What makes a setting exciting instead of bland

[Yora]

I love to do a lot of worldbuilding but every so often I look back at what I just came up with and can't help but think that it's okay and well done, but not really that interesting. There are plenty of settings that look exciting and make you want to play in them (and of course many more that aren't), but I never can really tell what makes them seem exciting.

What things have you seen in settings that make them look like exciting places to be in and not just generic places that could easily be exchanged with others?

[denthor]

Pure imagination

On the part of your players

[DMThac0]

Almost every good setting has one thing in common; about 6 simple descriptions that make it unique.

Let's looks at the idea of being on an island for the setting. It's been done, it's been done a lot, and it's been done to varying degrees of success.

Island of Dr. Mad Scientist:
1) Dead volcano on the island
2) Tropical forest surrounds the island
3) No natural creatures exist on the island
4) Giant compound carved into the side of the volcano
5) Strange Abominations guard and roam the island
6) Always feels like somethings watching you

Island of Ill Omen:
1) Perpetual grey storm clouds
2) Dead/dying trees all over the island
3) Strange ziggaraut half buried deep into the island
4) The ground seems to sap strength from you
5) The faint smell of rot is everywhere
6) Parts of destroyed vehicles and buildings from random places scattered about

Island of Wonders:
1) Bright and vibrant colors everywhere
2) Perpetual light, but not uncomfortable
3) Strange and beautiful creatures everywhere
4) Unbelievable structures made of and from the local flora
5) Everything worn is made of silver and gold on silk
6) There never seems a need to eat or sleep

----

The setting is a way to set up the 5 senses for the players and then a bit about what to expect from the world around them. It's a framework and reference for them to gauge how to react and respond to the environment and situations presented. Imagine Trying to run Curse of Strahd which is dark, creepy, and dangerous, then stick that story into a setting like the Feywyld. It would be quite difficult for your players to buy in to it seeing as the Feywyld is a beautiful and enchanting place. This will also help to make the world consistent, which is also key to a good setting, and allow players to suspend themselves in the fantasy world you're giving them.

Hope this gives you something to work with!

[Pleh]

I feel like this is a question for Max Killjoy, who has been very vocal about this topic in the past. In particular, interesting setting are first and foremost coherent, which is to say they make at least an internal logical sense, given the suspension of doubt due for fantasy.

For sufficiently industrious players looking for a sandbox, this alone may be sufficient.

The next important thing is that the setting be manageably elaborate. If you can hold the whole map accuratelt in your head, it's boring. If a local map of your immediate surroundings is convoluted and illegible, it's frustrating. This says there should be some intrigue and chance for failure when PCs attempt to interact with and manipulate elements of the setting, but they should be able to navigate it successfully even if they experience setbacks or failures. Elaborate to the point that the can strategize and predict consequences to their actions, but not perfectly always so.

So far as setting, this usually means NPCs and dungeons where there is ample information on the surface, usually more to find just under the surface, and intermittantly threats to their objectives hidden in the wealth of information, flagged by small clues the observant or paranoid player could discover.

Finally, if you've managed to make your setting both coherent and sufficiently elaborate, the last element is personal engagement. Why do the players or their characters care about the world they are interacting with? It can be relationships with NPCs (protecting allies and competing with antagonists or rivals), survival of the harsh elements, wealth seeking in a land full of opportunity, uncovering a great mystery, etc. It's about connecting the heroes to their role in the setting and what that means to them.

[Cozzer]

I would say interesting conflicts are the skeleton upon which everything else needs to be hanged on, since they're what players will actually interact with and influence.

I'm not just talking about the main good-guys-vs-bad-guys scenario, an interesting setting is full of smaller conflicts that the main characters can influence (or choose not to influence) on a regular basis. Different guilds with different approaches to adventuring, different noble families, different gods if it's very high fantasy, various nations with various ways of ruling, even just a feud between the blacksmith and the innkeeper in the starting village...

Of course, the question then becomes "what makes a conflict exciting instead of bland?".

[gkathellar]

I would suggest there are three major elements: novelty, genre interest, and aesthetic sensibility. These all bleed into each other, but it's worth addressing each separately.

