When Less is More:
Creating unique and memorable game settings through limitations
As a GM, you want options. So when you’re building your own campaign setting, you try to incorporate as many settings and species as you can - just in case you might want to use them later. The Forgotten Realms is a great example of this. You’ve got an Egyptian culture, a Mesopotamian culture, an Asian culture, pirates, Native American-esque tribes of plains warriors, desert nomads (in the Anauroch and in Al-Qadim), sort of Renaissance-y Waterdeep, good English yeomen in the Dales, the standard Evil Sorcerous Empire, plenty of secret societies and thieves’ guilds… the list goes on.
How many worlds have you played in like that? Ones that try to include everything, and so end up feeling more or less like all the other settings that try to include everything?
Now compare FR to, say, Planescape or Dark Sun or even Ravenloft. Chances are, if you’ve looked into some of these very unique settings, you either love them or you hate them. Why? Because they don’t have something for everyone. Their appeal is to a more limited audience. If you’re in that audience, it’s the best thing since sliced bread. If you’re not, you don’t understand why anyone would want to play that.
Such a limited setting is very memorable, because it has a different "flavor" that sticks in the mind past "generic quasi-medieval fantasy." By limiting your choices in a setting, you can create a unique world which will stick in the minds of your players.
The trick is to know: will they love it or hate it? If you have a long-standing group of players, this shouldn’t be a problem. You’ve all played together long enough to know what they’ll go for. If you have to recruit but have a large talent pool, create what you think is nifty, and like-minded players will gravitate towards it. If you’re desperate for players, you might run a few different world ideas past them and see which one they like. World-building doesn’t have to be a years-long endeavor, after all. Using a “bottom-up” approach, you can define a few key features of your world and start running adventures almost immediately. But that’s another essay.
The fastest, easiest way to give a personal stamp on a world is to place limits on it. Some you might consider are:
Terrain
Of course, you can always mix up the expected themes, as long as you stay within reasonable boundaries. Maybe the jungle is home to an advanced civilization that fears the wild beasts of the savannah.
Era
As a history buff myself, I find that it is best to temper strict historical accuracy with standard fantasy convention (unless a strict historical game is what you want to play). Most of your players have learned their medieval history from fantasy novels, movies, and gaming. If you challenge too many of their assumptions, they will balk and feel like they are in a class rather than a game, and that they cannot effectively operate in your world, since they don’t know the rules. Players will mostly be concerned with weapons, armor and adventuring gear, so you should be, too. Introduce further historical information as you can, but let the details slide. (For instance, I’ve found that some players insist on plate glass windows everywhere, no matter how often I said there weren’t any. I eventually gave up.)
Races
Or you can do counter-archetypical things with the race, rather than remove it entirely. Everyone knows that dwarves are great metalsmiths who live in the mountains, right? You might make seafaring Viking dwarves instead. That even preserves the traditional Nordic flavor of the dwarf, but puts him in a very different environment. Or you could go entirely crazy, and have the Court of the Celestial Dragon be made entirely of stumpy dwarven samurai. Would they have katanas or battle axes?
Whatever you do, try to avoid the "humans in rubber suits" syndrome. Demihumans and humanoids should somehow be fundamentally different from humanity and from each other. In most games, you could replace the orcish hordes with human barbarian hordes and it wouldn’t make any difference. Elves aren’t just nimble humans with good hair and long lives. It is very hard to try and get inside an alien head, to be sure. But give it a go.
Or, for the shock of your PCs lives, drop demihumans entirely from their list of options. It’s a human world, for the most part. Anything non-human they meet should be fantastical or monstrous. (Or should seem that way to them, at least). This also has the advantage of keeping the PCs on their toes when they meet new sentient creatures. If none of the PCs are dwarves and all they know about them are myths and legends, a meeting with a party of dwarves suddenly becomes a potentially risky business.
Monsters
Be especially sparing with the intelligent monsters. Their cunning and plans make them terrible foes, and if you have too many of them, they lose their unique edge. Compare "the cool campaign where we foiled a mind flayer plot to harvest the city of Serlina" to "the campaign where we fought some mind flayers and some drow and some beholders and a dragon and..."
