Campaign world: Where to start?

[joppeknol]

I didn't try this, but in order to make a map, you might want to play civilization (or something similar). Stop at a certain time and you have a randomized map complete with different nations with their histories. Rename the cities, replace the 'persians' with 'orcs' and 'russians' with elfs and you should have a fantasy world in no time. complete with 'unmapped' territory.

[gruundehn]

I am also creating a campaign, and this is how I'm working now (and it may change in the future). I started with a general history of the world and went to the primary gods and cultures. I built a section of the world and laid out the general features. I then decided what the aim of the campaign would be (this is the part that has changed most during creation). From that I decided what sort of characters the PCs would be - in this case common towns folk selected to perform a mission because they were unremarkable and would be hidden by being ordinary. Then I worked up the allowed Advantages, Disadvantages and skills (including spells). While doing all this I worked on the map and the true history of the world. Each time I did something I had to go back and reqork something else. Expect something like this to happen in any campaign you do, you will never get it right on the first thought.
If you want uncommon magic, I suggest making the world a Low Mana world. That -5 on all spells makes it extremely hard to gain a massive list of overly powerful spells, especially if you limit IQ and Magery for the starting characters. Any mage is going to put a lot of their time/effort (experience points) into improving a few spells in order to get them out of critical failures. Low Mana also limits Enchanting of magic items so they become rare as well.
Good maps are your greatest need. Good maps for you and inaccurate ones for the players. Make them draw the player maps, don't give them any maps unless they somehow find one. The only exception for this is the "common knowledge" (and innacurate) map you have hanging on the wall or whatever.

[dcarson]

Good point on (Dis)Advantages. Use the Trait Sorter http://www.sjgames.com/gameaids/gurps/sorter/ to decide what can exist in the world in terms of those.

[gruundehn]

BTW, I'm one who does not like to "wing it" very much so that is why I am getting so heavy into campaign creation. For your campaign you probably should start with the theme and ending of the campaign, go to a map and the local cultrue and expand from there.

[gruundehn]

I had another thought about limiting magic for your world. Have magic a new discovery and the only spells available are those without prerequsites. If a PC wants to learn a new spell, either they need to find a scroll or research it. And in this sort of situation I doubt that scrolls would be easy to find, more like you need to roll a 2 on 3D6 to find one. This slows down mages because they need to spend lots of time doing research (matching the historical idea of a mage) thereby reducing the chance for Experience Points, and it slows down the other characters also in the same way. You gain more control over the flow of the campaign and keep your players from becoming demi-gods after a year or so.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by gruundehn

I had another thought about limiting magic for your world. Have magic a new discovery and the only spells available are those without prerequsites. If a PC wants to learn a new spell, either they need to find a scroll or research it. And in this sort of situation I doubt that scrolls would be easy to find, more like you need to roll a 2 on 3D6 to find one. This slows down mages because they need to spend lots of time doing research (matching the historical idea of a mage) thereby reducing the chance for Experience Points, and it slows down the other characters also in the same way.

Specifically, it slows the other characters down due to the lack of magical healing. They'll either have to retreat to heal up every time they're wounded or be so cautious they never get wounded in the first place.

This will also limit magic so much that there's a fair chance that no PC will find it worth his trouble. The only Fire spell without prereqs is Ignite Fire as just one example.

You might see some Johnny One Spells built around Apportation or some (probably NPC) casters using Seek Earth but there's not a lot of zero prereq spells that are worth it on their own merits.

If the GM wants to control advancement then just don't give out as many XPs. If you go from an average of 3 cp/session to 1 cp /session, advancement will take 3x as long.

This has the possibility of taking you from a campaign that ends because the PCs have done everything to one that ends because the players feel like they've done nothing but finding the right balance is always a problem.

[Hans Rancke-Madsen]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

If the GM wants to control advancement then just don't give out as many XPs. If you go from an average of 3 cp/session to 1 cp /session, advancement will take 3x as long.

In my old fantasy campaign I controlled magical advancement by not allowing mages to learn spells unless they found a teacher willing to teach it to them. The most common spells were easy to find teachers for (still had to pay them), but the rare ones involved (figuratively) jumping through a lot of hoops. Mages could also research spells, but that required a laboratory (more expense) and took a lot longer, with no certainty of success (Well, near-certainty in the case of the simpler spells). Once researched, an unusual spell was kept secret unless it could be traded for some other rare spell.


Hans

[D10]

I was in the same boat around 1 year ago, I fleshed out my world, figured what would be where, and GMed a TL0-1 campaign where the layed the foundations of the worlds biggest empire.

Then now im GMing a campaign in the golden age of said empire while another empire rose to a similar power level on the other side of the inner sea continental scale conflict is only a question of time and the PCs are the elite of the elite (super prodigious mages, a prince, other 300+ pts characters)

After this campaign ends, if they succeed they will start a culture of freedom and magic throught the known world, until a huge comet hits the moon a few centuries from now and starts a chain of events that destroys many civilizations and weaken some forms of magic for a many decades.

And this "post apocaliptic" world is the end product im looking for, its supposed to be a normal TL3-4 world (with places far bellow) knowledge of magic but limited, and most of the awesome stuff has been lost with the old empires, and tons of dungeons and old lores to be explored.

I figured if I GMed several campaigns in several ages, I would have a world with much richer history in the end, and so far its working