Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lanefan" data-source="post: 4523828" data-attributes="member: 29398">How about technological back-sliding?  A setting where, for example, technology was king 50,000 years ago but then blew itself out, allowing magic to slowly try to take over.And societal change is easy...the simple fact of empires rising and falling is going to give rise to different societies over time no matter what the setting.  That said, most published settings I've seen don't go into much detail on what made said historical societies different; guess that's left up to the DM.My peeves with the generic settings are relatively few, as I'm quite happy with nothing's-perfect Euro-Tolkein as a base and several stated peeves in posts above are things I see as useful features.  My peeves:1. Unfamiliarity with its cultural base.  Unless I already know it, I'm too lazy to want to learn everything about a setting's assumed culture just so I can run a game in it.  So, no Al-Qadim for me.  And no Planescape.  And no (shudder!) Eberron.2. Too much information.  When it first came out in 1e, FR was an excellent setting.  Then came all the gype piled on to it...the novels, the articles, the 2e and 3e and now 4e revisions...the poor horse has been flogged long past the point of death.  The corollary problem here, of course, is those people who think that because a DM is using a given setting its established canon will at all times be faithfully adhered to....3. Unwilling to mix historical eras.  I *want* classical Greeks and Romans and dark-ages Norse and Celts and early-Renaissance Spaniards and English to all share the same world, along with Aztecs, Sumerians, aboriginal cultures, etc., never mind Dwarves and Elves (several kinds) and Gnomes and Hobbits.  And monsters.  Settings mostly seem either to want to stick to their own historical niche or to use no real-world-based cultures at all.4. Thinking of FR in particular here, too many settled lands, not enough unexplored country.  While this is easy enough for a DM to fix, having large tracts of land (like, say, about half a continent) be completely unknown to the "civilized" cultures gives a DM lots more to work with than if everything is known.Lanefan</blockquote>

Verification