Here's a little taste of campaign background; I have hopes of including some nice "primary source" material, but I wanted to give you something to gaze at (comment on, argue with) while I work on that.

The geographical setting will just happen to look exactly like Great Britain. The starting point will just happen to be right where Bristol is, and the name of that city will be (somewhat unoriginally) "Bridgstow".

While the setting will have bits and pieces that are distinctly evocative of historical Britain, that's partly an illusion; I've got a Greyhawk gazetteer, and I'm taking a chunk of that land mass, mushing it into a Britain-shape, and associating pieces of it with their approximate historic/legendary equivalents. So whether you think of the theocracy to the north as the Prince-Bishop of County Durham or the Archbishop Hazen's Veluna is up to you; the names and geography are mostly the former, but the social structure and characters are mostly the latter.

Here's some social background that's a little different from what the 3rd edition D&D folks are used to; for everyone else, you can just take it as the way it is for this campaign, or argue about why the campaign world's destined for trouble if it's set up this way.

Halflings are like hobbits. Unlike the current D&D image, they are not short gypsies. Instead, they integrate very well with human society, with many towns going by two names, a halfling (actually, they prefer "hole-builder" or "hill person") name and a human one. Effectively, the hill person town co-exists with the human town, generally managing to share space without fighting over resources. This is because the humans tend to farm the lowlands and the hill people tend to, uh, live in and off the hills, herding animals on land that's not desirable for farming and farming terraced slopes that are too steep for humans to want to fool with.

Gnomes, on the other hand, are (or at least seem to fit stereotypes of) short gypsies. Most gnomes the non-gnomes see are in visiting caravans, usually circuses or musicians, but sometimes merchants with exotic snake oil to cure your every ailment. Gnomes are tolerated, rather than encouraged, by many town authorities. Often the gnomes set up outside the town, and are not welcomed in. "By all means, go to the circus -- it's the best show all year! But leave your money-pouches at home, kids -- if you've got nothing to steal, you've got nothing to worry about." Gnomes have a reputation as flim-flam artists; everyone knows that a gnome can make you see whatever he wants you to see. Fortunately, although they're sometimes out to line their pockets at your expense, they're not particularly malevolent.

There are no kung-fu monks walking the earth and acting aloof. Well, there might be some in Asia, but there aren't any in Bridgstow.