Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="el-remmen" data-source="post: 8588339" data-attributes="member: 11">I ran games in the same setting from 1989 to 2009 and then a buddy ran one last game there from 2010 to 2016.This was Aquerra, an archipelago flat world, with a lot of focus on sea travel and conflict between religious factions that was several millennia removed from "The Time Before" when the world was dominated by a Pangea-like continent that was smashed into the current islands requiring a remaking of various civilizations.  This was a top-down setting that I did a lot of work on and detailing and still have two thick binders full of notes about.  I have two story hours in that forum for games set in that world, but between me and other DMs, we ran over a dozen different connected games in that setting over 20 years.When I got back to running D&D after a ten year break, rather than be trapped by the past and trying to convert the setting to 5E after all the work it took converting it from 2E to 3E, I instead took a place from that setting that I always liked but never got to use much and was under-developed, renamed and re-mapped it and used that as the starting point for my current campaigns, calling it "The Republic of Makrinos." This large island is surrounded in temperate and sub-tropical swamps and had a mountainous interior.The central campaign conceit is that PCs are not from this place, but are from what we call "The Known World" (no relation to Mystara), which can be however the PCs imagine it - it doesn't matter much, one conceit is that we're never going back there and the characters need a motivation for leaving. I describe "The Known World" as a scattered land of kingdoms and empires constantly breaking apart and re-absorbing each other, where most so-called "monstrous humanoids" have been driven to extinction and most other monsters have been killed off or put in zoos. Its age of adventure is long over, its evils institutionalized into virtues. It is sufficiently far from Makrinos that while it is possible for ships to reach between them, it is a long and harrowing trip that does not allow for easy migration or to stage an invasion.This allows the players to learn about the setting (Makrinos) as they play and their characters learn about it. The core conceit about this is that characters can think they know whatever it is players think they know about monsters and lineages and the like, but that doesn't mean it is actually the case.Put together this allows for two things:1. Players to make characters with a wide variety of motivating backgrounds without it mattering if the details match the world they will be exploring.2. Allows me the freedom (that I usually take anyway) to make monsters and encounters whatever I want them to be.Makrinos itself is a republic with complex laws, customs, and voting systems (based on a mash-up of ancient Greece and Rome with some other things thrown in), so very different from the typical monarchies that dominate the political landscape of D&D (see <a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/why-fantasy-goin-medieval-in-d-d.686999/unread" target="_blank">Snarf's recent post</a>), allowing me to develop a sense of "political foreignness" (not just cultural) as a backdrop the PCs can interact with as much or as little as they like.</blockquote>

Verification