"Green" World Design

The world is dying! The temperatures are rising (or falling, or just changing, depending on who you ask)! The landfills are exploding! They tell us that if we don't recycle, we're all going to die!

Well, I'm gonna do my part to save the earth! I'm going to start by recycling campaign settings!

Like a lot of people who have been into fantasy gaming for 20+ years, I've got a huge pile of notes on my main homebrew campaign world, which has seen quite a few adventures and had a heaping dose of "development" over the years. However, as I went back recently to see about reviving the old girl for another spin, I realized she had developed a few problems:

1. Clairmont (or maybe Carter) Syndrome, resulting from too many "important" plot threads dropped by the PCs (including some that really should have ended the world already), resulting in
   
2. Continuity lockout for new players.
3. Both of these, moreover, were the end-result of trying to turn the campaign into a Jordanesque BIG EPIC FANTASY in my college years.
4. There just wasn't that much left that was original about the world that I wanted to work with.
   

At the same time, however, I found that there was a great deal of background material about my world that I had written but which none of the players had ever really gotten into. Cultures, history, encounter tables, etc. all lay tucked away in scraps of paper and files on my computer, looking forlornly out at me like a rabble of Dicksonian orphans.

So I'm salvaging them, recycling them into the backdrop of a new campaign world, along with all of my old favorite modules and quite a few dungeon and wilderness maps.

All authors, whether professional or amateur, steal from someone. Might as well start burglarizing my own home.

Hat tip: Making B2 Green