How Busy can a Setting be

[Skade]

Just curious, but how many thematic elements or other devices exist in your campaign settings? What brought this to mind was some thoughts I had on a setting I wrote up several years ago, but have not used in a while. I was thinking about reviving it for D20 Modern, and so it's been on my mind.

Let's take the D20 Modern settings for examples. What if they all existed concurrently? Say that most people see the Gene-tech setting from Polyhedron. Every person in the world now knows that there are these half-animal freak Moreaus that the government is trying to save us from. Other than that though, its business as usual. In Chicago howver, a group of young people suddenly find that the old man living down the street really is a monster, but he's an illithid. Not only that, but he works with other illithids to take over the world with their psionic abilities. These characters are made with the Operation Psi (is that right?) setting in mind. In their adventures however, they come across other people who know more than they should. They don't know about Psi operatives or illithids, but they have killed a pack of werewolves, and made an enemy of a vampire, who happens to be the mayors Personal Assistant. Obviously, these guys are Shadow Chasers..

You get my point. Do you think there should only be one of these elemnts present, or should there be more options, and cross polination? You could keep going. Taking Marvel Comics for an example, all of these elements exist in their universe, with superheroes on top of all this.

-skade

 

[Bagpuss]

Depends, I would say stick with one main theme, and you can then probably work in 2 or 3 other major themes on an occasional basis. But you can have loads going on as long as you keep your focus and just have 'guest stars'. Look at Star Trek, you have a number of major villians (Romulans, Klingon, Q, Borg, Cardasians, etc) but you only tend to have one or two at most in any episode.

 

[Agnostic Paladin]

If you bring enough things into Modern you may begin to approach Dark*Matter. And that is a good thing indeed.

 

[Dr Midnight]

A setting can be as Busey as you want.

 

[Dragongirl]

A setting can be as Busey as you want.

oi!!! Now I will have nightmares for sure.

 

[megamania]

Busy is not wrong but keep to a theme until you and your players are "done" with it. By giving hints of other things happening, then when you move on to a new campaign the players are somewhat familiar with it already. Aids in making it more believable.

 

[Skade]

Depends, I would say stick with one main theme, and you can then probably work in 2 or 3 other major themes on an occasional basis. But you can have loads going on as long as you keep your focus and just have 'guest stars'. Look at Star Trek, you have a number of major villians (Romulans, Klingon, Q, Borg, Cardasians, etc) but you only tend to have one or two at most in any episode.

All of those races are still 'sci-fi". Would Star Trek have been riuned if there was a strong horror element to it. Say along the lines of Event Horizon, or Alien? Especially Event horizon, as it had that evil from beyond thing going. Well, imagine that the events of that movie happened in Star trek, except now there are Things, loose in the universe, alien monstrosities that slip through the void of space, hungering for oblivion. Is that stil Star Trek? now take it one step further and Deana troi has to lear to cast fireballs to fight the creatures?

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

Limiting yourself to a few main themes that truely shape the setting is probably a good idea, at least for campaigns that exist beyong your gaming group alone - or else new GMs and players will have a hard time getting into the setting. Many different themes can make a setting very confusing...

To use two settings I am involved with as an example:

In Urbis, the big theme is that magical architecture combined with lots of people living in a single city allow the usage of vast amounts of magical energies - thus, the world is dominated by lots of very large (by normal D&D standards) city states.

There are quite a few secondary themes, like the urban poor, massive social changes, and more. But the "Big City" theme is central to them all.

Pisces is still in flux (after all, it's hardly more than a week old - but nonetheless, there are some amazing ideas on the messageboards), but the main theme is that all the normal PC races are refugees who fled the destruction of their home world and are now stranded on a strange and alien planet.

Once you have developed the main theme(s), you can develop all kinds of secondary themes related to the first one. But that's just the details...