Apocalyptic Settings and Breaking Settings

[the Jester]

In the best case scenario, people break things because deep down people like breaking things. They like calling other people losers. They see someone doing something, they go and knock it over just to see what happens. They don’t establish their own new thing, they take from others and break stuff.

Forgive me, but you seem to have a very bitter view on humanity and what makes people tick. I would suggest that in the best case scenario, people do what you see as "breaking things" because they think they can improve them. They may not always be right, but the "best cast scenario" is certainly not one where everyone is always acting out of malice.

With all the setting I mentioned above (this is not just about 4E FR, but the real mentality behind destroying it and the other settings as well), there were simpler ways of updating them that demolishing so much of what made them good and appealing in the first place. But they were demolished all the same by people proud of the job they did of dismembering things.

"Simpler ways of updating them than demolishing so much of what made them good and appealing"...

If they were going to make major changes to the setting- and they were- how would you suggest they do this without demolishing what made them good and appealing?

Frankly, I think what they demolished, at least in the Realms, is a lot of the crap that made me never buy a FR product (since 1e, anyhow).

 

[Keefe the Thief]

So, WotC "destroyed" the FR because deep down, people like to hurt and destroy? I admit this explanation supplants Red Wizards idea in my heart as "most creative explanation for the change."
You know, the one where he stated that all people liking or writing for FR 4e simply did not "get" 3e, and that angered them so much that they thought: "lets trash the setting."

 

[Mercurius]

My point is this. Why make me change my setting so I can use the new rules? If the old setting doesn't fit with the new rules, then maybe the new rules are so different that the old setting should be left behind for a new one. Build a new setting that conforms to the new rules.

Wow, I didn't know Wizards of the Coast employed Campaign Police that actually force people to conform their campaign settings.

I mean, seriously. It shouldn't be that hard to adapt the old Realms to 4E if you want to. If you don't, then choose between sticking with your 3E game or start a new campaign in a different setting. But I just don't buy this kind of talk: "Why make me change..."

 

[thundershot]

Why can't you just use the plethora of campaign sourcebooks that don't necessarily rely on stats over the years and just use the 4E system? I don't understand the problem....

 

[Mercurius]

To the OP, first of all Fallen Seraph quite nicely summed up my own approach to post-apocalyptic settings:

For me it is taking what is left of civilization and culture to try and build something, create something, do something you can't do in a non-apocalyptic setting which is be the foundation of a new society.

I personally find it "sexy" also in that feeling of the unknown and also the known. Your heading off into the unknown and uncover things once known, a city, a technological device, etc. Your essentially building both a current history and finding out about the past.

This is EXACTLY what I'm doing with the setting I'm currently planning and has nothing to do with some nasty desire to break things and make people suffer but everything to do with building something new and exploring the unknown. To me this kind of approach lends itself wonderfully to the implied sword & sorcery theme of 4E: countless ruins to be explored, lost histories to weave together, ancient secrets to be uncovered.

But I also understand that you, Grumpy Celt, are talking more about taking a previously established setting and "breaking it up", as you say here:

I do not buy, for a moment, that breaking these settings and selling the bits on fire is anything less than an exercise in cruel vanity. I do not believe it is about discovery, unless vivisection is about science.

I think this perspective has more to do with your own psychological biases or "filters" (which you've made clear in numerous posts and which Najo quite nicely addressed) than it does with the actual motives of the people you are talking about. In other words, this is how you see the world, not necessarily how it is (at least completely!). I mean, it may be true some of the time, but to automatically equate an "apocalyptic treatment" with "cruel vanity" and "vivisection" rings false to me.

I think in the case of the Forgotten Realms the people at Wizards probably just wanted to do something different, to both reflect the tone of the new rules and default theme ("points of light") and maybe because they didn't see the point in going through yet another update of (basically) the same old Realms. I would even say that they took a risk that was based not in greed or malice, but in creativity and a sense of adventure. Whether it worked or not I cannot say (hopefully my book will arrive later today), but it seemed that the safer financial option would have been to do yet another go around with the same old products. But instead they're taking a risk and trying something different, so I applaud them for that.

