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ShortQuests -- individual adventure modules! An all-new collection of digest-sized D&D adventures designed to plug in to your game.

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mouseferatu" data-source="post: 1098486" data-attributes="member: 1288">I have no skill drawing maps. Every last ounce of artistic/creative talent I may have is devoted to the writing. I can't draw a straight line with a ruler, and I don't even think visually, I think descriptively. Nor do I have hours to make them.But I also don't feel I need a map for every location. Unless the precise locations or distances are vital, such as a very complex dungeon or battleground, my players and I both prefer a less rigid approach. You don't need a map to know the Temple of Whatis is next to Whosit's Castle; you just need to know it, and possibly make a note of it. The largest of my own homebrew campaigns, a world called Selion, has been the setting for four full-length (defined as six months to a year in this case) campaigns over the past 10 years. In all that time, I think I have made use of maybe 12 maps. More than half of those were dungeon/or building maps. One is the map of the continent. Only two were village/city maps; one of them proved unnecessary, and the other I simply stole from the inside cover of the old Bard's Tale computer game, and changed the names.Thing is, even if I did feel I needed maps, I still wouldn't want campaign settings to focus on them. To me, a campaign setting is about the world--and what makes a world different from any other world is history and culture. Frankly, IMO, you can swap out maps. Just make a small note as to what this or that building is, and you could use the same map for a village in Forgotten Realms, Ravenloft, Scarred Lands, Shadow Branch, or almost any setting. But I don't think anyone would claim those settings are all the same, because the histories and cultures and stories are all very different.So far as crunch, I think world-specific feats and magic items really add flavor; some special abilities should be limited to particular cultures/areas. A feat like, say, Combat Charioteer would fit very well into a Greek or Roman setting, not so much one based on the Renaissance. And honestly, I think PrCs should almost be restricted to campaign-specific books only. People trying to create too many "general-use" PrCs is why we have so many out there that get so much flak. A PrC is best used, IMO, to fill a particular niche in a particular setting.Again, not telling you that you should change your mind. But there's more than one way to view a campaign setting, and more that one approach to world-creation. To me, leaving out maps isn't "making more work for me," as long as the most important ones are there. Stinting on history and culture, that would be more work, because then I have to decide for myself what the people and places of this world are like in even the broad strokes--and if I wanted to do that, I'd make up my own setting. (Which, most of the time, I do; I actually don't play in published settings very often. But I buy them frequently to mine them for ideas--like historical events, story seeds, and cultures. <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=":)" />)</blockquote>

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