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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mercule" data-source="post: 6907595" data-attributes="member: 5100">As do I. It was painful for me to change the maps, but once someone pointed out that the larger continent looked a bit like Pac Man, I couldn't unsee it. The second round of changes was mainly to fix a few things that I'd broken with the first remodel. I'm not sure the players even had an opportunity to realize it had been changed, again, but I know and that's one of the dangers of doing too much work up front.This. My two primary players (a.k.a. default leaders) absolutely suck at geography, so maps never stick, even when I print them for the player side of the GM screen. I've had single-campaign players who were otherwise, but not the folks who I've gamed with for 20-25 years. Over the course of things, I would have assumed that the ancient wars that left behind world-shaking artifacts would have sucked PCs in; they only caught one player, in a solo game. Maybe the rich trade city that sits across a mighty straight (imagine if Constantinople had been built across a natural Suez canal, with all the trade implications, housed one of two human arcane colleges, and had been the seat of Roman Church until the truest paladins were driven into the Sahara, converted an empire of hobgoblins and became itinerant knights) -- they've passed through it once and cleared out. The island nation that houses the other human college and has remained studiously neutral for over a millennium? Avoided for 30 years of gaming.What have the PCs chased? Throw away lines about 1E undead moving silently (yeah, it was a thing, somewhere) because they had extremely limited levitation to avoid breaking twigs and whatnot spawned a scholar of the undead. The obligatory evil empire at the edge of the map that experiments on their people to enhance psionic potential? Sounds like a great place to sneak into. Multiple times. But, let's not worry about the social/political fallout caused by the power vacuum when we free a slave state from their grasp -- that's a good time to move to normal civilization, renounce allegiance to the (off camera) wizard college and help build a new one, even though you know your patron is a manipulative bastard. And, despite having about 30 well defined gods, we're always going to go to the same two because one is the LG god of the paladins and the other is a CG god of death that amuses the players because the church allows parishioners to donate their bodies to be raised as deathless groundskeepers so the clergy can do more interesting things.Short form: you can't predict the players. The best GMs just have enough interesting ideas sitting around to be able to throw stuff at the wall until something sticks, then improvise well.</blockquote>

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