NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="SanjMerchant" data-source="post: 7820986" data-attributes="member: 6860001">Pffft, what you do know about it? Carrying on like you wrote the thing or something....In all seriousness, it's not that I don't think that there can't be further adventures in the setting, just that the nature of the campaign's climax means that any sequel really should be built from the ground up to suit the specific instance of the campaign that it's... sequeling.  Heck, despite my somewhat curmudgeony, pessimistic disposition about such things, I'd probably ultimately be (cautiously) on board for a prequel setting book.  I just feel like a singular, canon answer to "what happened at the end of Zeitgeist" undercuts the strength of the original, much moreso than with other campaigns.To go with your Revolutionary War example, there's a reason alternate history fictions just don't have that certain oomph to them, no matter how well executed.  Once a thing has happened, we tend to think of it as being inevitable.  Rightly or wrongly, we immediately start thinking of the way things turned out as really the only way they could possibly have turned out.The US rebellion fails, the Confederate rebellion succeeds, the native peoples resist and bring a halt to the US's self-proclaimed Manifest Destiny, Napoleon wins at Waterloo, the Axis beats the Allies in the 1910's, D-Day is complete failure, the Cuban Missile Crisis goes really badly, even down to things like the Brexit vote or the 2016 US election... these things at the time were genuinely open questions.  We didn't know which way they would go.  In some cases, a great many people were convinced they'd go another way than they actually did.  But almost the instant they happened, we suddenly shifted to thinking of them as inexorable and inevitable, that anyone who'd been paying even a modicum of attention couldn't possibly have expected any other result.  That the colonies defeated the British Empire or the native peoples in North America were all but annihilated is now a given and history becomes a study of the details of the unfolding of that inevitable outcome.Heck, it's why "time travel to prevent the Holocaust" is always about killing Hitler and never about another tactic (sabotaging his political career, getting him better art lessons, ignoring Hitler himself and focusing on building up other candidates, shifting economic policy, or even going back to Versailles to make that treaty fairer).  We've come to think of it as so very inevitable that the only way we can conceive of it not happening is for one of its chief architects to be dead.And I think that, with a fiction that deliberately leaves an ambiguous or outright open ending, you get a similar effect when a sequel picks one result or interpretation over others.In another campaign/setting, I think it would matter less.  If, for example, you took Curse of Strahd, declared that reset-button paragraph in the epilogue to be non-canon, and wrote a sequel that made a bunch of assumptions about who lived, who died, and what state various potential side quests were left in, it doesn't feel like as big a negation of the major PC choice.  It's pretty obvious from the moment you sit down at Session 1 that the expected goal is to kill Strahd, so it's a reasonable assumption for a sequel to start with the consequences of Strahd's death.  Yeah, your players might decide that they like Strahd and willingly become his lackeys, but they're almost certainly aware that they're bucking the intended arc in the process.But it just doesn't sit right with me to set up a situation (and set it up so well!) where the just legitimately isn't an obvious correct answer and then come along with a sequel that tacitly stamps one possible solution as "the real one."--------------I know I'm just railing against the inevitable here.  The decision to write the book has been made and all that remains is shaking out the details both within the narrative and in the real-world logistics.  I guess I'm just sad that I'm unlikely to be able to run the thing myself before the setting book comes out and I have that... burden of canon expectation placed on me.  Even if my players don't even know the setting book exists, I'll still be unable to look at what they're doing without some kind of running commentary about how close or far it is from canon.  :-(</blockquote>

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