Customising Homebrew for Player Characters

I realised a thing recently. The classes - and other details of player characters - dictate which aspects of your campaign setting will be encountered in play. I mean, this is a resoundingly obvious statement when it’s put on a screen like that, but it has taken me most of my 36 years of running games to actually work it out.

To wit, I have done a lot of background work on the various flavours of wizardry in Utterbaum, because I like wizards. I have Pinterest boards for what the Dark College mages look like (bunch of goths, really), the Elementalists (somewhere in the ground between punk and druid), and the wizards of Venterhold (much classier). There are a few more waiting in the wings for when they’re relevant in the game - but that may be never because neither of the player characters is a wizard.

The player characters are a blood hunter (demon hunter subclass) and a cleric (life domain, deity of cartography). So the things that come up in the game are fiends and how they relate to the game world, and the gods, and maps. There’s also whatever background stuff is relevant to the plot at hand - which is why the Dark College and the people in Venterhold came up - but in the longer term, the material that’s going to keep coming back is the stuff that connects directly to the interests of the player characters, and to a first approximation, that’s dictated by their class.

I’ve experimented a fair bit with how to communicate setting to players. Utterbaum has a large number of in-world documents, which I’ve pushed to the players at intervals. Some of these get referenced again, others fade into the background. One of the issues with having these be online documents is that they’re not sitting in front of the players all the time like physical handouts would be. Much like ebooks, they suffer from poor object permanence. Heliomar has a few such documents, but the setting there has mostly been communicated through play, and occasionally through rumours communicated to each player as chunky messages in Discord. Some players engage with these hugely, sending me questions and seeking clarification, and using the information that arises from it in sessions. In previous campaigns, I’ve written a single setting document, and given the players access to it, sometimes even keeping it updated as more information is revealed through play. But all of these methods have been about stuff that’s happening in the whole world, not just the stuff that’s relevant to the player character interests.

So for the next game I’m setting up - which isn’t going to be all that far out; both my current games are in level 16-17 territory - I’m going to try a different approach. I’m only going to write up in detail the things that I think will be of interest to the player characters, as indicated by their classes. So the gods won’t be written up in any great detail unless there’s a cleric. The criminal underworld will only get laid out if there’s a rogue. Ecology and wilderness stuff will only get written if there’s a druid, and so on. Since some of the subclasses in 5th Edition are amazingly specific, those will also have an effect on things. And then if other material arises during play or is relevant to the plot, it’ll get detailed then, but I’m not going to snarl myself up with piles of continuity stuff that won’t get used. Although given my own interest in arcane casters, I imagine the various schools of wizardry will get detailed whether or not there’s anyone playing a mage.

The puzzle of how to get this information to players - and how to keep it in sight, as it were - is one I’m still working on. There’s a definite conflict here between world-building and the actual narrative of the game; very few in-world documents can avoid having extraneous, non-plot materials in there. Even a simple letter requires thinking about calendars (if it’s dated at all, though as a historian, I abhor undated letters) and how the letter could reasonably have been expected to reach its recipient (nobody trapped in a winter cabin in the mountains where the only creatures around are mutant owlbears is going to have a robust postal system). And broadsheets - which I love as handouts and information pieces - by their very nature are full of non-plot material as well as the one or two items or ads that actually carry relevant information. Physical handouts are possible (although clunky in actual execution - I have never managed to actually connect to the one printer that’s in the house) for Utterbaum, where we’ve had more in-person sessions than online of late, but not at all practical for Heliomar, wherein we’ve had one offline session ever.

I’ve developed something of a dislike for player-facing “setting description” texts that are not in-world documents. If there’s no point of view attached to them, they have to be objectively true, and those are ditchwater dull for reading purposes - much like Wikipedia entries. There are no hooks for engagement there in terms of character or flavour, let alone the player characters’ actual classes. The 5E background mechanic does allow for a little objective-mechanical-information about the world, but I’ve never done anything with custom backgrounds. I might look into that.

Anyway. Information that isn’t connected to player character classes probably won’t drive engagement. I shall try to remember this.

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