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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Shaman" data-source="post: 5598752" data-attributes="member: 26473">In the beginning, my settings were 'the dungeon' and the immediate environs - the Temple of the Frog in Blackmoor, El Dorado County in Boot Hill, and the Warden in Matamorphosis Alpha strongly influenced how I saw roleplaying game settings.Later I began to take a more top-down approach, starting with the world as a whole and drilling down to a starting point for the adventurers.Now I tend to start with as much setting as I feel I need to run the game I'm running.  For <a href="http://www.obsidianportal.com/campaign/le-ballet-de-l-acier" target="_blank">my Flashing Blades campaign</a> that meant starting with Paris and a few other cities and working my way out to the whole of France, with notes on the rest of Europe and the New World. For Boot Hill, it's still El Dorado County, with the understanding that it sits in "The Territory," a vaguely defined 'somewhere in the Southwest' locale. For <a href="http://www.obsidianportal.com/campaigns/cold-warriors" target="_blank">my Top Secret campaign</a>, it's like a spy movie - different cities, secret bases, and so forth. For the megadungeon project I toy with from time to time but will likely never seriously attempt to develop, it's the dungeon, a town, and the environs, again with some notes on what lies beyond the hinterland. For <a href="http://www.obsidianportal.com/campaigns/space_truckin" target="_blank">the Traveller game I ran awhile back</a>, it was one subsector in the Third Imperium, with extensive notes on the larger sector.If I like a published setting, I run it more-or-less whole - then again, I tend to pick settings that provide opportunities to extensively personalize them, like Charted Space for Traveller, El Dorado County for Boot Hill, the Warden for Metamorphosis Alpha or the Wilderlands for D&D. I use other settings for inspiration, but I don't lift chunks from them and plop them into a homebrew setting.I think settings benefit from diversity. I want geographical diversity - deep oceans, shallow seas, soaring mountains, sweeping plains, trackless forests, sweltering jungles. I want cultural diversity - this is one of the reasons I tend to like real-world settings more than any other, because few fictional settings even attempt to come close to the real world. I want metaphysical diversity - gods and magic and monsters and a world that reflects all of this.I think some referees get a good idea for something, then try to build a setting around it and end up writing themselves into a corner. A diverse environment makes for diverse adventure opportunities. I think a good setting, of any size, should be able to handle exploration, investigation, politics, and feat of derring-d<img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f635.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt="o.O" title="Er... what?    o.O"  data-smilie="12"data-shortname="o.O" />ther than the settings I mentioned above, I like Pacific City (from The Nocturnals) for Mutants and Masterminds, the Old World for WFRP, Arthurian England for Pendragon, and Manifest (from Ghostwalk).</blockquote>

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