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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mustrum_Ridcully" data-source="post: 4150629" data-attributes="member: 710">So, what's Paizos secret? How can they "live on" adventures? What did make the Adventure Paths special?Or can't they actually live on adventures alone (which is why they aiming for the Pathfinder RPG)?Outside of D&D and GURPS, most games seem to come with a built-in setting. Call of Cthulhu, Shadowrun, Das Schwarze Auge, Midgard, Warhammer, Torg.In our group, these games were only as "successful" as the number of adventures we found for them. But the "in-group" success is probably not the same as market success - since to play any of these games, we needed the core rules/setting book anyway.But a system with an in-built setting has a considerable advantage - it makes it likely that people that have the core rule book will be interested in adventures for the setting. If you use a more or less generic/setting-less game (d20 Modern might be the "worst" case), you have no idea what your customers are doing with it, and can't provide adventures that can appeal to them. But having the setting defined isn't enough - you need enough customers of your setting to have a reasonable chance of selling your adventures to them. I think one of the strength of Paizo's adventure path is that you got the setting together with the adventures. Shackled City, Age of Worms and Savage Tides might have been set in Greyhawk, but for the most part, only the adventure path material mattered. It defined everything the player and DM required to know about the world. And as I understand, Pathfinder is similar. So, maybe one trick for succesful settings with adventures is using the adventures itself as a method to describe the settings. A Bottom-Up approach on world design. This way, people don't have to try to fit the modules into their world. The modules are the world. This might not appeal to people with a homebrew world, but you can't create modules that can directly target them, anyway.</blockquote>

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