Elder-Basilisk
First Post
IMO, the key thing to be aware of is that different methods of incorporating all of your crunch will have different consequences.
For instance, going the Sigil and Planescape route seems like it would make the campaign more cosmopolitan and less mythic. If angels and demons are just ordinary guys who happen to be evil or good or whatever (and there might be good demons and bad angels) and you meet them, not on quests or in visions, but in the bar getting a drink, then the world and the campaign will probably align more closely with modern, cosmopolitan influences than with myths.
If, on the other hand, you go for the cooperate with the players and incorporate on an ad-hoc basis as you all wish to use the options, you will need to either fix a number of the options up front, set the campaign in a relatively isolated area where, with a new petty kingdom over every hill, it's easy to believe that there's a new culture you haven't encountered yet. In a city like Waterdeep or Greyhawk, there's an expectation that much of the world is mapped and charted and if new areas keep cropping up, you might wonder where all these people and cultures came from when they hadn't been a factor before. Even in the kingdom over every hill model, you expect cultures to display influences from their neighbors and to be at least relatively similar. You won't have dark-age feuding families wearing chain shirts on one island and a growing populous kingdom dedicated to the rule of law and wearing fullplate on the mainland without some kind of interaction between the two. Maybe the kingdom is new and the island's inhabitants are those who emigrated rather than abandon the old ways. On the other hand, while you can have Iceland from the sagas next to Norway, it's a little more difficult to have it right next to Elizabethan England and expect it to make sense that it looks the same.
Alternatively, the approach dubbed wuxia will introduce a lot of new elements and conflicts. If everyone and his uncle is a member of a new and different secret society and fights with a different style, you will have lots of options to see whose kung fu is better but those societies and styles need to have a presence in the world. If the PCs are the only ones who are members of such societies and those societies place no demands upon them, then the world will seem less fully-imagined.
Including feats and prestige classes is one of the tools of setting building. Setting building is fun and there's a lot of ways to do it, but you can't tell every story in every setting and have it come out the same. So, if you want to simply include all of the nuts and bolts, you need to be willing to tell stories that will work in whatever world you come up with to accomodate them all.
For instance, going the Sigil and Planescape route seems like it would make the campaign more cosmopolitan and less mythic. If angels and demons are just ordinary guys who happen to be evil or good or whatever (and there might be good demons and bad angels) and you meet them, not on quests or in visions, but in the bar getting a drink, then the world and the campaign will probably align more closely with modern, cosmopolitan influences than with myths.
If, on the other hand, you go for the cooperate with the players and incorporate on an ad-hoc basis as you all wish to use the options, you will need to either fix a number of the options up front, set the campaign in a relatively isolated area where, with a new petty kingdom over every hill, it's easy to believe that there's a new culture you haven't encountered yet. In a city like Waterdeep or Greyhawk, there's an expectation that much of the world is mapped and charted and if new areas keep cropping up, you might wonder where all these people and cultures came from when they hadn't been a factor before. Even in the kingdom over every hill model, you expect cultures to display influences from their neighbors and to be at least relatively similar. You won't have dark-age feuding families wearing chain shirts on one island and a growing populous kingdom dedicated to the rule of law and wearing fullplate on the mainland without some kind of interaction between the two. Maybe the kingdom is new and the island's inhabitants are those who emigrated rather than abandon the old ways. On the other hand, while you can have Iceland from the sagas next to Norway, it's a little more difficult to have it right next to Elizabethan England and expect it to make sense that it looks the same.
Alternatively, the approach dubbed wuxia will introduce a lot of new elements and conflicts. If everyone and his uncle is a member of a new and different secret society and fights with a different style, you will have lots of options to see whose kung fu is better but those societies and styles need to have a presence in the world. If the PCs are the only ones who are members of such societies and those societies place no demands upon them, then the world will seem less fully-imagined.
Including feats and prestige classes is one of the tools of setting building. Setting building is fun and there's a lot of ways to do it, but you can't tell every story in every setting and have it come out the same. So, if you want to simply include all of the nuts and bolts, you need to be willing to tell stories that will work in whatever world you come up with to accomodate them all.
