Setting Seeds: Keeping Settings Fast! Furious! Fun!

Art by Jack Holliday

Tabletop Roleplaying Games have been a long-standing hobby of mine since college, and something I enjoy quite thoroughly. I find more and more that I think about the nuances of this hobby and how to better improve certain types of gaming aids for the various kinds of Game Masters and Players that exist within our thriving community.

After posting on the Official Savage Worlds Facebook group, and talking a bit to Richard Woolcock about my setting seed concept
, I have decided to compile my thoughts on my current project onto this blog.

Personally, almost all of the games I run are homebrew, meaning I come up with the adventures and setting material myself for the most part. This isn't because I don't like the idea of using an awesome pre-made setting. It's primarily because I get overwhelmed by the amount of content in a setting. It often feels like I need to study the book as a full time job for a week or two. But, I'm an adult now (or so they tell me) and as such I just don't have the time to dive into a setting like that. I also tend to feel a bit confined when there is too much information, it makes me nervous to mess with the cannon of the setting.

Recently I was thinking about a concept I call a Setting Seed. It takes the idea of an adventure seed, which is a few simple sentences about a possible adventure to spark the Game Master's mind, and turn it up to 10 for a setting. The idea came about when I pondered back to my first campaign that I ran as a Game Master. I was using D&D 3.5 at the time (before I discovered the amazingness that is Savage Worlds) and I was mostly using a generic fantasy world. However, the Players handbook had a nice outline of the deities provided, with a paragraph or two on them as well. That was the only spark I needed to create a story that lasted from level 1 to 20 involving the players being the scions of a Lawful Good god, fighting against an evil god's dragon and his minions. We all had a lot of fun, and got a ton of use out of a few simple sentences.

Now that Savage Worlds is my RPG system of choice I plan on taking this concept and making a setting seed for Savage Worlds. My favorite thing about the system is its ease of use and its ability to get a game going with very little prep. Why can't I apply the same principals to the canon of a setting? To take such a basic idea and flesh it out a bit, I plan on covering the basics of a fantasy world in a setting I'm calling "Behemoth Legends" that uses classic epic fantasy of various mythologies as its base for flavor. In the Setting Seed will be religion, magic, regions, organizations, empires, cults, and the type of creatures found within the setting. Each object, person, etc. found within the game world will have a brief description outlining the basic idea followed by Essence. This concept covers the core ideas and flavor of the subject with a few simple describing words. For example, perhaps I wanted to add some sort of thieves society to the world I would simply describe the group a bit followed by something such as; Essence: Stealthy, Untrustworthy, Nefarious. Think of Essence as Trappings essentially.

My plan is to have plenty of ideas and options floating around in the setting with basic descriptions more than anything else. So instead of a few things outlined in extreme detail, it'll be a lot of things, with some detail for each. This way players and game masters can have fun with it all and create as they go.

If you have any suggestions for said concept, let me know!