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Message: <blockquote data-quote="DrunkonDuty" data-source="post: 3899448" data-attributes="member: 54364">Reynard & CSL:History and setting play a huge part in my campaigns. But then, much like you guys, I love creating settings. It's  nice time filler and relaxer when I get home from work. I enjoy it, and drew my initial inspiration for setting creation for the reasons you guys list. Tolkien initially showed me that it could be done. And of course since then there's been so much done along these lines.My  players are pretty good at reading the stuff I write too. Which is very gratifying. OK, they don't read everything I write. Why do they care that the opera house in my Dwarven Kingdom closed down two centuries ago due to a shift in culture away from the ancient tales and forms to more locally relevant forms? You'd have to be a saint.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f631.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":o" title="Eek!    :o"  data-smilie="9"data-shortname=":o" /> In terms of what I find inspiring: history is the hands down winner. Even false histories like Tolkien's. In another thread somewhere a couple of weeks ago some people were saying they hate when Real Life religion gets brought into a game (even dead ones like Ancient Egypt's).* I disagreed on the grounds that real life has detail, connections and a wealth of allusions and cultural baggage that no amount of stuff created for DnD possibly can. And this goes as much for a history as for a religion or art forms like music. My Dwarven campaign's opera (it's made a comeback!) is Wagnerian in style. I can see Dwarves loving Wagner. It's epic, long, heavy, fatalistic and, dare I say, pompous and self-important. Perfect for your standard received Dwarves (like standard received English, but Dwarves).I also get inspiration from other gamers. Glenn Vincent Dammerung's piece on Dwarven Opera (on Canonfire) was a great read. As most of his articles are. There's always stuff here and there to use. INcluding of course the main rule books.  Greyhawk is my personal fave too. Greyhawk's appeal to me is, to use the current buzzword, the Points of Light thing. There's a framework, some inspiration, but not so much that you can't make your own bits and insert them without disturbing the whole. My version, although not Canon, is not so different as to be unrecognizable. Hell, it could be superimposed over another campaign and barely make a wave. That's a great freedom yet at the same time gives you a frame of reference to communicate with others. In fact, saying that, Greyhawk's a common culture within which references can be made. No different, except in scale, from any other cultural movement, from Cubism to Christianity. ANd maybe this thought shines a light on why my attitude towards, say, Forgotten Realms, is quite negative. It's another cultural reference that I'm just not getting.*I'll use living religions too. As an atheist I have no concerns about committing blasphemy, which can be a genuine concern for some players (at least that's what I get from reading between the lines in some posts.) Hey fair enough: religion is a deeply held belief for most folks and I certainly don't think I should try to enforce my style of play (let alone beliefs) on them.Cheers guys.</blockquote>

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