Quote from: James McMurrayWhat's the problem? It's not like the game companies are sending people around to their customers to make sure that once their products hit the shelves you erase all your homebrew data for that area and start towing the line. Just use what you want and trash the rest.

The problem comes when the publisher starts publishing adventures, supplements, and creatures based on the existence of these areas. Now, if you want to use such a supplement, you have to shoehorn the whole thing into your  existing campaign. They always do.

-clash

Quote from: flyingmiceHi Tim!

Is the revised Tribes going to be published by Silverlion or by Chine?

thanks!

-clash

Not sure yet. I've got to get around to it revising it and with all the pain of H&S and lulu and bleh!
just want to kicks stuff.
Likely I'll let Chine games do it, but at the moment it depends on where its owner is and up to when I get it done.

Quote from: MaddmanExalted.  Not a place so much, but events.  The game starts at a certain point and WW has said they will *never* put in a metaplot that moves things forward.   That's for the PCs to do.  There are events like the Time of Tumult adventures and the Autocthion invasion, but these are very much optional and (this is the important bit) later suppliments didn't assume that they had taken place.

As far as I know, Harn is this way as well. If it's changed recently, but as of a couple years ago Columbia has never put out a product that has changed the world past a certain date. I doubt if it's changed much as they don't seem to be cranking out much anymore, despite their attempt at branching into d20 crossovers.

Quote from: flyingmiceThe problem comes when the publisher starts publishing adventures, supplements, and creatures based on the existence of these areas. Now, if you want to use such a supplement, you have to shoehorn the whole thing into your  existing campaign. They always do.

-clash

Stil I have to ask "what's the problem." that's true of anything published for a specific setting, whether it's targetted at a subregion of the entire campaign world or the world itself. If you want to have a Magister in your homebrew campaign you have to figure out how to squeeze him in. Likewise if you want to have the Bloodstone Mines in your campaign but before you bought the setting you fleshed out that area, you have to find a way to squeeze them in.

It's a fact of life that comes up whenever you do anything homebrew and then buy something campaign specific. Even if the company were to set aside an area and then never develop it, if you develop it yourself you have to shoehorn it into the rest of the world.

Whining about it just seems pointless to me. But I guess if someone doesn't want to lose their job as a pundit they have to find things to bitch and moan about.

Quote from: jrientsCount me as stupid then.  Some settings strike me as so crowded by official material that I can't fit my own work in them.

Me too. I prefer settings to be 100 pages or less personally. Give me the feel, give me a map, give me plot hooks, then let me run my damn game.

I could never run FR or Eberron for that reason.

I am apparently in the minority on this though, I see plenty of folks describe a 300 page campaign hardcover as a good start.

Blech.

Chuck

Quote from: RPGPunditIs there, or will there ever be, a fucking campaign setting that goes on without going out of print and DOESN'T end up detailing the "area of the fantasy world that we swear we'll never detail so you the game-master can do it"?

Aren't those two things contridictory?

Quote from: flyingmiceThe problem comes when the publisher starts publishing adventures, supplements, and creatures based on the existence of these areas. Now, if you want to use such a supplement, you have to shoehorn the whole thing into your  existing campaign. They always do.

Right.  Though to be fair, this is no better or worse than simply not publishing those adventures, supplements, etc.  

The key, in my mind, is that any given supplement (incl. adventures, setting books, etc.) should have minimum dependencies on other supplements.  i.e. It's OK for a region book to depend on the general worldbook, but it shouldn't depend on other region books.

Something like Planescape or Spelljammer could do it, but if you don't have infinite space in your world(s) and you never go out of print, eventually you'll end up covering ever inch of the setting multiple times over.

Quote from: jhkimRight.  Though to be fair, this is no better or worse than simply not publishing those adventures, supplements, etc.  

The key, in my mind, is that any given supplement (incl. adventures, setting books, etc.) should have minimum dependencies on other supplements.  i.e. It's OK for a region book to depend on the general worldbook, but it shouldn't depend on other region books.

Exactly. I will certainly agree to that.

