My own level of volume of detail is often much larger than I publish for GMs or give out to the players. When producing details it is often an interesting tightrope that I walk, and sometimes I have had my share of misteps, as have others who have faced this. Players very in what they want to know, and what they expect to know, about a campaign and the world(s) it is set in. Some want to know the hows and whys of everything, others want to start at a point of near ignorance and explore the setting and its complicated twists as they play.

Tekumel, Empire of the Petal Throne, one of the most famous (and eldest) of the game setting worlds, has often suffered from the information overload problem. In its earlier incarnations, players were handed an epic history spanning thousands of years. They were given a complex and unique vocabulary of fairly alien words and concepts used within that society, and expected to adapt to a social class structure, etiquette and complex religious belief system that dominated everything they could do within the game. These things were vital to understanding who you were, what your place was, how to interact with authority, what kind of entertainment was acceptable for one's characters, and literally how to speak in the game setting. On top of this you needed to know the mechanics (which changed completely with each version of the game that was published).

Despite the fact that there is percentage of the population who love Tekumel, there are also an even greater percentage of roleplayers who couldn't wrap themselves around the level of complexity and detail they needed to know and follow to play. The mechanics were secondary, and unimportant in the scheme of things - being overwhelmed by the setting was the real problem for them.

The Forgotten Realms and White Wolf World of Darkness approaches to presenting a setting was to time-delay the release of information. Start with a basic premise and about 200 pages of details... and then each month add another book of say 128-200 pages of more details. Deciding which details can wait and which ones should forever remain locked away as "designer secrets" (or to come out in later "plot advancement books" for the overall setting plots, in the case of White Wolf) meant that players had less to absorb in the short term, but in the long run was a deception.

Those entering this second arena of games who were "late to the party" would get more and more material heaped on them at their entry point. Eventually all those additional books also end up with a hefty financial investment, enough to scare away many would-be Game Managers and players who just don't want to spend $200-$300 to play a roleplaying game.

A Third approach is that of the minimalized setting. In this one produces a setting book that just doesn't hold all the details, but expects the Game Manager to flesh out the missing bits themselves when they get around to it. The original Greyhawk, some of the BESM setting books, and even my own Earth Unmasked settings took this approach. This means more work on the part of the GM, very few meta-plots to the setting, and a lot of leeway for the players within the available framework. The problem here is how the setting looks under one GM may be entirely different than how it is under another GM. The setting becomes only as good as the amount of time and effort the GM is willing to put into it.

Another approach is one based on taking an existing setting from novels, movies or television and expanding it into a campaign viable piece. I did this with my ongoing Bureau 13 campaign (using Hero Mechanics). Basically the player is given a half dozen to a dozen pages of details, mostly about the group premise and the rules restraints being used (since in my case we were using someone else's mechanics) and were told very little about the 'big picture". This works when they are dealing with a fairly modern, fairly Earth-like, fairly Western Culture setting (21st Century Earth San Francisco) .

What you have to assume is that either everyone plays a character that knows NOTHING about the world details, or that the players will sit down and read the novels to get a better ideas of the kinds of characters and how things work around them that appear in the novels. This could be done for a number of setting (ex: Star Trek, Star Wars, Babylon Five, the Callahan's Crosstime Saloon Series, etc.) but only works if the players are either experienced with the setting, can adapt quickly from a point of near ignorance creatively, or are willing to learn the setting before play gets heavily involved.

In the Bureau -13 case, several of the players chose to read the novels I was using as my basis, while others chose to be coming from a point of ignorance beyond the initial short handout. This means there is a LOT of things that the players don't know, and they have a fear that the unknown will regularly be what they are going to be wrestling with. This makes the campaign a combination of Action/Adventure and Horror, with a little bit of Mystery/Detective/Pulp thrown in. Are Dragons real? They don't know. Is the CIA spying on their agency? They Don't know. Are there Aliens living among us? They have no idea. Is the Bureau really a government agency? Well that's what they claim. Are they working for the Good Guys? They hope so, but don't really know. Is the organization structure the same as in the Novels? They aren't sure, they aren't cleared to know.

The problem with this is when the mechanics contradict the original source material, because of the problems with game mechanics systems that are not designed specifically for a setting's details, or when the source material contradicts itself in places (What is canon? Which episode/novel was explaining this correctly?) Choose the wrong answer and you may break someone's ability to beleive in the game. Or when one chooses to ignore source material for things that fit better with game balance (No, you are not being given as much weaponry and explosives as they use in the books - you have what you can manage to buy/borrow/steal from your contacts, stores and encountered sources). If you allow some events to happen in the game (Player X proves Captain Kirk guilty of violating the Prime Directive to the Federation Court and gets him relieved of command and sentenced to prison for the next 20 years) and you may also break the belief in others of the setting. Its a fine line for many folks to take this approach.