A primary villain race can make a campaign quite memorable. Some standards are drow, dragons, demons, and humanoids. Dopplegangers often figure prominently in "secret war" scenarios. You could also pick one of the lesser-used monster races for a real surprise for your players. How about a game where the bad guys are a shadowy organization of kenku (bird-men) thieves and assassins?
Drop a D&D convention or two. Maybe dragons aren’t conveniently color-coded by alignment. Or abolish the Underdark! Refuse to use any monster which was obviously created to harass PCs in the Good Old Days of dungeon-crawling (mimics, cloakers, and piercers leap to mind).
Try to keep some semblance of a reasonable ecology, with a few large predators at the top of the food chain and a double handful of smaller ones in the middle. Pick one or two major monsters for each habitat in your ecology. For instance, in North America, we have alligators and jaguars in subtropical swamps, wolves and bears in temperate forests, wolves again in the plains, and mountain lions and bears in the mountains. Eagles are the largest aerial predator, sharks swim in the ocean, and the snapping turtle can grow quite large in freshwater environs. The Arctic regions give us polar bears and orca. Raccoon, lynx, coyote, hawks and owls are just a few of our smaller predators. Then there are the creatures whose threat is out of proportion to their size: venomous snakes, for instance.
You can pick a monster theme: faerie creatures, desert monsters, conglomerate creatures (chimeras and owlbears and manitcores, oh my!). It’s best if your monster theme complements your terrain and adventure themes. A game set in a mythic Celtic milieu would be complemented by a riddling sprite, but a riddling sphinx would obviously be out of place.
Make your own monsters! One simple, yet highly effective, way of making a monster is to take a normal animal and augment it in a scary way. The giant spider and winter wolf are monsters made on this model. You could give the animal a breath weapon, the ability to fly or turn invisible, or poison and be within the realm of folk tradition. A hypnotizing or charming gaze is another possibility. More baroque spell effects may start to feel more artificial, but that’s a GM’s prerogative.
I’ll use a throwaway line from up above - "the cool campaign where we foiled a mind flayer plot to harvest the city of Serlina" - and expand on it, using some of the guidelines here.
I’ll limit my terrain to mountains. The city of Serlina is built on a mountainous ledge. It is part of no kingdom, but is one of many free city-states that dot the Helis Mountains. Travel is difficult, making each city-state fairly self-reliant. Battles are fought over the rare passes and trails that enable what trade there is, and tariffs on these roads are high.
I don’t feel like fighting my players on history again, so I’m content to let the era be Generic High Middle Ages Fantasy. All equipment in the core books is available.
Races will be fun. I want Serlina to be a mainly human city. We’re in the mountains, which suggests dwarves. Do I want to upset my players’ stereotypes and use, say, gnomes instead? Considering that the campaign I have planned involves some big fight scenes with some dangerous monsters, I decide that some dwarven toughness in the party would be good. We’ll have a dwarven sister-city buried into the rock beneath Serlina. The two are separate political entities, but have long had favorable relations. There’s a dwarvish quarter in Serlina and a human section in the dwarf city. I’ll keep the standard fantasy dwarven culture, too.
For a touch of exotic, I decide the other race will be avariel, or winged elves. They were the first inhabitants of these mountains. They don’t seem to mind the new races, curiously, and serve as perfectly disinterested couriers between the mountain peaks. I think that under their uncaring façade, the eternal elves are upset at this conquest of their ancient homelands and are slowly, slowly planning to take it back. Their “messenger service” is somehow a part of this plan - something about getting insinuated in the local governments. I’m not too worried about it right now, but it might make a fine follow-on campaign. Avariel are claustrophobic, and the mind flayer villains live underground, which mean I’m not allowing them as a PC race for this campaign. So the only PC racial options are human and dwarven. I’m willing to listen to other suggestions, but I’ll want a very good backstory and a way to work them plausibly into the setting.
