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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Yora" data-source="post: 8373729" data-attributes="member: 6670763">While the campaign I am currently preparing is a classic dungeon crawling West Marches game that doesn't have a story as I am concerned as the GM, I am still setting up the environment to express certain ideas, and working out behavior patterns for NPCs and monsters that reflect that. Whether the players will interpret their experiences in that world the way that I see it will remain to be seen.The main idea that goes all the way back since I first started working on that setting is that humans are really only the center of their own world immediately around them, but actually matter very little in the bigger picture. In the middle of the Sahara or Siberia, or anywhere in the depths of the ocean, traces of humans can be found quite easily, but they are really a tiny factor in what is going on in those environments. Small unassuming plants or little bugs, or just simple natural erosion govern these environments in much greater ways than humans, and have done so for millions of years and not just a thousand or so. The impact of humans becomes even smaller when you get to the Moon or out to other planets, and is completely meaningless to other stars. If the Earth were to disappear tomorrow, nobody in the universe would notice. And 10,000 years from now there might only be a few dozen people who have any knowledge of anything that might happen today.To work that as a theme into the setting, I made mortal civilization very small and very young. People have been using writing and smithing for only one or two thousand years, and they only got it so quickly because they found remnants from ancient supernatural civilizations that showed that the basic concepts are possible. And they are all gone. Except for the most recent one almost entirely forgotten, but there are still many overgrown ruins covering the world, which clearly were build by different peoples from different ages. Current city states are mostly build in the ruins of earlier cities, and people see new cities appear and old ones collapse all the time. The passage of natural cycles is greatly accelerated in this world so that local climate and regional environments can change very quickly. These are things entirely out of the hands of people and instead the domain of nature spirits, and these spirits really just don't care how their constant, though gradual, changes to the environment impact mortal settlements. Cities falling when their rivers dry up or they fall into the sea and people moving to other places that recently have become very hospitable is part of the way of life. People see it all around them that everything they make is likely to be gone in two or three centuries, to be forgotten and swallowed up by the forest like everything else. The works of mortals are temporary, only the forest is forever. As they understand is, this is how it's always been, and how it always will be. Their religions don't deal with the creation of the world or its end, and there is no concept of an afterlife.Another topic that I find very interesting is violence in non-state societies. Particularly vengeance is something that usually seems like something that should destroy everyone involved very quickly, but over researching the topic over many year, I found that this is largely because vengeance as we think of it today has become something quite different from what it was in non-state societies. Most importantly, the purpose of vengeance is not punishment or justice, but a means to prevent violence and crime. Vengeance is not something that is pursued primarily because you're angry and hate those other guys, but something that must be taken for your own future long-term safety. Vengeance has to establish that people don't get away with their crimes and show that whatever they did in the first place was not worth it. In states, this is taken care of by police and courts. But when there is no state and no higher authority that claims the "monopoly of violence", then there is no one else who could take care of it. To protect your group from future crimes, you have to let everyone know that anyone who tries it will regret it. Even if doing so will cause your own group much more damage than the initial crime did. Because if you let it slide and your enemies get away with it, then it's an invitation for everyone else to target you as well. Also, the people most suited to prevent people from committing crimes are their families. To make sure all families keep their own troublemakers in check before they commit a violent crime, their own heads need to be on the chopping block as well. Even if they don't like a troublemaker and won't miss him much if he gets himself killed, he's their responsibility and they will pay the price if they don't deal with it adequately. It doesn't have to be more people getting killed, and reparation payments can take the place instead. But those payments really need to hurt economically to be effective retribution. In reality, it seems that a lot of bad blood feuds start with a minor incident that still requires reparation, but the whole thing escalating when the agreed upon payments aren't made in time and people start to help themselves to the pigs or sacks and grain they are owed.Many typical fantasy adventure settings are environments in which there is no central legal authority, and where there <s>aren't</s> (should not be) any prison to serve prison sentences. And in these settings, vengeance should be a big deal, especially given how much player characters get involved in violence. I think the whole weirdness about the nonchalant everyday presence of extreme violence in fantasy games could be addressed in very interesting ways by having an established system of vengeance that NPCs actually follow. Almost no NPCs the players might encounter will be completely isolated. Every time an NPC is getting killed, there is going to be someone somewhere who's going to be really angry about it. Players might be able to leave no witnesses and don't leave any clues that it was them, but I think it will be very interesting to make players always be worried that someone might find out and that there might be retribution coming. No matter how justified they think their own actions were. I want there to be a lot more saber rattling and angry shouting from a distance, with a few arrows being shot before the other people disappear back into the trees.</blockquote>

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