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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jürgen Hubert" data-source="post: 4635746" data-attributes="member: 7177">I've been pondering these issues ever since I began developing Urbis. In addition to the issues mentioned above, here is another one which I consider to be fairly important:It must be digestible.I like lots of detail in a setting. I thrive on detail. But the average gaming group consists of five or six people, and all of them need to understand the basics of a setting before they can start playing. And not everyone has time to read through 100 or more pages of setting material.It's easy for the kind of "generic fantasy" settings that D&D exemplifies. Almost everyone has played in the Forgotten Realms or similar settings, and knows all the basic tropes and cliches that go with them. Elves live in the forest, dwarves in the mountains, wizards are mysterious, kings rule over feudal realms, and so on. You don't need to learn much more material to start gaming, especially if you start out in the traditional remote hamlet.Other settings are much more difficult to digest. This is one of the downsides of settings like Tekumel - no matter how awesome they are, they require massive amounts of information to digest before the players can start making their characters, and thus they remain niche products despite their cult status. The same is true of too many other settings which have fantastic ideas, yet contain too many new concepts to make them easy to run for the typical gaming group.Urbis started out with some fairly significant changes to the "standard" fantasy worlds - the move away from the typical medieval, feudal paradigm to a far more "modern" mindset and society (not to mention all those enormous city-states everywhere). I compensated by using lots of other, very familiar elements - not only am I using all the "standard" D&D races (complete with many of their associated tropes in recognizable form), but I'm also deliberately and blatantly stealing from real world geography, cultures, and history (I even provide the references in many cases). My hope that there will be enough familiar mixed in with the alien that players only need a short amount of time to familiarize themselves with the core setting concepts. Did I succeed in this?You tell me.   <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

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