Wik
First Post
Rystil Arden said:I'm curious--what attracts you to the 'Caribbean model', per se? This is not an accusation, just an attempt to explore why. Myself, I'd rather just totally start from scratch, and if forced to pick from the real-world, I'd go with the Mediterrannean, heading out to the Arabian sea for sure, so I'd like to see what the advantages of the Caribbean are in your mind?
Well, truth be told, if this were a home game, I'd definately go with a mediterranean model - in fact, the current world I'm putting together is based off it!
However, for a PbP, where we want to encourage individual GM development, I think an archipelego setting, where the islands are fairly close to one another, allows GMs to add their own material easily.
However, we also have a nearby continental area that would support a wide variety of land adventures - "central america" can support "trackless desert" adventures, and there are plenty of old ruins swallowed up by the jungles and swamps that we could throw in "South America". Really, if you look at the caribbean area (and by "caribbean", I should mention that I'm including much of the southern united states, and a good chunk of northern south america), almost every terrain type is included - about the only ones that are missing are arctic regions and deciduous and coniferous forests, and we could have those lining the coasts of the "north american" continental landmass.
Plus, the caribbean model supports a very popular method of gameplay in D&D - pirates! As a lot of best-selling D&D supplements can show you, pirates sell. And a caribbean/island scenario is the best way to support pirate adventures (without necessarily forcing it down people's throats)
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For the record, I believe a "South Pacific" model could work fairly well as a map model, and the mediterranean model (if centred around the Aegean sea) could work, too. The only reason I think the Caribbean works best as a model is that it's not as familiar to D&D Players as the mediterranean - I know that there are a lot of maps that are based off the mediterranean.
A caribbean model is easy to fiddle with so that it doesn't look like it's base - simply flip it so that the islands are west of central america instead of east, and mess with placement of the larger island masses. And maybe throw an island where the gulf of mexico is.
And Goblin's idea of flipping the island mass so that north america is in the south and vice versa is also a great idea.