Whether one is a fresh-faced, eager new DM, or a wizened old story-teller of a thousand campaigns, every person seeking to start running a roleplaying campaign ideally has a few things in common with their fellows; they want to tell a collaborative story, they want their players to be engaged, and, they want everyone to draw some sense of satisfaction or accomplishment from the sessions in which they play, and from the campaign as a whole. But before you can have a campaign, you need a setting. Settings can be as simple or as complex as you want them to be at the start of a campaign, though, avoiding a setting which railroads your players is harder to accomplish in the more intricately detailed settings.

At first glance, one might think that the simplest setting to use would be one already published by a major publisher like Wizards of the Coast or Paizo. While it is true that such settings can be played out of the box, I would hesitate to say that they are simple. After all, they are widely familiar to many players, who likely have their own conceptions about the way those settings are portrayed, and this can lead a new DM to feel, at times, constrained by these published settings, and even worse, the detail of these settings can be overwhelming at times. It is for this reason that I would suggest would be DMs borrow campaign settings and sourcebooks from their local library and peruse them to see how a setting is established, and what details are needed for a successful campaign. One could of course purchase these books, but at ~$50 each, even two or three setting sourcebooks for various game systems will quickly deplete the spending money and budget of most would-be DMs, especially if one’s monthly budget is quite tight.

For the absolute simplest campaign setting, I would suggest both beginner and experienced DMs try at least a one shot, if not a campaign in a village or town of their own imagining. This is the simplest way, because, as long as you take good notes throughout your sessions, you can build the village and the world around it as the campaign progresses, rather than getting bogged down in having to come up with hordes of NPCs, dozens of inns, taverns, and shops, and cultural tics and quirks of an entire kingdom or continent.

A good example of this method can be found in the first pen and paper campaign that I played with my brothers. Rather than work out an entire kingdom, my older brother, the usual DM of our little group, laid out a simple village, used an online name generator, and introduced us to the town of Silverleaf. This town, from which all our characters hailed, was detailed enough to keep our interest, and combined with the single major outside threat, of an encroaching hobgoblin army, made for an enjoyable and memorable campaign, with almost no detail given to any part of the setting further than some ten miles from the town walls.

Another use of this small initial setting is exemplified by a practice of taking a published setting and moving the time period to many centuries in the past, or forward into the as of yet unpublished future. The key in either case, for a simple setting, is to make sure the time period is far enough removed from the ‘modern day’ of canon that there is little in the way of details that would be shared between time periods. An ancient version of the Sword Coast, where Waterdeep and Neverwinter are but walled towns, with large tracts of wilderness that lies as-yet untamed and unsettled, or a far future Earth, many generations into the future after a cataclysm are both canvases that may be freely explored by your players and yourself, with little in the way of canon constraints and entrenched expectations (at least in terms of the setting itself).

If you choose to use such a simple setting to start a campaign, it pays to be aware of two major potential pitfalls. The first of these is that with so little established in the setting, you will be called upon by your players to improvise, and often. If you are uncomfortable improvising, then you can, in the days before each session, add a little bit of detail to the areas in which the players are likely to find themselves. As long as you keep good notes, this creative process will feel a little more natural, and will usually keep you from railroading the party to a particular destination, as there isn’t an exact route that you’ve set up that the party needs to follow from A to B to C to get through the campaign. If you don’t have such ‘tracks’ in your setting, then instead of having to go from the village to the forest, then to the dungeon, and from there to confront the mad necromancer in his tower, the party will more naturally explore their surroundings, and even if they take that exact pathway, it will feel more of their choice than a forced pathway.

The pitfall of improvising may require that, if the party explores in a completely different direction, or investigates someone you didn’t think they’d even notice, you as the DM make that avenue of exploration at least interesting, if not exactly what the party was looking to discover. That is to say, if there is a quiet man in the corner of the inn, and the PCs investigate him despite your intention that he only be window dressing, you will have to come up with some back story for him. While he could be someone quite important, like an ally or agent of the main antagonist, it may beggar belief as to why and how he ended up in the exact same tavern as the PCs. Such a story for that NPC would then force you as the DM to put more thought into how the PCs were being tracked without noticing it, and what this man’s purpose is in following them to this particular inn. I find that it is usually better to first come up with a personality trait and trade for the NPC, and then a reason for whatever their personality might express. For example, the quiet man in the tavern may simply be there on his anniversary, mourning his now dead wife, lost to the plague some weeks past. If the plague is a plot point, the NPC is still relevant to the campaign, but he is realistic and gives the players a new avenue for investigation rather than simply giving them plot advancement.

The second main pitfall to be aware of when creating a simple initial setting, is that your players have a lot of power in the creation of that setting. This is generally good, as long as you as a DM can gently guide them and rein in some of the more excessive impulses. It is however, intimidating, especially, I have found, to new DMs. The idea that your players control the story, even somewhat is a delicate balance between allowing there to be agency, but also keeping the setting from just becoming one big power fantasy (a tendency which even ‘good’ players will sometimes find themselves expressing, especially at higher levels). To control for this pitfall, I find it good to make sure that whatever you add to the setting makes sense for the setting, not just for the players’ level. If there is a part of the setting where normal peasants don’t go because it is dangerous, and in this setting, peasants are levied as infantry for their lord in times of war, the danger shouldn’t be a small band of goblins. The danger should instead be at least an encounter which would drive off if not kill a small group of adventurers, especially inexperienced ones. Other examples of controlling this ability of players to turn to murderhobo-ry would be to make sure that the intimidating bouncer at the tavern can take down several brawling commoners, or to ensure that a group of town guardsmen can stand up to a single marauding ogre without running to the adventurers and pleading for aid. Of course, one should note that it is a balancing act, and one does not want one’s NPCs to outshine the PCs, but rather they should have a baseline of competency which also makes them realistic people rather than cartoonish caricatures.

I will be adding more thoughts on developing campaign settings, including ways to add more detail to your campaigns, and some of my personal secrets for making interesting and attention grabbing campaigns in future posts. For now, I would love to hear any readers’ thoughts on this first style of creating a campaign setting. Would you try this with your group? Have you tried something like this? If so, how did it go?