Gazetteers: A Guide?

[virgil]

What's a good format/outline for a gazetteer? They're nominally a campaign setting for an extant rules system, with details of each region and its culture; essentially a giant fluff book, with some setting specific crunch in the back.

Relatedly: are they actually something the market is interested in? What's necessary to include such a piece, beyond the allure of the setting itself, to attract interest in gamers?

[Ancient History]

Tolkien was not the first fantasy writer to map out his fantasy world. But he did put a great deal of thought and work into it, and he did successfully get his maps published in his books, which highly influenced pretty much all subsequent fantasy.

The nice thing about a map is that it defines a concise geographical area - but it can't cover everything. There are always blank spaces, odd hills and forests, places that are just names but never detailed. Maps exist to be explored, filled in, and expanded.

Which is why in history you have the gazetteer: it is literally a dictionary guide that goes along with the map, explaining some of the names, the history, the points of interest.

Which is ultimately the RPG purpose of a gazetteer: to expand the setting by trying to provide players with places to go and things to do there. A gazetteer is both limited in scope and yet has to strive to give the PCs some interest in the area - "An Adventurer's Guide to Iowa" might be a tad difficult, but would probably focus on the possibilities for nefaious cults trying to influence candidates for the election, etc.

I use Iowa as a starting point because gazeteers set in the real world have a considerable challenge over, say, Bilbo's Guide to Mordor. You can already find out far more than you would ever want to know about Iowa from Wikipedia and other sources, because it is a real-world place. Entire books have, somehow, been written about Iowa. It is seldom a very exciting or diverse or interesting place, and people that are born there usually try to escape, but that is not anything that makes for a particularly good RPG product. Fantasy settings, by contrast, can be very exciting because they aren't bound to be boring.

Which is generally why, in Shadowrun, history lessons are worthless. "How it came to pass" is not something you generally need to cover beyond the immediate needs of the setting. This is something Call of Cthulhu never manages because a large part of the game usually involves some deeply secret history which the PCs are required to uncover and forms an intimate part of game and the setting, but for Shadowrun Al Capone is...not generally relevant. Prohibition was over a hundred years ago. They're more concerned with the giant bugs and things which are trying to eat them now.

But it also underscores how absolutely shallow all gazetteers ultimately must be - there simply isn't the pagespace to cover everything in real-world depth, and if there was nobody would read it anyway. Most people never read about all the Dales in the Forgotten Realms - why would they?

So it's generally a point of trying to come up with a suitably pithy Hitchhiker's Guide entry - hopefully longer than "Mostly harmless" - and in many settings you could do a lot worse than setting up your gazetteer as an actual in-universe physical or electronic document, since that allows you to assume a certain voice and communicate something of the tone of the setting. If you add in annotations or comment, you can also get that unique frission between two sources that disagree, revealing author bias and unreliability that gives wiggle room for players and gamemasters to decide what is true about certain things in their own game.

[angelfromanotherpin]

For formatting tips, I would look at the GURPS 3e setting books, which are very highly regarded.

As a consumer, what I want to know is: 'what stories can be told in this setting that can't be told anywhere else?' I can't tell you how many setting guides have tried to sell me on the same sort of generic adventure/intrigue activities that could take place in, like, historical France.

[OgreBattle]

A nice illustration of what the local sexy woman is like helps




The top seems like I'll meet one in a non-combat setting and perhaps use social skills, the bottom implies sexy violence