Want to create an entire world?

Sounds intimidating, doesn’t it? Particularly if you look at published campaign settings: Hundreds, often thousands, of pages dedicated to describing a fictional reality. Your first session is on Saturday! You don’t have time for all that!

Of course, you don’t need to do all of that to start gaming in your own setting. A detailed breakdown of the dialects spoken on the Triskan sub-continent might be really fun to explore, but are probably not strictly necessary for a new campaign taking place in the Sasharran archipelago.

But what’s the minimum amount of stuff you’ll need before the game begins?

In my experience, three to six pages.

Let’s break down what those look like.

THE MINIMAL PREP PACKET

Start with 1-2 pages of broad detail about the world. The goal of this high-level summary is to provide context for whatever local scene your campaign will end up starting in. The exact nature of what this overview looks like will vary based on the setting, your preferences, and probably the campaign you’re planning.

For my first D&D 3^rd Edition campaign, for example, I wrote one page summarizing the five major empires of the Western Lands (one paragraph per empire). Then I wrote a one page timeline of the setting’s history.

For an urban fantasy campaign, on the other hand, you might do one page on the true nature of magic and another page on the major fey factions.

Whatever this content ends up needing to be for your campaign, though, keep it to no more than two pages.

Tip: Make sure to include a calendar, if the setting needs that sort of thing. You’ll want to be able to talk about the passage of time in concrete ways.

Next, what do the players need for character creation? In D&D, for example, this includes the gods (because clerics need to pick their deity) and languages (because everyone needs to pick those). So do another 1-2 pages on that.

Finally, we’re going to aggressively zoom in and focus on the local setting. Obviously, you’ll need to start by deciding where the first adventure of the campaign is going to be set.

• A major fantasy metropolis?
• A village on the edge of civilization?
• A lunar space station?
• A lich-infested Rome?

Exactly what you’ll be prepping here will depend on the exact nature of the setting, but once again your goal is 1-2 pages of broad context that will give you a foundation for developing and improvising as needed.

Some things that are often relevant:

• Enough detail to describe local navigation. For a city, this might be a breakdown of neighborhoods. For a village, it might be the local roads (where do they go?) and terrain features (the Old Forest, the Trollfens, etc.).
• Who is politically in charge? Whether that’s a local authority (e.g., the mayor) or a distant one (e.g., Tsarist border patrols periodically pass through the region).
• What are the local factions? These might be businesses, criminal organizations, social organizations, ethnic groups, civic institutions, etc.

Your goal here is not to be comprehensively encyclopedic. It’s okay to say “there’s a city council,” for example, without specifying every individual councilor. Or to name one or two councilors while leaving the rest as a tabula rasa for later development.

Check to make sure that you’ve provided common resources that the PCs will go looking for. In D&D, for example, that would typically include:

• The local store(s) where they’ll be able to buy supplies;
• An inn or other place for them to stay; and
• A tavern, as a default social destination and/or rumor distribution center. (PCs just love going to taverns.)

A quick way to make your setting feel unique is to look at the essential functions being provided here and, instead of using the generic solution (general store, inn, tavern), coming up with creative and unusual solutions. For example:

• There is a strange, steampunk machine in the middle of the village. Insert gems or precious metals and it will deliver, within 2d12 hours, the items you request.
• The village doesn’t have an inn, but the PCs can find beds in the abandoned — and very, very haunted — military barracks on Blood Hill.
• The locals socialize in a dreamhouse or nobhill, gathering at night in their dreams while they sleep.

With these three parts in place, you’ll have your 3-6 pages of prep. From this point forward, the setting will continue to expand as:

• The players create characters and you/they need to start answering specific questions about where they’re from, etc.
• When you create your first adventure.
• When you create your second adventure.

And so on.

MAPS

While working on this initial material, you may find it useful to do some maps. To keep things brief, I have a couple of tips for this.

First, if you can get away with NOT doing a map, skip doing the map for now.

Second, if you’re doing a map, keep it sketchy and try to keep it at roughly the same level of detail as your minimal prep packet.