Novelty comprises the appearance of originality, be it material, tonal, or structural. Material originality involves the presentation of ideas that seem unfamiliar, either because they are genuinely new or because they are reinvigorated concepts that have fallen out of use. Nobilis has a setting that runs on the logic of emotion and intuition, defined by high weirdness and meant to invoke a degree of genuine wonder in the player. Tonal originality relates to how ideas are presented. Many elements of WH40k are almost painfully derivative, but a lot of its appeal lies in a tone that alternates madcap and satirical (soccer hooligan orcs) with deeply and sincerely influenced by Medieval and Romantic styles. Structural originality involves the arrangement of familiar ideas into interesting new configurations. I'd argue that Eberron doesn't really do any one thing in particular that's new, but nobody had ever really taken D&D's unacknowledged tropes and played them to the hilt before, and that's arguably what Eberron does - with a dash of early 20th-century pulp for good measure.

Genre interest is pretty much what it sounds like, but it's worth taking a moment to remember just how much this matters to people. Within certain limits, people are attracted to things that are familiar, especially in TTRPGs, where part of the appeal is, "just like this thing you like - but now you tell the story!" Dark Sun drew on an existing subgenre of "fantasy on a dying world," that had been around for quite a while and gave people the opportunity to play it. A lot of non-D&D games are explicitly genre games: WoD, Legends of the Wulin, Eclipse Phase, and more have marketing pitches that begin and end with, "come play a game in this genre you like and/or want to like." Genre mashups are at least theoretically compelling because they take two things you like and make one thing that you'll hopefully like even more. Shadowrun is made of this: people like elves, and people like cyberpunk, so obviously people will like cyberpunk with elves, right? Ravenloft is pretty much D&D + Gothic horror, but hey, that's something people wanted.

What both of the aforementioned point to is a setting's aesthetic. At the surface level, this comprises how a setting looks, in terms of descriptive language but especially in terms of illustration, which admittedly puts us non-professionals at a bit of a disadvantage. In either case, it's ... I hate to use this term, but a lot of it is brand recognition. This can be achieved through the use of a particular artist or particular style of writing, and in either case Planescape approaches the ur-example: with its ubiquitous neo-Victorian street slang and Diterlizzi's willowy, linework-and-sepia illustrations, a Planescape book is immediately recognizable and immediately interesting. Eberron and Exalted have less consistent art direction, but draw the reader in with the steady use of comic book formats and visual conventions.

There's also a deeper aesthetic kind of aesthetic appeal, one which takes place at the level of content, and I would say is more immersive and more thematic. It emerges when a work knows what it is about, emotionally speaking, and knows how to build on that subtext and how not to detract from it. This, I think, is where excitement is maintained, rather than generated. Spelljammer, for instance, is silly and intentionally throws D&D tropes on their heads even at a glance - but once you dig into the material, you realize that the it's much sillier than you imagined, and that pervasive silliness gives it a lighthearted, freewheeling atmosphere that emerges out of no particular element.

I've actually browsed some of your setting-work on these boards, and I quite liked what I saw, but I think it's sometimes a little dry. You take an intelligible, quasi-sociological approach to your subject matter, working out how you want things to fit together and look like. Personally, I like that a lot, but it's not necessarily what people engage with. Whether that's a problem is up to you, but that's my 2cp.

[LibraryOgre]

I think it's somewhat easy to feel that way about your own work, since you've gotten down into it and know it thoroughly, but I see two big things... Engagement and Hooky-ness.

Engagement is somewhat internal to the player... do your players buy into the setting? Are they willing to engage with it? This is part of what makes more generic settings difficult sells... why should I play this "Forgotten Realms" thing when I already have Greyhawk and it works just fine? They've engaged with Greyhawk, so they're more excited about it. They can talk about Frost and Wolf Barbarians and the Valley of the Mage and the Theocracy of the Pale and all of the potential these facets have. They've thought about the game they'd like to play in where they're all agents of the Scarlett Brotherhood and aren't the Zhentarim just a cheap rip-off of that?

A setting with significant differences can help with engagement, because they're not seeing it as just a retread of the before. Playing in Dark Sun is different than Greyhawk is different than Birthright is different from Spelljammer, and in ways more profound than Forgotten Realms is different from Greyhawk and either are different than Dragonlance.

