Some settings really glue everything together, while other settings feel like just a collection of different elements.

Which setting is the most cohesive and which setting is the least cohesive you ever read or played?

Least cohesive: Forgotten Realms. Things are just here there and everywhere it feels from the product. The books arent much help either.
Most cohesive: Greyhawk and the early versions of Karameikos/Mystarra. There were defined areas early on where specific races held sway and the kingdoms were more well thought out.

Star Frontiers, before Zebulons Guide, had a fairly cohesive layout too.

Torg bemusingly enough felt very cohesive despite or because of its somewhat chaotic nature.

Just about all of the White wolf product totally lacks cohesion. Aberrant seemed to come closest to something coherent for a setting. Then lost it with Trinity.

Quote from: Omega;762710Most cohesive: Greyhawk and the early versions of Karameikos/Mystarra. There were defined areas early on where specific races held sway and the kingdoms were more well thought out.

I think it’s more challenging to have the specific races mixed throughout the setting and then figure out how they interact with each other. I find the compartmentalising of race=country limiting. Chacun à son goût.

Cohesive worlds for me would be where the setting’s metaphysics have ramifications on how the world works. So Tékumel has little-to-no metal, verifiable “gods” without a good~evil morality, multiple species with indigenous vs coloniser populations, a history where the past has ramifications on the present, crazy shit underground with a reasonable origin... To play or run in Tékumel, you don’t really have to have consumed and digested all this info, but the fact that it’s there leads to a setting that feels real and deep.

Quote from: Omega;762710Just about all of the White wolf product totally lacks cohesion.

Especially the new WoD. This is really why I started this topic. I finally found what I don't like about those settings. It's all building blocks. It's not a blueprint like the older settings. The older settings had something that tied all the elements together. A more cohesive canon.

Least cohesive: Golarion.

Most cohesive: ... hard. Birthright, Blue Planet, Fading Suns, Zakhara, Rokugan... still can't decide. played recently, Birthright.

I do love the Known World. I even love Pandius content. I skipped WotI.  Seemed unnecessary.

Birthright seems very cohesive too. The naval rules are unnecessarily complicated IMO.

I dunno about Birthright. It seemed like it was literally designed for expansion packs.

Here's the Arabic like people. Here are the Italian Rennaisance type people. Here's the Viking like people. And here's the Russian like people.

Unless you bought the expansions, they were completely removed from the setting. And each region seemed completely independent, not connected, even though all of them were on the same continent.

And then Star Frontiers was too sketchy as a setting to make sense for me. The Frontier of what? Where are the home planets for each race? Why is known space so small? It's like the size of a Traveller subsector.

Where is Earth? And if humans aren't from Earth (a la Star Wars or BSG), why is there a planet named after Greek Mythology? Why is one named after Celtic (Morgaine). Why is one in Spanish? Just so many things that don't make sense, even though it has a lot of flavor.


Mystara seemed coherent to me thanks to the Poor Wizard's Almanacs. They showed how the nations of the worlds were interacting with their neighbors, and made it feel like a living world.

Tekumel's a good choice ... there's some manner of explanation for everything, and it fits.

Harnworld is fairly tight, but frankly, a good bit of that tightness (the expanded deity info, for one) comes from fan-produced material, which some might consider a significant downcheck.

Examples of just plain sloppy?  It pains me to say it, being a Judges Guild fan a few decades back, but I haven't seen a worse setting than the Wilderlands one.  It cuts and pastes a zillion different contradictory gods, it reads like random gen tables were used for just about everything, its insistence on the "City-State" tag for damn near everything large is silly, its equal insistence on puns and jocular names (one NPC, for instance, is named "Camel Shit" spelled backwards) is offputting, it takes the Tolkienian paradigm of tiny islands of civilization in a vast sea of empty to extremes, and it doesn't even have the excuse that no one had created a better setting before; Tekumel and Glorantha were already in print.

For generic fantasy, I'd call Greyhawk and Harn the most cohesive and Golarion the least. Mystara is a bit of a hodgepodge as well, but if I'm remembering right, it at least has a fairly detailed back story explaining why it's a hodgepoge.

Quote from: JeremyR;762897And then Star Frontiers was too sketchy as a setting to make sense for me. The Frontier of what? Where are the home planets for each race? Why is known space so small? It's like the size of a Traveller subsector.

Where is Earth? And if humans aren't from Earth (a la Star Wars or BSG), why is there a planet named after Greek Mythology? Why is one named after Celtic (Morgaine). Why is one in Spanish? Just so many things that don't make sense, even though it has a lot of flavor.

