Quote from: tenbones;1124345Worse case scenario is they pretend everyone gets along and you have black vikings, Arabian-analog samurai, Asian knights, all free of any context.

Everyone gets along... not so keen

But black Vikings, Asian knights etc. I am OK with. Ripping off real world cultures (as opposed to being judiciously inspired by them) and dumping not-Vikings and not-Samurai into your fantasy world is lazy and stupid, unless you explicitly have a setting where real-world people have been spirited off, like Hyperborea from AS&SoH, which is also cool.

If I was worldbuilding I would start at a minimum with having it in the southern hemisphere, just to start messing up expectations.

That's actually a thing in at least two D&D settings that I recall. Greyhawk has people descended from Gypsies. (Not to mention Zagyg traveled to Boot Hill.) Mystara has a region populated by the descendants of people from France - who either were, or became werewolves. Probably more not aware of.

Quote from: tenbones;1124025I've used all of Al-Qadim - I crashed my PC's onto Al-Qadim (from Spelljammer) and we ended up spending a solid year of real-time gaming there. I also wrote some of the "official" 3e Al-Qadim stuff for Dragon, so yeah, it's near and dear to my grizzled black heart.

My impressions: one of the best versions of D&D in terms of setting and production. I still have all my Al-Qadim stuff. It had flavor - it *really* captured the Sinbad swashbuckling vibe and its presentation of elemental magic and the Genie courts made it stand out without deviating too far.  

None of my players realized there were in Al-Qadim for almost three sessions. None of them ever wanted to play in it... but after doing some adventures there, they loved it. One even "went Native".

Al-Qadim was one of the better settings. What stuff did you do for Dragon?

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;1124548Al-Qadim was one of the better settings. What stuff did you do for Dragon?

Lessee - I did "Return of the Sha'Ir" in Issue #315, and "Heroes of Fate" in issue #321. I would have done a lot more but it would have turned into a full blown 3e setting and we can't have that. Noooo!

Originally I was going to do the Kara-Tur stuff for 3e. But James Wyatt was doing the book (which I did not like), and he got first dibs on the Magazine slot (grr), and literally *no* one on their feature writer pool wanted to do Al-Qadim. I jumped at it, as it was my close second choice. I whipped out so much material they split it up into two features.

Edit: I should add - those articles as listed are neutered versions of what I originally did. I made them more meaty. I'd begun my downward slide into loathing 3e, and realizing that 5-lvl beefy PrC's were the way to go in dealing with LFQR issues, editorial fought me a lot on it.

Quote from: Marchand;1124528If I was worldbuilding I would start at a minimum with having it in the southern hemisphere, just to start messing up expectations.

Nyambe: African Adventures beat you to the punch. The Sword & Soul genre deserves more love.

It's sad how little attention Nyambe received. At least Spears of the Dawn has a footprint.

Quote from: DeadUematsu;1124660It's sad how little attention Nyambe received. At least Spears of the Dawn has a footprint.

Greetings!

Indeed. I fully agree. I purchased the Nyambe setting book back when it first came out. The setting is interesting, detailed, and well done. It was a real tragedy that the setting was not marketed extensively, and it drifted into obscurity. I know many gamers lament the tired tropes of Western European fantasy--but the sad truth seems to be that in the aggregate, gamers are liars or deluded. Distinctly different historical and fantastic campaign settings have been produced through the years, and they are all generally obscure. The vast majority of the market continues to want and demand the same campaign setting stuff year after year, decade after decade.

I know there is a small niche of gamers, like myself, that genuinely love interesting campaign settings, and actually pay money and support them. They seem to be a distinct minority though. I think there is such a huge scope for fantastic historical settings, whether African based, Asian based, or South American based, among others. Some really awesome and interesting potentials involved there. I love it all.

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK

Quote from: SHARK;1124663Greetings!

