person, place or event, and by piecing together these disparate pieces of lore, a greater narrative emerges.
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Over this series, we will look at how we can inject world-building into the following:
- Shops and other vendors
- Creating a world map
- Religions
- Arefacts
- Beastiery
- Antagonists
- Secrets
Today, we will be looking at first principles. How to build the foundations of a new setting and how to pitch it to your players to generate engagement and excitement.
High-Concept Ideas
We want to create a setting idea that grabs our players’ attention. It must generate a powerful mental image in our players’ minds and stimulate their curiosity enough that they have a bunch of questions that they desperately need answered. Across different media, several settings do this really well. Examples include:
The Underdark: A vast cavernous realm full of forgotten places, horrendous abominations, and civilisations that plot against the surface dwellers.
Blame!: All of humanity once lived in a vast city. Aeons later, it is an empty superstructure. The few surviving humans are hunted to near extinction by a corrupted security system.
Trench Crusade: It is World War I, but this time the combined forces of the Abrahamic religions fight against the hordes of hell.
The Matrix: Life as you know it is a computer simulation; in reality, you are a battery for sentient machines.
Jurassic Park: Scientists bring dinosaurs back from extinction and make a theme park. It goes horribly wrong.
Each of the above can be described as High-Concept settings. A high-concept is an idea that can be described concisely, but still engages the potential audience. The best example of this is Alien, which was originally pitched as “Jaws in space”. So, presenting your setting as a high-concept setting is probably one of the best ways to get your players excited about the upcoming campaign.
Generating High-Concept Ideas
The following method is a distillation of my mental process when developing a new setting. The reality is that regardless of your idea, it will take considerable thinking time to work out the kinks and inconsistencies.
- Write down several ideas that you think would be cool to have in your setting. They could be films, books, games, a type of environment, a scientific concept, or even just a colour you like.
- Select 2 to 3 of these ideas.
- Generate a set of questions to link them together.
- Write answers to these questions, and an idea will emerge.
Webrail Example
(The most recent campaign I am running.)
Stage 1:
Inspirations are.
- Floating islands in space
- Snowpeircer
- Forests
- Terminator
- Spiders
- Godzilla
Stage 2:
We will select.
- Floating islands in space
- Snowpeircer
- Spiders
Stage 3:
Our questions are.
- People live in city-sized trains. How do they travel from island to island?
- Spiders? What makes them so important? Are they PC races? Are they antagonists?
- What are these islands floating in? Space? What lies below?
Stage 4:
Let's answer these questions.
- The islands are linked by a rail system built upon a vast, indestructible spider web. Made by gigantic spiders, obviously.
- The spiders built the foundations for the rail system. Therefore, they are seen as architects, builders, maybe even worshipped as gods? For once, they are not the bad guys.
- Every island should be its own environment. Separate and unique, like a planet. Therefore, it makes sense that it is floating in space, or something similar. Dark and empty.
The High Concept
''In the endless and starless abyss, a million fragments of lost worlds are scattered. They would be isolated and alone if not for the Webrail. A vast rail network linking them together, created by great godlike spiders. Train-cities travel the Webrail for trade, exploration and conquest.''
This is our basic high concept that we can build out from. Now we have this core concept, as we delve into other aspects of world-building, this central idea will guide and inform us as we move forward to create something truly immersive.
Next Week, Character creation
