by Charles Durfee

Created on: October 25, 2008

Creating a campaign setting is not as difficult as it might seem. At its heart is the ability to ask yourself questions and a willingness to explore possible answers through your imagination.

I started exercising these skills about 20 years ago, when my friends and I took the leap of playing with our Star Wars action figures and started physically acting out our collective scenarios. We quickly found that we needed some rules to adjudicate disputes, and we found D&D an excellent vehicle, which we started playing in its own right.

The campaigns I remember most are ones that took a simple "what-if" premise and explored it to its logical conclusion.I'll present a couple of examples.

One approach is to put a twist on a familiar setting element. For example, years ago with the Star Trek roleplaying game, I enjoyed some aspects of the new series Deep Space 9, but not others. So, I wondered how things might be different if my wormhole wasn't reliable. Being a big fan, I knew of an episode that centered around a unstable wormhole (the Barzan wormhole, which is only stable on the Federation side), and I started conjecturing. If the wormhole were unstable, explorers might be trapped on the other side! No one would approve such a risky expedition.

To compensate, I conjectured that Starfleet had solved this problem. They had created a device that stabilized the far side of the wormhole. However, upon further reflection, I decided this removed some of the uniqueness of my setting, so I made the device only increase the probability that the wormhole would appear in a given location, enough that Starfleet would go for it, but still Starfleet would be cautious. They would want to ensure that the expedition could survive for a time by itself. So, the first episodes concerned the players working with the Star Fleet Corps of Engineers to build a small base camp on the other side.

The setting was good, but I decided I needed some tension, which I added by making the device be a joint effort with another major power, the Ferengi. From there, I began to focus on what the adventurers would find on the other side. The campaign predicted some of the challenges that would later be faced on Star Trek: Voyager years later.

Another approach is to start with a familiar story and set it in a different time and place. What if the Princess Bride happened in a modern setting, rather than a fantasy one? Or feudal Japan? The time travel series "Doctor Who" did this particularly well during the

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