Indeed. I fully agree. I purchased the Nyambe setting book back when it first came out. The setting is interesting, detailed, and well done. It was a real tragedy that the setting was not marketed extensively, and it drifted into obscurity. I know many gamers lament the tired tropes of Western European fantasy--but the sad truth seems to be that in the aggregate, gamers are liars or deluded. Distinctly different historical and fantastic campaign settings have been produced through the years, and they are all generally obscure. The vast majority of the market continues to want and demand the same campaign setting stuff year after year, decade after decade.

I know there is a small niche of gamers, like myself, that genuinely love interesting campaign settings, and actually pay money and support them. They seem to be a distinct minority though. I think there is such a huge scope for fantastic historical settings, whether African based, Asian based, or South American based, among others. Some really awesome and interesting potentials involved there. I love it all.

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK

The following post gets a bit rambling, so excuse that.

Even the faux medieval "European" settings bear no resemblance to any real European culture in any historical period. When was the last time you saw a faux European fantasy setting with believable countries distinguished by cultures, languages, fashions, etc?

Even A Song of Ice and Fire, which gets attention for being grimdark, is terrible when it comes to distinguishing cultures and countries. I have no idea what the cultural difference between the Northern and Southern cultures is, much less the cultural difference between individual southern countries. A continent the size of South America all speak the same language with no dialectical variation. ASOIAF is overrated. It's grimdark melodrama, sure, but the worldbuilding is shit.

The four nations in Avatar: The Last Airbender are better distinguished, and that's a children's show. They're distinct enough that they would make great sides in an RTS. Which IMO is the standard by which worldbuilders should set their cultures: your countries should be immediately visually distinguishable as sides in an RTS game.

Watching youtube videos about historical fashions (for example) is mindblowing. You wouldn't know that level of cultural diversity existed from reading the fantasy genre.

At least be honest and state your campaign world map is "The Only Fantasy World Map" or "The Dangerlands". The sheer absurdity of those maps is at least funny, in a Discworld esque fashion.

On a related note, would anybody be interested in a Stargate-inspired fantasy setting where many planets with wildly different human cultures are connected by gates?

Quote from: SHARK;1124663I know many gamers lament the tired tropes of Western European fantasy--but the sad truth seems to be that in the aggregate, gamers are liars or deluded.

Neither liars nor deluded.

They are worried they won't GM the setting right OR their players won't grasp the setting, and thus not have fun.  

Running historical settings runs the risk of THAT GUY at the table who ruins everything because he can't just enjoy the game without nitpicking like a bitch. BTW, I actually sympathize with THAT GUY because when you have deep knowledge of a subject and a game setting just throws fact and fiction into a blender, it can be cringe inducing.

While most GMs are avid readers of setting books, most players are not. If you want to run a setting with deep cultural info, you need a method to get that info to the players in actual play, not via a 300 page book they will never, ever read.

And the players don't want to be playing it wrong. I run Legends of the Five Rings and many of my regular players won't join because they feel they won't "do it right" because they don't know anything about the setting, or ancient Japan.

I do not know how to overcome these problems. Zero idea. The best I've achieved is bringing in players who are willing to try, and then doing my best to immerse them in the setting in actual play with minimal handouts (1 page, 2 sides is my rule).

And I even read that one damn page aloud to them.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1124633Nyambe: African Adventures beat you to the punch. The Sword & Soul genre deserves more love.

A setting with no white or Asian people and Orc adjacent races which are all evil.  Only an alt-right fascist could have written this.

Quote from: SHARK;1124663Indeed. I fully agree. I purchased the Nyambe setting book back when it first came out. The setting is interesting, detailed, and well done. It was a real tragedy that the setting was not marketed extensively, and it drifted into obscurity. I know many gamers lament the tired tropes of Western European fantasy--but the sad truth seems to be that in the aggregate, gamers are liars or deluded. Distinctly different historical and fantastic campaign settings have been produced through the years, and they are all generally obscure. The vast majority of the market continues to want and demand the same campaign setting stuff year after year, decade after decade.

