Your Setting Microcosm

The macrocosm that you just built for your chronicle provides a good general backdrop for the chronicle. The microcosm is going to be its initial core setting. This is the place the starting personal characters should have their initial adventures. They might wander and the core setting will definitely expand. Here is where more detailed world building commences.

Central Location Summary
For some chronicles, this might be an entire metropolis. For others, it could be boarding school for teenage vampires. A high fantasy chronicle might consider an entire small kingdom as its core setting with perhaps the capital city and a locale like the king's palace or an adventurer's guild as a site to detail out for Game Zero. What ultimately matters is that the central location is big enough for personal characters to encounter both challenges and each other, but small enough to give personal characters very plausible reasons to meet and interact.

Once you know what your central location is, write up a one page document that covers the most important and interesting people, places, and things that will be encountered there. Give it tone and flavor appropriate for the genre. Include some concept art to present the troupe with visual references of what it looks like. In fact, some world builders might want to find their concept art first and then write up detailed descriptions based on the pictures rather than the other way around.

With your one page central location summary done, you can start filling in the details the troupe will need for Game Zero with other development docs. Here are some we suggest very Storygame Chronicle uses.

VIPs
VIPs, Very Important People are simply plot devices at this point in story building, not necessarily intended to be personal characters. They don't get character sheets until they become personal characters at or after Game Zero. They should have avatars, however. Who they are, what they do (or did) to make the central location the place it is should be covered. Their relationship network (friends, enemies, family, allies, gods, etc.,) should be covered, especially as potential personal characters.

The bigger your starting troupe, the more VIPs to make. At the very least, there should three: the recognized leader of the central location, their most formidable adversary, and the leader of a faction that has their own (possibly secret) agenda beyond the other two.

Common Character Types
The macrocosm includes ideas for every kind of personal character that -might- exist in your chronicle. Here, you design the kinds of personal characters that should exist and design some character templates for them. This is when you decide what the "average" for the average citizen of your core setting is and if they possess some kind of preternatural power or ability. You decide what kind of preternatural powers or abilities the personal characters can have and how they normally get them and learn to use them. It isn't necessary to write out every possible player race or every non-mundane  ability a PC might possess. What is important to establish what personal characters definitely can't be, what they definitely can't do, definitely can't own or have access to and present that list at Game Zero.

Making and using character templates is covered in more detail in Chapter Two.

The Metaplot
Every story needs is a story is a fundamental Storygame philosophy.