For example, when I did the first map for my Western Lands campaign I sketched a coastline, a couple mountain ranges, and the borders of the Five Empires. I eventually added regional maps with more detail, but I was still using that original map with very few additions more than ten years later.

You need less than you think.

THE PLAYER PACKET

The other thing to note is that the 3-6 pages you’ve written up can almost certainly, with perhaps just a teensy bit of editing, double as the players’ briefing pack for the setting.

Not only does it cover everything they need to know, it’s conveniently almost the exact length (5 pages) that I generally find to be the maximum amount of extracurricular reading I can rightfully hope that players might be willing to do before our first session. (Or, failing that, it’s short enough for them to parse at the table.)

THE FIRST ADVENTURE

An important thing to understand is that none of the material I’ve talked about here is part of your first adventure. What you need for that first scenario is separate from this foundational setting material.

If you’re a first time GM trying to figure out what your scenario should be, you might want to check out:

• Prep Tips for the Beginning DM
• Prep Tips for the Beginning GM: Cyberpunk
• How to Prep a Module

There are a wide variety of scenarios you might choose to launch the campaign with. Regardless of what type of scenario it is, though, it’s virtually certain that it will add more detail to your setting. For example, if it’s a murder investigation involving the Hephaestus Corporation… well, you’ll be adding a lot more detail about Hephaestus to your faction notes.

This is good! As I mentioned above, your homebrew setting will naturally expand through the scenarios you run in it. This is, in fact, the most efficient and arguably the best way to build a setting.

Of course, the amount of setting material you’ll need to prep for this initial scenario (and later scenarios) can vary quite a bit. For example, if you’re setting up a hexcrawl for an open table campaign, then you’ll prepping A LOT more setting material before the first session. If it’s a simple 5-room dungeon, then you might be adding very little.

Either way, you’ll have taken your first steps into a brand new world.

Your world.

DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 28C: Into the Banewarrens

Elestra, thinking quickly, fished a flask of oil out of her pack and threw it at the vermin-thing Tor was fighting. Agnarr stepped back, pivoted, and landed a blow with his flaming sword. The oil ignited and the vermin-thing was immolated by the wave of flames.

Tee stepped back and, drawing her own flask of oil, hurled it at the one Agnarr had just turned his back on. Agnarr whirled and a moment later there was nothing left of the creatures but two inky patches of burning grease.

The history of burning oil in D&D is something I find really interesting.

If you look back at the 1974 edition of D&D, there are two references to oil First, you can buy a “flask of oil” for 2 gp. (Most obviously intended to fuel the lantern, which appears immediately above it in the equipment list.) Second, you can use it as part of the Flight/Pursuit mechanics:

“Burning oil will deter many monsters from continuing pursuit.”

Okay, but what should happen if someone — whether monster or PC — should end up in the burning oil? The rulebooks are silent on this issue, but it seems likely that many GMs followed the same train of logic I did when making a ruling on this:

• How much damage should it deal? Well, all attacks deal 1d6 damage in 1974 D&D, so almost certainly 1d6.
• How large of an area does one flask of oil cover? Most the game defaults to 10 ft. increments, so a single 10-ft. square seems likely. (Enough to block a standard dungeon corridor.)
• How long does it burn for? Hmm. Probably more than just one round, right? 1974 D&D pretty reliably reaches for a six-sided die whenever it needs a randomizer, so let’s say it burns for 1d6 rounds.

This makes burning oil quite useful: It’s an area attack available to anyone willing to pony up the cash for it, and it’s incredibly useful for taking control of a battlefield or, as provided for in the rules, escaping from a fight that’s turned against you.

(Tangentially, in one of my D&D campaigns a PC invented a flash-burn oil specialized for combat: It cost 10 gp per flask and would deal 2d6 (take highest) damage, but only burn for 2d6 (take lowest) rounds. I gave it the name dragon’s milk. But I digress.)

The potential for abuse is, it should be noted, incredibly high if you (a) don’t enforce encumbrance and (b) don’t enforce any other consequences for hauling around huge quantities of highly flammable liquid. People will just throw oil all day with nary a care in the world.

