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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Brimshack" data-source="post: 3195816" data-attributes="member: 34694">I've spent a lot of time thinking about how to make unusual cultural sources more attractive to players, and I have ideas, but I don't know if I have a magic bullet at present. This is one of the reasons I tend to work with seagoing campaigns lately; it gives me an excuse to run characters from setting to setting. I think the interaction between people with different cultural backgrounds might be more interesting than any given odd setting would be in itself. With both Africa and Polynesia (as well as Native American settings) the notion of European style characters showing up on a boat is interesting to me, and it can be played from either end (you travel and meet these strange new people or strangers show up and turn your word upside down). But with Africa you could even use regular trade routes. For those players that might not be interested in purely African characters and setting, perhaps they are playing the lone Crusader who has ventured South along the trade routes into sub-saharan Africa.One thing that interests me about all of those settings is the possibility of good fighting good. It could be for example that the travelers are not essentially cruel or evil, they might even mean well, but their mere presence in some of these settings is a tremendous danger to the local population. It could well be that after a period of interaction the locals decide that they absolutely MUST drive the visitors out, even those who might have redeeming value. To me the drama of two forces for good squaring off against each other is an interesting prospect (very Mahabharata); it involves a moral dilemma absent in much of the standard good versus evil bit. Some on the 2 sides might regret their course of action, they might have to kill someone they respect, perhaps even love), but they will do it anyway because their interests are just that diametrically opposed. I guess one question I would ask is what do you mean by designing it for the players? Does this mean thinking about the sorts of things that players would enjoy? Or does it mean designing the world around a specific plot line for those characters? Do you need to decide what specifically the characters will be before beginning?Some of my most successful campaigns were met with grumbles from the players, and in the end the oddness that they objected to at first became the most enjoyable feature. ...some didn't work though. To me, I guess the question would be if you can break down the things that players enjoy about a campaign into components they like, can you then reporduce it in your new setting. A player might not like the idea of playing in Africa, but if he really likes political intrigue, then the success of the campaign will most likely rest on your ability to generate that intrigue within the African setting.</blockquote>

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