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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5830191" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine annual 1999 part 2/7The world that wouldn't die: Looks like we're going to have little introductory blurbs for their campaign worlds, like in the first annual. Can you say padding. Why have the extra space just to spend it frivolously? Still, they take the time to deliver some very interesting information. Next edition, Greyhawk is becoming the default campaign world! It sounds like they're going to get a huge profile boost. Of course, this is one case where the theory and the practice turned out very different, with the names and gods being used by default, but the actual geography being mostly ignored, and hardly any sourcebooks or adventures outside the RPGA Living Greyhawk material. (which was fairly substantial, but of course not so commonly available) So like the retrospective material, this presents a rather optimistic picture that won't really be born out by reality. Best laid plans of mice and men. Campaign holidays: Well, this is amusingly fitting for the issue. It's supposed to be a big celebration, so let's talk about the big days people get dressed up and party on Oerth. These of course vary from place to place quite a lot, although some take place on the same day of the year, particularly the solstices and equinoxes, which it seems nearly every deity wants to claim as their own. This is a reminder that fantasy worlds tend to have neater calendars than the real world, with the cycle of the moon precisely corresponding with the months, and no faffing around with leap years. It's also a good reminder that keeping a calendar rather than just a record of how many days pass when out adventuring helps adventurers feel the passage of time more keenly, as the seasons shift, and people back home live their lives. Plus it offers adventure hooks, especially if you design the celebration days for various humanoids. So this not only serves as an addition to a specific world (and effort has been taken to research existing days rather than just make them up wholecloth) but general worldbuilding advice as well. Which is quite nice really. Sword & Sorcery experts needed for grand adventure: I don't think it's any secret by now that the Forgotten Realms is their biggest campaign world, handily outpacing everyone else in both gamebooks and novels. Greyhawk and Dragonlance have both already had several year fallow periods, and been brought back when they thought there was a new market for them, but the Realms doesn't even falter. The years keep on passing, the characters keep on living their lives, the history keeps building up. In 4e, they have more books than all the other settings put together now. Much of the credit has to go to Ed Greenwood, but it's the other people who've managed to work within the world and build independent followings that really makes it feel like a living, breathing place, bigger than any one person's dreams and stories, no matter how powerful they become. You have to respect that degree of unrivalled success. Speaking tongues: You know, I'm surprised Ed never did a detailed examination of Forgotten Realms linguistics in the magazine, especially as it's something both Tolkien and Gary did a reasonable amount of work on. I guess when you also have as many different races adding an orthogonal axis to the issue, the degree of complexity becomes too much of a headache. And so it proves here, as this article decides to assert human exceptionalism by saying they're the only ones with different languages from region to region, while demihumans and humanoids don't, quite possibly thanks to their gods. Wouldn't that mean human gods dislike us more than any other race? That doesn't seem right somehow. Ironically, that breaks my sense of verisimilitude more than each race naturally developing a single language each. So this feels like old skool extra rules that will merely be a pain in the ass, rather than improving your game. Bugger that for a game of let's pretend.</blockquote>

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