The Big Bad Guys will be mind flayers, who live below even the dwarven city under the mountain. I decide there are a few other mind flayer "hives" in the Helis mountain chain, but no pervasive Underdark connecting them. The mind flayers plan to first form some cults in their honor in the dwarven city, then move upwards into the human city, gaining influence and power until the other races willingly line up to donate their grey matter to the intellivores. Until then, their cultists find sacrifices for their tentacled "gods."
Obviously, the adventurers won’t be ready to take on the mind flayers right off the bat. For some low-level encounters, they might fight bandits lurking in one of the passes or maybe a grizzly bear. At mid-level, I plan to have them finally hunt down some of the fire-cats they’ve heard about - large felines that breathe fire! A roc is too tough for them, but I might scale it down as a large but not gigantic mountain bird to fight. Some galeb duhr or other Earth Elementals might make an interesting encounter (which might not be hostile). And other humans and dwarves, of course, are the infinitely flexible encounter for all levels. If they’re past 1st level bandits, perhaps they’ll investigate the gem smugglers working in the dwarven city.
The monsters are really filler, anyway - thinks to hunt and kill for XP as the PCs get more and more involved in the mysterious disappearances in Serlina. (As you might guess from that attitude, my campaigns are combat-light. But lots of people like things to hunt and kill, so I came up with a brief themed monster list as an exercise).
I still have work to do - figuring out the series of encounters that will lead the PCs from a few odd happenings in Serlina to the dwarven cultists to the mind flayer hive, for instance. But that’s campaign building, which is another essay. The point is that, in under thirty minutes, I’ve sketched out a campaign setting which is quite different from the norm. In a rugged, rocky land, we have a series of tough, individualistic city-states. The landscape is white snow, brownish-red rock, and green pines. Bandits and soldiers fight to hold precious trade routes, aloof avariel with unknown motives carry the most sensitive government information, and fire cats stalk the unwary, deep in the pine forests. It has a frontier feel, with the cold wind whipping by like that. Deep underground, in dark, stagnant caverns, hideous tentacles horrors plot to bend the people above to their will, then devour them.
No, you can’t play an elven mage. Yes, these rough mountain folk would probably laugh at a foppish bard. But if your players are excited at the thought of playing some individualists in a world where toughness and strength are the measure of a man (or woman), Serlina could work for you.
If it doesn’t, take a half an hour and come up with something else!
Limiting Your Choices
Instead of strategically placing forests, deserts, swamps, and so on all around your campaign world, focus on one or two types of terrain that predominate the setting. If this offends your sense of geography, recall that a campaign setting doesn’t have to be an entire planet. If you can’t see a desert world, then try to see a large area of desert that will serve as the stage for all of your adventures. Some terrains naturally suggest certain types of games. Jungles do well with Lost Cities, Tarzan-esque heroes, and dinosaurs. Plains suggest mounted horse archers and tribal warfare. Warm seas might be good for either Polynesian islanders or an all-underwater campaign.
If you’re historically knowledgeable, pick an era and stick with it. I have seen groups where Conan the Barbarian is adventuring with Cyrano di Bergerac, and it’s a little silly. There are plenty of gaming supplements out there (the green historical AD&D 2e settings come to mind, as do a variety of GURPS sourcebooks) which can help you out with questions like, “Can my Viking have a crossbow?” and “What do you mean my priest of Amun-Rho can’t wear full plate?”
This is one of the best ways to tell your PCs that they are not in Generic Fantasyland anymore. You can remove a demihuman or humanoid race entirely. (Warning: this will annoy players who prefer to play that race). The elves have gone over the sea. Orcs ate all the halflings. Or the race may never have existed at all.
Who really thinks the mimic is a good monster, anyway? An animate treasure chest - please. Toss out most of the Monster Manual. Pick some signature beasts to populate your setting with, at a variety of challenge ratings. Remember that a pack of lower level creatures can be as tough as a single higher level creature. For example, a lone wolf can serve as an easy enemy for low-level adventurers. A wolf pack can return to haunt them at mid-level.
An Example
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