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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dr. Strangemonkey" data-source="post: 3884089" data-attributes="member: 6533">Well, I've actually decided to try and work up a campaign for my 3.5 to 4E transition group that is set in something like the Medieval American Southwest.Naturally, I'm making a lot of changes and adaptation just for my own fictifying purposes so I won't talk about those, but there are some inherent issues:1.) How much do you want to add to DnD to make this work vs how much do you want to add DnD to the setting?  What about DnD technology assumptions?2.) How much do you want to model a 'rendering' economy?  That is one in which looting changes from "Ooo, I'm stealing his hoard of magic armor" to "Awesome I get to make him into my magic armor"3.) How do you want to embiggen/fantasize the PoL situation?And here are my answers:1.) Right now DnD is on the outside moving in.  The DnD culture is currently setting up tradeposts inside this culture.  The basic premise is a twist on European colonization where a more or less coherent community was exiled from their lands and sailed to a Hispanola analogue.   They have more resources to start settlement, but will get far less support and interference from the homeland.  This lets players start with the familiar and let's me leave lots of questions open.The starting with more but getting less dynamic will also let me deal with some colonization issues without letting them become imperialism issues.I don't yet know what I'm doing about the technology.  My temptation is to try rewriting the medieval Southwest with a lot of Old World medieval technology just because that would be a huge speculative challenge, but I also fear it will rob the setting of the unique flavor that flint provides.2.) Lord, I really want to, but I think I'm going to take this in baby steps.  It's a massive undertaking, and I think I want to introduce to the players slowly.  See how they react.  I am heavilly reducing the reliance on magic items from the get go. 3.) Right, first of all.  Much bigger.  The geography is getting a huge fantasy boost.  The Rio Grande is now the Rio Gigante.  Some Rivers are now filled with souls rather than water.  Some hills are now not simply strewn with fossils but petrified gods.  Some hills are petrified gods.  So on and so forth.I am heavilly PoLing the PoL situation.  I think the basic PoL question when building the setting is:Is PoL a crisis or a strategy?  That is did people create a PoL situation as an adaptation or are they being forced to adapt to a PoL situation?Now in the Southwest PoL was a strategy.  Indeed the most sustainable local cultures really invest in it and spread themselves even on a local level across a number of small cultivated points that use very diverse strategies to maintain production in an incredibly dynamic environment.I'm sticking with that but I'm saying that whereas in my Southwest the environment is way less hostile in terms of metereology that the enivironment is far more hostile in terms of fauna.  Magic means that agriculture is more dependable and pastoralism more efficient, but it also means that evolve and compete along several different and novel dynamics.  Cultures have to defend themselves against far more vigorous competition (and exploitation 'Hello Dragons!') than they do in real life.</blockquote>

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