I am a worldbuilder. I cannot help myself. It’s simply so easy to be sucked into a new writing project and lose myself in the possibilities of a new setting. That is very fun, but it causes problems. Getting lost in the worldbuilding is the writer’s equivalent of getting lost in the weeds. You think you’ll do just enough worldbuilding to get you started, but that spirals out of control, and you find yourself calculating the conversion rates between various currencies. The dangers of RPG worldbuilding, am I right?
This is particularly difficult for me in terms of tabletop RPG settings. They practically beg for the nitty-gritty details. When I play games, I want enough narrative and mechanical hooks to interact with the world in unique and meaningful ways. Not just to interact, but also to find the story immersive. It puts me in an odd spot in the narrative/crunch spectrum, as I’m not fully a fan of purely narrative games, nor am I a big fan of ultra-crunchy games. Instead, I’m trying to find that sweet spot where narrative and mechanics synergize. I don’t know if it exists or if I’m chasing the Questing Beast.
Fortunately, EDGE Studio’s Genesys game has been the closest I have ever found to that goal. For those unaware, Genesys is the generic evolution of the Star Wars trio of core rulebooks from Fantasy Flight Games. The Edge of the Empire beginner game was the first tabletop RPG I played. I’ve run multiple campaigns with Star Wars since, and I will freely admit that Iron Horizons is heavily influenced by those, along with other sources I can get into later if people want.
The challenge is that I get lost in the worldbuilding aspect rather than the actual game aspect. Not helpful when you’re trying to create a tabletop RPG setting. It’s why my other big TTRPG setting (Laeonesse) has been stuck in limbo for multiple years. Granted, that one attempts to hack 5E (and now 5.5E) into a different feeling setting. I’ve tried dozens of productivity and project management methods to counter that. I have yet to be successful. Hopefully, this time it will change.
Minimum Viable Product Setting
Why would it change? I’m embracing the idea of a minimum viable setting, which I took from the idea of a minimum viable product, which I heard about from my local independent bookstore when they wrote about the minimum viable bookstore. At the most basic level, an MVP is a product that has only the bare necessities (insert Disney song here) to meet its intended function. It primarily comes from the business and software worlds, where a company would release a bare-bones product, see what comes back in user feedback, and then shape future development.
This helps ensure time and resources are not wasted on things that people don’t want. As resources and feedback come in, those are reinvested to increase functionality based on user feedback. Or, in my case, it gives me a very narrow scope to work on that will prevent me from getting consumed by scope creep.
There’s been lots of discussion about what makes a minimum viable TTRPG, with some very heated discussions resulting. There’s much less discussion on what that is for a tabletop RPG setting. Fortunately, Genesys helps us out here. The core rule book (CRB) has several settings included, while the Expanded Player’s Guide (EPG) has some additional ones. They also have full source books for the Twilight Imperium, Realms of Terrinoth, Keyforge: Secrets of the Crucible, and Android: Shadow of the Beanstalk.
The core book’s space opera setting (and Twilight Imperium sample setting) is much more useful. That gives us a pretty solid comparison of what the Genesys designers think constitutes a minimum viable setting. Additionally, we have the setting creation sheet and expanded setting creation sheets, which give us a structure to begin exploring this idea.
There aren’t many setting guides in the Genesys Foundry, which is the community content program. A quick check reveals roughly twenty items that can be considered setting guides. Of the forty-four items under that category, the rest are supporting material for official settings. Some notable ones include Inquisition: Medieval Dark Fantasy Setting, Arcanum Spell Noir, Awakened Age: Superhero Genesys Setting, Something Strange: Genesys Modern Horror, and *Mad Science! A Retro Sci-Fi Genesys Setting and Crafting Supplement. (Yes, these are all affiliate links, as are the links to the CRB and EPG below)
Minimum Viable Genesys Settings?
More importantly for us, EDGE studio put out two worksheets to help create settings: the Genesys setting worksheet and the Genesys expanded setting creation sheet. You can find both of these on EDGE’s website here. I highly recommend you get a copy of each while I go through the expanded sheet for Iron Horizons. The original sheet is a single page, which gives us a good idea of what the core book considers a minimum viable setting. The Expanded Player’s Guide, however, has a seven-page sheet, as is befitting a book that focuses on expanding material from the original book.
The one-page sheet includes space for the name, base setting/genre, tone, tropes & themes, setting-specific skills, factions & organizations, movers & shakers (important individuals, essentially), species types, and technology level. That’s it. In the tropes and themes section, I do appreciate how it includes questions about what tropes the setting is embracing and which ones they are subverting. That adds a unique twist to a TTRPG setting. Usually, TTRPG settings uphold tropes rather than intentionally subvert them.