-clash

Quote from: flyingmiceEveryone says that, but my StarCluster supplements sell very well, as does the Cold Space VDS - on the order of 50-60% of the main book. At least in pdf - The SC supplements are only in print for less than a month.

-clash

Oh, don't get me wrong, I am not saying can't, just unlikely. Also, realize that us small guys selling well should not be compared to larger companies, an I do not necessarily mean that by quantity. My supplements sell very well also. The Pie Incident has nearly equaled SA! in sales. That flies in the logic of the whole tradition. I attribute it directly to the marketing I did with retailers. I got early adopters on board and on board early.

That said, put out a fantasy non-d20 adventure and you will have issues. Heck, you also have the same strategy with supplements that I do. More extensions than adventures. I put adventures into my source books but usually 1/2 or more is additional rules or more likely, setting.

So, there are exceptions but the easy money is on core rules.

Bill

Personally, what I find more interesting in settings is concept and theme.  Give me the basic backstory, give me a "what the world is generally like" stuff, and maybe, maybe a few dots on a map, and let me do the rest.

My plan for my own project was always this.  This is the bad guys, this is what living in the wastes is like, here's a few examples, now have fun.  

Part of it is that mine's a post-apoc setting, and I've always felt part of the joy for players in a post-apoc, or cyberpunk or any other "near-future" for that matter, was being able to take your own hometown or other, and imagine what it would be like in the future.  

Of course, I'd also never really planned on bothering with sourcebooks.  I don't personally tend to buy them for games, I like my games to be suitably all-in-one, and I also don't really think I know how to write them.  I've always been bigger on grand concept than on niggling detail.  Indeed, even just the niggling detail like skill lists or feat lists is part of why I've never gotten my game finished.

Quote from: RPGPunditNot making the stupid fucking promise in the first place?

And seriously, its not like either the Realms or Eberron had literally used up every last inch of space they could detail that they just HAD to detail Sembia or the Vast or the Border Kingdoms or Xendrick.

RPGPundit

I'm not saying that FR or Eberron (which itself hasn't been around nearly long enough to have reached the point I was talking about earlier) have detailed every other inch of space and now must do so.  Well, maybe the FR, I don't know (I can only judge on it's age and how much I generally dislike it, I have none of the books, and don't want them.  Spent enough years having FR shoved into every peripheral D&D thing I ran across that didn't need it).
But you asked, and that is the best and most honestly realistic and justified reason I can think of.  Everyone else was coming off like it was universally an evil scheme to make "Profit!  Mwa-Hahaha!".  Just seemed like someone should break from that.

As far as 'not making the fucking promise in the first place'...  maybe they meant it when they made it?  Maybe the management's changed and the ones who are in charge now Don't mean it while those who made the promise Did?  Or maybe they thought no one really cared that much.  I've heard many time from many people that the Eberron book that got so much uproar actualy didn't detail the area they thought it was detailing and setting their pitchforks aflame over.  Hell only knows why things happen.  But we can either be adults and try to give it some thought, or we can be fucking children and be reactionary, crying that they're being mean to us because they're evil.

Quote from: flyingmiceI have the same problem with over-developed settings. I like to create my own stuff, and many settings have no place to put them.

OTOH, I understand why. I regularly get bashed by reviewers for not putting enough setting info in my games. I want to leave them open, so people can fit their own stuff in, but apparently people like me - and jrients - are a dying breed.

Now, while to a fair extent I don't agree with this, I can understand it.  Wanting some room to be able to put in stuff you come up with is understandable.  Granted my first thought falls closer to "Isn't that kind of like expecting the monopoly board to have missing or blank spaces so you can fill in some how you want them?"
I know, that's a bit extreme.  

Either way, too much or not enough, there's a balance you need to reach for the setting itself, that balance is important.  If you give too little, then you've failed to give the World (it's feel, it's operational rules and trends, what makes it That place instead of Anyplace), too much and apparently you choke off the DM's creativity.