In short, if the players engage with the setting, it seems exciting. If they don't, it's less exciting.

But there's also hooky-ness, beneath the general level of engagement... what hooks are there? What is there to DO? What's going on that has places for player characters to make a difference, or at least make some money? Dragonlance, IMO, largely suffered in hookyness, because the original setting cleaved so closely to Legends and Chronicles... too much was wrapped up in those books, and not enough was laid bare elsewhere to make up for it. Dark Sun had a different hookyness problem, in that it didn't feel like you could do much of anything important... most of the gears in the game were so overpowered that you couldn't hope to face them until you were similarly overpowered (which is why I actually appreciate the first two books of the Prism Pentad... the uncertainty created by a free Tyr destabilized the region, and made it feel a lot more open... before the next three books destroyed that uncertainty by creating a new equilibrium).

When I'm writing for an RPG setting, I think the key is something that novel writers should avoid... unresolved conflict. Setting up horrible dangers that haven't QUITE happened yet, so they will when the GM wants them to. What happens when that hag gets a wyrm? Or when the Spiderslayer finally defeats the Queen of the Webs? What are some inherently unstable situations that persist until some enterprising player characters come and mess everything up? That's hookyness. That's something you can write a backstory on, and have that backstory come up again.

[Martin Greywolf]

Well, we're not discussing worldbuilding basics here, so I'll assume that all the 'how do you feed an army of one million' details are taken care of. What a setting needs to shine is... THE THING. And THE THING can be anything you want it to be. For example.

Discworld by Terry Pratchett as a whole has just one core idea as its THING, that being that belief shapes reality, and therefore, plot contrievances happen and one in a million chance does actually work out nine times out of ten. The rest of the setting is then essentially an exploration of these ideas - people believe in a certain way the day/night cycle works, so light has to have a comparatively tiny speed, so it is explained via the magic field etc.

This then leads to a lot of characters having some sort of relationdhip with it. Rincewind wants the plot to go away and leave him alone, Granny Weatherwax hates when stories interfere and often twists them to her purposes (which are, fortunately for the Disc at large, benevolent... mostly), Cohen relishes in the whole barbarian hero thing (well, at first, and he never quite stops, just admits to drawbacks) and so on.

Of course, every book then has its own THING, but the overriding Discworld THING is still always there. Some books are more directly related to the belief thing (Hogfather, Small Gods, Wyrd Sisters), others only relate to it tangentially (Guards, Guards; Men at Arms) but it is always there.

Another good study of this in practice is One Piece - the setting is made of islands, and every one of them has its own THING, which is IMO a large reason for why OP has such a staying power. You have a shipyard island, slavery island, horror island, cake island etc etc, and every one of these settings makes what that island is matter.

So, a quick fix to a somewhat meh setting is to pick a weird idea and apply it and think it through to its limits. Making a Witcher-esque world of low magic? Okay, but what if horses had acid spit (wait, is that how camels were created)? What is the reason Genghis Khan attacked west was that he was running away from a dragon? What if owning a sword (and ONLY a sword) automatically made you at least a decent swordsman?

[Darth Ultron]

The only word that comes close to the concept in my mind is Love.

What makes a setting exciting is when you have a creator author who loves the setting and loves what they do. This love goes into every bit of the setting, and it shows.

After all, you can tell right away when a setting was made by someone who did not care about it at all, some one who was bored, someone who is trying to hard to be diff rent, and maybe most of all someone who was just writing stuff for a job and pay.

A perfect example is Ed Greenwood, there is no denying that he loves the Forgotten Realms. You can say the same with the '80's Dragonlance team. And even beyond RPGs, think of Stan Lee, George Lucas, or Gene Ronderberry. And companies like Marvel(movies only) and Disney. They all made characters and settings that go far, far, far beyond them just being ''a fictional thing".

And it really shows through in the Current Times. Like there is a D&D Setting that Shall Not Be Named, that on like page three of the book they have to tell you how cool the setting is because it is so diverse and has room for everything in D&D. That is not love right there.....

[Rhedyn]

If a setting is telling me it is exciting, it isn't.

