12.2 Creating a Setting

Basic Concept and Description

The basic concept for your setting should tie directly to the mood and content that you’ve selected for your game. If your mood is dark and gritty, your setting should have a fitting concept, such as a nation under the rule of an oppressive force, a free-for-all area where might makes right, and so on. If on the other hand your mood is bright and silly, your setting would have a concept that fits that mood.

Your setting can be large or small, depending on what the focus of your game is. It can consist of a whole star system with different planets or of a single high school class in the middle of a big city. Either way, you can always expand on it or add additional detail during the game.

Describing your setting doesn’t have to take very long. You can usually express the concept and basic details of a setting in just a paragraph or two. The rest of the setting can be developed through the PCs’ background items and links, various story seeds, and whatever you happen to throw out in play.

Many people like to establish large-scale facts about their settings. For example, they’d say: “In this setting, there are migglys, which are small humanoids that love to play tricks on people.” That’s fine for creating a rough impression, but for a game like Anima Prime, it’s important that those facts are generalizations and don’t need to all be memorized and always followed. So while most migglys are culturally trained to play tricks, there are sure to be some migglys who are completely turned off by the whole affair. In other words, feel free to create large-scale generalizations, but don’t be constrained by them. Actually, these kinds of generalized facts are most interesting when the PCs or other main characters prove to be the exception to the rule.

Creating a setting can take a few minutes or a couple of hours, depending on how customized you want it to be regarding powers, factions, and so on. Both GM and players can and should be involved in most aspects of setting creation, and PC creation will help to flesh out the setting and tie the main characters of the story into it.

Player Characters

The PCs are going to be tied into the setting. They either live inside of it or are thrust into it at the beginning of your story. Either way, they need to interact with it.

When you create your setting, keep an eye on what kinds of characters could be PCs and what they would be doing. Is there room for different roles? Are there struggles going on that the PCs could join in? As long as there’s room for adventure and drama in your setting for strong protagonists, you’re good to go.

Powers, Effects, Eidolons

One of the things to consider in creating your setting is the place that powers have within it. Are they common or rare? Inborn, trained, cybernetically implanted, or magically bestowed? How do everyday people feel about people with powers?

You also need to decide whether all of the powers are available, or whether some of them just don’t happen in this setting. Once you’ve got that figured out, think about whether your setting could use a custom power or two that you make up at this point. The Ghostfield example setting has a few you can look at to see what I mean.

The same goes for custom effects and eidolons. If your setting needs a few of those that are specially designed for it, making them up before you start playing allows the PCs access to them right away.

It might be tempting to come up with a whole bunch of new stuff for the players to pick before you start playing, but it’s definitely not a prerequisite. There are enough powers, effects, and eidolons available that you don’t need anything else to have fun. And if you want to add things later on, you can always do that, and PCs can acquire additional powers according to whatever character development system you’ve set up (see chapter 8).

Factions

As an extension of the basic concept as well as the question of what the player characters can get involved in, you can create specific factions that exist within the setting. You don’t have to create any of their specific pillars or other details before you start; you can always fill that in later.

Factions, even if you don’t use the optional faction rules (see chapter 9), add an element of choice and depth to the setting. The PCs can join or side with one faction over another, play one against the other, suffer the animosity of a whole faction because they messed with one of their members, and so on. Factions also provide a great opportunity for links with PCs, NPCs, and story events.

You can always add factions later on during play as well.

Setting Story Seed

Once you’ve figured out what your setting usually is like, it’s time for the GM to create a way in which it is changing. This is called a setting story seed. Such a seed is an event or dynamic that has the power to change things about the setting and in which the PCs can get involved, if they want to.

Setting story seeds can range from the blatantly obvious and aggressive (an invading force) to the subtle (the water from the river has started to taste metallic) to the weird and ominous (a black skyscraper just appeared in the middle of the city, and most people act as though it’s always been there).

Like with all story seeds, you don’t have to know a thing about why this is happening, who’s doing it, or where it’s going. It’s a seed that you can develop spontaneously as you play. You can tie it to other events, the group story seed, individual character story seeds, links, traits, and other in-game occurrences. Over time, you’ll figure out a way to make it matter, and the PCs can decide if they want to get involved and push the development of the seed and the setting in one direction or another.

You can develop more than one setting story seed for your setting, but one is usually enough to get things going.