It’s perhaps unsurprising to learn, given the efficacy and, frankly, importance of burning oil in D&D, that AD&D 1^st Edition spends much more time focusing on it. In fact, although the price of a flask of oil has dropped to just 1 gp, burning oil literally becomes a controlled substance on the Armor and Weapons Permitted table:

A number of protections against burning oil (like the resist fire spell) are also explicitly introduced.

And, of course, guidelines are given for many practical aspects of using burning oil:

• If you throw a burning flask of oil, it affects a 3’ diameter area, dealing 1d3 damage to everyone in the area (save vs. poison to negate). If you hurl a lantern, it only affects a 2’ diameter area.
• If it strikes someone directly, it deals 2d6 damage + 1d6 damage on the second round (and then burns out).
• Walking through or standing in an area of burning oil deals 1d6 damage per round and requires a saving throw to avoid being lit on fire.
• A lighted torch can be thrown to light an oil covered area (with guidelines for determining where it goes if you miss).

As with so many things in 1^st Edition, it’s an odd bag of contradictory details. (If you hit someone with oil, it burns out after 2 rounds. Should that rule also apply to “puddles” of oil that are lit? Is the 1d3 splash damage in addition to the 1d6 damage for standing in the burning pool? Or does a thrown flask of oil not create a pool and only creates splash?)

Regardless of the hazy parts here, it does generally appear that oil continues to be an effective method of performing an area attack. Nowhere near as powerful as a fireball, certainly, but far more accessible and flexible.

Let’s briefly detour over to the 1977 Basic Set. Here we find:

• 1 flask of oil can create a 5-foot-wide pool. It will burn for 10 rounds, dealing 2d8 damage per round.
• A creature struck directly with oil suffers 1d8 damage in the first round and 2d8 damage in the second round. (It’s then “assumed that the oil has run off, been wiped off, burned away, etc.) This is accompanied by a truly dizzying system for actually targeting the creatures. (You need to roll 11+, but then you adjust for Dexterity score, and also the height of the target.)
• You have to ignite oil AFTER throwing it. (You apparently can’t light it like a pipe bomb and then throw it.)
• Flaming oil will not harm non-corporeal monsters like wraiths and specters. It deals only half damage to skeletons, zombies, ghouls, wights, and mummies. Monsters that normally use fire weapons (e.g. red dragons, fire giants, hell hounds) are also immune.

We can see here that J. Eric Holmes did, in fact, follow a logic similar to my own (albeit with a smaller area affected and more damage afflicted). This version is more powerful than AD&D’s and would basically persist throughout the later version of Basic D&D (with the addition of a grenade-like, wick-fueled burning oil bomb to the equipment list).

LANTERN OIL DOESN’T WORK LIKE THAT!

I don’t care.

Why are lanterns in D&D fueled with such an insanely flammable liquid? I don’t know. Maybe it’s harvested by alchemists from the glands of fire lizards and is absurdly cheap compared to other options, and house fires are a huge problem in this world. Or maybe the characters are carrying a bunch of different types of oil, and we just doesn’t worry about trying to figure out exactly which one is which.

The point is that D&D-style burning oil creates interesting gameplay and has strategic interest.

Although I will note that AD&D 2^nd Edition did make a point of distinguishing between “Greek fire” (10 gp per flask) and “lamp oil” (6 cp per flask; can’t be used offensively, but can sustain existing blazes).

THE BIG SHIFT

The big shift for burning oil in D&D starts with 3^rd Edition, which divided the weapon into alchemist’s fire (1d6 damage per round for two rounds, can’t be used as an area attack) and oil (5 ft. area, 1d3 damage, burns for two rounds; if thrown, only has 50% chance of igniting properly).

You can see how these rules were derived from AD&D, but the efficacy of oil as an area attack has been crippled.

4^th Edition’s treatment of oil is actually hilarious. On page 210 it says:

Here’s an overview of the contents of this chapter:

(…)

Adventuring Gear: The tools of the adventuring trade. Look in this section for everburning torches, flasks of oil, backpacks, and spellbooks.

