The reason, I believe, that Sturgeon's Law applies is because with Fantasy settings you are attempting to satisfy two contradictory conditions for success: Familiarity and Novelness. As a writer you want there to be something familiar about the setting so as to be able to draw people into it easier than a completely unfamiliar world. Say, you have a race of magical beings that you call "Elves". At the same time you're attempting to have something new or different so as to give your audience a reason to keep going with what you're doing. Say that your "Elves" are all clones of Elvis who fell into their world through a hole in time and space. Now, showing that twist to your readers too early on and you risk loosing them for any number of reasons, but not having that twist in there at all and you end up having to fall back on characters in the setting to be even more compelling.

With a novel or short story that's not such a big deal. They're supposed to have compelling characters. In a role playing game, its just plain ruinous because the compelling characters are supposed to be supplied by the people playing the game.

Which brings up the second paradox of a fantasy world builders have to deal with. How to allow the players to be important. There is no "with" or "or" in conjunction here. That one sentence is the paradox. Players are going to want to be important in some way. Otherwise, what's the point? I can be unimportant in my job. I can be unimportant in the grocery store. Part of the fun of diving into to RPGs is to take on that thing which is important. If you don't give the GM some where to make these characters to be important to, then you've just make their job that much harder and you may end up loosing a good number of potential buyers for your work.

But how important do you allow the characters to be to the story being told through the setting? And important in what way?

The quickest and easiest way to establish the importance of characters is to allow the players to make them unique. Or as unique as the players want. I am guilty as much as any other role player for basing some of my characters off of others from fiction I am familiar with. In my own game system, this is where the system's rules come in to contact with the setting. The setting is a large part of the list of skills and abilities and the other neat things that the player gets to do when creating a character. Without the setting these lists can get very generic, very dull. There are only so many ways one can describe the skill needed to wield a sword effectively. But being able to describe an esoteric technique only taught by the monks in a far away distant mountain monastery? That is just one way of getting the mind of the player into the setting and the game.

Things get harder after that. Where did the monks come from and why are they living far away and in the mountains? How does one get to be part of that group and be taught their secret, deadly techniques? The players are going to want to know.

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As I've noted in a previously, the setting for my game was born out of unfinished story I wrote during my college years. That fact of the matter is that I only decided to make it that way, later on.

Bauxe has grown by leaps and bounds as I've worked on this project. Starting off as just a city I have since added the "Old Kingdoms", the place were the people who now inhabit Bauxe came from, a slew of races besides just plain old humanity, a lost civilization, and an entire cosmology that didn't exist in that angst ridden spattering of words written nearly ten years ago.

Some of the biggest hurdles I had to leap to get this far had to have been the cosmology. It was difficult because I have a philosophical thing against the very idea of gods/Gods that had to be overcome for it to work. I started clichéd, at the beginning, and started writing a bible of sorts. Not an authoritative source, just some words that would try and explain a history of the universe. I created five beings that I call "Makers",  that I labeled according to their contributions to the Universe. There is the Maker-of-Forces (physics), the Maker-of-Things (mass, matter, and magic), the Maker-of-Gap (change), the Maker-of-Time (duh!), and the Maker-of-Noise (chaos). This particular naming scheme is subject to abuses I only became aware of after the fact. There is also an Un-Maker which has yet to be introduced anywhere.

And so I wrote up how they created the universe, the first worlds, the first life, and so on and so forth.

Stuff that doesn't really matter to what the characters do on a daily basis. But it does give me a point to work from for other things which the players do care about like explaining why there is magic and how the characters are able use it. Now, granted, I had already decided that there was going to be magic in the world, and there are some players for whom this is enough. But there is something of a need for me to try to complete a simple set of rules for this play universe to be run by. I can't really explain it any other way.

Eventually some of this material about the creation of the Universe will make it into the novel I wrote last year for Nano that I'm going to be using as a base or introduction to the setting. That novel currently resides on my harddrive awaiting a rewrite.

Another way in which Bauxe grew was to give it places for things to happen in. Places for characters to go exploring. To that end I created several "districts" to the city. Places I gave name to include "The Knocks", "The Market", "The Black Alley", "Beggar's Way", "Mayor's Row", "Barney's Discount Emporium", and ever so clever "Docks". After which it became all about the history of these and other unmentioned places. One of the techniques I use to relate the history of Bauxe to the players was through a conversation with a bar patron although that could use some re-framing and rewriting eventually. Most of the players, I imagine, will have characters who grew up in Bauxe and should know some of that stuff.

