I’ve seen some good discussion about genre emulation recently, and it got me thinking about the challenges of running a unique setting in an rpg.
What differences do you see when running a unique setting instead of emulating an existing one, and are there any tips or tools that help you to do so?
One thing I struggle with is providing a visuals for the world. I am not a visual artist (my drawing skill is on par with a 10 year old’s), so I generally need to repurpose existing art at the table.
I think that genre and the expectations that go with it are what keep RPGs from turning into a class entitled “Introduction to [Specified Fantasy World] 101.”
The problem is that genre is also by its constitution constraining and repetitive, hence often stale.
We gamers go back and forth between genre and close emulation of content (media, etc.) held in common by the players on the one hand, and breaking genre constraints to make things fresh, on the other.
It’s the spectrum between highly bespoke settings like Tékumel and the most generic echo of “Elf + Dwarf + Halfling + Human in dungeon to fight evil and get rich.” Most gamers don’t hang out at either far end of that spectrum.
I think most players find middle ground by blending two common genres. Wizards + Dinosaurs. Ninjas + Cowboys. And so on. It’s a way to make the stale fresh.
To jaded old players like me, even those combinations are stale. It’s nobody’s fault.
Mostly the choice depends on how much work the players in a group are willing to do to get into a setting. Learn a conlang? Probably not. Look up some stuff about the 1890s? Probably at least a little.
Really interesting set of questions!
One challenge I see in running a unique setting is establishing expectations regarding how the world will function, so that everyone at the table feels they can interact with the world and have an understanding of what is likely to happen when they do.
An easy way to address that is to build the world collaboratively with your players. A natural result of the process is that everyone is more or less on the same page. There are lots of methods for this in a range of games. @yochaigal wrote a particularly good set of procedures: Build Your World
If you’re not into collaborative worldbuilding - I would just say being as clear as possible about the cores ‘rules of the world’ is the most important element. As @VanWinkle said, a lot of (all?) unique settings draw from established sources, so giving your players references to your own inspirations can be helpful.
Regarding visuals, I’m also not an artist, and I find combing public domain images to be a great way to gather images - see some great sources for this just posted over here: Design Resources
Combing Pinterest and building a mood board is also a good move 
A mood board for my sci-fi campaign
I’m a big fan of starting sketchy and building out as you go. My current D&D game started with pretty much just this:
It’s a primarily forested world with a bleak coast to the east and an uncrossable mountain range to the northwest. The major city of the mountains is a highly centralized and hierarchical monotheistic culture that is waging a crusade against the more decentralized polytheistic cultures of the forest. They want to control everything from the mountains to the coast. The PCs are explicitly free agents, not on either side just trying to make their own way in a war-torn world. And that’s it.
Similarly I’m planning on running a Sorcerer & Sword game soon that will pretty much have this as the starting point:
18th Century style city centers isolated by a dangerous and difficult to navigate forest that is deeply mist shrouded and dotted with medieval ruins and communities.
And like, that’s it. Once the group decides on a locale and builds characters I’ll build out details as needed.
There are pro’s and con’s for both I think.
Established/Existed Setting:
PRO:
CON:
Your own setting:
PRO:
CON:
I did collaborative world building for my Spelljammer game and I go over how I did that here: Collaborative Faction Building
I think it’s about picking specific influences for the game: space as imagined in the 70s plus master and commander. Then you can look for images that align with that.
Also: don’t try to do it all in the beginning. Discover stuff at the table and share the creative load with the players.
I start from the premise that you never invent anything, but you can reasonably remix and hybridize other people’s ideas.
the main problem (which is at the base of FKR) is to have a shared world
using a world already established (from a book, a movie, a comic book, etc.) is easier, because everyone draws from that source and if someone in the group is not familiar with that material is easy to address it
inventing your own genre/environment is creatively exhilarating (and exhausting) but it’s harder to convey the idea to others who aren’t in your head
the best chance (and the experiment I’d like to conduct sooner or later) is to create the shared world from scratch in session zero and then use it at the table with an FKR approach
I would use Microscope probably
“Unique setting” does not equal “unbeholden to genre.” Genre is a red herring.
The real meat of a setting is made up themes and images and conflicts. Even if, on the surface, the setting belongs to a genre you’ve seen a hundred times before, a solid foundation of themes and images and conflicts will make it a vital, living thing.
I’m going to post this again as a reply:
Let me rephrase the main theme of this thread then, I was aiming for discussion about settings which do not fit into a genre that is easily communicable and familiar to the players, and techniques to use when running them.
Of course, a unique setting is not a requirement for a good campaign, you can run a great game in, say, a bog-standard fantasy D&D world, but I feel like rpgs offer the ability to let creativity run freely and imagine types of fictional locales and societies which are not already well established.
I just disagree that a setting has to stand apart from established genres to be “unique.” I don’t know, maybe I’m nitpicking your word choice. I also don’t think avoiding established genres altogether is the antidote to the kind of “genre emulation” discussed in the tweets you linked to at the top of the thread.
But, fair enough, you want advice for communicating something unfamiliar to your players. If the previous suggestions regarding group worldbuilding don’t work for you, single-page handouts with everything the players need to know distilled into a few sentences are a good tool.
