How to organize the setting?

[Fred Campbell]

Please go easy on me, as this is my first post.  I've been working on my own indie RPG for years.  I have the system (my own design) down on paper, and I have a setting in mind with many parts written out.  But, I'm having trouble organizing the setting materials.  Do I describe the races first?  The world's geography?  It's history?  What I think would be really helpful would be to use an existing background that is very well organized as a model.  Does anyone have any suggestions as to an existing background that is really well organized?  Thanks in advance for any advice you can give.

[Adam Dray]

Can you tell us more about your game? Not all the nitty gritty setting details, but what your game is about at a high level and what kinds of things the characters do, and what kind of things the players do?

I recommend approaching setting as just another component of your game. That is, its contents should fulfill a specific purpose within your strategy for getting players to play a certain way. Once you know what you're trying to accomplish System-wise with your setting, it should be clearer to you how to organize it.

[Adam Dray]

Oh, and I meant to say: Welcome to the Forge!

[J Tolson]

Are you referring to just the sections on setting or is this a larger question of how to organize the entire text of the game so as to be easy to read and visually appealing?

For everything else that people might say about D&D, the books tend to be fairly well organized and easy to follow (for the most part). If you plan on distributing the game, even if it is just to friends, I would recommend organizing it in order of character creation. As such, assuming a fairly general setup, it would be beneficial to start with describing races and how they affect the game mechanics, possibly with information on how they have affected history, but such notes should probably be brief. If you have classes or professions, those would probably come next, and so forth. This allows a person to jump into the game as quick as possible and it also establishes a fairly solid groundwork for further discussion of the world itself. Hope that helps.

~Joel

[Fred Campbell]

I was referring really to just the setting.  I've already written much of the game mechanics part, and it's not really directly affected by the setting.  Come to think of it, the game mechanic part could be viewed as a "universal" type system like Savage Worlds or Gurps in some respects -- it could be tailored to multiple settings.  Maybe what I need is a reference to a really well laid out RPG generally.  I do not have the latest D&D materials, so maybe they are laid out relatively well.  Is there another stellar example of good organization?

[Fred Campbell]

Can you tell us more about your game? Not all the nitty gritty setting details, but what your game is about at a high level and what kinds of things the characters do, and what kind of things the players do?

Regarding setting, I had envisioned an entire portion of my RPG being devoted to setting detail.  Partly this is because I think it would be fun to write.  It is also partly because I think it would substantially influence play to have a more fully realized world.  The shortest description of the setting I can think of is Napoleonic meets magic.  I've been influenced by the Sharpe's rifles books, my general regard for Napoleonic miniatures games, etc.  More recently (long after I started this thing) I've also been intrigued by the Jonathan Strange book, though my magic system bears no resemblance to the fairy-based magic in that novel.  So, I intend to do an 18th century style setting on the cusp of industrial revolution as informed by magic.  Does this detail help?

[Josh Roby]

Welcome to the Forge, Fred.

I am neck-deep in my own setting section, so I know where you're coming from.  Have you outlined it yet?  That is an essential first step.  If your response to that is, "but I don't know what order things go in yet!" do this: get a piece of paper (or a word processing document) and just list off everything that you think needs to go into the setting section, not worrying about ordering until you have all (or most) of the pieces.  Then, once you know what parts you need, you can shift them around into the order they need to appear in.  Then you can write whichever section appeals to you that day, knowing where it will fit in in the larger document when you have all the pieces.

That said, I'd caution you against long, detailed demographic descriptions of the corners of your world.  Unless demographics are really important to the play of the game, ditch 'em.  Here's the thing: you need to present the setting in terms of how the player characters will interact with it.  If the player characters don't care about the population of Kingdom X, don't include that.  If the player characters are going to be exploring ruined cities, include those. Since my game has a heavy emphasis on character exploration,  I write all my setting material either through the eyes of a character that could be a PC, or as materials that a PC might have come into contact with (flyers, books, newspapers).  At every step, every segment describes what could be the events of an actual game.

That approach serves my purposes -- but your purposes and goals may be different.  As Adam points out, we can't really give you good advice on how the setting "should" be presented unless we know what your game is about.  There is no correct or best way to lay out the setting -- emulating some other book will not help there.  You need to figure out what is most appropriate for your book and your game.  Does that make sense?

[dindenver]

Hi!
  I would say that it important that the style of description matches the emphasis and style of the rest of the game. If it is a game in a napoleonic genre, then you should list locations of roads, farms, forts, bridges, walled and wall-less cities, etc. These are things that Napoleon focused on and were the keys to his success.
  Also, being able to develop loyalties, chain of command and rely on specialists and generalists seemed very important in Napoleon's campaigns. So, the names and locations of leaders, specialists and potential allies should be featured.
  So perhaps each subsection of your setting section should be a geographical place, a country, county, province, etc. with descriptions of geography, roads, bridges, military resources, magic resources and potentially valuable resources, people and traders. And then follow up with alliegences and hisgtories?
  Just an idea, but you see how you can take the theme of your game and apply it to even encyclopedic information...

[Fred Campbell]

Thanks to all for the excellent advice.  I'm going to work on an outline and then start filling in the resulting sections as I go.  I think my difficulty in getting started on the setting is that the game really started as a cool idea for a magic system that wasn't really based on any particular setting.  So, once I worked out the magic system and attendant game mechanics, I've found myself asking, "now what?" with regard to doing the setting.