Novelty, good writing, and presentation (includes art) are why I like settings. Eclipse Phase is very novel, some of the writing is good and the art is fine. It's where the lore (aka writing) becomes inconsistent that pulls me out of that setting and just makes it not make any sense. Meanwhile it's sister Nova Praxis does a much better job for me.

In books, the Wheel of Time isn't terribly novel NOW but it has enough things different from newer work to maintain some novelty but what really carries the books and the reader through them is the writing. I feel the same way about the Expanse and other books.

Meanwhile I can't stand well writing settings or books about things I don't find interesting. It doesn't matter how "good" it is, your medieval historic OSR book with no magic is of no interest to me.

To ramble more, the web novel of "I'm a spider, So what?" is about a Japanese girl who reincarnates as a spider monster in a fantasy world and has to survive in the mega-dungeon labyrinth she is born into. Very Novel, solid story, the translation is weak though. It can make reading the chapters a chore merely because the English is bad even though the other elements of the writing are good and interesting.

Something to be careful about is the danger of trying to be too clear and thorough. For example, you could describe every brick of a castle, but that would be boring so you abstract it to keep the narrative flowing and interesting. Setting books are telling a story. They are not a history textbook, you have no ethical obligation to portray your fictional history as accurate as possible. The goal is to keep it interesting.The Bible gets away with chapters and books about lineage because it is religious text your setting shouldn't do that even if you take other things from the bible like Dragons, Sea Monsters, the Behemoth, Outergod angels, demons, sorcerers, magic items, and miracles.

[Knaight]

This is a rough heuristic, but besides the things that are just competence (decent writing, thinking through a setting, so on and so forth) I find the general hooks to be settings being distinct in a way that gels with the personal aesthetic preferences of the readers. This characteristic of being distinct needs to hold through different zoom levels, where the setting is distinct at both an extremely high level summary and at a level that will show in use in the context of small parts of individual sessions.

This leads to a simple rule of thumb. You should be able to describe a setting in a one sentence elevator pitch without using any proper nouns or setting jargon - and people who know that setting should be able to identify it from that description.

[Mastikator]

Hooks that lead somewhere. Something to grab onto that will take you places. Details that you can pick up and look at and touch and taste. And the hardest part: NPCs that feel like real people.

[Thinker]

For me, speaking from an RPG standpoint, there are a few things. First is competing interests that might lead to conflict. It doesn't matter too much what the nature of the conflicts are, but I'd like them to be easily identifiable when reading about the setting - is there industry versus nature? Are these two religions at odds? Do these guilds hate each other? Give me something. Open wars are OK, but I really want to see a world that is a powder-keg. You can get fun, intrigue-fueled adventures, skirmishes, extractions, escort missions, and all sorts of things to do. I don't want them spelled out. I want my imagination to run wild about them. Next, I want mystery. I want to look at a map and say, "What's over there?" I don't want the answers spelled out for me, but I might want to go on an adventure to find out (as either the GM or the player). I want the information about factions and powerful NPCs to be incomplete and I want it to be open to interpretation. Sure, Doctor Von Stickenstien is collecting body parts, but I don't want to necessarily know why. Lastly, I want things to make logical sense. You don't have to show me the logic, but I want to be able to have a sense that things could work together somehow.

[Yora]

Hooks that lead somewhere. Something to grab onto that will take you places. Details that you can pick up and look at and touch and taste.

This seems like the most condensed version of the most essential elements. A great setting is not about the things you expect to see. A great setting is about the things you expect to do. After all, it's a game. Not a book or a movie. It's not about hearing about and seeing amazing places and creatures, it's about doing things. When you see something in fiction and would love to play a game in that world, it's really because you want to do the things you see being done. What the setting does is facilitating situations and events that require a certain setup that is unique, or at least specific to this particular world.

Maybe a better approach to designing campaign settings is not to say "I want this, and this, and this thing to be in this world", but to say "I want to make these, and these, and these things to be possible in this world",

[Quertus]

What an interesting question.

So, personally, I'm generally not interested in the setting per se, but in the adventure. So, for me, the setting needs to be conducive to the adventure.