Finally, if we're looking for deeper motives behind "apocalyptic treatments" and settings in general, I think it has something to do with the nature of the world we live in right now--which is quite apocalyptic, really. We exist in a time of great change, and many argue we are approaching a point of breakdown/breakthrough (ala chaos dynamics). This is also echoed on the microcosmic scale as cycles of change and catharsis in our individual lives, or among families or organizations. So I think it makes sense that people are fascinated with apocalypse and, again, isn't necessarily indicative of some kind of pathological cruel streak.

 

[JesterPoet]

Ummmm... forgive my ignorance but are people suggesting that the new FR is somewhat post-apocalyptic in nature?

I'm not a FR fan at all, so I haven't been following it, but I'm a HUGE post-apocalyptic fan, so if that element has been added, I'm very interested in checking it out.

Or am I just misunderstanding the OP (and a few of the following ones)?

 

[Mercule]

What bothers me is that my 20-year campaign and your 20-year campaign may have started out the same but quickly took on the style of the players. We adventured the way we wanted to and created the world we wanted. Now WOTC comes along and changes it so that if I now joined your group we'd be playing in the same game world. It makes the past 20-year exploits in our campaign meaningless.

I can see this. Really, any gaming group has a shared memory of their setting's history. That's what makes it cool to game with the same people for a long time.

There are multiple historic events and nations in my home brew that were caused by previous players. I don't currently play with any of the players for whom this world was created, and I don't expect to ever do so again (most I don't even know how to contact).

My current group (AFAIK) thinks its cool that the world has history and PC exploits can be retold to others -- so they know their deeds matter. But, I don't want them living in the shadows of the "original" PCs, either, so time moves on.

As far as joining our games (assuming we both did FR up to now), I would say there's a couple of options.

First, I've got my version and you've got yours. I've never liked the Harpers, Elminster, or Lathander so odds are those are all killed off in my version. Loviatar, on the other hand, is cool so she's stolen the loyalties of the drow from Lolth (dark elves, in my home brew, have advanced torture methods so this change might actually have happened, were I to run FR). You, on the other hand, have had Lathander as a major figure who has really increased his standing and the drow are more like insane cultists than anything civilized. How do we "join" our versions of FR?

Second, and more likely IME, is that one of the versions will resonate more with the larger group and become the setting of choice. The less-used one may still have stories told about it, though.

Both of the above are certainly possible, even without the new 4e FR.

Third, we start from scratch and use a new baseline that will grow to reflect our new group. The 4e version is no worse than any other baseline. It may be better because neither of us will be trying to force it to resemble what we remember (at least, we'll be less likely).

If you've got a flavor of the Realms you like, don't change it for your game. If I were to start up a Greyhawk game, I'd use the 1981(?) version, rather than either the Gazetteer or From the Ashes, regardless of the edition. I might pick up an edition-appropriate version of the setting to get some crunchy-bits, but the maps, etc. would be from the version I liked.

I think the 4e FR guide is best for people who are new to D&D or new to the Realms. Sure, you may have some issues with a new group or PBEM, but that's a different issue, IMO, from continuity.

My previous comments don't even mention how much of a cliche it has become to end a campaign setting with an apocalypse so one can start a new campaign in the same world but with new rules. I firmly believe that if one has to tear the world to shreds to make the new rules fit, leave the bloody world alone.

Now, this, I generally agree with. I don't mind tearing things down, etc. But, if it's just to make the 3e flagship setting be the 4e flagship setting, then it's really lame. Release a new setting. People were fans of FR because of its flavor.

 

[Jasperak]

Wow, I didn't know Wizards of the Coast employed Campaign Police that actually force people to conform their campaign settings.

