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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="der_kluge" data-source="post: 1819429" data-attributes="member: 945">This is indeed a tough topic.I don't think I can easily define what makes a good setting.I think Al-Qadim had a lot of qualities to it that made it great.  Even though there was very little actually setting information in the original book.  It was mostly a map, and some sketchy information.  But there was a flavor about it, a certain je ne sais quoi that I really liked.So, it was just enough to get me started.  I think what killed it for me were all the supplements that bored me to tears with custom, and law, and all the other stuff that stifled my creativity and imagination.Ravenloft was the same way - a great setting with a great flavor that had a lot of room to explore, and it had a lot of idea generators - that is, with all the little domains you could start your characters in all kinds of different locations, and each of them was uniquely different.So, for Ravenloft, the thing that sold me was the detail, and the consistency, and the huge potential for flavor, and gothicy goodness.I love Masque of the Red Death because it was just a template of rules that I could apply to real world settings.  So, it was fun to dig up Washington Posts from 1890 and read news stories - there was literally a ton of potential information available on the setting since it was real!I also really loved Planescape.  I think the thing that made Planescape was good was that it was just a menu of interesting places where you could go, and the setting was created so that it was *easy* to get from one to the next.  So, DMs had this veritable shopping list of neat places where they could send their party, but rather than go into a quandry about how to get them from one neat place to the next, they had a convenient means of doing so.  So, the pace could be as quick or as slow as the DM wanted.  That was a real refreshing change.  I think what I didn't like about it was all the politics of trying to get a group to work together.  With all the Eastern-influenced faction stuff, it was easy for in-party conflicts to get created.I've never really cared for Forgotten Realms, Dragonlance, Grayhawk, or even Birthright.  They just don't really do anything for me.Where we were headed with the Bluffside world was a world full of history and mystery, and alive with exploration and discovery.  The world map would be basically a southern and a northern continent with the rest of the world left black, because it's unexplored.  I still really like that concept, but I think for my own campaign world I'm building now, where I am nowadays is in a much lower-magic, lower-fantasy state of mind.  It's hard to create a realistic, low-magic, low-fantasy world that's actually interesting. <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=":)" /></blockquote>

Verification