For the setting to be conducive to the adventure, what does the setting need? Well, it needs to have sufficient breadth to cover the players' interests over time. It needs to have sufficient depth and internal consistency to be worth looking at, investing in. It needs to be sufficiently familiar to give the players a firm starting point, yet sufficiently novel to allow for new material rather than just be a rehash of previous experiences. It needs to have sufficient elements - conflicts, NPCs, Explorables, whatever - and sufficient diversity of elements to engage the players. And these elements need to be mutable, engagable.

So, to give an example or two...

If a low-level D&D party wanders and finds a hidden village, with a half a dozen interesting pre-made NPCs (and the GM ready to flesh out more as needed), and a local "off-limits" mysterious area of floating rocks (guarded by something unknown and barely CR appropriate)?

Well, that's a rather limited selection interesting things to engage (talk to NPCs, investigate why / how / when village became hidden and unknown, and investigate the forbidden floating rocks). If the party doesn't care about any of those, there response may well be, "we add the town to our map, resupply, and move on".

The village having made the floating stones off limits means that they haven't Explored the possibilities yet - that's something that the players get to do. OTOH, you could have the village have already explored the phenomenon, already created a new school of magic and a unique martial art, already integrate floating rock into their art, their industry, their culture. This has the advantage of giving the setting a unique feel, a unique and memorable culture.

I think that the key is to find a good balance of both.

Also, pay attention how approachable the elements are. If you've got a dozen cool plots / Explorables / whatever, that all require Epic level to actually have any impact on, the party may not enjoy being first level and catching rats.

[Yora]

Finally, if you've managed to make your setting both coherent and sufficiently elaborate, the last element is personal engagement. Why do the players or their characters care about the world they are interacting with? It can be relationships with NPCs (protecting allies and competing with antagonists or rivals), survival of the harsh elements, wealth seeking in a land full of opportunity, uncovering a great mystery, etc. It's about connecting the heroes to their role in the setting and what that means to them.

I would say interesting conflicts are the skeleton upon which everything else needs to be hanged on, since they're what players will actually interact with and influence.

I'm not just talking about the main good-guys-vs-bad-guys scenario, an interesting setting is full of smaller conflicts that the main characters can influence (or choose not to influence) on a regular basis. Different guilds with different approaches to adventuring, different noble families, different gods if it's very high fantasy, various nations with various ways of ruling, even just a feud between the blacksmith and the innkeeper in the starting village...

But there's also hooky-ness, beneath the general level of engagement... what hooks are there? What is there to DO? What's going on that has places for player characters to make a difference, or at least make some money? Dragonlance, IMO, largely suffered in hookyness, because the original setting cleaved so closely to Legends and Chronicles... too much was wrapped up in those books, and not enough was laid bare elsewhere to make up for it. Dark Sun had a different hookyness problem, in that it didn't feel like you could do much of anything important... most of the gears in the game were so overpowered that you couldn't hope to face them until you were similarly overpowered

Something I've seen repeatedly hammmered in in discussions about adventure and campaign design by several different people is Factions, Factions, Factions. And designing a campaign setting very much overlaps with designing the basics for a specific campaign, except that you are designing the basics for multiple different campaigns. And working a lot of factions and their various conflicts into a setting certainly sounds like very solid advice.
But now that I think of it, in light of the other comments here, it's not just enough to have factions and conflicts, but to make them so that players can join them and become personally invested in them. Having a big conflict in which the players are doing various third party contractor work isn't really that exciting or engaging. The adventure of such a quest can of course be really fun and actually great, but it doesn't really utilize the setting.
When I look at Star Wars and think it would be a great setting to play in, I of course don't think that it would be thrilling to play an errand boy for the Jedi Order or play Blue 9 in the Battle of Endor. I want to play a Jedi Knight or Red Leader.

I have read a lot of adventures for D&D and Pathfinder over the years, and it lies in the nature of the medium that these adventures can easily be moved to different settings within the official world, or even any other possible world. It is no surprise that virtually all of these assume the PCs to be third party contractors hired specifically for the job, and usually assume the antagonists to exist in something of a vacuum. But I feel that internalizing this approach as the only way to do it is a mistake. It creates assumptions about how campaigns work that completely ignore things that should be obvious. There really isn't anything revolutionary or original about the idea that the players are heroic representatives of their factions.

