When is a campaign setting no longer relevant?

[Ariosto]

That's a good point, GMforPowergamers. A counterpoint is that the future is never what it used to be -- and trying to make it look more like today just ensures that there's something to "date". Star Trek from the 1960s, or Forbidden Planet from the 1950s, is only so much more strikingly (and quite appropriately) "out of this world". Indeed, when I saw in the early 1970s the footage from the original Trek pilot (worked into the two-part episode in which Kirk faces a court martial), it impressed me as even stranger.

There must be familiar points of reference, because of course the story is really about us. However, we also need some sense of that gulf of time -- and anachronisms from the past are the only ones we really know! All we can say for sure about life 300 years hence is that it is likely to be very different. So, what we cannot even conceive in literal terms we must represent symbolically. It's the reverse of "updating" Shakespeare in modern dress for a play that had a "contemporary" setting when it was written.

(If memory serves, Star Trek postulated the collapse of our present civilization before the rise of that which produced the Star Fleet. That and/or other cultural influences could rationalize customs that may seem old-fashioned to us, and of course there is always fashion itself!)

 

[Ariosto]

As far as D&D settings go, I feel that Greyhawk, Blackmoor, and Mystara are way past their expiration dates.

Why? What on (our) Earth has transpired to make them any less worlds of fantastic adventure?

Might it not simply be that they engaged you when they were new to you, and your ennui is due to their having become too familiar to you? Why should they be any less delightful to someone else discovering them anew? Is there something peculiar about you, a quality you think "folks new to the game" today must lack even though you possessed it when you were new to the game?

 

[rounser]

The penny dropped for me on what keeps AD&D 1E and Greyhawk in particular a bit different from generic fantasy setting #19902 (e.g. Mystara, Thunder Rift, Dragonlance, Birthright etc).

It's playing up the sense of the eldritch. Let me explain.

Even when it was new, the AD&D internal artwork made the thing look like the nearest thing modern publishing had to an old spell tome. "Unearthed Arcana", in the literal sense. Quirky names and references abounded, compounding this impression. Greyhawk modules like Tomb of Horrors and Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth dripped with history and dusty arcane secrets. I was so fooled by the "old tome" look of the Greyhawk boxed set that it wasn't immediately obvious that it was faked. The Dungeon Master's Guide's style is an enigma wrapped in a thesaurus.

This hasn't been totally lost - the 3E books nod to it with the covers, but the interior artwork and writing style totally let it down. Even BECMI and Mystara lacks it (so please don't get out the nostalgia accusations just yet), and it was a big difference between 1E and 2E. 4E lacks it too. It's not even in the Red Box Basic game, which would be a contender if I were rose-tinted glasses-ing my perspective here.

Maybe it's not Gygax vs Mentzer, maybe it's just the art direction of 1E, and that Gygax had his nose buried in a thesaurus looking up similes for "wizard" when he wasn't inventing anagrams, and maybe Sutherland et. al. were looking directly at old style mythological artwork to inspire their own style. I don't know. Even by the time of orange spine books it was pretty much gone (try to detect it in the Wilderness Survival Guide).

I think that if you want to reboot D&D, or a generic D&D setting, then playing up the sense of the eldritch is a key way to make it appealing and intriguing, even to a modern audience into Buffy and Harry Potter. If the books look and read like ye olde tomef of ancient myfterief, and you have modules and settings carrying the theme forward, then that's a kind of nitro fuel in the D&D brand tank. Even if it means silly anagrams to make the names sound that way. That's how you might recapture the core D&D magic without having to reinvent it all the time, perhaps.

Well, it's a thought, at least. How do you make a D&D book an arcane tome and a useful reference? There's the Asmodeus in the details. Maybe sidebars? The main text written like a spellbook, with translated specifics in the margins? That'd be cool. I think similar stuff has been done with Pluffet Smedger, Volo, and Elminster before, but not to the nth degree. It'd blow out the page count though.

