Gazetteer Template

Last week, I talked about how best to organise setting details, specifically creating a gazetteer outline. So let’s do that.

There are tons of gazetteer formats in the RPG wilds, ranging from the short capsule hexcrawl descriptions in Judges’ Guild Wilderlands setting to the long narrative hardback sourcebooks of D&D’s Forgotten Realms. I’m perhaps showing my age, but the gazetteers I’m most familiar with are those describing the Known World of Mystara. These had a solid mix of narrative descriptions alongside new rules, classes, spells, and monsters. The latter bits excited me the most. Indeed – I skipped most of the prose and went straight for the “mechanical” elements I could bolt onto my own game.

This is a good validation of the less is more approach: game masters may simply ignore setting information that isn’t immediately applicable to their setting. Unless you were playing a canonical Mystara campaign, the Gazetteer narratives offer much less than the classes, spells, monsters, and rule mods that you could drop into your own setting (and which do a great job of setting description all by themselves).

This is the model I’ll use for the Isle of Minocra: I’ll describe the setting in terms of NPCs, races, monsters, encounters, and treasure that game masters can use as-is or tweak for their own game. Everything else – history, background, the rationale for how things got to be the way they are today – is implied through those “mechanical” elements, for use by the GM as he or she sees fit for their setting, not mine.

Gazetteer Format

I’ve combed through various gazetteer formats, both for game settings and for real-life places. Turns out there’s no single, proper outline for a gazetteer – it’s all a matter of what the author wants to describe about a place, and where he or she chooses to place emphasis. Gazetteers can be dry rosters of quantitative data (e.g., The Domesday Book) or colorful almanacs of maps and fun facts (e.g., Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine). That said, I’m leaning toward something like this:

1. Introduction [updated 5/4/18]
   1. Setting elevator pitch – the context for everything else; should imply tech level
      1. Title and Tag – the setting’s name and a one-line description of the action
      2. Opening Crawl Trailer – setting synopsis (think of the scrolling text at the beginning of every Star Wars movie)
   2. Conspectus – thoughts, concepts, and references that evoke the setting and its flavour
   3. Gazetteer format – describes things in game terms, using as a reference, dropping into an existing setting
   4. Using the Gazetteer – advice for dropping into the GM’s own setting
2. Geography Atlas [updated 5/9/18]
   1. Map – the highest-scale hex map of the setting, including fixed encounter locations; everything that follows is somewhere on this map
   2. Regions – a breakdown of official or de facto regions/districts on the map, with random encounter tables; may or may not include child maps
   3. Fixed encounter descriptions in capsule format; descriptions should note any prominent monsters, loot, or NPCs, but avoid full stat blocks
3. Players’ guide [updated 5/21/18]
   1. Starting points – homebase descriptions, with NPCs and high-level features (e.g., goods and services in a settlement); could include zoomed-in maps
   2. Adventure hooks – rumours, events, and conflicts of which the PCs are aware because they’re in the setting (I’ll treat these as “current events” that must be fleshed out by the GM)
   3. Character options
      1. Races – race descriptions, brief cultural notes
      2. Classes – class descriptions, brief notes about their role in the setting (e.g., notes about religion expressed through a cleric class description, arcane rules for mages, fighting orders for warriors, etc.)
      3. Perks & Flaws – though these terms are specific to Chimera, think of it as a placeholder for new or modified feats, skills, aspects, etc. – whatever your game uses – that players can choose during character generation
   4. Equipment – any new or modified armour, weapons, vehicles, ammo, gear, etc. plus any special notes about currency or modes of exchange
4. Game Moderators’ guide [updated 5/21/18]
   1. Adventures – missions or quests the GM can run in the setting; these would be abbreviated, like Johnn Four’s 5-room Dungeon format and could include maps
   2. Monsters – new beasties to unleash
   3. Treasure – shiny new things for the PCs to covet, especially rare, unique, or enchanted items
   4. Rules- any new or modified rules, adjustments to existing mechanics, or ways of handling things specific to the setting (again, make this specific to your game system)
5. Appendices
   1. Blank version of the Atlas map the GM can tweak for his or her own purposes (e.g., make a players’ map)
   2. Players’ Guide (1 page summary of players’ guide above, given as player handout) [added 5/3/18]
   3. System notes or conversion guidelines?

Final Notes

This is my first draft of the format, and I suspect other necessary entries will reveal themselves when I start organising the Minocra material. That said, I’d like to limit the final page count to 16 – certainly no more than 20.

What do you think? Given the conceit that this is supposed to be a quick-reference document the GM can expand upon, what doesn’t fit or what else would you like to see?