In the Beginning

Gygax created the World of Greyhawk, and we saw that it was Good.

I've recently discovered this little "Old School Renaissance" phenomenon on the internets, and it's resurrected my own interest in playing.  There are so many systems to choose from, but I think I've narrowed it down to either some variation on OSRIC, or Basic Fantasy Roleplaying System.  While I've heard good things about Labyrinth Lord, I never played OD&D, and can't quite wrap my head around the whole race-as-class thing (I'm sorry but a dwarf is a race, not a profession).  BFRPG seems to strike a balance between simplicity and the separation of race and class, but nothing is set in stone.  Anyway, discussing which system to use is probably another entry entirely.

When beginning a campaign, the first thing that comes to mind, perhaps even before deciding on a game system, is creating the world.  (The flavor of your world might suggest a certain system might or might not be preferable.)  And time spent here is usually well-spent if you're fleshing out the flavor of a world and leaving many of the details for later.

All of my earliest attempts at world creation back in high school and college tried to emulate the feel of Greyhawk, sometimes too closely.  In many ways it seemed (and still seems) the ideal setting for D&D, offering a wide variety of cultural influences - from Vikings to Mongols to savage jungles and forsaken deserts, with the general feel of medieval Western Europe in between.  Plus, you could name your PC anything and it would seem to fit in.

In retrospect, this makes sense because from what I've read Gygax did not design his world from the top down; rather it was from the ground - perhaps even the dungeon - up, with each new nation or geographic feature added as needed to account for something new in the rules, like the Barbarian or Monk character class, or for an adventure ("hey, wouldn't a pyramid set in the desert or jungle be a cool place for a dungeon?").  Only afterward did he try to organize the Flanaess into a coherent whole.

Contrast that with Ed Greenwood's Forgotten Realms setting, which seemed at once more generic and more specific in its flavor: Moonshae Isles = mythic Britain, Mulhorand = Egypt, etc.  FR struck me as some sort of bastard child of Robert E. Howard's pulp Hyborian Age of Conan with Tolkien's high-fantasy take on elves and dwarves and some of his naming conventions.  Perhaps I was conditioned by Greyhawk to expect some vague sense of history in a campaign world, which made an attempt to explain much of the shared civilization of the Flanaess.  Or maybe FR just wasn't Greyhawkian enough for my taste.

I didn't really take much interest in any of the other "official" worlds presented by TRS, like DragonLance.

Taking a course in ancient history in college only served to befuddle my world-building endeavors.  Learning of the rise and fall of "real" civilizations over millennia of history made me pay more attention to how a world came to be as it was.  I could not imagine "winging" a campaign setting, lest it commit the cardinal sin of not making historic sense to me.  Throw in magic and the supernatural, and now you have to reconcile all that with "real" history.

I remember the 2nd edition AD&D's Sourcebooks for certain settings (A Mighty Fortress, Vikings, Celts), but it always struck me that such a narrow, specific setting might get tired more quickly.  How long could you be a Viking warrior or a Celtic druid before your options started to all look the same?  So the discovery of the Old School Renaissance (OSR) gave me hope that if I returned to my roots, adventuring Nirvana could be attained.

I toyed for a while with trying to recreate a lost campaign world I designed 25 years ago, mostly as a map with some Gazetteer-like notes, but it felt too Greyhawkian to me.  Plus, I lost any copies I had of it.  So, I started from scratch.  Well, not exactly from scratch, since I think every world-builder has some concepts and names floating around in their heads or in dusty tomes that were once high school composition books.

I started with the trope of an empire in decline, an empire that served the role of the Roman Empire in Earth history. But I liked the Byzantine flavor of the empire in Harry Turtledove's Videssian series, so I based my Empire more on Greek Hellenistic culture to give it a twist.  (This means that names of scholars, priests or the erudite would have a Greek- rather than Roman-sounding affectation.)

So that's the start.  Next I'll be describing the setting some more....