Ground Rules

First a bit about the approach I think I'll take.  Everything is subject to change later, since I'm basically doing this stream-of-consciousness for now. :)

The game I ran was D&D 3.5, but I'd like the world to be more generic than that.  However,  since we're talking about a game world (rather than, say, a setting for a novel) we need some way to express relative power levels when describing characters, dangerous creatures, magic items, etc.  I will therefore create the Ilium Sliding Scale of Overall Buffness (TM).   This will be a simple numeric scale, reminiscent of some very simple game systems like Risus.  I may describe a character with just one of these numbers, or may break it down to more particulars.  The numbers will have no concrete meaning, but instead are meant as relative ratings.  All things being equal, a creature with a Buffness rating of X should be a good match for two opponents with a rating of X - 2, or 4 opponents of rating X - 3.

The Buffness number for a particular item or character will refer to their "best thing".  So for a warrior it refers to how good he is in a fight.  For a politician it refers to how wily a negotiator he is.  If a character possesses some particular strength or weakness not obvious from their description, it will be called out with its own Buffness.

A typical starting character or aveage NPC would have a Buffness of 3 or so.

Examples

Honoria is a well-rounded adventurer specializing in cat burglary.  In a case like this, the specialization is listed as a separate number:

Buffness - 5
  Cat Burglar - 7

Menuhotep is a powerful wizard from a distant land.  Like all good wizards he has focused on his arcane studies to the exclusion of all else and is pretty useless without it.  I might list his Buffness as

Buffness - 10
  Physical - 3
  Scholar - 7

Obviously the reader will have to fill in a lot of details before a character or item described like this can be used. I may eventually break down and reference a particular game system, but for now I'm going to try to stick to the Buffness scale.

A little more explanation

I've more time today so here's a more complete explanation of what the heck I'm doing.

I'm a long-time RPG player and GM.  I recently ended a D&D 3.5 campaign set in a homebrew world.  The world was pretty generic D&D stuff, but I had a few ideas that were (in my not-so-humble opinion) pretty cool.  Those ideas never really saw play, though due to a lack of planning and time.  So I'm going to set out to re-build that world from scratch without the pressures and deadlines of a bi-weekly game to run.  I'll start with the macro-level history, geography and culture of the game world, then tighten in to detail a starting area for low-level characters.  Along the way, hopefully I can build a world that will make for a fun campaign.

Probable Exercise in Futility

Place-holder. This is where I'll re-develop my game world from scratch with an eye toward packaging and publication as a free PDF type thing.