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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Shaman" data-source="post: 5328765" data-attributes="member: 26473">With respect to implied setting, isn't this true for most roleplaying games?<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul"> Success in 1e AD&D comes primarily from acquiring treasure, and the game tells us who the treasure-seekers are, and about what role they play in the world if they are successful - win the foozle enough times, and you have the opportunity to build a stronghold and gain followers who are drawn to you by your reputation and prowess. The immediate rewards are treasure, the long-term rewards are power and glory - this tells me a lot about the world in which the game is intended to take place.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul"> Agents in Top Secret are paid by the mission, which reveals them to be contract agents; the relationship between the agent and the case officer in spy stories is often marked by tension and deception, so the implied setting is loaded with intrigue from the giddyup by the connection between the agents and their employers.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul"> There are four basic backgrounds for characters in Flashing Blades: Rogue, Soldier, Gentleman, and Nobleman. These backgrounds are well-represented in swashbuckling genre fiction. Contrast this with Maelstrom, in which characters can be merchants, tradesmean, and so forth. Both are historical roleplaying games, but FB actively reinforces genre fiction tropes while Maelstrom leans more toward presenting a slice of life in Elizabethan England.</li> </ul>The lifepaths of Traveller, Sanity in CoC, pretty much everything about Paranoia - the list goes on and on.Now, as to "empty" versus "richly detailed" as they pertain to locations, here are snippets from two of the maps I use for Flashing Blades.<img src="http://i567.photobucket.com/albums/ss115/Black_Vulmea/Cassinidetail-1.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " data-size="" style="" /><img src="http://i567.photobucket.com/albums/ss115/Black_Vulmea/Parisdetail-1.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " data-size="" style="" />Because I am playing in a historical milieu, I have access to a vast amount of detail, more than any fictional setting ever created. Yet looking at these maps, I don't know who lives in the village of Courgain, or what dangers lurk in the Bois Mulot, or the names of all the goldsmiths and moneylenders on the Pont au Change. Despite their very clear and distinct placement on the map, and literally years now of reading about the time and the place, there is a vast amount of information I must be able to create on the fly - I do that by learning as much about the setting as I can and filtering it through the mechanics of the game and the genre of the stories which inspire it.This is not in any way a feature of historical roleplaying games alone; consider the 11,000 worlds of the Third Imperium and the rest of Charted Space in Traveller, a highly detailed setting which is nonetheless as near to empty as a referee could imagine. You could spend years detailing a single planet in a single system if you were so inclined - much like the authors of Blue Planet chose to do for their game - and still make only an infinitismal dent in the enormity of that setting's emptiness.The settings I like best contain both considerable detail and vast swaths of emptiness at the same time. There is "empty" hidden in plain sight everywhere I look on those maps of France, or of Charted Space.</blockquote>

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