Pre-Loved Campaign Settings
May 2nd, 2011
Most of the time, when a DM (or GM, or Storyteller, or Keeper of Arcane Lore, or whatever you like) is sitting down to plan out his or her epic masterpiece of a campaign, he or she begins by envisioning a fantastic world with a lengthy background and all kinds of information. This journey of creation is very self-fulfilling, and very few DMs can keep from falling hopelessly in love with their own brainchild, much in the same way that all mothers think their babies are beautiful, even if they really, really aren't. This isn't to say that all, or even most, home-made campaign settings are no good, just that, regardless of how good it is, the DM will always love it, as it is, essentially, mined from his heart and soul and then carefully and meticulously crafted and sculpted by his mind into a finished product.
But this is not always the case. Sometimes, instead of crafting a whole new campaign setting from scratch, a DM may get it into his head to run a campaign in an existing setting. Most commonly, that setting is one of the “official” campaign settings which are supported by a major publishing company, such as Faerun, Eberron, the Pathfinder campaign setting, or the like. These worlds already come with their own rich history and points of interest, and have been polished and improved by dozens of designers, writers, and other professionals who logged many a man-hour into maximizing the world's entertainment value.
Still, though, in my experience, most people who play in Eberron, the Forgotten Realms, or other “official” settings tend to only sort of be playing in these settings. A few landmarks and cameos might pop up, and a character may play a race that's exclusive (or at least iconic) to that setting, but at the end of the day, the typical Faerun campaign really isn't all that different from a campaign in any other relatively generic fantasy setting. This obviously varies from DM to DM (those who know all the Forgotten Realms lore tend to have campaigns that are a little more…"Realmsy"), as well as from setting to setting (Eberron and Planescape, as campaign settings, tend to have a stronger impact on a game than Greyhawk or Faerun).
Case in point: Baldur's Gate (or the sequel, or Icewind Dale, or Neverwinter Nights, etc., etc., etc.). How much work would it really take to divorce Baldur's Gate from the Faerun campaign setting? Not a whole lot. Change a few names, and that's about it. It's a great game, of course, and it also does a good job of making sure to drop in little bits of Faerun history in its books and cameos, but there's no part of the game that really depends on the setting.
It suddenly occurs to me that I'm not sure exactly where I was going with this. I have a hazy idea that the plan was to somehow use this as a segue into running a campaign in an existing setting that isn't really a campaign setting. That, by the way, is what this article is really about. But, honestly, even when you do that, most likely your story will still probably be fairly easy to divorce from the setting. There's nothing wrong with being able to divorce it from the setting, as long as it really does feel like the setting.
I guess that's what I really meant to get at: published campaign settings are largely self-important. They don't really exist for anything other than to be played, which means that, most likely, unless you've already spent a lot of time playing in them, you aren't likely to know a whole lot about them. And because they are specifically designed to be fairly flexible, to allow lots of different DMs and players to enjoy them, that means that, unless a group has stuck with one setting for a large chunk of their gaming career, most likely they don't really know that much about the setting, and so it really is just a backdrop of generic fantasy with a few well-known landmarks popping up, and not much else.
Consider, on the other hand, a campaign set in a fantasy world that is not only well-rounded, but with which you and your players are actually very familiar. What, precisely, this realm is going to be, I don't know: after all, I'm not a member of your group. For my own part, I've certainly considered the merits of a campaign set in Enroth (of Might and Magic fame), or in Azeroth (pre-Warcraft 3, for the record). I've definitely toyed with the idea of a campaign in Krynn, which I count here because, despite being an "official" campaign setting, it's primarily a series of books (as opposed to Forgotten Realms, which is primarily a campaign setting and just happens to also have books and games).
And those, of course, are just the fantasy settings (and not nearly all of the ones that have even occurred to me, at that). There are lots of other potentially interesting settings out there that don't mesh as well with the traditional sword-and-sorcery style gameplay of D&D and Pathfinder. Some of these settings even have their own roleplaying game systems that have been published for them (Star Wars RPG jumps immediately to mind), but even those that don't have their own special systems (which, unfortunately, have a tendency to not be as unique or interesting mechanically as games which aren't tied to pre-existing intellectual property) usually have a system or two that's designed for something pretty close.
There are lots of benefits to playing a game set in a beloved pre-existing world. For one thing, it's fun: after all, you loved the world in the book/movie/game/whatever you first saw it in, and, most likely, you can carry over whatever it was which attracted you to it in the first place over into the game. There are lots of great opportunities for cameos (as long as they're done tastefully…), and allowing players to explore areas or organizations that are only sort of hinted at in the source material. Obviously this works best if both you and your players (or, at least, a good number of them) are familiar with the source setting, but even if you're the only one, using a pre-existing setting with which you are familiar gives you a strong starting point and a firm grounding in the setting. You also know for certain that the campaign world is a gem (after all, you love it, and you're a little less biased than if you made the world yourself). In fact, one of the greatest joys of running a campaign set in a pre-existing world is being able to share all of the things that you, yourself, love about that world with all of your players.
One major caution that I would give about such games is making sure to avoid overshadowing the game itself. For example, if the setting you wanted was, say, Star Wars, it would be tempting to have everyone play as one of the characters from the movies. The problem with this, however, is that this dramatically limits what can and can't happen in the game, as the story is basically already written: there will be times when the PCs have to fail, and other times when they have to succeed, let alone dictating the way in which they go about trying to solve their various problems. At the same time, you also need to make sure that whatever the story of the campaign is (for example, the players are all rebel fighter pilots), it's important that they be able to play a key part in its events, and aren't eclipsed by the setting's existing NPCs (for example, if they led the assault on the Death Star, it would be somewhat anticlimactic if the end of that adventure was "…and then some new kid zooms past you, fires, and makes the shot without targeting. Good job clearing the way for the important person, guys.").
For this reason, I would generally recommend setting the game in a part of the setting that has a lot of open room and may not have been fully explored already. This could be a different physical location (using the Star Wars example, we'll say some planet or planets that didn't appear in the movies), or a different point in time (such as before or after the movies, and/or the books or games), or maybe even an "alternate reality" (for example, if the players make their own, new characters, who somehow get mixed up with the rebels instead of the cast from the movies, thus freeing the players from the predestination problem). Generally, for the same reason, I prefer to only use a handful of direct cameo appearances, both in order to keep those cameos special, and to ensure that there's more to the campaign than a string of NPCs from the source material.
That's all for this week. Join me next time, when I'll be discussing a little something I like to call “The Case of the Invisible Jelly.” In the meantime, play what you love.