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Today I wonder who likes a game like that. Or rather who picks up a game like that to start playing. I can definitely understand those who’ve digested a book at a time as they’ve come out, but I find the whole idea of all those books even existing as extremely intimidating.
I play a setting with 40 source books (the Zakhara region of the Forgotten Realms, with some changes to the prehistory [to fit Prescott’s Trilemma Adventures in], including some homebrewed numismatics since I love weird coins, and a bunch of other stuff added in from other settings).
I used to be intimidated of settings with too much stuff to read. (My salvation at the time was either homebrew settings or homemade wainscot settings. A wainscot setting is our ordinary present day Earth + weird stuff. Sandman or the X-Files are both examples of wainscot settings.)
What changed? Two things.
First of all, I found the “three tiers of truth” thing that makes prep a lot more manageable.
The Three Tiers of Truth as described in Blorb Principles.
Second, I found the correct way to sort GM data: by place. Forget about A–Z or timeline sorting; geographic/​spatial sorting FTW.
If I need to look up something about Zakhara, I know that the place to start is in the Land of Fate box set. The other boxes just dig in more detail about the various places. (Also I have a folder with the books as poorly OCR’d text files to grep through. Usually gives a jumbled up version but enough to find which booklet to look in.)
My experience with table-driven settings (like Yoon-Suin) is that it’s amazing… at first. But if you don’t write everything down, you’ll be lost pretty quickly. Since we’re hundreds of sessions into our current campaign, it’s pretty great to be able to look things up in a canonical resource. (The Forgotten Realms wiki is also pretty great.)