Emphasis added. But guess what isn’t in the Adventuring Gear section of the Player’s Handbook? Guess what isn’t in the book anywhere at all?

Ah, 4th Edition. Never change.

D&D 4^th Edition Essentials did manage to remember to give a price for lantern oil, but I’m fairly certain there are still no rules for using burning oil as a weapon.

Burning oil makes a comeback in 5^th Edition, but remains quite weak:

• You have to light oil as a separate action or attack.
• It can cover a 5 ft. area, burning for two rounds.
• It deals 5 fire damage.

So… why was burning oil suddenly nerfed to, in some cases, no longer being a part of the game at all?

Partly I think it’s because of the expectation that encumbrance won’t be enforced, allowing PCs to haul around dozens of flasks of oil that can be deployed ceaselessly. Mostly, I think it’s fear of a mundane item “poaching” what spellcasters can do.

The irony is that you can look at a whole plethora of perpetual D&D design discussions:

• Non-spellcasters not being able to compete with the area attacks of spellcasters.
• PCs not being able to reliably retreat from battle, so players always fight to the death.
• A lack of dynamic control over the battlefield, resulting in boring combat.

… and burning oil is just sitting there waiting for somebody to notice it.

Honestly, I’ve had great results from just using my rulings from 1974 D&D:

• 10 ft. area.
• 1d6 damage per round.
• Burns for 1d6 rounds.

I recommend adding that and dragon’s milk to your 3^rd Edition and 5^th Edition campaigns.

Campaign Journal: Session 29A – Running the Campaign: Clever Combat
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

Published scenarios often teach us that scenario hooks are a bang-bang interaction: The mysterious stranger in the corner of the tavern tells us about a mysterious artifact, hires us to go look for it, and we immediately head to the dungeon to retrieve it.

Or we’re traveling along an idyllic country road when we come across the smoking remnants of a merchant’s wagon that was attacked by goblins. The ranger finds their tracks and leads us back to their warren.

There’s nothing wrong with these bang-bang hooks. But they’re disproportionately represented in published adventures because the writers have no way of knowing what’s been happening in your campaign: Everything you need to run and play the adventure has to be self-contained in the adventure.

But as the GM, you do know what’s been going on in your campaign. In fact, you can control it. That gives you the power to easily do so much better than the author of that published scenario.

• What if, instead of a “mysterious stranger,” it’s a long-time ally or patron of the PCs? Someone they’ve built a relationship with.
• What if instead of fetching an artifact that an NPC wants, the McGuffin is something that the PCs need to accomplish their goals? Maybe the stranger isn’t buying their services, but selling them information.
• Instead of a random merchant, what if the goblins attacked someone the PCs know and care about?
• What if the goblins don’t just materialize out of thin air, but are a threat people in the local village have been talking about for weeks? Or are part of a goblin clan that the PCs have fought before?

These kinds of long-term threads will weave the adventure into your campaign. The stakes will be higher, and more meaningful to the players, because they aren’t just transitory concerns.

Long-term scenario hooks can be implemented in a variety of ways (and have a variety of effects) depending on the campaign structure you’re using, but for the sake of simplicity let’s focus on episodic campaigns for the moment — the players are presented with a single scenario; they complete the scenario; then they get presented with the next scenario.

Broadly speaking, there are two ways to implement long-term scenario hooks. First, you can retrofit the hook. When you pick or design your next adventure, you simply look back at the campaign to date and figure out how to use the existing continuity to hook the new adventure. What are the PCs trying to accomplish? What do they want? Who do they care about? Who do they hate? What are your players talking about between sessions? Just dangle it on the hook.

The other option is to plan for the hook. Which is basically what it says on the tin: If you know what adventures you’re planning to run later in the campaign, take a peek at them and think about how you can incorporate and foreshadow those elements into the earlier adventures of the campaign.

