Back in April I floated the idea of combining Lexicon and Microscope in an exercise to develop a campaign setting. I realized not too long ago that this could be a very useful activity for creating a baseline setting for my Seekers of Lore campaign.
I see it working something like this.
- Frame the campaign fundamentals (in this case, the world was created, civilizations grew, there was a time of massive change, civilizations ‘broke’ and things were lost).
- Establish some basic guidelines for the design participants, based on Lexicon and Microscope. Ben Robbins has since Kickstarted and released a game called Kingdom, but I haven’t finished reading it yet.
- Design participants build up material per the guidelines, with entities referencing and cross-referencing each other. This is perhaps best done using a wiki.
- Setting moves into open play. I picture this being an open world, so different Questions may be answered by different groups.
- I plan to play using Swords & Wizardry (now free at DriveThruRPG, and I’m playing it in another campaign right now so keeping to consistent rules sets helps me), but I’m pretty flailsnails about the whole thing — the setting is not particularly rules-specific.
- Campaign participants roam the world, discovering forgotten places and recovering lost knowledge.
- As campaign participants discover things and learn the answers to Questions, the wiki gets updated and newly-uncovered bits are exposed for exploration.
I need to think about this some more.