[whswhs]

More generally, when I start a new campaign, I don't use a campaign planning sheet, and I don't have a standard list of things I look at. I try to identify the theme of the campaign ("what are all the characters' doings going to be about?") and to create a setting where that theme can be explored. What specific details I create will vary with the theme.

Looking only at original settings—

In Sovereignty, the key actors were supers who were so powerful that the world's governments treated them as one-person sovereign states without territory (other than their personal residences, which were classed as embassies), so I mostly wrote up sovereigns the PCs were likely to have to deal with.

In Salle d'Armes, I took historical Paris and made up people a group of fencing students were likely to meet—their master, a rival master and his students, women who held or attended salons, and so on. When one of them was called in for an interview with a lieutenant of police, I treated him as a Patron/Enemy figure and didn't worry about his character sheet.

In Manse, I actually had each of the players make up a noble lineage of sorcerers—style of magic, internal organization, marital rules, family tree, style of dress—and then wove them all together into a social fabric, including turning a bunch of the names they made up into NPCs, some of whom came vividly to life. Oh, and I drew a detailed map of the huge isolated castle they all inhabited.

In Gods and Monsters, I took the world of the 1920s and transmogrified it so that various characters from pulp fiction, film, and similar sources were real and functioned as proto-supers (my running joke was that "Adolf Hitler is real, but Leni Riefenstahl never existed").

Bill Stoddard