My World-building Strategy

When creating the world of Choriim, I made use of a new strategy for actually putting the thing together. When I finally completed Choriim, I assumed that this was the end of my design troubles, and gleefully adopted it for all my projects. Since then, my d20 cyberpunk and Singularity Campaign projects collapsed, which indicates that my grand scheme may have worked through sheer luck.

Anyway, here's how I go about writing up a setting:

(Note: sections of this I swiped whole-cloth from other sources. Almost none of it is original. And the three-document strategy comes from the Wizards of the Coast setting search, which I didn't enter, but used as a limited form of guidance.)

The first thing that I do is work out the basic concepts of the setting. This can usually be condensed into a short sentence or two. I then write it down, and put it in a prominent place. I also determine the heroes and major villains of the setting, consider what's new about it, compared with other things I've done, and consider the nature of supernatural/sci-fi elements of the setting. These all go into a single document, which typically is only a single page long. (This is all taken directly from that WotC setting search.)

Example: The basic concept of the Singularity Campaign is that in the medium-term future mankind's extra-solar colonies have mysterious come under attack from an alien enemy dubbed "The Kurge". The starfighters usually flown by Earth's pilots have proven ineffective against the Kurge, but it has been determined that properly piloted mechs can oppose this enemy. Unfortunately, in order to be effective, the mechs must be piloted through a direct cybernetic interface, and it has been found that implanting such ware into adult hosts causes seizures and madness. Therefore, Earth has desperately recruited a force of adolescent prodigies to pilot the mechs against the Kurge. (Yes, it's inspired by about a hundred giant-robot anime shows. No, I didn't claim it was original.)

Having completed the campaign overview, I start work on two more documents, one describing the rules to use and the other detailing the setting. Ideally, the first will have all the rules data required, with the second will have no rules content at all. I seem to unconsciously aim for a total page count of about 120 pages between the two documents, but I don't really know why that is.

Naturally, having a single setting document, even one running 100 pages in length, doesn't allow much opportunity to flesh out a world. That's a project for later, preferrably done during actual campaign play.

There are three more things I try to bear in mind when writing these things up:

1. The setting overview is there for a reason. Anything that doesn't support the setting doesn't belong in the documents being written.
2. The rules exist to further the setting, and not the other way around. Therefore, I will write as many house rules as it requires to get that done. That said, I also try to keep the number of house rules to a minimum, since each such rule makes the setting harder to run.
3. Every major campaign block (every race, every region, every society, every character) should have some sort of unrevealed secret. These serve to give the GM material to work with when running the campaign, and give players things to investigate. I also try to make sure I never repeat a secret. (And, as the above implies, I am pretentious enough to write my material with the view that someone else would be running the campaign. Since I try to avoid using pre-generated worlds, this seems rather foolish, but there it is.)

Crucially, I don't edit my work while I'm still creating. Only once I'm done will I consider re-writing chunks of it. Otherwise, I just get locked in a cycle of constantly revising one problematic section of the setting.

I doubt this is at all useful, and I probably sound a hell of a lot more pompous than I did previously. Oh well.