The Virtues of a Small Setting

[cailano]

That can absolutely work, and it's a good point. The setting as a whole can be deep and rich—think Golarion in Pathfinder—but a campaign doesn't have to (and probably shouldn't) embrace the whole thing.

[Tecmes]

PbP or not, I find it very beneficial to restrict the "map", whatever it is.

It increases the feeling of belonging and "owning" the setting.

Your building example is interesting. The size is an issue. A "map" can be a whole country, as long as traveling allows fast transit and it's clear there isn't much in-between, but really a small region (or smaller!) works better. However if it's too small, it's harder to put the brakes on the PCs wanting to explore everything quickly.

[RobBadener]

My Traveller game has run for 7 years now in one star system and never gotten dull.

[cailano]

38 minutes ago, RobBadener said:

My Traveller game has run for 7 years now in one star system and never gotten dull.

Haha, yeah, I guess "small" can be genre dependent!

[matt_s]

@PowderhornI'm rambling about this.

pbp and its challenges: PBP is a hard format for tabletop gaming. It is very hard to keep track of (1) your character's fluff and mechanics (2) the mechanics of the system (3) the mechanics and fluff of the party and (4) the immediately adjacent plot of the game when you are posting maybe three times a week which is at the high end for pbp and many of those are likely text and no crunch which is fine but doesn't help the atrophy of your knowledge of specifically how to do x in new system y . Which is why good index and bookmarked pdfs are so important!

Add indepth lore on top of that and it's a real challenge. And in many cases lore isn't immediately relevant to the campaign so the setting document gets skimmed once and promptly forgotten about until something relevant comes up and you've completely forgotten. And nobody on this site is Tolkien with respect to worldbuilding and writing. WOTC, Paizo, Kevin Crawford (incoming ban from Powderhorn), your favorite creators are not either.

Speaking of Tolkien, what he does so well is that there's a great corpus of lore some of which I've read beyond the big trilogy + hobbit but it just calmly lies in the background (and the Silmarrillion being boring is basically a punchline!). What he instead does is similar to the magic trick from The Prestige

- the Pledge: he shows the reader something quite familiar, the quaint countryside, a peaceful and mundane agrarian life

- the Turn: he takes you on a journey which culminates in soaring through the heavens on giant eagles as an active volcano roars about them

- the Prestige: they go back to the Shire and although it has changed they are back where they started in a sense.

so he doesn't just throw you off the deep end. Instead, the world beyond the Shire is teased out bit by bit - here's a ruined barrow from the Men of Westernesse, there's an ancient watchtower, now we're at Rivendell, then Moria, then Lorien, etc. Robert Jordan also slowly eases the reader into the setting as well. Throwing off the deep end can work in literature (Herbert in Dune, Steven Eriksen in Malazan) but it would be awkward in tabletop.

And single throwaway lines work - Snake Plisskin flew the Gullfire over Leningrad. What does that mean? WHO KNOWS? IT SURE SOUNDS EVOCATIVE! And that is what matters. Explaining can make it worse not better - who cares what the Kessel Run is? If the wizened old NPC says "I fought with High Lord Durmark at the Field of Cormacken" that can be that, no need to draw up the order of battle etc. at all. You know that (1) the NPC is the real deal (2) he and the High Lord go way back (3) the past ain't peaceful.

Not even having the lore can work well in pbp as just saying "this is acme fantasy" and filling gaps as you go works well given the lifespan designed or otherwise. And for my wild west game, I didn't even pick a specific year and state until the players bugged me about it! But that has the advantage of me being able to draw on actual history. It's a game first and foremost, and it's about everyone GM included having fun.

GRRM does a similar kind of thing in his books. The world out Westeros is deliberately obscure, who knows what's in Asshai or other far off places - and the point is that we don't know and neither do the characters, it's all speculative nonsense. So when someone claims they've been to Old Valyria that means a lot and should even be a little frightening.

idk, ramble ends now.

 

 

 

[AbsentWizard]

There are certain situations where the setting is so different from traditional unspoken assumptions about settings that it is necessary to write a lot more about it in the setting document. What's happening when things are not written out explicitly is either that it doesn't come up because it doesn't matter, or it doesn't come up because it matches everyone's unspoken assumptions about the setting so that it does not bear detailing or discussing. A setting that is very different needs to explicitly spell out all the ways that it breaks those assumptions because it is easy and tempting to fall back to those assumptions because they're comfortable and familiar.