Still, I'd rather see supplement after supplement pumped out detailing a world to the Nth degree than "126 Prestige Classes suitable for play in the area between 101st Street and 113th Street!" or "The Magic Mouth spell disseminated in 12 chapters".  Regional detailing is really easy to ignore, and might even give you some ideas you want to use for your own stuff.

Quote from: J ArcanePersonally, what I find more interesting in settings is concept and theme.  Give me the basic backstory, give me a "what the world is generally like" stuff, and maybe, maybe a few dots on a map, and let me do the rest.

My plan for my own project was always this.  This is the bad guys, this is what living in the wastes is like, here's a few examples, now have fun.  

Hmm, seems a lot of people (in this thread at least) feel that way.  But really, if all you have is "Here's the idea, here's a map, there's Startholme.  Here's 15 plot hooks.  The End" what have you been given that merits saying you're Playing in That World?  That's the core of my arguement for more detail...  the less detail on the setting, the smaller the line between "We're playing in X" and "We're playing in my homebrew world".

Quote from: WolvorineHmm, seems a lot of people (in this thread at least) feel that way.  But really, if all you have is "Here's the idea, here's a map, there's Startholme.  Here's 15 plot hooks.  The End" what have you been given that merits saying you're Playing in That World?  That's the core of my arguement for more detail...  the less detail on the setting, the smaller the line between "We're playing in X" and "We're playing in my homebrew world".

Core mythology is different from gazeteer-esque detail.  Which is something that FR and Greyhawk and the like have missed completely for years.

Look at Vampire, or any of the White Wolf games.  None of the corebooks give more than the most cursory detail as to what individual places and such are like in the World of Darkness.  Instead you get lots of detail about what vampires are, what they do, the basic divisions among them, and some notes on the theme and common conflicts in the World of Darkness.

Everything else is up to you.  How things are in my neck of the WoD are up to me.  And I quite like it that way, because it gives me the freedom to create my own part of the greater world.  

Now, there were some books put out, that focused on a few of the larger cities in detail, but well, I don't buy sourcebooks, and not a one would ever cover where I live.  But I didn't really want them anyway.

Theme, conflict, mythology, these thigns tell me a hell of a lot more about a gameworld than a big list of placenames and NPCs, like what you find in the Forgotten Realms.

Quote from: J ArcaneCore mythology is different from gazeteer-esque detail.  Which is something that FR and Greyhawk and the like have missed completely for years.

Look at Vampire, or any of the White Wolf games.  None of the corebooks give more than the most cursory detail as to what individual places and such are like in the World of Darkness.  Instead you get lots of detail about what vampires are, what they do, the basic divisions among them, and some notes on the theme and common conflicts in the World of Darkness.

Everything else is up to you.  How things are in my neck of the WoD are up to me.  And I quite like it that way, because it gives me the freedom to create my own part of the greater world.  

Now, there were some books put out, that focused on a few of the larger cities in detail, but well, I don't buy sourcebooks, and not a one would ever cover where I live.  But I didn't really want them anyway.

Theme, conflict, mythology, these thigns tell me a hell of a lot more about a gameworld than a big list of placenames and NPCs, like what you find in the Forgotten Realms.

True, but WoD (at least last I knew, granted I pretty much stopped with 1E V:tM) is set in what amounts to the real world.  They could (and did) detail what vampire life in chicago is, but to try to detail chicago in general is a lot more work than it's really worth.  Info about Chicago isn't that hard to come by.
Now Sunnydale, or Amn, or Threshold (to pull a few out of thin air based on nothing, really) is a bit different.  These are't real places.  Granted those are cities, not countries or huge parts of the world (mostly because I went from one city - Chicago - to a few others, but partly because I couldn't think of any fantasy setting countries off the top of my head).  
But it still strikes me that to actually be playing in a world/setting, you have to have enough to be able to say that you Are playing In that setting, and not just playing in your homebrew world with some storebought trappings thrown at it.

Not that I'm saying anything about any One True Way or any shit like that, but I seem to be the lone voice for the other side of the coin on this one, and when no one speaks for the other side, the other side usually gets beat up like the little kid with the glasses and the sqeaky braces.