[LibraryOgre]

On the faction front, I think an important part is that you should seldom have just two factions in an area. Two factions may predominate, but there should be a bunch of other factions, each of whom want something, and whose goals will sometimes, but not always, align with another faction.

Something I did when expanding the civilian side of Rifts Coalition States was talk about factions within the society. Sure, there's the big Pro-Emperor faction that the books talk about, but what about the other, smaller, factions who might have influence, or form alliances with each other?

And, if you use alignment, look at ways that groups of similar alignment will oppose each other. Not just good/evil or law/chaos clashes, but also good/good or good/neutral, or evil/evil and evil/neutral clashes.

[Cluedrew]

A setting is exciting if you get excited about it, so I think that is one mostly about its initial hook. Staying power of course is also great, but I think that is a different issue.

So why do people get excited about settings? Because they want to play in them. This is where I stop doing the replace the word with its effective definition thing. Now I get to the question: "So why do people want to play in a setting after there initial look at it?" and requires more thought.

Maybe the novelty of it intrigues them. Maybe it has cool elements they want to explore. But for me those things just want to make me read more about them, not actually play in them. Not sure how much that generalizes, but I definitely feel that what makes a book or movie exciting is different than that of a game setting. There is overlap of course but still some important differences. As a prime example, books work quite well if there is a main conflict, because that is what the story will be about. Game settings seem to benefit from more than one source of conflict, you can pick and choose and bring different elements together in semi-unpredictable ways. And from an immediacy to it all, there have been stories I am not sure what they will be about, but in a game the chains of possible actions and reactions should be visible, just clear enough that you can guess at them but only guess so you have to play and find out. And these chains should start right out of the gate. Maybe they will be really long, but I don't think they should start late.

At least that is how it works for me. It is a little bit messy though, but I think I have a nice summation: Exciting settings make you want to do things in them.

[Max_Killjoy]

I feel like this is a question for Max Killjoy, who has been very vocal about this topic in the past.

No pressure...

I'll dig into this later today when I'm back home.

[Nifft]

An exciting setting...

- Allows character concepts that I find interesting.

- Permits / encourages conflicts that I find interesting -- that can be conflict types, conflict targets, or conflict results.

- Has some evocative / mysterious / wondrous elements which aren't fully explained, and yet I trust the GM to flesh them out in a way that I expect to find interesting.

[Slipperychicken]

Stories are what make me interested, and setting is just one component of storytelling. Setting alone does not excite me unless someone has slipped one or more good stories into it.

When people claim to have found an "interesting setting" or "interesting character", I think what they're really interested by is one or more stories that either has already been told, or that they imagine could involve it.

[Quertus]

Stories are what make me interested, and setting is just one component of storytelling. Setting alone does not excite me unless someone has slipped one or more good stories into it.

When people claim to have found an "interesting setting" or "interesting character", I think what they're really interested by is one or more stories that either has already been told, or that they imagine could involve it.

So, let's say that I find a really bad group, with a really bad GM, playing fatal. I could join them, knowing that I'd gain some really amazing horror stories. But I walk away. Why?

My guess is, it's not just the stories, but the process one goes through to get to those stories, that matters. Kinda like the theory that the ends justify the means, but the means are part of the ends, too.

[Kadzar]

Something I've seen repeatedly hammmered in in discussions about adventure and campaign design by several different people is Factions, Factions, Factions. And designing a campaign setting very much overlaps with designing the basics for a specific campaign, except that you are designing the basics for multiple different campaigns. And working a lot of factions and their various conflicts into a setting certainly sounds like very solid advice.
But now that I think of it, in light of the other comments here, it's not just enough to have factions and conflicts, but to make them so that players can join them and become personally invested in them. Having a big conflict in which the players are doing various third party contractor work isn't really that exciting or engaging. The adventure of such a quest can of course be really fun and actually great, but it doesn't really utilize the setting.
When I look at Star Wars and think it would be a great setting to play in, I of course don't think that it would be thrilling to play an errand boy for the Jedi Order or play Blue 9 in the Battle of Endor. I want to play a Jedi Knight or Red Leader.

