This week, we change focus and begin talking about the Mirror Realms of the Tempest Campaign Setting, the official campaign setting of SyncRPG.com. You should ask “why do we need yet another campaign setting when there are so, many, good, ones, already? I have made no secret of the fact that I love several of the published settings out there (here, here, and here). Well, the answer is that we don't own the rights to any of those. We want to create an open community where you can share anything you create freely and easily, and to do that, we need to own the legal rights to all the content of the setting (in order to give much of them away). That's the reason why Tempest exists, but that doesn't define the content of the setting.

The Tempest Campaign Setting creates an opportunity for us to create a new setting to offer something a little different. Not Planescape or Spelljammer different; it should be both familiar enough to be immediately usable, but different enough to be interesting so it holds your attention and you will want to stick around. After two years of collaboration and work, I think we've struck the right balance, and we're now ready to begin sharing the setting with you as SyncRPG prepares for its public launch.

The question is, how do you make something that is both familiar and also interesting?

I believe the answer is found, at least for us and for anyone who wants to build a new campaign setting, in re-examining the basic structures of the genre. Don't re-invent the wheel. You don't need to invent six new base races to make your setting special or original. Instead, spend some time thinking about what makes the basic concepts work. Zoom in close, and try to identify why the concept is a part of the game. Once you have some idea of what makes it work, then investigate the themes of the concept that excite you. There is a reason dwarves have been in every edition of the game. Same with elves, and Vancian Magic. Look at its function and then look for something you really love about it. Once you find the element that interests you, amplify it like crazy until it becomes something new.

Do you think elves are mysterious, sexy, aloof creatures of the forest? Great! Make the elves of your setting highly mystical, magic-addicted people who are just as likely to sell you magic as steal it from you. The fact is that the game has an awful lot invested in having elves in the world, but there is no reason why you can't customize them in a way that makes them interesting and exciting to you once again. Very few things about your world should ever bore you.

In the Tempest Campaign Setting, one of the ways we did this was by actually creating a homeland for each of the playable races so that each of them came from a very specific place once upon a time. Instead of having a history of integrated races co-mingling for most of the setting's history, the racial civilizations have only been interacting heavily in the last few centuries. Other races are still foreign and rather exotic. This device has the added benefit of going a long way towards explaining why so many members of a single race have such similar cultures, and it also gave us space and territory to create a lot of racial subcultures. As a result, the standard races and racial cultures exist in the world in a major way, but they are supplemented and extended by a variety of cultural variants and minorities in their homeland that make the world a more interesting place in which to adventure and explore.

The trick to making a setting that is both old and new is to adapt the traditions of the game and to expand on them in ways that make them interesting to you. Try not to invent whole-cloth. Instead, expand and amplify the elements that excite you about the things that attracted you to the game in the first place.

Next time, Tempest Thursday continues as I talk about making a shared campaign setting that is both yours and ours.

Discuss 'On Making a Setting that is Both Old and New' on the SyncRPG forums