Story and World Topics

[jacook]

I may have missed this somewhere, anyone know what the differences and relationships are between story and world topics?

[lfseeney]

I have found none, maybe just to help us keep them straight.

[zarlor]

It's just organizational, I believe. Story topics are things meant for use in a game session whereas World topics might be for background topics. So maybe Thor plays a big part in your current campaign you might have him listed as a Story topic, but maybe the rest of the Norse pantheon play only minor roles, or maybe for other pantheons that aren't prevalent in the area of the world your players are in you might keep those as World topics.

[Silveras]

Yes, that's one of the questions asked in THIS thread, and the answer I gave there is much like zarlor's here.

[Precisi]

Yup, generally they explained it how Silveras did in the other thread. Basically the World Almanac is for larger world setting stuff, like if you were doing Forgotten Realms, that'd be all the World/Genre/theme stuff. Then anything individual to your campaign that you're running would be in the Story. Named NPCs, specific items, etc.

[rob]

The main reason behind this distinction is to reduce clutter. If you have a large realm, you'll constantly be sifting through everything. However, your game really centers on only a subset of that material at any one time. By allowing you to move all the non-central material into the World Almanac, you can work with a much simpler set of data in the Story Almanac. All the links between topics exist, but the clutter is greatly reduced. This speeds up finding material when you're looking for it and reduces the distractions that may otherwise arise from wading through vast amounts of data.

For example, if you're running a game in the Forgotten Realms, there's a vast array of material about the setting. If the players are operating in and around Waterdeep, you really don't need to have all the material from the other regions cluttering up the list of topics shown in the navigation pane on the left. In fact, you probably don't even need to have the whole of Waterdeep shown. So you can leave the bulk of the setting material in the World Almanac and put only the material your players are interacting with in the Story Almanac. Then you have a much more manageable chunk of material to work with, yet all the rest is just a click away.

Hope this helps!