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Message: <blockquote data-quote="barsoomcore" data-source="post: 2237060" data-attributes="member: 812">Barsoom is pretty wacky, though I haven't defined it in very much detail, and the players have yet to figure it all out.When they started, I guess they assumed they were on a planet, with all the usual hoohah. Amongst the flava elements I included "The Sentinels", a series of stationary stars spread equidistantly across the southern sky. Sorta looking like geosynchronous satallites in equatorial orbit, actually, which is what my players assumed they were.As the years have gone by, however, they've realised that Barsoom is actually a CONSTRUCTED world, one that has been formed out of the "building blocks" of the campaign cosmology -- the Shadow Realm, where all is nothingness, and the Dream Worlds, where all possibilities exist simultaneously. Those "satallites" are actually some sort of control mechanism that maintains Barsoom in its state of perpetual flux between these two extremes, along with assorted (and ill-defined) other systems, all of which the party is struggling to figure out. Even as the systems begin evidently failing, and all life on Barsoom is threatened.Since the entire campaign actually turns on the struggle for control of those systems, all this stuff isn't just flavour for the players to remember. It's critical to them achieving their goals and saving the world.Two things:1. You can have LOTS of deviations from the mundane standard, if you introduce those deviations through the course of the campaign, so that the players only have to digest one change at a time.2. You can avoid obnoxious player behaviour ("But a flat world should have an extended horizon!") by refusing to define things completely. When they say dumb stuff like that, just shrug and smile and say, "Yes, it should. But it doesn't." It's magic, kids. It doesn't have to obey the rules. Kind of by definition, I think.</blockquote>

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