Hey y'all,

I'm a long-time GM of Genesys (and Edge of the Empire, and the FFG Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay), but I'm trying to work up my first Genesys setting document, adapting a setting from another RPG.

Any best practices y'all can share? Traps you fell into that I should watch out for? Tips for publishing and/or formatting? Anything, really, would be helpful.

Thanks, folks!

This site (and ones like it) can be your friend.

Are you intending to publish something on the Foundry? If so, you will likely run into copyright and trademark issues for adapting setting material from another RPG. If you're just writing up setting material for your personal use, I'd say keep it simple for now. There's a tendency among GMs to do huge amounts of world building when much of what they create never sees play. Focus on the player characters and their current adventure and let your world build out from there. I highly recommend Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master by Sly Flourish for a good overview of how to do this (geared toward D20, but easily adaptable to Genesys).

As someone who started fiddling around with, like, half a dozen settings after the core first came out, and then stopped because there was just too much to do (and has since started fiddling again): I would recommend using as much of the material that is out there (both official and community) as is possible.

Don't recreate Archetypes/Species if you don't absolutely HAVE to. Don't create a bunch of new Skills if you don't absolutely HAVE to. Definitely don't start creating a bunch of Talents.

Gear (weapons, armor, and general equipment), IMO, is the worst (requires the most work) of it all, but is potentially where you will need to spend the most time. Or at least I do, as I rarely find myself liking the things that are out there.

Basically: there are A LOT of materials out there now. Save yourself a lot of time and effort and use whatever is available to you that you can.