I know there is a small niche of gamers, like myself, that genuinely love interesting campaign settings, and actually pay money and support them. They seem to be a distinct minority though. I think there is such a huge scope for fantastic historical settings, whether African based, Asian based, or South American based, among others. Some really awesome and interesting potentials involved there. I love it all.

Well, I enjoy small, niche settings.  I usually don't like other peoples' take on small, niche settings. And while my own settings are definitely niche, they are derived largely from Western European fantasy (mostly Roman, Celtic, and  Norse), with a smattering of Native American, Egyptian, and occasionally some tiny piece of something else (e.g. Sumerian, Slavic).  That is, primarily I'm not buying someone else's setting to play or explore it.  I'm buying it to mine some nugget to use in my own campaigns.  The more niche their setting is, the less it matches my preferences, the less likely it is to correspond to something that I'll use.  At least on average--every now and then something completely different but niche could be helpful.  Yet, I don't usually want to waste the time to wade through a bunch of settings to find that helpful one--the work/reward ratio is poor from my perspective.

Every now and then, I'll get some benefit out of a setting because it is coherent enough to provide me a reaction.  For example, I'm never going to run Pundit's medieval authentic stuff.  I'm not interested in running a medieval authentic campaign.  I am, however, very interested in running pre-medieval and alternate fantasy not really medieval that derives from another fantastical pre-medieval world. (That is, one of my own settings that is pre-medieval projected into a later era.)  Thinking about what it means to be an "authentic medieval" game is a useful marker, even though I'm not going to do that.  For a different setting to be useful to me, it may or may not matter that it be true to the source material, but it is vital that it be true to itself--whatever that means.

I think this gets back to the way most people are adept at recognizing that they are dissatisfied with something, but lousy at telling you why.  You've got Joe Gamer out there getting a little bored with whatever setting he has been playing.  So he expresses that as he wants something New, Different, Exotic!  You give him 57 varieties of exactly what he asked for, and he isn't happy with any of them.  Because what he really wanted was an interesting, slightly different twist on what he was doing before.  Of course, a lot of lazy authors take that too literally, as well, where the put out the same old stuff with nothing changed but a twist on  the surface (e.g. "It's just like Forgotten Realms with lots of Pirates and Muskets").  That might be a playable concept for a setting for some people, but to make it work, they have to extrapolate the differences into the setting.

One of my favorite settings, which is a lot like Al-Qadim, is Legends of the Burning Sands. It's a spin-off of Legend of the Five Rings. But if I ever run it, it will be with B/X or D6.

w00t! Yay, fans of outside ersatz Britannia unite!

I love Legend of the Burning Sands (LBS) even before they made an RPG book for it. It was an interesting retake on the AEG L5R card game mechanics and politics; I think their Dueling was better than L5R, and the finite pool of water reminded me of VtES.

I still have a big chunk of cards from its last set -- one of each starter deck! And the insinuated cultural friction in Medinaat al Salaam was awesome. So glad I got those cards AND my LBS rpg book. The metaplot set up is nuts with easy PC starting points and rapidly increasing (or optional) wheels within wheels.

And thanks for the ringing suggestion of Nyambe, everyone! I've been eyeing it but have an allergy to anything D&D 3.x/PF-esque. Maybe I will give it a second glance.

Quote from: Opaopajr;1124771I still have a big chunk of cards from its last set -- one of each starter deck! And the insinuated cultural friction in Medinaat al Salaam was awesome. So glad I got those cards AND my LBS rpg book. The metaplot set up is nuts with easy PC starting points and rapidly increasing (or optional) wheels within wheels.

I have two full shoeboxes of LBS. Regretfully, not much from the final set, The Awakening, which is hard to find. If I ever run it, I'm going to create two decks to use for random encounters: One of NPCs and one of events. Draw one card from each, so you get "Fatima, assassin" and "Knife fight."  You could do that with other CCGs as well.

Quote from: tenbones;1124039What's to grok? Sinbad! Ali-Baba and the 40 Thieves! Sherezade! all the classic Ray Harryhausen movies! Then toss in some D&D-style Vancian magic and conceits.

Now you got ME interested in the setting...