You’ve decided to write an epic campaign for your tabletop role playing game from scratch. Awesome! But how do you do that? In this series I’ll chronicle my approach to designing and writing a long campaign as I’m doing it. Today’s topic in the series: creating nations, kingdoms, factions, etc.

Use your Why

In my earlier post Your Campaign Theme I talked about finding a central point for your campaign. Something I’ve often found helpful in boosting creativity is by constraining the problem. I’ve found this in all kinds of things, like when I used to build the starship Enterprise out of duplo lego pieces with my kids.

The reason I put kingdom building early in my campaign design is because I want to have an immersive world. My players are coming into existence in a fully functional land that has existed for eons before them and will continue on far after their story ends. They may cause massive disruption and leave the world in a far different place, and I hope they do. But in order to get them to want to affect the world, I want them to feel like it’s real.

Looking back on your theme, how would that impact the types of kingdoms, nations, factions, or other groupings of people? This is a great time to push your theme very early in your design process.

For my example, my theme is individual power vs collective right. Let’s see where that gets me.

Aspects of a Nation

First thing I did was to list a bunch of aspects that affect or might be used to describe what a nation is. The list I came up with is:

• Climate
• People
  • Urban vs Rural
• Agriculture
  • Imports and Exports
• Beliefs
• Culture
  • How do they treat outsiders?
  • Peaceful vs aggressive
• Neighbor relations

The first thing I did was to just list those. Then I looked back at the list and thought about which parts jumped out at me, especially as it pertains to my theme. I don’t have to fill out every entry that I wrote, and in fact I only flushed out two of those on my list and that’s okay.

Keeping in mind the individual power vs collective right, it seems like the neighbor relations is a great place to add that. I can make one nation lean heavily into individual power and another lean heavily into collective rights.

My Lands

One of other aspects of my campaign is that I want to give players meaningful choices. I don’t want to take a hard stand on which view is right in my central tension. To accomplish this, I’ve decided to make three nations which each pairwise share a border.

I drew a small sketch of my three lands so I can have an idea of the general relationship between them.

If that looks sort of like the United States, cool. Part of my campaign is we live in an alternate Earth.

I threw some names up there, Fendra (originally Kendra but decided to change), Navin, and Uttana. Since I’m doing an alternate-earth and I know the Appalachian Mountains make for a natural border, that became where I divided it between the two. I also am very familiar with the South Carolina area so that’s my starting point for my adventure. I didn’t bother to draw out what’s to the west of Navin because I don’t need to know it yet.

Now that I know the three lands I’m starting with and I know I want to use these to drive my theme, I’m going to pick my starting location to be part way between the extremes so that my players can be affected by both but not already deep into either. (Spoiler: The others are ‘a coming!)

Adding details

Now I’m going to just fill in some ideas for each of my lands that should paint a broad picture of what they’re like. I’m looking up at the categories I wrote before and I’m putting it into context of what matters for my theme.

• The Kingdom of Fendra
  • Most of the natives are openly antagonistic towards human refugees
  • The monarchy has wide support within the native population
  • The successor of the King or Queen is chosen by them and does not have to be hereditary (though it often is)
  • Humans are quickly becoming powerful within the land, primarily because they have this firm belief they can improve their station in life
• The Nation of Uttana
  • Democracy
  • They have open trade relations with Fendra for a very long time – more than the lifetimes of even the oldest races
  • Generally friendly
  • There are some land disputes over the border they share with Fendra about a redirected river, but neither side has ever been willing to go to war over it
• Navin
  • Monarchy
  • Maintains rule by force
  • The crown is generally despised by the people, but they respect the strength
  • Currently in an uneasy stalemate with Fendra
  • Cautious trading partners with Uttana (all trade is supposed to happen at specific check points)

Stop Now

At this point I’ve got some good tensions between the nations. I could even write up a one page (and no more) summary of the setting to give to my players. This would help them pick what kind of character they might want to play.

I find it important to stop, collect my notes as they are, and move on to the next step. Otherwise I could go on and on in setting building, but I don’t want to spend multiple weeks building a world that won’t get used. I have a rough sketch that I can fill in as play continues.

Next step: The starting scene.