2009-12-18 Historical Settings

Over on A Hamsterish Hoard of Dungeons and Dragons, Taichara asks Historical settings: What elements? Trollsmyth replies with For Taichara: Historical Settings.

When I bought Kitsunemori, I loved the Japanese flavor, the history, the culture, the alternate magic system, the equipment list, the calendar – all the things Trollsmyth mentioned.

Kitsunemori

But in actual play, *it did not work*. The players didn’t buy into it. They remembered some rules like the turning variant or how traditional armor works, but they wanted to play monks even though the setting doesn’t have them. Nobody cared about the current date. Nobody played variant magic users unless they were more powerful than the originals. Weapons and spells were useful if they were more powerful than the material in the existing rule books.

Of the things that were *useful for the campaign*, the setting had far too little. But now I know what to look for!

What I’m looking for:

Gods and religion* inspire players with clerics. Churches and temples are interesting political factors. Evil clerics always provide a good adventure hook.

Names*, lists of names! Sure, there were some high-level NPC stat blocks in the product, but I never got to use them. But I loved to see names. In fact, I ended up printing out lists of Japanese names I found on the web – and when the campaign moved into the City of Brass, I printed out a list of Arabic names I found on the web. The setting didn’t have enough names.

Maps* – everybody loves maps. Player maps are important for the buy-in, and referee maps are important for inspiration. Maps provide names for rivers, mountains, ranges, valleys, cities, villages, lakes, oceans, bays, forests, nations. Good, detailed maps are very important.

Clans* and *rulers*: More power structures, more political factors. If the setting mentions bandits in some province, then that’s an adventure hook. A general tries to fight them. Another adventure hook. There’s a neighbouring province that’s seeing an increase of bandit activity. Another adventure hook. I hope that the general, the bandit leader, their second in commands, and the lord of the neighbouring province all have a name and a sentence or two to go along with it.

Monsters* – I want monsters from local fairy tales, with pictures, and summaries of the actual tales that inspired the monster. They might inspire me! You say the river god can manifest as a water dragon? Excellent.

Artifacts* – if I want to take the campaign somewhere, I need a small list of magic items that can serve as turning points in the campaign. I need to know about them at the start of the campaign so that I can do an appropriate foreshadowing. Plusses if the artifacts are known items from folklore. Where is Excalibur? I like smaller magic items, but they aren’t necessary for a historical setting.

Adventures* are the thing I’m mostly interested in. As far as I can tell, anything that is not an adventure seed should be a deletion candidate. Make the product as short as possible with the highest number of adventure ideas you can cram into those pages. The more detailed these are, and the more the setting reflects in the adventure, the more useful they are. These adventures should be short and episodic such that they can serve a variety of roles without tying me to an adventure path.

Typical NPC* backgrounds, their equipment, and their stat block. Typical city guards, typical adepts of the various temples and the favored spells, small write-ups of interesting groups like beggars, mountain priests, temple whores, holy men, chariot racers, etc.

#RPG #Publishing

Comments

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Yeah, but I have an odd group of players who just eat that sort of stuff up.

I can’t believe I forgot names! That’s one huge thing for me, is coming up with names that fit the setting.

Otherwise, there’s not that much divergence between our lists.

– Brian 2009-12-18 03:10 UTC

Brian