Settings - "empty" vs richly detailed locations

[Hand of Evil]

I favor city states, where the city is detailed and the surrounding area has some details, then wilderness. With all the monsters and such, exploration and expansion should be kept in check. This also allows me to play around with different concepts like location based alignment.

 

[Merkuri]

My favorite setting book for a while has been Secrets of Xen'drik, a 3.5e Eberron book.

The book contained detailed locations, but what it was really good at was getting a DM's brain churning. It put forward tons of mysteries and left their answers up to the DM. When it did make an attempt to try to explain something it usually had several explanations and asked the DM to choose one (or make up your own). It was so full of plot hooks that it could've been mistaken for a hedgehog.

I never actually used the book to run a campaign (I don't DM much), but what I loved about it was that it was basically an invitation to make the continent mine. No player picking up the book would spoil one of my plots. There was nothing in it that I could see the need to contradict, only to build on.

I want a setting book that gives me and players enough detail so that we both have the same idea in mind about what the setting is, but not so many details that I feel constrained by it.

I want a setting book that makes my own creative juices flow, not one that does all the work for me.

 

[Doug McCrae]

Merkuri, I agree that Secrets of Xendrik has a very open-ended feel to it. It's quite unusal among rpg books. I was going to say I've never read anything quite like it but then I remembered that many of the Glorantha books are similar. There's a particular section, I think in the Glorantha: Genertela boxed set where members of different cultures/religions describe their creation myths, meaning of life, their basic world-views and so forth and the great thing is they are not only completely different, but contradictory.

I think in Glorantha, contradictory views of how the world came to be can actually all be true, as the universe was created outside time, 'before' there the rules of reality, such as causation, had been set.

 

[Wednesday Boy]

I didn't like in the 4E Forgotten Realms and Eberron campaign books when they would detail an area and say something like, "...and recently a large number of individuals who visit have gone missing but no one has gotten to the bottom of the mystery yet."

I like having the freedom to fill in the blanks on my own but I wish they had something more specific to get my creative juices going. The authors are clearly creative people and I would love to see them finish their thought: "...recently a large number of individuals who visit have gone missing and most townspeople think it's Old Man Whittington come back from the dead." Then it would be up to me to decide whether it really should be Old Man Whittington or something else entirely. So I guess I'm more in the "detailed" camp.

 

[Diamond Cross]

I like both kinds of settings. To me, just because one setting has more details than another, doesn't mean it's stifling to the imagination nor does it say that you can not change it or add your own information under any circumstances. If a setting is richly detailed, it doesn't limit my imagination but only fuels it even more.

 

[gamerprinter]

Being a new 3pp, when designing 'worlds' there is always the possibility of publication, so my emphasis lately is in developing detailed regions, not worlds, such that one can 'plug and play' my detailed region into your existing world - a vast swamp near the mouth of a great river (any river), an archipelago of islands off in one of the undetailed oceans of a world (any world).

The verisimilitude is there in the details provided, but the regions don't have to be from one given world as any given world.

I think it better satisfies the needs for different gaming groups and is something I've been pursuing in two settings I am currently building for publication.

GP

 

[Jhaelen]

Comparing my reactions about Hammerfast and Vor Rukoth, it seems I prefer richly detailed over empty.

Hammerfast describes most of the buildings (and the most important inhabitants) in a settlement and gives an overview of the surrounding area. It also includes ideas for a mini-campaign. I thought it was the perfect level of detail to inspired me.

Vor Rukoth describes the ruins of a vast metropolis, giving short overviews of districts and describing a handful locations for each district. Aside from remining me strongly of the old Parlainth box for the Earthdawn rpg, I felt that was too sketchy to make good use of it. While there's a ton of adventure hooks, just like in Hammerfast, I felt I had to do all the work to create a full-fledged adventure from any of them.
The only area sufficiently detailed to get started with minimal work is the starting area outside the city. There's also practically no info on the surrounding area.

Similarly, in the Eberron setting, the party recently traveled to Graywall, the major city in Droaam.

Using just the ECS you get a small paragraph of info. I didn't really feel that was sufficient to describe it properly to the players and have good answers for their questions. My usual tactic to rely on a couple of random tables seemed not to do the place justice - it's a city of monsters, after all!

Luckily in Dragon there had been a backdrop article, detailing the five city districts, pinpointing hot spots and a bunch of npcs. Even without providing a map that was sufficient info to play a session in Graywall and give me some ideas for a side-quest.