Salient Points

My scanning/shredding quest has now reached one of my biggest creative failures.

The setting in question was envisaged as a "binary planet" - two planets orbiting a common point, each effectively acting as the moon of the other. I don't claim it's a particularly original thought, given that I nicked it from an episode of "The Transformers", but it wasn't terrible.

Where it went wrong, though, is that I proceeded to create the two worlds, Luminious and Vorgania (yeah, I'm bad at names, too), almost entirely in isolation of one another. In each case, the other world was just there - there isn't really any interaction between the two, there isn't a shared mythology, there aren't many shared gods (and those that are shared are pretty much just a set of names).

Such a wasted opportunity.

The thing is, it's not a bad idea. But that key defining feature should have been something that absolutely saturates the setting - there should be myths about how it came about, the two worlds should in some sense be reflections of one another, there absolutely have to be interactions between the two, and so on.

Basically, what I'm saying is that any setting will have certain key features - things that are unique to, or otherwise distinctive about, this setting. A really good example would be Eberron's "ten things" list that really serves to set the tone of the setting. And whatever those unique features are should be interlaced throughout the setting. They don't all have to appear everywhere, but they should all appear somewhere, and there should be some reflection of at least some of them everywhere.

(Incidentally, that's another reason I'm not keen on WotC's "multiverse" thing - I'm a fan of Dark Sun and Spelljammer and Ravenloft, but they're not the same. Each has features that makes it distinct. By forcing them all into a multiverse, especially if they link them up too tightly, the distinctiveness is necessarily reduced. And, yes, that's a criticism that can be levelled against "Infinity War" also, though that gets lost somewhat in the fact that that film is already trying to do too much in too little time.)