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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lanefan" data-source="post: 8241120" data-attributes="member: 29398">There's two different situations here and we may each be talking about one, hence a disconnect.Situation one: there's a distant part of the game world that's never been developed or even thought out clearly by the GM, and for the forseeable future there's pretty much zero chance of the PCs going there.Situation two: there's a distant part of the game world that the PCs have heard of in passing; the GM has vague ideas of what's there but that's it, and again there's a near-zero chance of the PCs going there anytime soon.Situation one: no updating required, if for no reason than there's nothing in place yet to update. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />Situation two: updating required if necessary, based both on effects (known or unknown) of the PCs' actions and on external events.An example, sort of, from my game:[spoiler]Far to the south of the usual adventuring area, but noted in the game-world history and on its maps since day 1, is a large city called Tanquair.  For ten or more years of play all I-as-DM needed to do with Tanquair was think about it in my own mind and occasionally remind myself it was still down there; the PCs never got within a thousand miles of the place and never really had any effect on it. (and even though its local language was always on my random-languages table nobody ever rolled it, which meant I didn't even have to worry about telling anyone about the place the language came from!)Then a mission (actually the start of a covid-shattered adventure series) took them down to that part of the world; meaning I not only had to think more carefully about what made Tanquair tick, I also had to design what lay in and across the ocean to its south which up until then was "off the map" territory.  A few months later Tanquair ended up becoming their away-from-home home base, forcing me to go into way more detail than I ever really expected to (I had wrongly guessed they'd use their long-range travel capabilities to continue operating out of their usual base, far to the north).Fortunately for me, I'd always envisioned Tanquair as a fairly stable sort of place anyway, so updating it was dirt simple.  More challenging (and interesting!) was designing the southern ocean and what lay around/across it: a bunch of small realms to the east and to the south a great big empire very loosely based on an amalgam of various proto-Chinese dynasties.  Again, at the moment there's a near-zero chance of the PCs ever going there, though they've had all kinds of interaction with a few of its more-piratically-inclined citizens, but now they've heard of it I feel I need to keep it - and all the other realms surrounding that ocean - vaguely updated.  (further, I'm now looking long and hard at that area should I ever want to run an entirely different campaign and recycle the same setting)And even then they caught me off guard: I'd done a high-level map of that southern ocean* and because the PCs needed to triangulate a directional pull to a site in mid-ocean they on a whim picked a random coastal city in a small irrelevant realm to the east and said "we're going there to try our directional spell again".  They had magical means of long-range travel that allowed this, and suddenly I'm trying to DM them in a new and strange city that until that moment had been nothing but a nameless dot on a map!By the end of that session I knew a lot more about the kingdom of Bonbai and the city of Baique than I ever expected to. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />Odds of their ever going back there again: near zero.* - it's map 7 on this page: <a href="http://www.friendsofgravity.com/games/decast/maps/index.html" target="_blank">Decast maps</a>[/spoiler]</blockquote>

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