Should Campaign Settings include a metaplot?

[frankthedm]

I think metaplots are good ideas provided authors do not use it as a means of major upheavals to invalidate older books. Metaplots help DMs keep get ideas for what goes on in the wolrd and remind players that stuff happens without them. When there are 3 plot hooks and the party spends 2 weeks in a dungeon because they constantly spelldump then sleep, they deserve to find out the other 2 hooks have gone sour.

Bad Metaplot is when the first low level adventure has High level NPCs kill the Evil King while the PCs watch just so TSR's Standards and Ethics division can begin to rip slavery out of Dark*Sun.

 

[airwalkrr]

Several people have pointed to Greyhawk as being an example of a campaign that is "metaplot free," and I disagree with those people. Quality of the setting aside (I still think it is the best), Greyhawk has as much a metaplot as any other campaign setting. Need I say From the Ashes, anyone? That supplement alone can be considered one of the biggest changes to a campaign world in D&D history. Let alone Gygax's destruction of Oerth in the Gord the Rogue novels.

And you know what, none of these things has had a negative impact on my game. I have run both pre and post FTA campaigns in Greyhawk and I have both used and ignored the Gord the Rogue novel stories in my campaigns before. My players and I have enjoyed them all.

I imagine no DM would have a problem with a metaplot for a campaign setting if the metaplot followed exactly what that DM was doing in his own campaign. But the nature of the beast is that such a thing is impossible. And if you truly want your world to be alive and for there to be a REASON for new sourcebooks, then a metaplot is a necessity. You can't expect them to publish books on a campaign setting encompassing 20 years of history in which NOTHING happens, just to avoid stepping on any individual DM's toes.

Ok, so a sourcebook comes out detailing a war in a region of the world that your PCs just negotiated eternal peace in. Big deal. Comic books have retro-active continuity all the time, I'm sure your campaign could stand a little. And if you simply can't stand the existence of the product that describes said war and can't find a way to ignore it, have your PCs called off to another part of the world to continue adventures there. But just continuing on the way you have is not going to crucify the setting just because some novel or sourcebook has a different history than you do. If your players complain, state that there are an infinite number of universes for which an infinite number of possibilities exist and in the universe their PCs are located in, the war never happened. So you can't use the sourcebook in your campaign? Boo-freakin'-hoo. You might have been all excited to hear about a Kingdom of Bloodskull sourcebook only to get disappointed when you heard that they killed off its king, but for the other 99% of campaigns out there that probably didn't adventure much in the Kingdom of Bloodskull, the sourcebook offers the chance to explore new ground.

Anyway, the point is campaign sourcebooks cannot be viable products if everyone expects the designers to either a) abstain from a metaplot or b) adhere strictly to your home campaign's history. Enjoy the sourcebooks for what they are: the opportunity to add dimension to never-before-travelled ground in your campaign or an excuse to start a new campaign. These worlds have to have some action in them for people to continue to be inspired to start their adventure there and just because the designers have a different vision for the setting than your own is no reason to claim metaplots are the devil. They can't appeal to everyone, but I assure you a generic product with no action and no pizazz would die off quickly and have no pizazz. Either that or the designers would have to suspend themselves in time to prevent changing anything about the setting that the fans love, which would quite frankly become boring quickly. People are already complaining about the detailing of roof-tiling in the Realms. You have to shake things up every once in a while to keep things interesting.

 

[ThirdWizard]

Planescape was one of the two settings I had in mind that suffered at the hands of metaplot. I don't consider dead gods so much a problem... it concerns elements that players might never have dealth with outside the adventure. It's Faction War that is in your face and gets my ire.

For the record, Faction War was supposed to be the first in a series after which Sigil would supposedly be put back more or less the way it was. The cancellation of Planescape, however, made this impossible and many peiople attribute Faction war to its demise or ascribe it as TSR "killing" the setting off. Neither is true and it really gets a worse rep than it deserves because of this.

As for me, I think metaplots are important to a setting.

 

[resistor]

For the record, Faction War was supposed to be the first in a series after which Sigil would supposedly be put back more or less the way it was. The cancellation of Planescape, however, made this impossible and many peiople attribute Faction war to its demise or ascribe it as TSR "killing" the setting off. Neither is true and it really gets a worse rep than it deserves because of this.

Is anything known about what these planned but not written adventures might have been like?

 

[Khairn]

Some meta-plots work and help to enhance the game. When done right, I really enjoy the flavor it brings. But there are other cases where the meta-plot does nothing but cause problems. So the answer is both yes and no

 

[Sammael]

No. There should be metaplot ideas, like the ones presented in Power of Faerûn, but I don't like being force-fed changes to my setting.

 

[prosfilaes]

And if you truly want your world to be alive and for there to be a REASON for new sourcebooks, then a metaplot is a necessity. You can't expect them to publish books on a campaign setting encompassing 20 years of history in which NOTHING happens, just to avoid stepping on any individual DM's toes.

I don't see why it is a necessity. Most worlds are large enough to accomodate a lot of books. Traveller's Imperium was literally ten thousand systems. Even if you confine yourself to one continent of one world, you could sell quite a few books going over each country, each area. Planescape was infinite, and the possibilities of Sigil alone could have justified several more books. There's a lot to be done without advancing the timeline.

And on the flip side, you can encompass 20 years of history without blowing everything up. If you start in Europe in 1950, there's a lot of interesting changes in the next 20 years without radically alterating the setting. But it seems like every game designer would rather start their game in the equivalent of Europe in 1910, so they can rewrite everything the players like about the setting by advancing it 20 years, and then when people get used to that, do it all over again.

 

[Hussar]

What Prof. mentions is a complaint I had about Scarred Lands. Ghaelsped is a massive continent. There are so many things left undetailed about it. Yet, they added Termana to the mix and added more metaplot there. Following that, they added three more continents as well.

I always felt that there was so much left undone in Ghelspad. The setting also suffered heavily because of a lack of focus, IMO.

Personally, I would love seeing a highly detailed snapshot of a setting for a five year period. Far more in depth than the usual two or three paragraphs we usually see. Ptolus seems to be something like this. A massively detailed setting even though it's only one city.

IMHO, I would much prefer lots of details on a small scale setting than a few details on a large scale one.

 

[Staffan]

No.

I prefer it where a setting is essentially frozen in time from a publishing point of view. That is, every supplement describes the setting at the same point in time. Adventures can be released that are based on various setting-changing things, but these setting changes should not be incorporated into future products.

Exalted did this right, IMO. One of the first books they released was Time of Tumult, which included a campaign embryo based on an extraplanar invasion, with a timeline of what would likely happen if no-one interfered. Later books, however, have not assumed that this invasion actually happened. Some of them have acknowledged it, along the lines of "If you are using the Autochthonian invasion from Time of Tumult, that interacts with these things in ways X, Y, and Z." I believe I have seen the people in charge of the setting say that if they were to release other "metaplot" books, that's how they'd handle things in them too.

 

[MonsterMash]

IMC there are usually a number of major arcs involving political bodies, but not one metaplot everything is tied to.