How much detail does the starting town really need? (homebrew setting for a family campaign)
I'm constructing a homebrew setting to run for my family — none of us are hardcore RPG people, so the world has to do a lot of heavy lifting. It needs to feel alive the second they step into it, without drowning them (or me) in lore. I won't say it's anything inspiring - It's an isekai-ish fantasy: modern people pulled into a magical world whose underlying "fabric" is slowly unraveling. Seems popular at the moment and an easy concept to start for role playing.
I ended up building it in two deliberate layers, and I'm not sure I got the ratio right.
Breadth - I gave the whole world a light pass: a few continents, a handful of nations and factions, the central cosmic problem, the big conflicts. Enough that whatever direction they wander, something is there - but I purposely didn't go deep. It's scaffolding. Key entities and their motivations, tied to organizations and their purpouse.
Depth - Almost all the real detail and effort so far I've put into a single entry point: a lawless frontier town called Crossings (I know, inspiring) where they'll arrive and probably spend the first few sessions. I tried to make it genuinely lived-in - the marchwarden who runs the place on common sense, half a dozen shopkeepers (baker, smith, ford-keeper, tanner, tailor, apothecary), a tavern owner who's quietly the local information broker, who feeds intel to whom, who's at odds with whom, what each of them did before they landed here, plus a few dated local events (a flood three winters back, a recent magical "tear," the arrival itself).
To get there I wrote a few short stories first - little 2–4k-word scenes from different NPCs' points of view (a market morning, a night at the tavern, the agent who meets new arrivals). Partly to find their voices, partly because it's just easier to know a town after you've watched a few ordinary days happen in it. Then I pulled the people, places, and relationships out of those scenes into an actual map of the town.
https://imgur.com/H6pOYJE
https://imgur.com/3NtUZlD
Here's the result and my actual question:
is this a sensible amount of depth for an entry point, or have I over-cooked one town while the rest of the world is a painted backdrop?
For those who've actually run beginner campaigns:
- How dense do you make the starting location compared to everything else?
- Where do you personally stop adding NPCs and relationships before it's prep you'll never use at the table? I don't have unlimited time
- Does "deep entry point, shallow everywhere else" work in practice, or do they immediately sprint off the edge of your detailed zone?