D&D General What are the minimum standards for a published adventure campaign?

[Lanefan]

I don't know about anyone else here, but my time is somewhat limited. If I take the time to come up with a series of Greek-like islands, for the Ancient Greekesque campaign my players agreed to participate in, I'm going to be extremely unhappy if the players decide to piss off to Egypt instead. We agreed to play a game set in Greece, so why would I have anything prepared for Egypt?

Later is fine. But I'm not going to be prepared for them to out-of-the-blue just declare they're headed to Egypt.

Depends, I suppose, how long one spends on prep before dropping the puck on the campaign.

For my current one, before puck-drop I had "Greece" fairly-well detailed and mapped, a couple of neighbouring areas somewhat detailed and mapped, and a continent-sized area mapped in low detail, along with notes as to what other cultures existed where so they were available to players right form the start. I also had the world's history, pantheons, and cosmology nailed down (some of which I could port in from prior games and just file the names off); and a couple of ideas for long-term underlying plots, some of which went places and others of which never saw the light of day.

This all took about a year of on-and-off doodling, some of which was done while still winding up my previous game. In the 15 years since, I've expanded on all this significantly as the game's gone on.

I typically don't like doing this. It's like having a player who agrees to play in your Vampire game coming and asking to be a Mage or a Werewolf. No. We're playing Vampire not Mage or Werewolf.

To me, if the campaign is starting in faux-Greece (which is, one assumes, a Human realm) my wanting to play a Norse character would seem much less jarring than if I wanted to play a Dwarf or a Hobbit or some oddball 5e species.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I typically don't like doing this. It's like having a player who agrees to play in your Vampire game coming and asking to be a Mage or a Werewolf. No. We're playing Vampire not Mage or Werewolf.

I think it depends very much on the player and why they're asking, and what impact it's going to have on the game. Generally I feel like "different culture in the same world" thing is usually unproblematic so long as the player isn't trying to make a problem, and the character could feasibly have got there, and speaks the main language. Werewolf in a Vampire campaign is a much bigger problem in most cases, because of the extreme antipathy and danger between the two groups. Sometimes it can even be actively useful to have an outsider culture in culture-specific campaign because they can have stuff explained to them (which often helps all the players, note, not PCs, who might not full realize some stuff). Speaking from recent experience here.

I have seen characters who should have been denied though, including one of my own when I was a teenager - We were creating PCs for Castle Falkenstein, and everyone was creating the usual bunch of snooty and/or eccentric and/or brave/bold aristos and elites who Castle Falkenstein focuses on. But I was deeply annoyed that Castle Falkenstein totally misrepresented everything about the industrial revolution and wasn't plausible even in it's own context, so had created a surly cowboy from the US West who was here in Europe for questionable reasons, and who wasn't going to bow or engage in "etiquette", or duel with anything but pistols, and was surely going to be spitting chewing tobacco on the floor of the Archduke's study. In short he was a different culture to make a problem - and I was too young and dumb and lacked the self-awareness to realize actually I should just have said "I'm not playing Castle Falkenstein, it's wanky Victoriana!".

 

[Zardnaar]

Why not just put Greek, Norse, Drow, Egyptian, Roman, Anglo-Saxon, and a bunch more all in the same world?

That way, they can start out Greek (my current campaign did this) but later move on to different cultures-realms-societies if-when either the plot or their own whims-desires take them there.

Doing this also gives players more leeway in the potential culture options for their characters; e.g. one could play a Norse character in an otherwise-Greek setting if there's a Norse culture elsewhere she could have come from.

Because it's a crap Americanized pastiche?

You don't have to be Greek but you do need to be something plausible to that world Eg Phoenician, Egyptian etc.

It's actually what the players chose so it's fine. Any new player would have to be on board. If tgey weren't and are disruptive they won't be a player for long.

It's fantastic Greece eg I replaced Pesrua with Zahar but it's earth map at least locally.

 

[Lanefan]

Because it's a crap Americanized pastiche?

You don't have to be Greek but you do need to be something plausible to that world Eg Phoenician, Egyptian etc.

Ah. I gleefully mix up various cultural eras in my settings (following the Xena-Hercules model) meaning you can be in faux-ancient Greece, travel across a sea and find yourseif in faux-ancient Rome, then travel north on that same sea and find yourself in war-of-the-roses-era Britain.

 

[Zardnaar]

Ah. I gleefully mix up various cultural eras in my settings (following the Xena-Hercules model) meaning you can be in faux-ancient Greece, travel across a sea and find yourseif in faux-ancient Rome, then travel north on that same sea and find yourself in war-of-the-roses-era Britain.

That's what FR and Mystsra are for.

 

[Parmandur]

Ah. I gleefully mix up various cultural eras in my settings (following the Xena-Hercules model) meaning you can be in faux-ancient Greece, travel across a sea and find yourseif in faux-ancient Rome, then travel north on that same sea and find yourself in war-of-the-roses-era Britain.

I think Xena/Hercules took that from Robert E. Howard.