Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Darrin Drader" data-source="post: 1321672" data-attributes="member: 7394">Wow, what a cool thread! This is a subject that interests me a great deal, not just because I've done a fair amount of design work for campaign settings in 3E, but also because I am interested in jumping over to novels sooner or later. I've worked on a forthcoming Forgotten Realms book, several Oathbound books, and some of my own stuff.Personally I like a variety of different game styles. I like high magic, low magic, in-between magic, high fantasy, gritty, and alien. Yes, I like it all, and what's more is that I want the ability to switch between them in the same campaign without messing up the continuity of the campaign. Yeah, I want the impossible and I know it.Without talking about the Forgotten Realms (the book I worked on isn't out until August, so maybe we can talk about that one once it's released), I can talk somewhat about Oathbound and my own homebrew. The first, most striking difference is that they're almost diametric opposites. My homebrew is called "Galovinius" and is essentially fairly low magic and the campaign style somewhat emulates the swashbuckling heroics and political intrigue of the four musketeers. Occasionally I dig up some major magic or a BBEG to throw at the party, but in this world the characters spend quite a bit of the time caught up in some sort of big political power play. In the last campaign the characters started out by trashing a kobold stronghold, spent some time tracing the sale of lotus extract (highly illegal in my world) back to its source and by the end of the campaign (skipping several key elements) a bannished god was killed and the silver elves (essentially the albino elves of my world) ended up subjugated by the main empire of this world due to their aggression. The next campaign that starts up in a week takes off where this one left off. Now the silver elves will once again be unhappy with the empire, and they will make alliances to try to win their freedom. Some of their new allies will be good and others will not be. I could go on and on about this, but I call it good here.The other campaign setting that I've been involved with developing in one form or another since late 2001 is Oathbound. Oathbound is almost the opposite of my homebrew. Where the main PC races in Galovinius are humans, elves, and dwarves, in Oathbound there are species aplenty that are drawn from a number of worlds. Where my home campaign is low magic, Oathbound is very specifically high magic. I suppose the political complexity is there in both settings, which is one of the reasons Oathbound continues to interest me, but it isn't about promoting the stability of an empire for the benefit of the million or so people that live there, but rather characters getting caught up in various types of power plays. With Galovinius I always design things relatively conservatively, keeping with many established fantasy conventions where with Oathbound I try to push the limits and be as original as I possibly can - I've been guilty of a liberal use of tentacled creatures in the past. The nice thing about Oathbound is that you can pull in any element from any campaign setting and make it work in this world. Likewise, you can take a few elements from Oathbound and craft an entire campaign world around them. Also, because its a capstone setting, your characters can come to the setting, play here for a while, and then leave. Or, if the group really likes it, they can run the entire campaign exclusively in the setting.One of my favorite campaign settings of all time is Spelljammer. It includes many elements that I enjoy - lots of "aliens", a swashbuckling adventure style, and the ability to add some elements that are normally strictly science fiction. I ran an adventure in one campaign where a monstrous race was towing an enormous asteroid towards the Forgotten Realms with the intention of smashing it down on them in an obvious effort to destroy the world. I had another where the party's ship was captured by illithids and they had to bust their way out of a gold mine asteroid and reclaim their ship and their gear armed with nothing more than pick axes.So how different do I want it? I suppose different enough that I can identify where the distinguishing differences are. If I'm in the mood for a traditional fantasy game, I usually go to either the Forgotten Realms or Galovinius since I know them both pretty well. If I want something really out there, its Oathbound or Spelljammer. Like someone mentioned earlier, what I don't like is when they create the standard D&D races with different names. Why not just say that the elves, dwarves, etc. in this world fill X niches?What do I want in a new campaign setting? I want something that supports a classic style of play and has an interesting twist. I want to be able to run a dungeon bash adventure followed by ... whatever else that is unique to this setting.Of course the topic that hasn't been addressed yet is different genres. I definitely like the post apocalyptic and the space opera genres. For that reason I'm a big fan of RPG Obects' Darwin's World as well as the Babylon 5 RPG. Both settings enable me to tell completely different types of stories in completely different universes.</blockquote>

Verification