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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7344235" data-attributes="member: 42582">I don't agree with this. Frodo's home is The Shire, which is a quintessential rural idyll. His uncle has been both a central figure in this place, and yet an outsider. His gardener has no real wanderlust but an obsession with elves. Etc.Once you fill in the details of Frodo's backstory that matter to him as a character, you get something that is not especially generic.I often use pre-drawn maps for establishing basic details of geography; and settings often give names for historical figures, towns, gods etc which are useful - eg our "good" god in this setting is St Cuthbert; the town with the bazaar is Hardby; the hills where you spent your youth in a tower learning magic from your brother are the Abor-Alz; etc.It saves having to set all this stuff up. And in terms of GMing techniques, if the important thing for the player is that his/her PC comes from a forest, or the hills, or whatever, then superimposing that over some pre-drawn map and loose backstory doesn't cost anything and just speeds up the process of getting started. One reason I like the centre of the GH maps is that it covers the full spectrum of default fantasy settings: forests for bandits and Robin Hood types; cities and towns (Dyvers, GH, Hardby); ocean (Woolly Bay); the Wild Coast for free cities and mercenary companies, as well as ports that pirates can sail from and dock in; the Pomarj for an evil empire; the Bright Desert and Abor-Alz for pyramids, nomads, and the like; Celene for an elven queen; etc, etc. All the tropes are there.(The map on the inside cover of B10 Night's Dark Terror is fairly similar in this respect - it's really just missing ocean and desert; but it's got towns/cities, mountains, a lake, forest, hills, plains for riding across, etc.)Of course, some campaigns don't really need this sort of detail - eg my Cortex+ Heroic vikings game happens in a generic "north" which I narrate as needed; and for Traveller random world generation has proved adequate to the task of establishing places for the PCs to be.</blockquote>

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