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

It's difficult for fantasy settings to truly become dated. With science fiction, it's different - the original Traveller RPG had memory values for huge megacomputers which modern USB sticks easily surpass by multiple orders of magnitude.

One of the most "up-to-date" SF settings is Transhuman Space... and yet I already wonder if the technological progress in some fields will catch up to it soon, long before the "official" year 2100 of the setting's time frame.

 

[rounser]

It's difficult for fantasy settings to truly become dated.

It appears that WOTC disagrees. From what they've said, they seem to be weighing D&D and it's settings in the balance with regard to current "relevance" (to pop culture?) and in updating it to be part of "contemporary fantasy". Or maybe I'm reading too much into those comments.

Beyond broad statements like "zombies are out, vampires are back in", I wonder what's being used to judge the zeitgeist? If you look at MMORPGs, movies, anime, novels and such collectively, is there really anything usable to be gained by reading these pop culture entrails? Are publishing houses and movie studios subscribed to research into what should work right now? Probably. Who knows their hit rate.

Is D&D really a white elephant, consigned to the dustbin of history unless it becomes a mirror of current popular culture, or is it going to be another Transformers or Star Trek, where themes that worked once will work again? Maybe if it keeps updating to remain "relevant" we'll never find out, because the compromises made to become "contemporary fantasy" will have compromised D&D's original appeal to an extent that it loses that original appeal entirely. I hope not.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

I don't think a setting can become totally irrelevant. At worst, it is in need of an update or "reimagination". Science Fiction faces this a lot. Other settings might face it because they become to convoluted or went in the wrong direction at some point.

Darksun is a dessert world

That's where pudding comes from?

 

[rounser]

That's where pudding comes from?

And he who controls the pudding, controls the universe.

Dune and Dark Sun themes could be wed very easily.

 

[Mallus]

Settings can't go out 'out of date'. They can, however, accrue a large body of uninteresting and badly written material that reduce their popularity. Note this happens in series fiction/film all the time.

Usually this means the cessation of new products. Sometimes it means a successful reboot that reinvigorates the series and results in more products (ie Star Trek 2009).

Virtually anything that can be done once can be done again. Hell, things that shouldn't have been done once are done multiple times!

P.S. Dear other posters, please do not mention Star Trek and the Transformers in the same breath. It makes my lifelong inner Trekkie cry -- and it makes him angry!

 

[wingsandsword]

(If memory serves, Star Trek postulated the collapse of our present civilization before the rise of that which produced the Star Fleet. That and/or other cultural influences could rationalize customs that may seem old-fashioned to us, and of course there is always fashion itself!)

Well, as I recall my Trek lore. The history of Trek was that there was a World War III fought as a nuclear war in the 2050's between the United States and its allies and a bloc of Asian nations called the Eastern Coalition. The world spent decades rebuilding, but about 10 years after the war Zephram Cochrane invented the first warp drive, and attracted Vulcan attention and making contact with intelligent, friendly and somewhat advanced alien life accelerated the rebuilding process and ushered in a Renaissance that took mankind from post-apocalyptic horror to an interstellar spacefaring world with a united world government in a little less than a century.

Doesn't seem so old-fashioned or utterly implausible. Cochrane building a warp drive in the ruins of the U.S. Pacific Northwest after a nuclear war is a little far, but he may well have been developing it before the war and spent the last 10 years doing the last work at a much slower pace.

 

[ExploderWizard]

It's kind of odd thinking of a fantasy setting as obsolete or dated. I believe that individuals can get bored once all of the material for a given setting has been explored but that in no way makes the setting itself irrelevant.

I see fantasy settings as being similar to novels that take a lot longer to read. The older settings might not be as interesting to someone who has explored them hundreds of times, but to someone who has never discovered them, these settings will be just as fresh and exciting as anything else that's new.

With regard to published campaign settings, I suppose the length of time such settings remain interesting depends on much the DM and players add thier own material to make the place special for themselves. I still enjoy playing in the older settings as much as exploring new ones.