EXAMPLE: JOURNEYS THROUGH THE RADIANT CITADEL

SPOILER WARNING

As an example of what this prep might look like, let’s take a peek at Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel. This adventure anthology, shepherded into existence by project leads Ajit A. George and F. Wesley Schneider, is a collection of thirteen D&D 5^th Edition adventures designed for PCs from 1^st level through 14^th level. Although loosely bound by the conceit that the adventures are set in a location which can be reached via the transplanar nexus of the Radiant Citadel, each adventure is a completely standalone experience.

Nevertheless, it seems quite likely that many DMs will run Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel as an episodic campaign, running each adventure in sequence, one after the other.

So how could we prep long-term scenario hooks for these adventures?

To start with, the tiers of play in D&D 5^th Edition make for a handy rule of thumb here: To set yourself up for success, you should be dropping the groundwork for your Tier 2 and Tier 3 adventures in the Tier 1 adventures of your campaign.

The Tier 1 adventures in Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel are:

• Salted Legacy, in which the PCs get caught up in family drama and business rivalry in the Dyn Singh Night Market.
• Written in Blood, in which the PCs journey to a farming commune to uncover the source of an undead curse.
• The Fiend of Hollow Mine, in which the PCs must hunt down a demon-spawn which has unleashed a plague in San Citlán.

Using these scenarios as the foundation for our campaign, let’s take a look a the scenario hooks for the next several adventures in the anthology. One of the great things about Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel is that the designers have included multiple scenario hooks for each scenario, so we’ll have some nice flexibility in what we can work with.

Wages of Sin includes this scenario hook:

Zinda’s March of Vice is famous throughout the region. An influential ally of the characters requests that they attend and, while they’re there, purchase a bottle of jeli wine to be used as a gift in a diplomatic negotiation.

Let’s go back to “Salted Legacy.” The ally requesting the jeli wine purchase could actually be Lamai Tyenmo, the owner of Tyenmo Noodles who hired the PCs. But let’s also find ways of pointing forward: At the end of “Salted Legacy,” perhaps Tyenmo asks the PCs to keep their eyes open for interesting ingredients and drinks that she might use to create new noodle dishes and enhance her menu. (That’s a nice, open-ended link, because it’s quite likely the players will find ways to continue engaging with it in every adventure. “Hmm… I wonder aurumvorax steak noodles would taste like?”)

In “Wages of Sin,” the PCs get involved with Madame Samira Arah, a King of Coin (one of the rulers of Zinda), and her investigation into a series of attempted political assassinations. It might be nice to pre-establish her. If we reach back to “Written in Blood,” one of the hooks is:

A trader the characters have had past dealings with — perhaps from the Radiant Citadel or the Dyn Singh Market — invites the characters to Promise to participate in a business deal with Aunt Dellie.

We’ll have this merchant be Samira Arah. She’s been doing some economic outreach and the guards she had with her took ill after their visit to San Citlán. One of the merchants from “Salted Legacy” recommended the PCs to her, and she contacts them in the Radiant Citadel.

Sins of Our Elders takes place in Yeonido during the week-long Dan-Nal Festival. One of the hooks involves the PCs being invited to attend the festival by a family member or friend. You can look to the PCs’ backgrounds for the family member or friend (who might be native to Yeonido or might just want to visit), but we can add a little foreshadowing by having Samira Arah mention in “Written in Blood” that her next festival envoy will be to Yeonido.

Gold for Fools and Princes takes place in the Sensa Empire, where the empire’s rich gold mines are disrupted by an infestation of gold-eating aurumvoraxii. The big thing we’d really like to pre-establish here is the Empire’s reputation for goldsmithing and the powerful Aurum Guild. This should be fairly easy: Lady Drew, the trader from “Written in Blood,” can try to sell the PCs Sensan gold. In “The Fiend of Hollow Mine,” some of the miners who worked in the now-abandoned mine can talk about traveling to Sensa to see if they can find work with the Aurum Guild.

Trail of Destruction brings the PCs to Etizalan, where an increase in volcanic activity is threatening settlements across the region.

The Shieldbearers of the Radiant Citadel [think fantasy UN Peacekeepers] hire the characters to visit Tletepec to verify rumors that the region is becoming dangerous, so that they can prepare for an influx of refugees. They suggest the PCs start their investigations near Etizalan.

