How did you experience the WotC Setting Search

I tinkered with my setting for some time...then my friends sent me their submissions to look over before they were submitted.

Oh gods were they bland, banal, and soul-crushingly boring.

Just like mine.

Never sent it in.
 

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Jürgen Hubert said:
I am supposed to write an article about the (in)famous Setting Search that ultimately culminated in the Eberron campaign setting. I participated in this search myself, so I have at least some material to start with, but I'd like to hear some other perspectives.

How did you experience the Setting Search - either as an observer or as a participant? From its earliest announcments to the declaration of the winner?

And for those of you with access to the Search function, could you please dig out some relevant threads for me? In particular, I remember something about an "Unofficial FAQ" around here...

I was really excited about the whole concept until I read the guidelines where it stated that the setting was to be traditional. I really would have liked to see the dogs unleashed on this. My favorite settings from 2e are all the ones that were non-traditional (Planescape, Dark Sun, Ravenloft), so my hopes weren't too high on this one.

It also detracted me away from making a submission. I probably would not have made one anyway as most of my ideas, while fun for my campaigns, are not what I would call commercially viable.

When Eberron was released, it was pretty much what I had expected: Forgotten Realms with a twist, which in this case was "pulp" action. I was very pleased to see a setting that supported intrigue very well, though. I just wish they had focused more on that angle, and less on the action. I still think Eberron suffers greatly from lack of depth. I think they did way too much breadth, which may be good marketing, but not my cup of tea.
 

Flexor the Mighty! said:
The only real thing I remember about that time was reading people post on various forums that thier homebrew was far too precious to be whored out to WOTC for a mere 100k.

In other words, their homebrews didn't stand a chance at being a mass market production.
 

Arcane Runes Press said:
My biggest regret is that I've never seen Keith Baker's 1 pager. I'm curious to see how he presented Eberron, and managed to his ideas for such a diverse and quirky setting across in a single page.

I'd like to see that too. I've never been good at marketing; it would be very educational.
 

I looked at my most developed setting, and realised that there was no way it was coherent enough to fit into the 1-page format. So I flung together a psionics-based setting in a couple of days, simplified it down to the requisite 1 page, and sent it in. Without my name or contact anywhere in the envelope.
 

Baron Opal said:
It was very useful to help organize my thoughts about the campaign, however, and I would be interested to know if the ten or hundred page manuscripts were given format direction.

I've been thinking recently about fleshing out Phandeslon a bit more, and also would be most interested to see the guidelines for the 10-page step.
 

I really enjoyed the Search. Myself and a friend had been developing a homebrew world - where psionic, arcane, and divine forces existed in a kind of embattled trinity - for a few months over email when the SS was announced, so we found it relatively straightforward to condense our bible down into Just The Facts. Because English is not my partner-in-crime's first language, it fell to me to tweak the one-pager so that it hit all the right buttons. I did six revisions before the final one dropped out of the mix. We sent it off, heard nothing, didn't win. But it was pretty exciting.

Our homebrew didn't seem to offend any of the informal guidelines that were released or talked about, so I tried to make the one-page treatment 'just different enough' to catch the attention of any Wizards executives who wanted to sell the PHB but obviously needed something which would have an identity outside of FR and DL. As I recall, it did occur to me whether the touted on-line D&D MMORPG was going to use the new setting, but if that intuition found its way into the writing, it was on a purely subconscious level.

We went in expecting to be good enough to win - I think that's the only way to do your best work. In retrospect, I possibly shouldn't have worried so much about what Wizards *wanted* to see in the treatment, and just been completely faithful to the setting, whereas in fact I was only about 95% faithful. Still, we have no way of knowing how many shortlists, if any, we hit, and whether we would have fared any better in doing things differently.
 

The original announcement had two key words.

'Traditional', as others have said, was largely misinterpreted. They wanted swords and magic, and a place for all the standard D1D tropes, but that's about it. Some people found this too confining when they really shouldn't. One of the top three was loosely based on Renaissance venice, if I recall correctly.

The other key word was 'scope'. The submission should have a scope similar to the Forgotten Realms. That was the tough one--they wanted a campaign setting with many countries, societies, cultures, and continents that could provide ample room for a wide variety of players.

I quickly realized that my current homebrews couldn't cut it--they were too mishmashed, peurile, or derivative of famous literary works. The challenge was to come up with something original, out of whole cloth, and pitch it to the committee. So I spent a week or so thinking and came up with two very original ideas that I liked.

I stumbled over each of these. My first submission fell into the 'Golden Age' theme that seemed to hit a chord with the selection committee (as evidenced by three of the top eleven settings having that direction), but I wanted to give it a touch of Arabian Knights feel in that magic was something gained by bargaining with Powers, not the usual cost-free spellcasting. I emphasized that in the one-pager, and I realize now that it probably didn't go over well. I also described the setting in terms of its major city, which doesn't speak well for scope. I still hope to make this a homebrew or a source of short stories.

My second setting was even less traditional, having the various races dispersed to the moons of a ravaged world. More scope, more than one world? No--because the exodus had unified their cultures considerably. In the end I realize that this one had even less scope than the other--but the seeds planted there have grown into a novel that I am currently working on.

I have no doubt that whoever read the submissions, if they weren't too tired to read mine, thought "huh-cool!". They were cool ideas. But it's obvious to me after seeing Eberron that they both failed the 'scope' test horribly.

Small ideas are easier to conceive and easier to advertise than big ideas. What really, really impressed me about Eberron is that it is just brimming over with original ideas and storylines. The monster nation of Droamm--how cool is that? Very cool, and a world where that was the only unique thing would be worthy of a homebrew campaign and a colorful, entertaining one-page setting submission. But wait--there's the Silver Flame, the orcish druids repelling the invasion of the Daelkyr, the threat of psionic Sarlonan overlords, the dragonmarked houses, the Lords of Dust and the legend of the primordial dragons, the Last War...the list goes on and on. I just started running an Eberron campaign, and it is a DM's paradise! Eberron has scope, lots and lots of scope, and that's where both of my submissions fell short.

Of course, Keith didn't put all that into his one-pager, and he had help from the other designers after he won the setting search. Keith had a healthy dose of luck on his side that his one-pager was read by the right people and percolated to the top of the heap so that he could show WotC a little more of his world in the 10-pager. His one-pager doesn't go into all those details; if I remember correctly, it talks a bit about the Last War and the Dragonmarked houses, but really emphasized above all the pulp/noir feel that he wanted to convey.

I think it's availiable on his website if you want to read it.

Anyway, that's my persepctive. It was fun to write the one-pagers, and I'm getting some good use out of those ideas. I don't begrudge the finalists or winners one bit, as what I've seen of their work has been top-notch. The setting search was a fun ride!

Ben
 


Ormiss said:
Any chance of being pointed in the right direction? I searched his website for a while, but can't seem to find it.

Sorry, can't find it there myself anymore. I thought I saw it there at one time, but I could be wrong. Maybe if you sent him an e-mail he'd be willing to share, but he's off conventioning at the moment I think.

Ben
 

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