A 'generic' setting is the most likely to cause conflicts, lack of interest, or boring games. A nameless Western-European Medieval world with elves and dwarves and magic that bears some similarities to Merry Olde England and to Middle Earth, is unlikely to draw a whole lot of player interest, innovation, or long term fun. Without some details, some unusual content to set it apart, it has no heart.

The way to make a generic setting work is to, of course, add in details, usually upon player suggestion and request. The problem here is that means that you are in a state of constant expansion, of adding things in on a large scale, whenever players reach 'the edge of the map'. You have to work quickly on your feet, be able to remember the new details you've added to ensure you don't contradict, and to have pro-active players who really want to be the driving force that makes the game work.

In practice, unfortunately, this solution rarely works. In most roleplaying games at least half the players (or more - sometimes the entire group) are oblivious to the need for them to be proactive at times, due to their experiences under other GMs and their styles. This leaves you, as GM, holding the bag again, and having to do so all at the last minute, which is generally an unsatisfying position to be in for the long haul.

All of this brings me to my current challenge. I'm working on a setting that has some similarities and connections to Earth culture, but is set so far in the future, and so far away geographically, that Earth is a myth. There are a number of histories floating around, and none of them actually tells the truth of the past of the world involved and how mankind came to be there. There are a lot of beliefs that are derrived from events, observations and social structures, as well as the collection of 100 surviving books from before their arrival on this world from Earth. The various specific cultures in the world have very different histories, beliefs, religions and reasons for why people know or believe something, and in some cases exist in different technological levels in certain fields.

To give players a complete overview, and lots of information about who believes what, would take hundreds, maybe thousands of pages. Then too comes the problem of what information should be 'revealed knowledge', to be discovered within the plot and events in the storylines I run. There are parts that will be accessible (such as the fact that the Complete Works of Shakespeare is one of the surviving 100 books, and thus folks would know the major characters in the plays and famous quotes from them) but there will also be parts that should not be known by everyone, only those who grew up in a specific culture group.

One solution is to limit characters to members of a single culture, but that reduces the diversity of character types. Another solution is to have a small "startup" handout that comes with the mechanics, and then after people choose character culture and training to hand them more pages of detail specific to them. This only works, as usual, if no new players or characters are later introduced. Once someone has found something out they won't suddenly forget if they replace their character later, though good roleplayers won't let too much info leak from one character to another. And new players might feel left out if the game goes on for a while, as the long time players who accumilate information over time that can effect events and actions.

Seperating detail information into categories, prioritizing it and releasing it or revealing it as needed means that sometimes players will not be playing within the character of someone who grew up in the world. This might affect my own suspension of disbelief, or may affect player reactions to each other over time when the information comes out later. ("If I had known that everyone believes in Ghosts I wouldn't have agreed to stay in a haunted house. If I had known ghosts were REAL I would have taken precautions!")

So what will I do? Well, since I don't have a specific audience planned for the game it will be a bit harder. I have to decide the style of the setting, and make sure the mechanics will support the style (since I'm designing a new mechanic this step takes some time but will produce a better integrated result latre). I'll start with a simple over view as an outline, and craft outwards, expanding detail as I go.

My 100 books is essential to this process, since in the rudimentary steps I'll be doing things like saying "Culture X considers the Historical plays of Shakespeare to be most essential of the books and have crafted their society culture around an English Style Monarchy, with a cultural ideal in its leadership by Henry V. They hold to a fear of despotic rulers like that portrayed in the tragic tale of Hamlet or the overly ambitious and blood thirsty nobles of the infamous Scottish Play. This obviously an extreme simplification, but gives me material to go back and fill in on as go to develop each of the cultures and how they interact with each other, as well as the problems that they are facing. It also means that the very basic framework will work as a starting point for players.

After that, handing out detail later in the scheme of things may be the only way to go. It's not the most efficient, but it may be more effective. The difference of course, is that I plan to warn people well in advance that they aren't getting a 'campaign in a box', that what they are getting are building blocks, rationed out over time. If this doesn't work, then it's always possible to re-organize or re-package the information.

I've left myself room for setting growth by deciding that instead of a large map with lots of continental details to deal with in design at the start, that there are mostly various chains of islands that are populated, with the very largest being about the size of India. This leaves room for exploration, lost civilizations, and not having to produce all the setting details at the very start (so that I don't spend years developing a world before letting folksplay in it).

Thanks for taking the time to read my ramblings.....

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