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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8248439" data-attributes="member: 42582">Right! So much this!This is what I was pointing to in my posts upthread both about whether or not I need to know the layout of a starport when GMing Classic Traveller, and in my ranking of campaigns by degree of starting prep. And also what I was not just pointing to but directly addressing in my post upthread asking [USER=29398]@Lanefan[/USER] about the role of the setting framework.That sort of thing, yes. I'm not surprised to see maps in there, and their use to resolve travel.Picking up on a couple of the other things - cosmology and deities to give religious PCs something to work with; history to show how things got to be what they are - there seems to be a heavy emphasis here on not just what there is but knowing, in advance, how it got there.To think about how a different approach might work, consider the following:* In the real world, the way that we establish historical facts, and even more cosmological facts, is to look at what there is and to reason back from it to probably causes, with that reasoning informed and constrained by our best accounts of the relevant causal processes; * Sometimes we don't know; * Sometimes we discover new things that are and these force a revision of our historical conjectures, and perhaps even a revision of our accounts of the causal processes.None of those facts about how humans work stuff out about the world they live in gives any reason to think that the world is inconsistent. It just means its complicated and we don't know everything about it that there is to know!Now imagine adopting a similar sort of approach in establishing a RPG setting:* Eg a player chooses a god for his/her religious PC, based on what s/he thinks is cool or genre appropriate or whatever - now we know that that god is party of the setting; * Maybe another player writes up some backstory for his/her PC which refers to a time spent in exile in The Barrens, so now we know that place exists; * Etc, etc.From this information about what is, we gradually build up a picture of how it came to be. Our evidence base is pretty thin, and our reasoning isn't scientific, but these are actually complementary as the thinner the evidence base the less likely common sense is to deliver up contradictions!JRRT did this with LotR. You can see this eg in Unfinished Tales, where we learn how he kept revising the story of Celeborn and Galadriel. That didn't stop him from writing the stuff about Lothlorien in LotR.I'm not saying that anyone should adopt this sort of approach in RPGing. I'm just pointing out how it is eminently possible.Of course it won't work if our processes for working out what happens now rely upon all that background/historical stuff as an input. But they don't have to. Other processes are quite possible and can work quite well.</blockquote>

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