I have read a lot of adventures for D&D and Pathfinder over the years, and it lies in the nature of the medium that these adventures can easily be moved to different settings within the official world, or even any other possible world. It is no surprise that virtually all of these assume the PCs to be third party contractors hired specifically for the job, and usually assume the antagonists to exist in something of a vacuum. But I feel that internalizing this approach as the only way to do it is a mistake. It creates assumptions about how campaigns work that completely ignore things that should be obvious. There really isn't anything revolutionary or original about the idea that the players are heroic representatives of their factions.

Yeah, the advice to put in factions is sort of close to a good idea, but it seems like people giving advice without knowing the reasoning behind it. I'd say it's close to a good idea because it can provide groups of people besides the PCs who want things. On the other hand, if done poorly, they can just end up one-dimensional NPCs who just dole out quests under the rationale that it will help their cause in some vague way.

So I'd say it's important for your NPCs (both as groups and individuals) to have goals and that your players be able to interact with those goals in some way, whether by thwarting them or doing something for them in exchange for some kind of favor. And then, what one faction wants to do, or wants the players to do, will likely conflict with another faction in some way, and if the players want something from both factions, they'll have to resolve that in some way.

Also, factions should be fractal, in a way. It should be possible to divide a faction down to several sub-factions (and possibly divide those sub-factions into sub-sub-factions, and so on down to the individual level) between people who have the same basic goals but with different priorities or opinions about how to approach things or their own ambitions. Not that you need to define these when coming up with factions, but they're something to keep in mind as possible problems, complications, or opportunities for players.

So, say they fail a mission for their patron; it's not likely such a thing will hurt their faction too much, but it could hurt their prestige and possibly give more power to their rival. Or maybe they're trying to get in with the local thieves' guild. There's no way they're going to be able to talk with the higher-ups, but perhaps, if they do some work for the local fence, maybe he could put in a good word for them?

Also, a nice thing about factions is that, even if the players manage to kill off the main villain, someone within the organization can rise up to take their place. I wouldn't do this too much, as overuse could make players feel like their actions have no real effect on the world, but sometimes it is appropriate for someone to step into a vacuum of power and take over, albeit likely with some change in priorities and/or methods. They may continue pursuit of their predecessor's plot, or, perhaps more menacingly, abandon it, thank the players for helping eliminate their competition, and leave them wondering whether they've actually made things better or worse.

Now, I'm not actually sure how much this has to do with setting, other than I guess to say you should put such things in your settings?

[Pleh]

Factions, Factions, Factions.

Unless you're often wandering through untamed wilderness or a dungeon full of monsters (who may or may not be aligned with any factions).

Yes, in most concerns about Setting, you want to focus on the civilized world and that means Factions.

But it's not the end of the story either. Unless your setting is intended to never leave a mega metropolis, there should probably be some uncivilized wilderness (or dare I say, Savage) encounters to punctuate the social intrigue and break up the action.

Some of my favorite features about some of my hand crafted settings are about the world's natural geography and how it affects the inhabitants. For example, living between an enormous mountain range and the coast just south of the northern arctic causes water to constantly blow inland from the ocean only to be wrung out by the mountain slopes. The lowlands between are hyper hydrated so there is plenty of water for crops, but the minerals are washed out so the soil is poor. Most peasants are poor and rely more on hunting and river fishing than agriculture. The elves living just off the coast on their feylike island homes reap the benefits of all the rich lowland silt washing over their beaches. And so on.

[Darth Ultron]

This seems like the most condensed version of the most essential elements. A great setting is not about the things you expect to see. A great setting is about the things you expect to do.

I think that is way too short sighted. You are talking more about a simple hook or gimmick. Like ''wow the setting has ninja pirates!". Sure it sounds cool, to some, and some people will like doing that.....for a while.

The problem is a setting should not rely on such a simple cheap hook gimmick. The setting should provide an exciting world you can make your own adventures in...not just a hook so you can do one cool thing. Like sure you run a ninja pirate game in the setting...maybe for a whole year.....but then people will be like...eh, ''can't we do something else, anything else?" And you look back at the setting, and all it has is ''wow, did you see the cool ninja pirates'"?

