Reply to thread

Message

<blockquote data-quote="Ariosto" data-source="post: 5044802" data-attributes="member: 80487">Dealing with a big area, you need some sense of norms, of what &quot;the usual&quot; is so that you can focus your notes on the unusual and extrapolate what's needed to fill in blanks in between.(That's important as well in old-style campaign dungeons, in which between 1/2 and 2/3 of the rooms are typically &quot;empty&quot; in monster/ treasure/ trap terms.)A big leg up can come from drawing on aspects of the real world familiar to you (and maybe to your players). Fritz Leiber put a bit of Los Angeles in his city of Lankhmar; Dave Arneson turned an old Dutch map around for Blackmoor; and Gygax's Greyhawk region originally bore (as I understand it) even more resemblance to Wisconsin than in the later commercial version.Then again, the basically &quot;medieval European&quot; frame of reference, and the many borrowings from mythology and &quot;pulp fiction&quot;, also meant that much did not need to be made up from scratch. If you're an armchair historian of ancient Greece, or the Crusader Kingdoms, or the Mongol Khanates, or Akbar the Great's India, then that might serve a similar purpose for you. You probably have some favorite books, comic books, movies or TV shows from which you can borrow bits without slavishly copying.With some such starting point, it can be easy to conjure as necessary details of natural history, architecture, technology, customs and so on. Especially with the resources of the Internet, you might often find images and other things that can serve as &quot;players' aid&quot; handouts.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Ariosto, post: 5044802, member: 80487"] Dealing with a big area, you need some sense of norms, of what "the usual" is so that you can focus your notes on the [I]un[/I]usual and extrapolate what's needed to fill in blanks in between. (That's important as well in old-style campaign dungeons, in which between 1/2 and 2/3 of the rooms are typically "empty" in monster/ treasure/ trap terms.) A big leg up can come from drawing on aspects of the real world familiar to you (and maybe to your players). Fritz Leiber put a bit of Los Angeles in his city of Lankhmar; Dave Arneson turned an old Dutch map around for Blackmoor; and Gygax's Greyhawk region originally bore (as I understand it) even more resemblance to Wisconsin than in the later commercial version. Then again, the basically "medieval European" frame of reference, and the many borrowings from mythology and "pulp fiction", also meant that much did not need to be made up from scratch. If you're an armchair historian of ancient Greece, or the Crusader Kingdoms, or the Mongol Khanates, or Akbar the Great's India, then that might serve a similar purpose for you. You probably have some favorite books, comic books, movies or TV shows from which you can borrow bits without slavishly copying. With some such starting point, it can be easy to conjure as necessary details of natural history, architecture, technology, customs and so on. Especially with the resources of the Internet, you might often find images and other things that can serve as "players' aid" handouts. [/QUOTE]

Verification