Here we want to pre-establish the Shieldbearers. We can do that by having them question the PCs after end the regional plague in “The Fiend of Hollow Mine.” We could also add a small squad of Shieldbearers active in the region — trying to bring aid to the plague victims — that the PCs could encounter earlier in the adventure.

And that’s more or less all there is to it. Obviously, you could also continue weaving these threads through the later adventures. For example, if the PCs are getting on well with Samira Arah, she might send them to the Goldwarrens on some errand as the primary scenario hook for “Gold for Fools and Princes.”

FOR THE DESIGNERS

Although I opened this discussion by saying that published adventures were predisposed to bang-bang hooks and that it’s impossible for adventure writers to know the continuity of the campaigns of the GMs who choose to run the adventure, it’s NOT true that you can’t design long-term scenario hooks for published adventures.

The trick is to simply prep tools and content that GMs can use before your adventure begins.

A tool I’ve developed in my work as a designer are groundwork sidebars. (These are one of several scenario tools you can used in published adventures.) Groundwork sidebars give the GM examples of how material can be incorporated into earlier adventures; it’s literally laying the groundwork for the adventure.

You can find numerous examples of this in the Welcome to the Island adventure anthology for Over the Edge, for example.

WATCH THIS
Advanced Gamemastery: The Campaign Stitch

Blades in the Dark drives its narrative through the interplay of factions. One of the factions described in the core rulebook are the Fog Hounds, a “crew of rough smugglers looking for a patron.” Their goals (as expressed in the form of a faction clock) include:

• Eliminate rival smugglers (8)

And their enemies are:

• Bluecoats (canal patrol), the Vultures (rival smuggling outfit, Tier I)

The Bluecoats are another full-featured faction in the setting, but the Vultures are not. The only reference to them, in fact, is what you see here.

In my current Blades in the Dark campaign, however, the PCs have ended up in a war with the Fog Hounds. It seems quite likely that an enemy-of-my-enemy situation will arise in one form or another, making the Vultures of particular importance in what will happen next.

So I needed to fully flesh out the Vultures, and I thought that might prove useful to other Blades in the Dark GMs.

THE VULTURES

A smuggling operation focused on the spirit trade.

Tier: I

Hold: Weak

Faction Clocks

Recruit a powerful envoy with connections in Whitecrown (6)

Learn how to counterfeit “bespoke” spirits; fake individuals (8)

Turf: Warded building in Old North Port (HQ). Private passenger car that can be attached to trains (with smuggling compartments). Tangletown pit-fighting operation, featuring taxidermied animals possessed by bottled spirits.

NPCs: Wendel Messerli (public “leader”; young, earnest, convincing).  Nicoline (true leader of the Vultures, traveling as a hobo; stealthy, fiery, clever). Christel the Fisherwoman (whisper, whose face is never the same twice; many-voiced, powerful, duplicitous)

Notable Assets: Hobo information network that hitch the rails. An array of Imperial transport and cargo documents, some forged and some legit. Spirit lures that can fish spirits out of the depths of the Void Sea.

Quirks: The Vultures have a secret language of hand-signs derived from hobo signs used at the stations to communicate car destinations and threats. The true leader and founder of the Vultures is Nicoline, a hobo who still chooses to live the wandering life of the rails and veils. Wendel is a fresh-faced youth who presents himself as the leader of the group when necessary, but meets secretly with Nicoline on transcontinental rail journeys to receive orders and strategy.

Allies: The Circle of Flame (clients), The Gray Cloaks

Enemies: The Dimmer Sisters, The Fog Hounds, Spirit Wardens

Situation: The Fog Hounds have targeted the Vultures for elimination, hoping to secure the rail-based smuggling routes that the Vultures currently command. Using Christel’s unique skill set and the custom lures she can create, the Vulture specialize in retrieving specific spirits from the Deathlands. They are hoping to be able to use their new connections with the Circle of Flame, who have found them useful agents, to learn more about the Lost District and gain access to the ancestral spirits there.