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A part of the fantasy genre that is hard to get away from is the idea of different species of sentience sharing a common lands. Or not so common lands. It is something that it shares with Science Fiction. Ideally, the idea is to attempt examination of humans and their world through non-human eyes. The question to put to the world-builder is exactly what are you attempting to examine through the creation of the different species, if your ideas even get to that level of cleverness. And I am not saying they have to, but I have found that it does help to give your fans something to think about. Part of fulfilling those expectation from the first paradox.

Another idea that is hard to get away from in fantasy worlds is class structures and struggles. While I could go down Marx's path and argue everything has to do about class struggles, the medieval and European renaissance periods from which a lot of fantasy writer draw societal inspiration from is strongly rooted in such. So it seems to be a natural fit to do the same in your own. I have to wonder about that. Is it not possible to have a more egalitarian society in such a setting or must there always be divisions? Do people really want to be that different from one another that they'll bring their old preconceived notions to a place that doesn't have any such markings from the old?

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Bauxe as a setting has a fair amount of mish-mashed ideas and half completed concepts. This is easily seen in the way I have the races currently described.

Besides Humans, Bauxe is filled with the Qu'ar (nicknamed Slights because of how they seem to be only "slightly" there), Nomads, Roughs, Scitters, Rooted, and the Brutes. The Qu'ar are semi-elvish in as much as they have pointed ears and tendencies towards a longer view of life. Nomads, while I clarify this in the novel, are thought to be cousins to the Slights and have spent millennial living off of the plains surrounding Bauxe. Roughs have the least amount of background and are a reptilian race. I'm not sure why it is I even have them in there, other than to give that choice to players. Scitters are a combination of goblins and insects. They're from another world but were trapped on Bauxe's planet eons ago. Nobody knows this yet and I've not had a chance to get to that in the novel. Rooted are my version of the Ents. I've always have been amused by the idea of Tolkien's, but at the same time they seem to be woefully underused in LotR's lore. It seems like I've spent an inordinate amount of time and effort on their description and background compared to other races.

Which leaves the Brutes and Humans. The Brutes are an engineered race. One created to fight in a war some ten thousand years in the past. Again, this is not something known in the current time of Bauxe, but that much has been developed and written into my notes. Otherwise they're simply what their name says; strong, resilient, and almost tireless. Civilization has changed them the most out of all of the races I have created for the settings so far.

Humans are humans. There is no difference between what I see everyday and what I've written.

The twist in the rules here is that I've decided to make everybody good at something. Humans included. If you look at most RPGs, there is usually one race that doesn't really get anything special about them. Most of the time, that's Humans. This has always bugged me, so I changed it for my own.

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Of everything I've put together in the setting I am most happy with the magic. Or magick. Or Majic. Or whatever. I keep experimenting with spelling to see if there isn't something different I can bring out in the word that seems more appropriate to Bauxe. Anyways, I'm happy with it because of what I have been able to give to the player though it.

Magic in Bauxe is the conscious shaping of the Aether. Aether is best understood as another energy source in this universe that certain people have the ability to wield through focused thought. It is not the same Aether as was coined in the previous versions of science that we all know of, but instead I've decided to define it as the potential that exists between the condensation of energy into mass. People who are able to shape that potential are said to possess "The Gift". I've not yet decided how or what allows players (a special organ or something) to do so, but I'll eventually come up with it. I'm a big fan of the whole rational/scientific magic idea despite my first few attempts at writing up magic for the setting were going in the opposite direction. What changed was my view of the phenomenon. Given any person with any sort of curiosity whatsoever that is able to wield magic, they're going to want to try to understand how it works and if they are able to get the same results using the same techniques time and time again. Maybe not in the completely lab/experimental science of today going for complete qualitative and quantitative answers, but more of a crafting "add substance B in order for the glass to turn blue" sort.

I've not yet had a chance in the setting of Bauxe or in the novel to explain this, and so, exists only here and in my notes.

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After I have got most of this information (and more! there is always more to write about when it comes to the setting) all packaged up and ready to go, there is still the matter of letting it go. No matter what hooks I may place in the material for GMs to use there will be those who attempt to create new stories in the setting that have nothing to do with what I may imagine (and eventually write) the ultimate outcome. And that's a pretty strange feeling. To know that this world may exist out there in parallel with a hundred others which have been similarly created with the goal of having fun and exploring. This setting has been a fount of expression for me, a place where I have had the chance to explore portions of my personal philosophy and illustrate ideas that have been hiding in the corners of my mind for years.