Playing RPGs with a shared campaign setting like Golarion, Mystara, or Greyhawk can be an excellent way to have access to a fully defined, fleshed-out world for your adventures, but it carries a certain set of baggage that can frustrate a GM mid-campaign. Many a campaign death has resulted from the stagnation that comes with the use of shared campaign setting. The stagnation, on the part of both the player and the GM, ultimately derives from a lack of ownership over the world: no one feels like they are making anything, and that passive reception turns to boredom. The cure for this ailment is to find ways to create investment in a shared campaign setting. Here's how:

The Good

Using a shared campaign setting is excellent because so much of the work is done for you. Use the available materials! Provide a reference work or two to your players, and get everyone on board to use the stuff in character backgrounds and narratives. Reward players who put some effort in making their character a part of the existing lore, and try to make others want to do so too. It makes the game more fun for everyone, and it gives the participants something to read about in between sessions.

The published lore is full of inspirational content. Use it! As a GM, whether you are using a published module or writing your own, find things that excite you and drop it into your game. Flesh out whole areas that interest you, and if a hook grabs you, be sure to run with it! One of the best parts about being the GM is that you, ultimately, get to control where the campaign goes. Be sure it includes stuff you like.

And finally, an often overlooked feature of playing with shared campaign settings is the ability to perform big picture planning. With a shared campaign setting, you can plan things out, not just five sessions in advance, but fifty sessions ahead if you want. This is extremely useful if you are an epic-storyteller-type who wants to weave a campaign full of world-shattering events, and NPCs from all over the globe. Sure, you could make it all up whole-cloth, but why both when there are fully defined worlds out there to get you started?

The Bad

The single biggest complaint that I have heard about shared campaign settings is that experienced players have knowledge of all the world's secrets so everything has been spoiled. It is a legitimate complaint, but it can also be an opportunity to genuinely surprise people. Take a major element of the setting and change it. Make the setting your own. It will surprise experienced players and make everything feel fresh and new, or at the very least different, again.

Another serious complaint arises when a player or GM doesn't like something about a particular campaign setting but they agree to play with it anyway. This is a bit less of a problem today since Paizo's pathwork approach to Golarion has been compartmentalized much better, but it can occur even there. Can you really run a Golarion campaign without Cheliax, for example? But as with the previous complaint, the advice to cope with this is the same: make the setting your own. If you share your views on something, like guns or advanced technology, in the setting, it can become and opportunity for everyone involved to adapt the setting to something that excites everyone. Maybe you replace Alkenstar with a dragon-ruled nation, like in the old Council or Wyrms box set. (Check out Rite Publishing's In the Company of Dragons if you do!) Whatever you do, the most important thing is to get everyone invested in the setting, and disliking something can be as useful as liking something if everyone talks about it.

Solutions

So to sum up: creating investment in shared setting is an important element of using a large, pre-made world, and exploiting its advantages and disadvantages can help everyone enjoy a superior play experience. Since the work has been done for you, there is no shortage of inspirational content, and GMs have the potential to undertake far larger levels of big-picture planning than would be possible otherwise. But above all else, talk with your players and each other, communicate what matters to you, so that all together you can make the setting your own. Every group plays and discovers their own, discrete version of a shared setting that is unique and exciting. Don't be afraid to use a shared setting, even if you like to write original material, because anything that reduces the prep-time necessary to play is good for everyone.

Next time, I change focus and begin to talk about the Mirror Realms of the Tempest Campaign Setting — the official campaign setting of SyncRPG.com. In the first post, I talk about the difficulties of including traditional motifs while trying something that is fresh and new.

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