Most of that gets explained either in the core books ore especially in Knight Hawks.

There is no Earth. Each of the races has a homeworld and pretty much everything is the frontier as all the races are only relatively recently out and exploring.

Hidden backstory is that the region was seeded and uplifted by a race that passed through and moved on. One of those little big mysteries that was never resolved.

Shadow World as envisioned by its original creator (Terry K Amthor is very cohesive. Its a fantasy setting with a science fiction rationale. The entire setting has a vast overarching back story, but each region has experienced its own history & only the best informed (mostly immortals) people have a clue about the true history of the setting.

Events that affect the whole world are in the remote past & are long forgotten, but they echo down the millenia because of immortal beings and their institutions persist throughout that time.

Every culture in the setting feels the effects an ancient twilight struggle of which they are unaware until these powers rain ruin down on them. In the shadows a secret war goes on that concerns every being on the planet, but the things that in a normal fantasy setting would be the "Great Evil" are often just the swift moving objects in the foreground distracting from puppet masters in the distance.

Unfortunately many generic supplements were created, against the will of the  creator of the setting. Those generic bland & flavorless supplements are not considered cannon anymore now that Terry K Amthor is in charge of his own setting. Since Terry got Shadow World back he's fulfilled the potential of the setting.

I think the only settings more cohesive are ones like Harn, Empire of the Petal Throne, & Glorantha.

Then again perhaps we should identify what cohesion means exactly. My idea is that there is an over all structure to the setting a history that gives meaning . Some of these structures are cosmological or metaphysical. Cohesive means, to me, that the setting makes sense & doesn't disrupt my willing suspension of disbelief. I think that's close to what others are saying.

By this metric Palladium's fantasy setting & the Wilderlands fail in my book.

Quote from: Ravenswing;763186[...] its equal insistence on puns and jocular names (one NPC, for instance, is named "Camel Shit" spelled backwards) is offputting [...]

There's an NPC in Griffin Mountain named Bodoni Bookface.  That's the name of the font the book was typeset in.

I think the JG stuff stands as a good example of the "no, your game world/sessions are not going to be as polished, deep, and sophisticated as the works of professional screen/script/novel writers, but it will be yours" philosophy.

Personally I found Birthright to be the most cohesive setting in my fantasy stable.  Traveller gets a nod for least cohesive, as the randomly generated sectors and wildly disparate tech levels gave results about as nonsensical as the JG Wilderlands, too.

Quote from: daniel_ream;763331I think the JG stuff stands as a good example of the "no, your game world/sessions are not going to be as polished, deep, and sophisticated as the works of professional screen/script/novel writers, but it will be yours" philosophy.

I wouldn't have minded if the setting was as polished, deep or sophisticated as the many thousands of homebrew settings whipped up by talented amateurs.  Professional novelists are so far out of the picture they can't even be seen.

In the event, any setting is "yours" only to the degree you make it so.  I can just as readily spend 50 hours making Forgotten Worlds (say) more playable as 50 hours making the Wilderlands more playable, and it's the same labor either way.

Quote from: Ravenswing;763544I wouldn't have minded if the setting was as polished, deep or sophisticated as the many thousands of homebrew settings whipped up by talented amateurs.  Professional novelists are so far out of the picture they can't even be seen.

I think at the time the Wilderlands was released, those homebrew settings were a great deal more like it than Tekumel.  Certainly a lot of published works from that time have the same kind of juvenile in-jokes, if not in the same quantity.

QuoteIn the event, any setting is "yours" only to the degree you make it so.  I can just as readily spend 50 hours making Forgotten Worlds (say) more playable as 50 hours making the Wilderlands more playable, and it's the same labor either way.

That's what I meant.  The Wilderlands is "theirs", and all the in-jokes and random "hey, I read this cool book last week" mashups no doubt make it very cool for them, but not so much for any other group.

Probably the most cohesive I've read were a couple GURPS settings: Goblins, The Mad Lands, and Yrth. Although the latter had potential for incoherence creeping in. Also, it was the only one I ran, and I got complaints from one player about it being too incoherent. From what little I've read of Harm, it seems pretty coherent, too.

Yrth, though, suffers from a problem I see in a lot of attempts to make a coherent setting: it seems a little bland in places. Everything is too "explicable", even the inexplicable parts. It's kind of aimed at top-down, serious world design tastes. Whereas the more deliberately incoherent settings, with the pun names and the anachronisms, appeal more to players who want a setting to adapt organically to what they are doing. If I'm in the mood for a lighter feel, Yrth won't do it. If I want to be more serious, though, I'd be down for a more coherent setting.