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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 393689" data-attributes="member: 4937">I've yet to see a published world that actually saved me time in creating a campaign.  Most of what is published is so utterly useless that it exists only to provoke thoughts.  I typically don't need thoughts provoked, so I don't need someone else to kick start a campaign with ideas like 'there are orcs in these woods', 'this kingdom is having political strife', or NPC stats or variations on that theme.Ideally, a published world setting would be utterly unordered.  Simply hundreds of general seven sentence NPC's with statblocks, hundreds of businesses and establishments wrote out to a half page or two, hundreds of basic maps of buildings and small villages - and NO cities, NO countries, NO continents, NO history, and NO big plots.  Everything would be available on an accompaning CD so that I could search, sort, cut and paste and concatenate as necessary.  That would save me work.  Continents, cities, big plots, etc. are the easy part.  Supplements would be things like, 'Laws and Customs', 'Songs and Chants', 'Books, Art, and Literature', 'Dangerous Places' (a collection of 100 15 room dungeons in generalized locations), and so forth.  Each would also simply be a source book of finished ideas to be cut out and used were they are appropriate in your campaign.  That would save me work, because it would reduce by 50% the ammount of work required to fill in the blank spaces as they appeared.But published RPG settings just cost me money and don't offer me anything, so I don't by them.Homebrews are almost always less superficial than published settings, with more history, more imagination, and so forth.  And published settings are themselves generally based on 'homebrews' that probably have far more depth than is ever published - well, FR be an exception to that rule, because it never had alot of depth until the fans started playing with it.I always get the impression with a published setting that to truly enjoy it, you have to have the guy that created it be the DM.</blockquote>

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