What Type of Details Do People Want in the Description/Book of a Campaign Setting?

[Requilac]

Thank you all for the great and detailed responses. I have taken notes on recurring themes among the posts or certain things I found of interest and will certainly keep them in mind. The depth and detail which you all have put into responding I am very grateful for. Now that the praise has been delivered, I will move onto answering questions or asking some of my own, alongside clarifying some details which has misled some.

The purpose of a campaign setting book is to help GMs to run campaigns. To do that, it needs to be written in a way that does not require a GM to read the whole thing, and it should be very easy and quick to look up details in the middle of a game. Otherwise, it's not really much help.

Very interesting point you bring up, and definetely a valid one. Here is my question though; how would you format the campaign setting book to be easily accessible like this? I suppose the easy way around that is always a table summarizing the details before every chapter, but often times I feel like that wouldn't give enough information that a DM would need on the fly. The thing is that putting more information in that chart would make it to difficult to read in the span of time a DM would need. Do you have any possible solutions in mind?

The others are good. There is only one information which is missing for me: how important are race/family/nation/alignement/ancestral gifts/ancestral maleditions/... ? I'm not gonna build the same character in universes where everything is blood-related (with all the "rightfull heir" stuff), or universe that are more meritocrat (or "chosen by the fate" stuff).

Wouldn't the importance of all those different factors change from society to society with the world though? While of course I would need to mention what societal values are most important in the immediate region of where the players will be trying, trying to make that standardized around the entire Material Plane sounds more than a little odd and oversimplified.

Personal opinion: I really like to read what peoples inside the universe think about how magic works.

If you aim at D&D, I usually feel like a having a precise explanation on how the magic works is counter-productive, because it will at some point contradict the details of the rules.

To be fair though, magic in D&D was never concretely consistent and was made much more for narrative and mechanical purposes than any sort of desire for logical principles. I am not really too concerned about that as handwaiving is inevitable even when using the Weave explanation. Contradictions with imaginary systems like magic are a natural part of gameplay which no one has really ever been able to solidify.

For me, the most important part is "why is he worshiped?". In a lot of settings, gods are shaped by their followers, so "who are the followers" is more important than "who is the god".

Physical appearance -> I usually don't care. Unless that's really important (cf Tiamat)
Domain -> I need this for my priest
Related creatures/races -> That's usualy redundant with the physical appearance.

I really like when gods have a symbol associated to them (rainbow, shield, money, ...). It helps really when describing, for example "you see on the wall a rainbow slowly appearing, revealing a sercret temple to X, god of luck".

The main reason why I thought physical appearance may be important is because I am using a rather weird pantheon of gods that mainly associate with humanoids through their dreams and wanted to make sure a DM knew how to properly describe how a god appears if they where to interact with a PC via dream. Of course, the gods would all take on a myriad of different forms to their followers, so each would need to be described if even very generally and vaguely.

Oh, and when I was referring to domain, I meant literal, physical domain. As in their little slice of the respective Plane of Existence which they ruled over. The actual realm in which they presided over.

Races/species are a great place to talk more about planes of existence, through their history/...

Too specific. Don't forget that DM that use your settup may change a lot of stuff, possibly even say "let's put my campaign one century later".
However, if you make an "introduction scenario" for your settup, you can put the calendar here.

I think you may have misinterpreted me. When I said calendar, I meant something like the Gregorian calendar, not like a schedule of events. The amount of moons/months in a year and the date at which the holidays occur at shouldn't change, even if the campaign is set a century later.

I hope it helps.

Indeed it does. Thank you for the detailed commentary, you certainly gave me many things to think about.

This sounds fine, though it's leaning heavily towards magic (with 1 paragraph about magic and 1 about religion). This si fine in DnD, ut if you want some focus on mundanes, maybe include some mention of important martial schools or orders.

That is certainly an interesting thought, especially since my campaign setting is relatively low magic, but don't you think describing martial schools and orders may be a little too specific for a general overview? I mean sure I should mention it at some point, but in the 1st summary of the campaign setting players see? It would be quite an odd detail to put in considering I don't even go in depth enough to mention the names of any gods.

It is an interesting addition, but I wouldn't include it in a document less than 20 pages long, as there's probably more important stuff that could be on the page in that case.

The document is probably going to be longer than 20 pages, though I doubt by any sort of longshot. I was thinking that a calendar may be important because some of the gods are heavily related to the stars and specific constellations, so I think having a way to identify which god's constellation is in the sky at what time could be an interesting plot hook. For example, I was thinking about saying something like "On the ides of the 7th moon the Great Tree Constellation, the sign of the god Cohdwiggoed, is seen directly above the observatory at Orcinople at 12:00. It is said that at that time certain blessed plants of primordial origin would spring to life and hunt down those that have wronged Cohwiggoed until the dawn of the next day."

Generally, I want to know what the big pieces are, and how those big pieces fit together.

I'm working on a setting gazeteer right now, and the first thing I did was consider the big pieces, and the pieces nearby that were going to influence things. I looked at the map and considered how geography was going to divide the groups I was putting in there. I looked at the Hacklopedia of Beasts (and, as it came out, the HOB2) for creatures that were going to live there, and what they might be like and how they might interact. When I put the big pieces on the board, and saw how they fit together (who acted on who and how), I saw the little places where other things might fit in. Hags, Sirens, Wyrms. Why this place doesn't have any orcs, and what fills their ecological niche. Places where friction was going to happen.

Interesting, so you actually start by creating a map and then forming around the countries and monsters based around that? If you don't start out with an idea of the political atmosphere, then how do you know what the map should look like? Do you simply find one from another source, or do you draw it yourself based on your whims? I am intrigued by this process as I have never seen it before, and maps where never my strong suit.

Themes, moods, and genres might be appropriate, too. But things like prevalence of magic, relations between countries...I wouldn't include that unless it's going to be relevant for their character creation.

Interesting you actually choose those two as examples of things not relevant to character creation. In my personal experience most players' first question on a campaign setting regard the prevalence of magic, which would effect whether they would play a caster or not, and up close to the second most asked questions are on the relations between countries, so that they know not to pick PC races that would conflict with each other if included in a party. May I ask why you find these details irrelevant, because that certainly seem to be a deviant, but not necessarily wrong, opinion on the matter?

I'm going to assume, for the rest of this, that you are discussing making a full SETTING, that you would like to get published, and want other people to DM in. That's what I will respond to first on each question.

I don't have any plans for publishing the campaign setting as in selling it persay, but I was going to post it over a couple of forums that anyone who wishes to could use it. In all honesty though, I have my doubts that anyone except for me will actually use it. Who knows though, maybe a player of mine might get inspired to DM their own campaign in it ? Regardless, the book would be much more written for my own benefit than anything else.

Do you have new races? Because that is going to drastically alter my answer. For now, I would say use the 3.5e Eberron Campaign Setting as a guide.

I have introduced exactly six new races to the campaign setting, and there is a possibility for more of them to be added, but I doubt it. Why do you ask?