I mean, seriously. It shouldn't be that hard to adapt the old Realms to 4E if you want to. If you don't, then choose between sticking with your 3E game or start a new campaign in a different setting. But I just don't buy this kind of talk: "Why make me change..."

Why can't you just use the plethora of campaign sourcebooks that don't necessarily rely on stats over the years and just use the 4E system? I don't understand the problem....

The Forgotten Realms is a campaign world that has had 20 years of support through campaign sourcebooks, modules, computer games, and novels. Those channels of support have built a game world that has a style that is different from Ravenloft, Dark Sun, or Eberron. It is high fantasy, not horror, survival fantasy, nor steampunk. It was never post-apocalyptic (except maybe Netheril.) And quite frankly it was never about stats. It was all about story. High Fantasy.

The new 4e Realms do not resemble the old IMO. It looks to have a different feel. Like a poster said earlier, there can be a great benefit to adventuring in a post-apocalyptic world. There are so many new options; canon can be rewritten. Why don't they do that with Eberron? They really should have made Eberron their new POL setting and based the RPGA around that instead of the FR.

@Mercurius-The RPGA is WOTC's campaign police. If I want to play 4e Realms, I have to play in theirs.

@Thundershot-The new Realms (just reading, not playing) has a different feel to me, as does 4e. How do you expect one to play a 3e version of FR and then a 4e version with the RPGA. What I don't see is a benefit to using the FR when WOTC could have just created a new setting that fit better with their new base races, classes, and rules. It just pisses off the people that have a lot of history with the setting and gains virtually nothing since little of the past 20 years of growth in the setting matters with their restart.

To sum up, I think part of the problem is that WOTC took a high fantasy setting and made it something new to fit their designs. They just happened to nuke everything so they could fit all of their new stuff in.

 

[Arashi Ravenblade]

I love destroying a setting.
I love Final Crisis, I like the Realms having their butts kicked, I like the Idea of Star Wars legacy. and I think HP Lovecrafts Mythos is great reading. And the book of revelation is my favorite in the bible.

 

[El Mahdi]

The few times I have enjoyed an apocalypse as part of popular entertainment is when I read Stephen King’s* The Stand, watched the movie The Day After and a precious few others, including some zombie movies. On the whole, dismemberment of society does not appeal to me a great deal and I have never participated in a game where the setting is apocalyptic, either during or post-apocalyptic.
. . .

So, why then the apocalyptic treatment of these settings? Why is it assumed that dismembering the settings is sexy and appealing? What do people see in a setting of failure and defeat? . . .

I think it's a lot like the Pheonix rising from the ashes, out of the destruction comes opportunity for greatness. The giants of the past, the giants that used to live with, and overshadow, the world and would be heros are now gone. It's now up to you. In a world of struggle and grayness, where just surviving day to day is a major accomplishment, true heroism shines like a supernova.

To use 4E FR as an example (although I'm not impressed with the product that was put out, due to other reasons already stated in other threads) I do like where they have taken the Realms. I feel there are different stages of Post-Apocalyptic settings. There's the "Day After" setting where the apocalypse just happened and everyone is still dealing with it; the setting where it's a while later and people are just surviving the new, dismal status-quo; and then there's the status-quo has been broken by some (usually unlikely) hero or event, and now the world is truly rebuilding with a sense of hope. I think "Jericho" was an example of the first. "The Postman" is a good example of the second with the very end of the movie transitioning into the third. I feel that 4E FR is also in that third category. There's a new, relatively stable status-quo. The giants of the past are not there to do the work for you anymore (or chastise you for, in their opinion, not doing it right). The future is literally yours for the making. It's up to you whether it's going to be bright or dark.

In a time like ours, where most everyone has basic necessities without too much trouble ("most" everyone - not "everyone"), true heroism kind of gets lost in the mix. Celebrity status seems to be what is envisioned as a hero. Doing what is right, just because it's right, is many times even scorned or laughed at. But in a world of darkness, this kind of heroism shines like a beacon. The "contrast" between good and evil is very pronounced.