 

This doesn't apply to the vast majority parts of the vast majority of sessions. There is a moon. There is a sun. The sky is blue. Water flows downhill. Most of the interesting beings are humans-shaped. Giant eagles, ancient ruined watchtowers, underground caves, active volcanoes, and evil jewelry are still fundamentally familiar things that most readers/players are familiar with, or combinations thereof.

 

Snake Plisskin flew the Gullfire over Leningrad parses probably as "a human-like person, operating some kind of craft, went over some city". Most are familiar with these concepts; maybe not this specific instance of it, but enough to get the gist of the event. It can be evocative without needing any further description or explanation.

 

I think that an example of where the cracks start appearing is when one starts describing things happening in specialized fields for which most people have no reference or familiarity, not even through media. "Snake Plisskin moved for discovery of the Gullfire," in the sense of legal procedurals, doesn't parse into anything familiar for many readers, even though it is still drawing from well-established things IRL.

 

In a hypothetical game set entirely within court procedures and lawyering, where all interactions outside of the court building is simply skipped over and the results described, there needs to be a LOT of specifying the legal frameworks and case code, so that the players themselves can navigate it and make informed decisions. Feel agency. The settings needs to be extensively written about even though the entire game physically happens in a single room.

My point being: "the virtues of a small setting" just implies "everyone's already familiar with all the working elements here", and from there implies not straying far afield. Which ... you do you, but I dislike.

[AbsentWizard]

On a tangent: I think that it's a saving grace that Game of Thrones and GRRM's books leave so much of Westeros unexplained and obscure, because a great many of the parts that are detailed demonstrate a deep unfamiliarity with the functioning of the real-world cultures that they are borrowing from. Some parts are caricatures done with what seems to be no sense of irony or introspection whatsoever.

 

It is regretful and almost irresponsible because these portrayals can become a major portion of the public's perception of these cultures and matters.

[cailano]

actually, I’m not trying to convince anyone that they have to use a conventional setting. My one-building game, for example, is sitting in a bizarre nightmare world straddled by a god-sized spider for reasons unknown.
 

I would suggest that if you go with a setting that will take some exploration and/or exposition that keeping the scope small becomes even more important.

[AbsentWizard]

What's different about this bizarre nightmare world straddled by a god-sized spider that is actionable by the players, and may need explanation, but wasn't provided?

[cailano]

8 hours ago, AbsentWizard said:

What's different about this bizarre nightmare world straddled by a god-sized spider that is actionable by the players, and may need explanation, but wasn't provided?

Plenty. That's the whole point, right? Exploration and discovery.

[Malkavian Grin]

5 hours ago, cailano said:

Plenty. That's the whole point, right? Exploration and discovery.

Appreciate avoiding the spoilers ;)

Re: Small setting

I find myself drawn to OSR style games because they remind me of how I started GMing. I knew next to nothing about TTRPGs as I was a video gamer. I think Final Fantasy 1 helped cement my idea of what to expect from a game. Anyways, I had played a handful of games in D&D 3.5, read the books cover to cover one time, and started writing a campaign.

It was all loose ideas at first, and since I'm terrible at doing epic scale stuff I only focused on what mattered in the moment; the pc's immediate surroundings. So, to start, the setting was intensely small. It started with dungeon instead of the setup for why they were there. At the end of the level 1 dungeon I decided right then and there that it would be infinitely cooler if the necromancer got away through a secret door instead of dying. Without realizing it, I'd given the players a hook that they sank their teeth into!

My players asked around for details and I dropped them hints about things they would want to explore. In doing so, they started traveling (I didn't know about hexcrawling back then) and I'd expand the region little by little. By the end of the game, I'd developed about half of a single country and a small portion of a neighboring island country. All from the bottom-up.

I think going from small to large in a setting is better than the other way around. No one really cares or knows what the mysterious tower of Skul'anthros is about or means. It's a fun name or whatever but it'll never be as exciting as the Mouse's Cheese pub where they started a bar brawl randomly and then felt bad and paid to have it rebuilt or whatever.

No personal connection to a thing means it will have definitely less impact on a player.

[cailano]

Great post @Malkavian Grin