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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Faraer" data-source="post: 4840873" data-attributes="member: 6318">People commonly fail to realize both how large these worlds are and how local it is to live there, even for adventurers. This is partly caused by the need for base setting works, which don't know where your campaign is set, to give continental overviews and maps that wouldn't be available to characters, and various reluctances to showcase daily life in print -- Gary Gygax assumed a lot of knowledge about medieval life, for instance (though he later spelled it out in Living Fantasy), while multiple RPG and magazine editors have refused to publish basic Realmslore on trade.Presenting a whole world, suitable for many campaigns, rather than a smaller region is liable to distract precisely in as far as DMs and players fail to recognize this locality. The illusion of a world far beyond the immediate campaign, created by some combination of preparation (wide-ranging lore) and improvisation is an important way of making campaigns feel real.There's been a wide and I think regrettable phenomenon in D&D and the published Realms (at least) in the last while that I call foreshortening, in which things become easier, quicker and closer, encompassing the 'players can do anything' philosophy, reviving past cultures, speeding level advancement, tieing encounter strength to PC levels, bringing drow to the surface, making gate travel and construction easier, and assuming modern geographical integration and speeds of communication.I think it's telling that we talk about finite character race choices and so on as restrictions and limitations, which perversely assumes all-inclusion as a norm and characterizes deviations from that as a kind of authoritarian curtailment. Obviously, this phenomenon isn't unrelated to the selling of class and race supplements to players. It's like thinking of a sculpture as loss because bits of the stone block were carved away.That's how the Realms has sometimes been abused, in stark contrast to the coherence of good Realmslore -- the web of interrelationship represented in the setting itself as the Weave.</blockquote>

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