Noodling/Welcome to the World

Notes about setting information

Overview

Most RPGs don't provide enough actionable setting information, it seems like. If you're trying to design an adventure or some character's backstory or whatever, it's helpful to have some things established so you know what's reasonable and what's not. There's something here about specific vs general - like, lots of setting books detail dozens of people and places, but this is almost never especially useful; if I need to come up with an inn on the fly I can generally do so, and the ones in the books aren't noticeably higher quality than the spur-of-the-moment ones. But it is helpful to know that they prefer wine to beer in this country or that the houses are all built on stilts to avoid floods. Possibly the idea is to get a couple guideposts and let the GM generate stuff within that.

Separately, another important thing is getting the numbers right. If you're ad-libbing it's easy to end up in a situation where it's established that something is supposed to be far away, but also that a fast horse from town can get there in a few hours, or a reward is supposed to be modest but could actually support somebody for a year.

Ways to give details

There are a couple different ways you can do this kind of thing.

• Exhaustive list: this is sort of the standard guide-to-the-forgotten-realms thing, where it lists every town in the forgotten realms and what their bars are and what level fighter the innkeeper is.
• Non-exhaustive list of examples: this is pretty common for names and similar. "People from Montaigne have names like Jacques, Claude, or Ricard." There is some underlying principle here but it's implied and not stated (because the author doesn't want to say it or because they don't have a compact way of saying it or because they can't fully articulate it).
• List of rules: This isn't especially common but it does get used somewhat. "Vodacce food is complicated and tends to involve seafood, olives, and/or noodles." Rules can be thought of as exhaustive or non-exhaustive lists of ingredients and directions for combining them, which means this whole thing is recursive.

Kinds of detail

It seems like you can distinguish between stuff that is color and stuff that is "determiners". How much, how far, how long, etc are all determiners. Same-page kind of knowledge is color.

Stuff to look into

• Geography
  • Major population centers
  • Major landmarks
  • Biomes
  • Some idea how much of population is urban vs rural
• Society/Culture
  • Major social groups
    • Rough economic status, identifying marks, how they're viewed by society as a whole
  • Philosophical/religious beliefs
  • Kinds of things people eat/drink
  • Kinds of things people wear
  • Kinds of places people live
  • What this country thinks of other countries and vice-versa
• Economics
  • What the currency is (and its subdivisions), how it rates relative to other currencies
  • Whether this is a rich/poor society overall (relative to other countries)
  • Roughly how much a poor/middle/rich person gets for income in a year
  • Roughly what possessions a poor/middle/rich person has
  • Economic interdependencies with other countries
• Transportation
  • Major forms of transportation, how fast/far they can go, how reliable they are, how expensive they are
    • For people, for goods, and for communication
• Politics
  • What kind of government it is at various levels
  • How tight the government control is
  • How popular the current government is
• Current Events
  • Major recent historical events (last 30 years, say)
  • What are the major things on people's minds right now?
  • Do people generally believe stuff is getting better or worse?