Things to Avoid In Set Construction

[Nymdok]

Avoid Reinventing the wheel - If you want elves, throw em in there and call em elves.

Avoid Bland Geography in your Maps -When drawing your maps, feel free to do interesting stuff with coastlines, river flows, fjords and whatnot. If it seems 'odd' then assign it a quick explanation. Theres no telling when you might need a weird place later like a crater impact etc.

Avoid the One Climate Type World - Try to get all the Major geographic types on the World Map. Desert, Jungle, Forrest, Swamps, Tundra, Plains, Mountains. The rest of it will largely go unnoticed, but you WILL have different environments to set adventures in and thats what matters.

Avoid Trying to Come Up with 'neato Names' - Need quick names for people? Anagrams of existing names work pretty quickly and easily. If I need a leader of a Thieves Guild right now, Id use Ifkin Slows. Sounds exotic enough and Ive been watching Daredevil.

Avoid Trying to Build Your Own Language- You aint Tolkien. Need a quick language? Use one. One of the existing ones. Use google translate to pull out words in different languages. Note that this probably works best in the US where people only speak 1 language. Ive succssefully leveraged several and speak almost none of them.

Avoid Making it Harder than It Needs to Be - If you're game is set in the modern world, for the love of pete, use google maps! If you cant build a bad guys lair in a few minutes using google maps and either Gimp/Paint then you aint trying.

Avoid the Minutiae Till It Matters - The bigger your world, the broader your brush UNTIL the players get there. Its perfectly ok to jot down 'Here live the Northern Plain Savages who trade in furs', but by the time the players get there, you're gonna want to fill that in a little.

Avoid the Lure of Worldbuilding - Under the heading of Broad strokes, DONT over develop your setting! Leave anything unexplored mostly undeveloped so that you can quickly reshape it to fit the needs of the current adventure. You can never tell which way the players are gonna go, or when they are gonna need enemies and/or allies so having a little wiggle room in there can be handy.

Avoid Mundane Beastiaries of Blood - Most 'wildlife' is insects and herbivores. Predators arent as common as you think and normally fit the 'feeder' species.(Note that australia is an exception where there are aparently 3 Koalas, 42 kangaroos and everthing else is either spider, shark, or snake).

Nymdok

ETA : Edited to more closely fit the OPs request.

[Dalillama]

Originally Posted by Nymdok

Avoid Mundane Beastiaries of Blood - Most 'wildlife' is insects and herbivores. Predators arent as common as you think and normally fit the 'feeder' species.(Note that australia is an exception where there are aparently 3 Koalas, 42 kangaroos and everthing else is either spider, shark, or snake).

That said, a lot of the animals that will have a go at killing people who get to close are herbivores (or principally such) anyway; boars, cape buffalo, aurochs, camels, rhinos, hippos, etc.

[RyanW]

Originally Posted by Dalillama

That said, a lot of the animals that will have a go at killing people who get to close are herbivores (or principally such) anyway; boars, cape buffalo, aurochs, camels, rhinos, hippos, etc.

A lot of that goes to another rule: Any animal that attacks an alert human probably thinks it's a threat, not a snack.

Some related rules:

T-Rex should have been sleeping off a hearty meal of Gallimimus, not sneaking in to get a cameo in the finale.
Predators usually do not have a cast sheet, and so won't know that the random group of humans they encountered once are the heroes and stalk them for two hours.
If a backwards hurricane causes the ice age, wolves will have plenty of deer carcasses back home, and won't need to make a beeline for Manhattan.

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by Dalillama

That said, a lot of the animals that will have a go at killing people who get to close are herbivores (or principally such) anyway; boars, cape buffalo, aurochs, camels, rhinos, hippos, etc.

Yes it never ceases to annoy me when television and movies treat "herbivore" as "harmless" when the most dangerous large land animals are all herbivores.

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by tbrock1031

Similarly, the letters "e" and "i" don't need to be replaced with "y" in every name, nor "s" with "z" or "u" with "w".

Unless the y is used in the place's language to denote a different sound. E.g. close central unrounded vowel [ɨ] (as it actually happens in Polish names) as opposed to close front unrounded vowel [i].

Originally Posted by tbrock1031

Also, vowels don't need to be doubled up ("Aayla" instead of "Ayla" for a name),

. . . but it's perfectly sensible for them to double up anyway, such as Aaron, Saara, Hawaii/Hawaiʻi etc.

Originally Posted by tbrock1031

and apostrophes should be placed to make sense ("Allira'el" might be acceptable, showing a break in sound between the 'a' and the 'e', but "J'ak'e" should just be shot.)

I would like to expand on that one:
'Make sense' will vary drastically depending on what language the name comes from. Mar'ïnka/Mar'yinka and Slov'yansk are perfectly sensible Ukrainian place names - in fact, you must place an apostrophe after a consonant before a ï/yi, may not ever place it before an i (except in a loanword from a language where you may), and may or may not need to place it before (y+vowel) letters depending on what sound you need to produce. That's an example of an apostrophe used as a hard sign. But let's imagine a language that uses an apostrophe as a soft sign, and defaults to hard consonants; in that case, J'ak'e and Jake will have totally different reading, and the apostrophe will make sense in a given naming context.

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

Unless the y is used in the place's language to denote a different sound. E.g. close central unrounded vowel [ɨ] (as it actually happens in Polish names) as opposed to close front unrounded vowel [i].

. . . but it's perfectly sensible for them to double up anyway, such as Aaron, Saara, Hawaii/Hawaiʻi etc.

I would like to expand on that one:
'Make sense' will vary drastically depending on what language the name comes from. Mar'ïnka/Mar'yinka and Slov'yansk are perfectly sensible Ukrainian place names - in fact, you must place an apostrophe after a consonant before a ï/yi, may not ever place it before an i (except in a loanword from a language where you may), and may or may not need to place it before (y+vowel) letters depending on what sound you need to produce. That's an example of an apostrophe used as a hard sign. But let's imagine a language that uses an apostrophe as a soft sign, and defaults to hard consonants; in that case, J'ak'e and Jake will have totally different reading, and the apostrophe will make sense in a given naming context.

Avoid using apostrophes unless everyone is clear on what difference that makes to pronunciation (and it does make a difference).

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by RyanW

A scientist seeing this (assuming he had a compass indicating east and west were "backwards") is as likely to come to the conclusion the magnetic field is reversed relative to Earth as the planet is spinning the other way. Without a magnetic compass, it would be meaningless.

Not quite. There's direction of rotation relative to direction of revolution, and the difference between the same and opposite directions there isn't one you can interpret the other way by flipping an arbitrary sign.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

Don't draw rivers on your map that cross mountain ranges.

This is not an absolute rule; the river might make a hole in the mountain range (to give an easily recognized example, the SF bay area is a big hole blown in the coastal ranges by the Sacramento river).

[Polydamas]

Doubled vowels can also indicate a long as contrasted with a short sound.

Confusion between /u/ and /w/ or /i/ and /y/ is common across languages because /w/ and /y/ are somewhere between consonants and vowels (eg. English why or by or informal spellings like hy). Martin is imitating 15th century English and Scottish spelling.

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

Avoid using apostrophes unless everyone is clear on what difference that makes to pronunciation (and it does make a difference).

L. Sprague de Camp used to begin his novels with a few paragraphs on pronunciation.

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by Anthony

This is not an absolute rule; the river might make a hole in the mountain range (to give an easily recognized example, the SF bay area is a big hole blown in the coastal ranges by the Sacramento river).

it was actually a gigantic low area created by some kind of faultline subduction to create a break between the coastal mountain ranges.