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Message: <blockquote data-quote="woodelf" data-source="post: 2126374" data-attributes="member: 10201">Interesting. Never ran into those folks. Back when DL was new, most of my gaming buddies and i read the first trilogy or two. And that was it. I bought the sourcebooks, but not the modules--but then, i've never really bought pre-written scenarios for any RPG. I never even bothered looking at the subsequent novels--the first two trilogies were good, maybe even great, but not good enough to merit buying subsequent books, and the library didn't have them. Why didn't we actually *play* DL? Two reasons, closely-related. First, everyone i knew played a homebrew setting. Even the one group i knew who nominally played in FR, pretty much used the map and that was about it. Secondly, DL just never grabbed any of us, especially as a settnig. May be. I'm not gonna read a stack of novels to find out. Distill all that into a couple good-sized RPG books, without all the narrative and plot and characterization that go into a novel, and i'll eat them up. [It's actually one of my primary complaints with a *lot* of RPG settings: quit developing your setting through fiction, and give me gazeteers (or whatever you want to call them). I'm not interested in wading through a novel to get the setting info, even if it's a great novel; and even if i do, novels make lousy reference works when i want to look something up.] Agreed. However, it's just not *that* unique. At least for me, the uniqueness was what got my attention; the discovery that it actually wasn't all that unique was what turned me off. Well, the fairly vanillaness of thessetting, combined with the comic-relief races. I wanted something *more* unique.   But at some point, what's the point? I mean, which elements *are* defining of  DL? How many of them can you change before it's just another fantasy setting. You can't have it both ways--either the setting is worthwhile because it's unique, or it's worthwhile because it's familiar. Anyway, i guess the DL setting never really grabbed me. It always seemed fairly vanilla, with a few twists, some of which i thought were really cool (the changes to magic), some of which a couldn't stand (the changes to races). Nonetheless, i *loved* the first two trilogies, and i actually think they're pretty good literature, not just good by game-fiction standards. But what made them good had precious little to do with the setting, and a great deal to do with the characters. There's a lot of good fiction out there that falls into the same category, IMHO. Frex, I would love to recapture what i love about Blake's 7, VR5, or Firefly in an RPG campaign. But what i'd want to recapture would be the character interactions--the settings, in each case, are fairly non-remarkable. I think that's part of why DL falls down as a setting: people fall in love with the novels because of the character interactions, and putting different characters into the same setting just doesn't do it.</blockquote>

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