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Message: <blockquote data-quote="fuindordm" data-source="post: 2438960" data-attributes="member: 5435">That's a useful idea... I'll have to try multiplying the number of clues I hand out by a factor of 10 and seeing whether that's enough to get the PCs on the right track. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":-)" title="Smile    :-)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":-)" />...but then, if any city they decide to go to can be interpreted as the City of Glass, the symbolism is probably too weak for them to pick up on it.  Or else the world has been painted in very broad strokes untli the point where the PCs decide on a course of action, and you fill in the details and the symbolism as you go.It's definitely a problem if you want them to share a motivation.  This is why so many campaigns are a quest to save the world.  At least that's something everyone can get behind.It sounds like you should be writing novels rather than designing campaigns, and if you manage to make this work I envy you your players!  Seriously, it's a good and very satisfying method from the design perspecive, and I would jump at the chance to play in a campaign like this.  I've always had to settle for less, though.I don't think I've grokked the question.  But when I create a campaign world, metatextual consistency isn't my primary goal.It does sound like we have similar approaches in a lot of ways.  Have you ever read Tolkien's letters and essays on The Lord of the Rings?  One of his central themes is the passion of sub-creation--when thinking beings, up to and including the Valar, recognize the beauty and intricacy of the world they live in they feel compelled to imitate the act of creation.  The Silmarils, the Dwarves, the Two Trees, and many other elements of Tolkien's world owe their existence to this motivation.Your preferred style of campaign world, it seems to me, is like a beautiful jewel--strongly structured, self-contained, and beautiful to apprehend.  I try to create worlds that are larger and more chaotic.  I like to write histories for my nations and ethnicities, and to have lots of variety in cultures and attitudes. I try to create worlds that have a sense of historical verisimilitude, and worry about the stories I want to tell in that world later.Of course I also try to put in a generous dose of 'secret history', symbolism, and metatextual structure to the campaign, but it's more on the level of the story that I want to tell and the parties involved, and doesn't spread out over the whole world.  The players might miss a lot of the significance, but that's OK with me if they're enjoying their exploration of the world.So that's a long answer to what I think you were asking, which is 'how do you impose a symbolic structure on the complexity of a nation, and how do you relate one level of complexity to another on the metatextual level?"  The answer, is that I don't bother.  If the story needed an analogue to the Greene Knight, then I would pull such a person from whatever nation or ethnicity happened to be convenient to the players, and dress the character up with blantant and hidden symbols identifying their role.That's right.  If they do need to apprehend the metacontext, it's at the plot level, not the setting level.  And that's simply because I enjoy creating wide, sprawling, pseudo-historical settings. I also enjoy having culturally diverse PCs.  That's for gaming, though--the novel I'm working on now, however, falls more towards your end of the spectrum.Cheers,Ben</blockquote>

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