My Thracia's Setting
I have a confession to make: I didn't bother prepping a setting for this campaign.
It's weird. Normally I like to indulge in some worldbuilding, especially if I am running a more long-form campaign. Uncanny Earth was the last time I did that, and it was so much fun mashing X-Men up with MCC. It was also a lot. So much of my worldbuilding for Uncanny Earth didn't come up at all in play. I assume this is a skill issue on my part, but it's also a bit of a given when running a sandbox. It's part of the deal of letting players choose their own path.
This time I felt like doing things a bit differently. Funnily enough it didn't start that way when I first began prepping Caverns of Thracia. Back when I planned to run this with my home group, Thracia was part of a larger sandbox. I'd even thrown together some ideas of a setting. The dungeon was to be located on a plateau within a vast desert that used to be an ocean, dried up long ago after a magical calamity (because this is D&D). I liked the idea, but it did feel specific to that table which did not end up forming.
Fast forward a few months and I decided to run Thracia as an open table on a public discord. While I did not exactly start from scratch, most of the original setting ideas got scrapped. The primary reason for this is that I wanted sessions to purely focus on dungeon-crawling and so I actively avoided prepping anything outside of it. This may seem restrictive, but Thracia is massive. It's not the biggest megadungeon, but it is a megadungeon nonetheless which means there is enough content here to last me quite a while.
To me, megadungeons are settings unto themselves. I really felt this when I played in Arden Vul briefly. Not once did I think "it would be cool to check out another dungeon". I am still confident that Thracia is enough on it's own for the purpose of my campaign. I'm not against including more adventure sites in the future, but I'm not calling it a Thracia campaign for nothing.
The thing is, Thracia does not come with much setting detail beyond some context for the dungeon's history. Of course, being a megadungeon, the assumption is that a town would be nearby, but which town it is and where it is located relative to the dungeon is left entirely up to the GM. There is some light suggestions for where to place the dungeon within a larger game world that basically amounts to: whichever part of your world looks like Greece. Fair enough.
Knowing that I was going to handle town via play by post, I did not get too invested in prepping it as an adventure location. I've had great experiences with sessions spent entirely within town, where players politick, carouse and investigate, but I did not want that to take up game-time which was to be dungeon focused. As such, I threw together a few notes on the nearby town, which I named Minos.
Minos is a small village mostly inhabited by local tribes who have made homes out of the old ruins of what was probably a nice place once. It is now being rebuilt by the Thracian Revival Company, and the idea here is that it will grow over time as the dungeon starts to boost the economy. In it's default state, there really isn't much going on here. You have your basic shops which supply and outfit adventurers with mundane gear and you have your shitty little tavern for light carousing.
The idea behind the Thracian Revival Company was to provide an in-world explanation for the presence of adventurers and a kind of loose justification for the open-table format. They also provide me with a new faction I could use, which would be made up primarily of adventurers. By default the PCs are sponsored by this faction, who provide basic accommodations and meals, but they may decide to break from it at any point.
The Company's founder, the elusive Orpheus, is a carryover from the old prep I did for my home game. I liked the idea of a shadowy figure behind the enterprise the players are involved with. On a basic level he is the richest man they know of, so any high-value treasure will likely be sold to him or his company, but he is shrouded in mystery and not easy to trust. It's up to them whether they want to continue being sponsored by his Expedition or to strike out on their own.
That was pretty much all the setup I had going for the wider world when we first started playing. Everything else came from the players and my efforts to react to their activity. For example, it dawned on me that because a few of the players were interested in the Bronze Age setting their characters were coming in from real world places and cultures. I thought this was actually very fitting given that Thrace was an ancient civilization in our real world. Why shouldn't the players be coming from real cultures too?
At the same time, I never specified that this was a human-only campaign, so while it seemed more and more that we were playing on Earth, elves, dwarved, halflings, goblins and orcs existed here, as well as all the fantastical creatures included in the dungeon. Furthermore, I also did not specify that players had to follow real-world ancient deities, and so a few worshippers of the Shadowdark pantheon made their appearance as well.
Rather than chafe at these contradictions I decided it would be more fun to embrace them. Yes, this is a world where a god named Ord is worshipped, but so is Zeus. Yes, this campaign is taking place in the Mediterranean right after the Bronze Age collapse, and yet elves wander the forests. Yes people still worship Zeus, Athena, Ares and other deities from across antiquity, but there are also worshippers of a new pantheon made up of Ord, Memnon, Ramlaat, Madeera, Shun and St. Ydris. So to me at least it gives me the feeling that we're playing in the twilight years of a Mythic Earth. Vibes wise it reminds me of that one Fafhrd and Grey Mauser story where Ningauble transports them to bronze age Earth and they end up having to fight a sorcerer.
What's been refreshing is how much this feels like yes-anding the players' choices. I honestly don't know what Elven culture is in this setting, but I can always just ask the Elf player. If I get two different answers from two different players, I can live with that contradiction, it makes the world feel more real, actually. Rather than say that the Shadowdark pantheon and the Ancient Greek one are separate cosmic entities, I can run with the idea that perhaps these are just new names given to old Gods, and that deities across different cultures are actually all manifestations of the same core ideas and beliefs. This is especially useful in the context of Thanatos, who is the Thracian god of death. Thanatos is a real entity in the caverns, but he is certainly not the only god of death. He is just one of many, which leads me to think that he is just one expression of a universal idea.
This openness to just letting the setting be something the table creates through play and discussion leads to a richness in the world we're inhabiting. I also feel like handling the wider world via PbP gives me the time to think and respond to player investigation on the wider world. If a question needs answering, I am not under any time pressure to come up with an immediate answer. I can sit and ponder for a bit.
At the end of the day most of this stuff is just flavor, but it does help contextualize who the PCs are in this world and where they come from. It also can play a significant role when it comes to downtime. I love hearing my players suggest they want to pray at their god's temple, or take on scholarly pursuits. It feels like an invitation to build more of the world together.
Crucially for me, it means I can build this world as needed and not cram a bunch of detail into my notes that won't end up serving anything. Mid-session this kind of worldbuilding on the fly would be overwhelming. But over a week of discord conversations it's actually super chill. And I like my hobby to be chill, ultimately.