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GameMastery Guide / Getting Started / Creating a Campaign Guide

Voice

Source GameMastery Guide pg. 20
Voice is how the guide conveys the content to the reader. It includes choices like viewpoint, tone, and style, which can not only affect how the content is conveyed, but can also provide additional information and insight for players in and of itself. The two main approaches to voice are an “inside” or subjective voice, or an “outside” or objective voice.

Subjective Voice: This method presents some or all of the content of the campaign guide in the form of fictional documents or dialogues, such as travelogues, journals, letters, or scholarly works written by people in the setting. Subjective voice documents are heavy with setting-specific flavor and present a strong point of view, a fictional window into the world for the reader. On the other hand, they can be biased or incomplete, and they tend to provide less information in the same amount of space than documents written in objective voice. These qualities can be good things, especially if you want players to initially receive somewhat biased or inaccurate information about things, but crafting such documents typically involves more work. Subjective voice presentation can serve double duty by introducing players to the fictional authors of the documents in addition to the subjects they discuss. For example, if the party is likely to interact with a certain sage or noble in the setting, perhaps part of the campaign guide can be written in that character’s voice. This way, when the game starts, the players already have a feeling of “knowing” that character.

Objective Voice: This style of guide is written from the perspective of the Game Master and exists outside of the setting. This approach allows for a broader perspective in campaign guide materials, in which you can provide comparisons to modern examples and discuss things a subjective author might not know. Objective voice tends to be more concise because you can say exactly what you mean without having to phrase it in terms an insetting character would use. This lets you provide more information in less space, saving time and effort if they are at a premium.

Combining Voices: Of course, you can also mix subjective and objective voice in your guide. You might use a primarily objective voice to provide the bulk of the information and then put the information into context with snippets or examples of subjective voice, such as quotations from in-setting characters or even more involved things like sketched-out maps.

Archives of Nethys

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Voice