World-Planning

I've picked the title world-planning, as distinct from world-building, because this isn't about building your own campaign directly, it's more about thinking about your setting in some general terms.

That is, it's not about designing continents, cities, countries, NPCs, dungeons and the like, it's more about the philosophy of your world and how it all fits together.

Take, for example, the long-espoused concept of PC exceptionalism. Weigh that against the relative ease that, as a DM, you can level a party from first to twentieth level using ONLY monsters that are humanoid from playable races. I'm not suggesting you should do this, but you certainly can do it. You can comfortably go from first to about thirteenth or so fighting only humans. Also consider, for a group of first level characters, if they encounter a pack of wolves of equal size four times, over the course of their life time, they'll reach second level. Five bandits and a bandit captain twice, ever, and that's pretty much second level. Why aren't there a lot of second and third level peasants out there? Or higher level ones.

Consider as well, depending on the source of your inspiration, exactly what their culture might have been like. In Celtic cultures, druids performed the role of priests and were, to the best of our knowledge, present in most villages. So were bards. Warrior-types were common. If you look at the Scandinavian cultures, and the northern-germanic cultures (Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Huns etc.) warriors were common, skalds - a bard equivalent were common, so were priests. If we keep going east, into Mongolia and Siberia, hunters and shaman were common. If we look at modern Africa, the hunter-gatherer tribes, or at places like Papua New Guinea, the clue is in the name: hunters are common. In PNG, warriors are common too, because raiding into neighbouring villages was, and is, routine. Throughout medieval and renaissance England, peasants and yeoman were expected to fight - under the Tudors laws were passed requiring yeoman to practise archery after church on a Sunday for example. In China, although there's some dispute, contemporary sources describe armies with hundreds of thousands of troops, mostly peasant levies, on each side fighting battles. Whilst the Shaolin monks are the best known modern examples of gong fu, films like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and House of the Flying Daggers or TV series like The Untamed and The Water Margin probably do more to depict the historical reality of hundreds, thousands even of forms of gong fu, scattered across the country. That might seem unlikely, but China has always had a huge population: various sources suggest it has consistently had multiple cities with a population of over 1,000,000 since before 500 CE for example. In Ancient Rome, citizenship was a reward for serving out your term in the army, and while not just anyone could rock up and serve, it was quite common. Add gladiatorial slaves and there was a strong element of warrior types present, as well as others.

The point of all of this is to suggest that the concept of PC-exceptionalism is poorly founded across a wide range of cultures - and that's limiting it to the ones I know a reasonable amount about. I am not claiming these cultures were 100% warriors, warriors need farmers to support them, crafters to make their equipment and so on and so forth. I'm suggesting that if you try and project D&D character classes onto historical cultures, you'd find fighters, rangers, druids, bards and clerics in decent numbers in most cultures. Paladins, as either oath-bound or religious warriors would appear too, in many. History is replete with people claiming to do magic - if it was real, you've got to imagine the artificers, wizards and sorcerers would be there as well.

If you still want a world where PCs are truly exceptional, what does that say about your world? Why does no one fight and gain xp? Where are the wars? The bandits? The monsters? On the flip side, how do your PCs gain experience? How do the churches send out their clergy to the village churches if they're all zero or first level?

If you have a world where higher level characters are more common, what does that world look like? How common are they? What level is the typical village priest? If you say a village usually has about 75 households, how many of them have someone who has served a few summers in the local lord's levy? What level warrior/fighter are they? Does every village have a bard? Or do bards wander? How about wizards, sorcerers and warlocks? Mad Hilda might not be quite as mad, she's just been listening to the Great Old One she made a pact with, and reading the thoughts of the villagers around her in her dreams. If ninth level wizards are common, how accessible are teleportation circles? How much does it cost to use one? Think about the number of sessions you expect your players to spend to get to ninth level, and the amount of game time that will be. If it's not hard for the party to hit ninth level (it's often less than a month of game time, it's rarely longer than three months, unless you do something odd like time-skip), why should it be hard for the NPCs to get there? How does ease of teleporting between cities change your world? There isn't AN answer to this, but likely ones would be that expensive, small items don't get carried on the roads, the get teleported. Royal messages don't get lost that easily (how unlike Game of Thrones), because they get teleported and so on. Teleport points will be guarded of course, so you can't teleport an army into the palace, so the nature of subterfuge and plots will change. But so will assassination attempts. 

How do laws change? I run a game where all the religions in the world are allowed and accepted. Some of those religions require human sacrifice. Some hold human life sacrifice to be sacred and forbid it. In my world, sacrifice is only allowed if the "victim" is willing, and there is effectively a weregild (a guilt-price) paid to the family of the person being sacrificed. It is often the elderly, those who cannot live with the pain that not even a wish or similar can remove, because it is due to old age, who choose to go down this route, knowing that their death will bring benefit to their families. Sometimes others, who come from religions where death expiates wrongdoing choose this path. Because the sacrifices are willing, those religions who hold life sacred, accept it as the choice of the person being scarified and abide by the law. This might not be how you resolve the issue, if it arises, but it allows the society in my world to work by and large without friction on this issue. If you can use Skywriting, how do defamation laws change? It can be hard to track down who wrote what after all. What would be the opinion of a town if the party came in an killed a prominent business elven woman? Just because she's the head of the local thief's guild, she's a citizen, sits on the council, pays her taxes, there's no evidence of criminal activity except the word of these outsiders. What to do? In modern society, the head of the local crime syndicate doesn't usually face the death penalty for running a group of petty criminals. Drug barons, that's a different matter, but technically being drug kingpin is not punishable by death according to the law books. 

What are the histories and prehistories of your world like? This starts to merge into world-building a little, but consider, on Earth, human history went pretty much through Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age and then it starts diverging from there. That's a generalisation, how the Greeks used bronze and the Chinese used bronze is different, but to a larger extent with stone and a lesser extent with bronze the properties of the material govern its use, it's only with iron (and later materials like steel, ceramics etc.) that the culture can impose their whims on the material. So if you have a different progression, how does that happen? What artefacts of the different ages have been left behind? Our world has measured progress in terms of materials, how has magic advanced in your world? What impact has that had? Has the world always had evocation? Confuration? Healing magic? Based on your pantheon or pantheons how has the balance of powers shifted between the gods and goddesses? What has that meant in terms of the magic accessible to the mortal realms? If the deity of healing was a minor power, who only came to the fore recently, what does that mean to your world's history? 

While thinking of this, consider your setting and your pantheon too. Why do the Scandinavian myths have a cold Hell, but the Middle-Eastern ones have a hot one? You might like to ask yourself about the ways the environment in both places can kill you...

How do the non-human species fit into your world? All those questions you've just asked for humans really need to be addressed for each of them as well. Some of the answers might be the same or linked: if magic burst into the world with the Iron Age, maybe Elves did too? If Forge Magic came late, maybe the Dwarves did too?

There are many, many more questions you should be asking yourself about your world (and if I had a team and a huge amount of time, I'd dig into them) but these questions can start making you think about the way your world works so when you make a choice about placing ruins, how a city looks and so on, you can start to put extra layers in, but in a consistent way. Your players, ungrateful, unobservant wretches that they are, may never notice, but the richness of the world and your ability to just drop a new location and give it vibrancy and history and bring it to life will make them feel the world is more alive. Ultimately that will give them a better game, even if what they mostly won't to do is hack and slash...