This sheet aligns most closely with the settings we see in the CRB. For the most part, these settings are genres or sub-genres, rather than specific setting names. Examples include Weird War, Sci-Fi, Fantasy, Space Opera, Modern Day, and Steampunk. The EPG adds Age of Myth, Monsterworld (modern day/historical people hunting monsters, think Dracula or Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Supernatural), and Post-Apocalypse. Interestingly enough, these are not so much settings as they are genres. Sub-genres may be the better term, according to our earlier discussion, since it includes sci-fi, space opera, and steampunk. For this, we can just call them settings.
What’s included in the core book settings?
To follow along, you’ll want the Genesys Core Rulebook and the Expanded Player’s Guide. First, we’ll take a look at the space opera setting in the CRB, as well as the sample setting (Twilight Imperium). Five tropes make up the entire basic setting. For Genesys, when we mention tropes, we’re usually looking at a few hundred-word discussion about an idea that often occurs in the genre. Space opera includes such tropes as Grand Stories, Singular Heroes, High Stakes; Impossible Technology? No Big Deal, Broad Strokes for a Bigger Canvas; and Aliens and Androids.
That’s it. We only get details when we look at the sample setting, Twilight Imperium, originally a board game. They took that setting and turned it into a TTRPG setting focused on the Keleres (a group of agents and troubleshooters for the galactic council).
To begin with, we have a roughly one-page (double column) overview of the setting. It includes history, major factions, and key elements of the universe that can act as plot hooks either for adventures or full campaigns.
It then moves to the character options added for the setting. This includes four new archetypes (which in D&D would be races/species), but oddly, no careers (which are similar to D&D classes). It continues into equipment with thirteen new weapons, three new types of armor, and four pieces of gear. Not that much, to be honest. The EPG settings have a little bit more, but essentially the same setup.
It finishes up with five new setting-specific adversaries. These are pretty generic examples, including space pirate, xenomorph horror, nano-swarm, telepath, and alien warlord. Granted, as a whole, generic is how Genesys (Again, Generic System) operates. The assumption has always been that the core book is a toolkit to build something with, rather than something already built and ready to take out of the box.
We do have a framework for what the designers consider a minimum viable setting:
- 1-2 page setting overview that discusses history, factions, key elements, tropes, and themes
- 4 character archetypes
- ~20 new setting-specific pieces of equipment
- 4-5 setting-specific adversaries
For comparison, we can look at the Twilight Imperium **setting guide— Embers of the Imperium. For comparison, this book includes 15 species as archetypes and 9 new careers. Additionally, the number of new pieces of equipment is upwards of 100, and new vehicles number around 70 (including the different versions for different factions). That is a huge increase in content.
Setting Worksheets?
Now, for this section, you can check out the two setting sheets here. They’re free to download and open up a PDF file that anyone can use. The basic one is a single sheet, focusing on the tropes, themes, major organizations, major NPCs, setting-specific skills, and a little bit about technology level. Very, very basic. Useful for a minimum viable setting? I’m less convinced. They’d work pretty well for a one-shot, I think, but I’d have a hard time finding them a compelling setting. They lack a narrative, or at least a metanarrative, that shapes the world. When I talk about fantasy after this series, I’ll try and go a bit more into that idea. They do, however, work fairly well to create the sort of setting represented in the CRB and EPG.
I’ll be focusing on the second worksheet for this series. It goes more in-depth into locations, NPCs, organizations, and other elements that drive stories forward, which I think are what make a setting, compared to a genre. I’m not a huge fan of “kitchen sink” settings (A “kitchen sink” setting is a setting that has all the ideas, tropes, and concepts included). The most famous one is the Forgotten Realms from Dungeons & Dragons.
One of the reasons I was more than happy when the new Star Wars canon eliminated the Yuuzhan Vong, along with a few other elements that I thought fit quite badly with the setting’s core.
I recognize why TTRPG companies would develop these settings. It’s cheaper and more efficient to develop one setting that can concentrate the purchaser pool than to develop multiple settings that might splinter their customer base into even smaller ones. Most people know
The setting worksheet does a good job of preventing many of the problems I have with a kitchen sink setting from developing accidentally. It certainly allows you to make one intentionally, but I think it’s difficult to wander into one with this worksheet.
So… now what?
I’ll go through the first introductory sections of the worksheet in the next post, focusing on Iron Horizons, and work through the entire process. I’ll cover the content so folks can preview new Iron Horizons material, mechanical and worldbuilding, and reflect on the process. Hopefully, this will help people feel more comfortable making settings with Genesys. And fingers crossed, some of you will want to play or run games. Maybe even with Iron Horizons!
In the meantime, what does a tabletop rpg setting need for you? Is there a minimum viable setting that you’ve found enjoyable to run or play in? If so, let us know!
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