I think Iāll add something
Since several people on this forum are in a campaign in this setting, I canāt tell you everything but I want to yap anyway.
My setting (The Straight(s) of Ahgin) is partially a world but most of the setting/lore is located in a massive sea straight in between two continents. The entire region is wealthy, fertile, a melting pot of cultures and an absolute drama show.
Just around 500 years ago the local supervolcano Theraz in the straight blew up, which was during a massive war between the massive goblin republican nation of Zagros and the elvish monarchy of Harashthar. The entire region that had suffered massively during the war was further devastated by the aftershocks of the eruption. The big nations fell apart and the entire political climate shifted.
Nowadays we are in a quasi renaissance, still magical, but less dependent on magic and science has progressed instead. New nations and countries have formed and alliances have shifted. The old giants are slowly trying to see if they can regain what they consider old glory, the wounds of war long forgotten. However, the new kids on the block do not wish to take that lying down. Additionally, even newer powers are trying to see where they can go.
As power spheres begin to form, people are trying to look for new and old technologies to better their chances of coming out ahead. And if you canāt invent further, you just dig deeper; and there is always something deeper. Is it the horrors? Yes, yes it is.
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The setting has a big focus on politics, history and archaeology. Several things were not fixed and I often develop details and cultures further. One fun thing I discovered is basic linguistics. I am no linguist but the way language shapes, how certain jokes or phrases make sense or work and how you might now be able to translate something because for that old culture this was so obvious they might not have written it down.
Also themes how history shapes us even if we donāt know it, how history can be changed by those with an agenda, how cultures develop in their weird settings and then succeed and fail. Often not because they were good or evil and more that because sometimes the things that made them successful screwed them over in times of crisis. That sometimes they fell not because of an evil empire or raging horde but internal corruption and humanoid fears, failures and desires.
Sometimes we figure out that there is a theme of eternal recurrence in how we rebuild and fail and sometimes my players talk for a long time with two gnomes (which are weird in my setting) about food culture and how an underground civilization with no access to dairy considers cheese an weird horrific thing, while praising the value of deep fried volcanic sea worms.