Oh, I didn’t take it as an attack. Sorry if I’ve come across as defensive, that was not my intention.
I often use the Tekumel method for nearly any setting - the characters are travelers from another part of the world and aren’t expected to know too much of the specific differences. I will assemble a little player’s booklet outlining what they do know and see, and then just show them by running the game.
I’ll start with the most similar actions and behaviors familiar to the players. I tend to only play adventure games, slice of life, and/or domain management stuff, so its pretty easy to have a “core loop” that is familiar for them. Sure they are migrating to a massive weird science fantasy city with a byzantine political structure, but 80% of the game will be dungeon crawling as the unique setting elements slowly seep in.
I try to leverage on art as much as possible and will create a mood board for the setting, all with repurposed art (unless playing in an existing setting). I will also cite movies, books, comics, basically anything I can leverage to be like “sorta like this.”
I think that Justin’s suggestion may be the best way to introduce a highly peculiar setting. (I say peculiar because “unique” seems to be misleading in this discussion so far.)
That is, players experience the visitation of a new realm along with their characters, who are all new arrivals in the setting hitherto foreign to them. If some of them die, they can take “local characters” after having achieved a sense of the place.
The “visitation theme,” as Jon Peterson calls it in Playing at the World, is extremely popular in fantasy, from Mark Twain’s novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court to the stories of John Carter on Mars to the kids in the Chronicles of Narnia to the kids in the old D&D cartoon series. When the main characters experience the wonder of the new place, it transports audiences, and it works for RPG players, too
Another way is to give short primers, like that booklet that Justin just referred to, as well. I remember when I saw Lynch’s Dune movie when it came out in 1984, they actually handed out glossaries for the audience to understand the factions and terms. I thought that was great, as a boy. It gave me the sense of entering a truly alien place.
I find myself just elaborating on what Justin said! I’ll come back with more ideas later.
Unique settings are literally everything I do lol.
I have definitely had mixed success, but over time I have tried to do the following (in no specific order):
I’m sure I can think of a million more points, but already these are starting to overlap and these were just a handful off the top of my head so I’ll leave it here for now.
A further thought about this interesting topic.
What counts as peculiar (again, let’s not say unique) is in the eyes of the beholders. (No, not that Beholder!)
If all your players know Flash Gordon really well, or if they are all medievalists on the job, the web of common references is thicker in that direction and you have less explaining to do. If you are playing with young kids who simply lack extensive experience in the varieties of fantasy available in the various globalized media of our time, any setting may be peculiar and full of wonder.
So, peculiarity of setting and the need to bring players up to speed on your world depends on their experiences. The more your setting includes features familiar to them from other sources, the less peculiar it is. Where everybody has setting expectations that overlap, genre exists.
By the same token, if you are trying to blow their minds with something weird, dig into sources that they have no connection with. The risk is that you alienate them, giving them a setting that they can’t relate to.
I think you made a very good point there, “unique” or “peculiar” is definitely in the eye of the beholder. I wonder if, say, Warhammer 40,000 rpg or Shadowrun players have their own discussions about how to bring in new players who are not familiar with the setting. I imagine that the challenge would be very similar, although the issue would be filtering through a huge mass of information rather than having too little.
They probably do have these discussions. Then again, for Shadowrun, it’s easy to say, “Imagine a near future cyberpunk world injected with D&D fantasy: Elves, Orks, Dwarves, etc.” Players can pick up the names of corporations etc. as they go.
Warhammer 40k must be different, but saying, “Imagine a cross between Dune and Star Wars, but much, much darker than either, and with battle-armored space marines fighting aliens in the name of a God Emperor,” they’d get it if they have a handle on those references.
The trick is conveying all the details. And that means that the less the referee needs them to understand details, the easier it will be for them. Broad brush strokes do the most. If you want a blue backdrop, broad brush strokes with blue paint get us there fast. If you want red, start with red. But the detail takes time to develop. What do you think of that idea? If it works, then perhaps a good intro for players to a peculiar world is to start with those tones and colors and moods and most easily-grasped concepts. And then hope that your world’s details are not off-putting deal-breakers for the players you’re trying to hook.
I think starting with broad brushstrokes is a good way of describing it. Early on introducing the big, easier to grasp and most fundamental aspects of the setting. And letting the detail slowly develop…through exploration, collaborative worldbuilding or a combination of the two.
A corollary to this question that I’m curious about:
If you run a unique setting how unique and peculiar to the setting do you make your player characters? Do you prefer to start with more well-known types of characters and throw them into a strange land? Or allow character generation to be part of the intro to the setting, and have some of those idiosyncrasies introduced there?
(Not really thinking there’s a single right answer, of course, but curious about people’s approaches)
You can embed setting into character creation.
A life path system can also serve as a tour the setting. Players not only see the choices they’ve made, but also the other choices available.
PbtA style playbooks can embed a ton of setting information, again not just from the choices made but via what’s on offer.
You can also have a session 0 / group character creation procedure that has the players tie their PCs to the setting, often while making meaningful contributions.
For example, in Stonetop, the session 0 procedure involves:
It’s an involved process, and it doesn’t make everyone experts, but it does typically get everyone involved and invested and largely working from a common starting part.
(Edit: formatting)