What is your campaign world

[Bestial Warlust]

I ran a few sessions several months back to make sure my group would like TFT before committing to developing anything. Since then we're been back to our D&D campaign ( not 5th for this curious). I've been going through the process of figuring what setting I'm going to use ,I'm not sure if I'll use the "official" setting. I say that whispering as I don't want the SJGames police coming to my home and arresting me ;).

I'm curious to know what campaign settings are people here using. Are you using pre published settings? Those of your own design? A mix of different settings?

[larsdangly]

I have significant experience (a couple dozen sessions or more) with four TFT campaign settings:

Cidri: This is kind of a cop out answer because your corner of Cidri might be radically different from everyone else's. But that is also kind of the point, so embrace it!

Hyborian age: My 'conan' TFT campaign has been one of the funnest uses of the system.

Middle Earth: a surprisingly great match

Fantasy 16th century Europe. This one called for significant expansion of the Jobs rules and house rules re. magic to make it feel right, but in the end was very satisfying.

[amenditman]

I use the default setting, Cidri. But made it my own place, not using anything published.

[Skarg]

For TFT, I and the players I used to play with used our own developed locations on Cidri (tending to be mostly or all omitting certain things, e.g. Mermen, Prootwaddles, Centaurs...). My largest TFT campaign is a huge set of maps expanding in all directions from the original Dran map, which I keep using for ease, familiarity, nostalgia and attachment to a campaign I've used for so long.

I think the outlined defaults in ITL are a nice starting place, but what I most like to do is make my own maps of my own places and have each place there deviate in interesting and sometimes extreme ways from the ITL baseline, so that there ends up being an interesting game of exploring and travelling the world and finding different opportunities, challenges, allies and opponents etc in each place, and the game world takes on a life of its own.

The Dran map is a nice ready starting location... BUT it has disadvantages in that many players will have access to just read (or already have memorized) what's there. And that the GM needs to read someone else's details and get familiar with them. And then that if they continue playing that setting, they're stuck with Dran in it, and need to work that into whatever they create later. For an experienced world-builder, I'd recommend creating their own world with a similar level of mapped detail to start with, and then build on it as needed for ongoing adventures.

The main strategic GM decisions I know about involve the magic - I found out after including everything, and regretting it, was that I wanted to edit the lists of spells and enchantments and potions to omit or limit what magic is known and available in what forms and for what prices, where and to whom.

And establishing that there are many gates available for public use, tends to directly undermine the exploration and travel meta-game I mentioned above. We tended to have occasional gates available to specific places for limited times, for not-insignificant fees (and often observed by authorities).

[Shostak]

The game I'm running for my group is set in a setting I created for a GURPS group and have ported over to TFT. I've placed the TFT version in a far-off corner of Cidri because the other initial members of our gaming group all played in Cidri back in the day and seemed eager to head back there. In the area this campaign is set in, races like orcs, goblins, halflings, etc., are extremely rare. Permanent enchantments like magic items and gates are also seldom seen.

[ParadoxGames]

I play in Cidri, and mostly do arena combat situations, while developing some locations for a campaign, which I'll drop in between a few of the pre-made adventures, like Clockwork Tower.

[Steve Plambeck]

The long-time group I used to play with had our own world, one giant continent completely mapped out pretty early on. Initially developed by one GM, it had plenty of geographically separated regions where the other two GMs in the group could develop things in more detail without stepping on each others toes too much. But the mountain ranges, major rivers and lakes, woodlands and jungles and deserts, biggest islands, and countries were all established and named after the first few years play.

In the course of almost 20 years continuous play the histories, cultures, languages and religions of all the kingdoms and peoples got pretty well fleshed out, and that was one of the most satisfying things about building our own world. In the early years though most of our adventure scenarios were in a region of independent Greek-like city states very much based on our own Bronze Age. Those were easy to develop in fine detail, and made great home bases for PCs who could travel among those cities and meet NPCs that might have come from anywhere in the world.

And most of that was built just around the original Melee and Wizard rules well before ITL finally came along. We didn't swallow Advanced Wizard or ITL whole hog, but cherry picked what best fit the established world history. We especially disallowed PCs knowing magic item creation or just about any of the higher IQ spells that came out with Advanced Wizard. And we never admitted Prootwaddles to our universe!

We had long, long running story arcs, and consistency was a super big deal with all of us. That was always the filter the later, advanced rules had to get through before we'd implement them. Most of the advanced combat rules were similar enough to our house rules that they never posed a problem, although we also remained a gunpowder-free world. We had a fair number of magical items, but each was unique and each was a priceless antique that had survived from an earlier "classical age". Only GMs could introduce a magic item as part of a story, and none were simply for sale in stores anywhere. We kept things balanced the way we liked.

[larsdangly]

My Cidri campaign has a layout a little like Glorantha's 'Pavis' and 'Big Rubble' region: A city (quite large, with an extensive network of sewers) and a nearby region of cyclopean ruins (stretching tens of miles and going multiple levels deep), a surrounding region of river valley, hills, desert trade routes, etc., and some tele-connections to more distant and rarely visited islands and so forth.

The core concept is that the whole thing sits on the flanks of a supervolcano, which has erupted ever couple of thousand years, entombing the current city in ash, only to have another city re-emerge in the area within a few hundred years. The base map and some of the local areas are mapped from scratch, and pretty much all of the NPC's and sand-boxy story lines are freshly made up. But I also drop commercial products in willy-nilly, including Dyson Logos's stuff, all the old D+D pastel modules, Under Mountain, a bunch of good OSR megadungeons, and of course the published TFT adventures (like, Tollenkar's Lair is a half day travel from the main city gates, and Thorz's palace is on a big island a week's sail away).

I run the area as pure sandbox: the players start in or near the main city (depending on their character concept), and then they go where they want to go and do what they want to do until they over reach and get murdered by some gooey monster.

[TippetsTX]

I love these threads when they pop up... always interesting to see how others choose to build their campaign worlds whether using Cidri (and the default assumptions built into TFT's rules) or not.

The idea of Cidri has always fascinated me. It was so different from the Middle Earth clones that I initially grew up playing in, not that those are bad, but it was probably the first setting to challenge my presumptions about what a fantasy world could be (TBH, I hadn't read alot of non-standard fantasy when I was originally introduced to TFT).

It should be no surprise, then, that I have always used Cidri as my TFT playground. Of course, as I evolved as a GM, so did my version of Cidri. I spent alot of time thinking about the unanswered 'why' questions in Steve's descriptions of Cidri... why did the Mnoren build Cidri? Why did they disappear? Why are there so many familiar elements from Earth's history and mythology? Why does magic work there? Etc. Over time I have also integrated ideas from other settings that I like which is what led to the ambitious idea for my current campaign... bringing Monte Cook's Ptolus setting to Cidri.

http://forums.sjgames.com/showthread.php?t=160488

[larsdangly]

I feel like the outline of Cidri provided in the core book is an invitation to create a campaign setting that is sort of like a hybrid of Diskworld and the side of Greyhawk seen in Expedition to the Barrier Peaks.