The current age has no all-encompassing empire. The world is shrouded in a dark age, between the collapse of the last great empire and the rise of the next, which might be centuries away. Minor kingdoms prosper, to be sure: baronies, holdings, city-states. But each settlement appears as a point of light in the widespread darkness, a haven, an island of civilization in the wilderness that covers the world.... No settlement is entirely safe, however, and adventures break out within (and under) such places as often as not. D&D 4th Edition Players Handbook.

I was going to write about the second part of the biomes (you know, the ecosystems with lots of life, not the barren ones like tundras and deserts), but real life interfered. So, instead, I'm writing this in a family cottage in Michigan, at a memorial for my Aunt Arlene. Here, we have good food, reminiscences, cloud cover, rain, and connections with family. What we didn't have was combat or friction that made a good RPG. Which is good, because this is life, not a role-playing game. But, it made me think back to the column. What makes a good role-playing game world?

I'm going to start this with three caveats. First, any place can make a good role-playing setting. But like the canard, "any rule system works if the GM is good enough," that's not necessarily helpful advice. You can make any system or any world work, just like you can cut a board anywhere. But, just like spitting a board with the grain versus against the grain, some things are just plain easier and make a more aesthetically pleasing product. Second, there's going to be a difference between a one-shot convention campaign versus a six month, "play a session for an evening every other week," campaign versus a campaign that is intended to last for years and years. One isn't better than the other, but if you are looking for something that is going to be long long term, your world is probably going to end up different. Third, and this may seem uber-obvious but still bears repeating, a role-playing game is not a novel, film, or TV series. There's some things that you just can't get away with in a game that you can in those other mediums, unless you want to endure charges of railroading or have your players walk out on you.

With all that in mind, let's look at some of the factors:

1. Strong allegiances. The players need to be doing something, or they need to have something done to them to force them to react. Either of these suggest some group or organization is in the picture. If the players are acting, it helps to have some type of command structure for them to be a part of. This will let the GM have some control over the characters and some way to move along the plot. If the players are reacting, then the big group is the Big Bad, the main antagonist. Note that I am purposefully vague on what that group is. Shadowrun does this to a large extent; if done correctly, the corporation giving the missions will suddenly yet inevitably betray the characters. In Paranoia, the Computer is both the main mover and the main antagonist.
2. Turmoil. Status quo is boring. Something needs to move the action along. Note that this is more suited to a smaller length session. Having the "disaster of the week" happen every time gets a bit unbelievable. So, if you are planning to make this a really long session, make the turmoil something very permanent. Turmoil gives the characters some type of event to react to, and shifts the current power structure to something more chaotic.
3. Agency. What you don't want the players to do once they encounter the grisly murders or the nameless horde is to say, "we let the authorities handle it." Some settings manage this by making the player characters the authorities, but then the phrase to avoid is, "we call in backup." Here's where the social, out of game, conventions can come into play; the players and the GM silently or not-so-silently agree that in order for the game to work, you need to have the players be self-reliant. Or, you can enforce this in game; isolate the characters so backup simply cannot happen. Either place them in the prototypical dungeon where they are physically separated from backup, or make communication impossible because of the technology. A third approach is to limit the character's social net. Again, Shadowrun does this well because the characters are mercenaries, not really part of a group. The Buffy/X-Files approach works well, where supernatural events make the characters not believable.
   Part of this self-reliance includes the freedom to not be responsible for the actions of combat. If you're running a standard hack-n-slash game or you expect the players to enter combat, then the last thing you want to do as GM is have authorities come in later and arrest the characters for assault, battery, breaking and entering, and murder. Sometimes, the hardest thing in designing a world is finding good bad guys, bad guys you don't feel guilty of killing and that will put up fights (for my collection of bad guy options, please see my earlier column). Or, you play a Violence campaign.

Let's look at some published settings (and I'm indebted to Shannon Appelcline's wonderful Designers and Dragons work for helping me remember these old systems - I'd recommend these publications highly):

• D&D 4e. The 4th Edition Players Handbook has the above quote. This world has turmoil and agency. There is no power structure controlling the world, and the player characters are expected to be heroes and rout evil. Any morality in the game is eclipsed by the alignment system; orcs are bad because they are evil. What D&D doesn't have is the allegiances beyond the alignment system. This tended to get reflected in games I've seen, where players are expected to follow the adventure because it is there. Again, it doesn't have to be that way, but the game suggests this.
• Battletech. I'm looking at the FASA 90's version. There were five houses (Davion, Liao, Marik, Steiner, and the evil evil Kurita), Terra, many smaller mercenary groups, smaller trading companies, pirates, and micronations. Communication between stars was managed through ComStar, a theoretically neutral private company. Characters were usually mechwarriors, elite fighters in big bipedal mechs. For some reason, the human form is the best fighting form imaginable. It must be the binocular vision. So, this has the turmoil (war), the agency (elite fighters, assuming the players wanted to play these folks, which is a probably good assumption given the name of the freakin' game is Battletech), and the organizations (our go-to was one of the five houses, although there were a lot of other interested parties). All in all, it facilitated a good action-packed story, assuming you wanted to tell this type of story.
• In Nomine / World of Darkness / Buffy The Vampire Slayer. For this, I'm treading on not familiar ground, having played these games only for a few sessions. These worlds are modern day, with an overlay of supernatural beings. The characters partake in this world as vampires, ghosts, faeries, werewolves, magicians, hunters, angels, and demons. These worlds, like Battletech, have clans and groups and politics. The tricky thing is to make sure the politics doesn't smother the game (unless you're into that sort of thing). At some point, you need to make sure the characters are on their own and can't rely on the overall structure.

And two non-published settings:

• Zombie Apocalypse. You're all familiar with the trope, I assume. Walking Dead is popular, although for my money, I'd do the Ex series. I've run convention games with zombies using the Serenity setting (really, what is the difference between reavers and zombies), and it seems like it would make a nice long-term campaign. The nice thing about zombies is it adds a singular event that shapes the entire campaign. It adds turmoil and enemies that you don't have to feel guilty about. It also polarizes the world into two very strong allegiances, the living and the dead. Of course, the dead tend to all be on the same side. The living can vary, from Cline's and Walking Dead's factions and subplots to a more Resident Evil style of "95% of all the humans have banded together for the common good."
• Megapolis. Megapolis was my first foray into creating a world. It's patterned after the Greek polis structure mixed with Torg, where each city-state had a distinct structure, magic, and tech level. Of course, the characters would be heroic -- either representing the pinnacle of their particular city or be totally off-world with his or her own special power. Characters could move from one city to another, and the multi-world aspect would allow the game to highlight different aspects of each character. Some city-states have aligned themselves with others, while others are in constant warfare with their neighbors. The largest city-state, Megapolis, consisted of three smaller populations, and friction among them is high.
  To help with the adventure, I decreased the human birth rate (to make sure there were areas with low population), upped the weirdness factor (to make sure there was a lot of activities for the players), and decreased the ability to travel and communicate (to limit the reach of city states and to emphasize the wild lands). I've run three different adventures using this world, tweaking it each time, and the mixture of civilization and outlands has served me well.

Well, hopefully this helped a bit with the other side of planning a good world. Next month is back to the biomes. God speed, busia.