After all, it's a game. Not a book or a movie. It's not about hearing about and seeing amazing places and creatures, it's about doing things.

I don't think this is true. A story description gives a great feeling of being ''there" in the setting and does make people feel like they want to BE there, in the setting, doing those things.

For the setting to be conducive to the adventure, what does the setting need? Well, it needs to have sufficient breadth to cover the players' interests over time.

Very true.

It needs to have sufficient depth and internal consistency to be worth looking at, investing in.

True.

It needs to be sufficiently familiar to give the players a firm starting point, yet sufficiently novel to allow for new material rather than just be a rehash of previous experiences.

Disagree here. I think the ''firm starting point" is a bad idea. Familiar is mostly bad. You want to avoid, the ''we have x, but different".

It needs to have sufficient elements - conflicts, NPCs, Explorables, whatever - and sufficient diversity of elements to engage the players. And these elements need to be mutable, engagable.

Yes.

[The Jack]

I think a big thing is, how did that fool say it... you want a 'dichotomy' of ideas. Factions with extremely different ways of looking at the world are great ways to grab player interest. You never want one side to be entirely wrong, but you don't want a side to be entirely right. Factions need compelling points to make and compelling flaws to go with them.
Great examples can be found with
The New California Republic and Ceasar's legion .
Andrew Ryan's Rapture.
Lex Luthor (writer dependent)
Traditions and Technocracy.


Or, y'know, they can have the exact same flaws and merits and be just as good and bad for it. The important thing is exploring ideas. Now, the problem with that is that you can get pretty unrealistic with it IE All elves should die, Klingons are doomed,WoD has misandrist-feminist vampires even though the vampiric condition itself would mostly eliminate sexism between vampires, only a child would want to weaponize dinosaurs for military applications, but some people aren't that smart, and can have fun with that kinda stuff.

[Thinker]

This is sort of drifting into the territory not so much of "have factions", but of "have themes". Your themes should support ideas you want to explore with your world. Factions are one way to express that, but you can also have individual people, monsters, game mechanics, gods, and simple world mechanics that support your themes.

[LibraryOgre]

I think a big thing is, how did that fool say it... you want a 'dichotomy' of ideas. Factions with extremely different ways of looking at the world are great ways to grab player interest. You never want one side to be entirely wrong, but you don't want a side to be entirely right. Factions need compelling points to make and compelling flaws to go with them.
Great examples can be found with
The New California Republic and Ceasar's legion .
Andrew Ryan's Rapture.
Lex Luthor (writer dependent)
Traditions and Technocracy.


Or, y'know, they can have the exact same flaws and merits and be just as good and bad for it. The important thing is exploring ideas. Now, the problem with that is that you can get pretty unrealistic with it IE All elves should die, Klingons are doomed,WoD has misandrist-feminist vampires even though the vampiric condition itself would mostly eliminate sexism between vampires, only a child would want to weaponize dinosaurs for military applications, but some people aren't that smart, and can have fun with that kinda stuff.

However, I'd say that the dichotomy is not enough... you need the factions between the big gears, too. Take NCR/Caesar's Legion, for example. Those are the big factions, sure, but you've also got House and the Families. You've got the Fiends, and Primm, and the Khans, and the Remnants, and the Super Mutants, and the Boomers, all of whom have stakes and interests in the big dichotomy. And if you present everything as being part of the big dichotomy, you wind up with a lot of untilled earth.

[Mendicant]

Factions are more key than big themes, because factions are full of NPCs. I don't think I've ever had a player who was nearly as motivated by a theme or idea as a couple good NPCs, at least not once the game was actually running.

[The Jack]

Were the fiends relevant at all for the narrative? They were just psycho raiders.

Yes, I agree. The little factions were very nice in that narrative because they were contrastable and comparable to everyone else.

Big themes and ideas you can get behind or oppose.
Then a few curveballs in there to skew with things and change your understanding of how things work.

Legion's a great example. Everyone says they're monsters, you likely get introduced to them after they butchered a town too, but when you meet the leader, he's not the edgelord/monster you expect, but a very reasonable dude. Meanwhile, the NCR is just full of more and more shortcommings as they close in on what america used to be before the war.