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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Shaman" data-source="post: 2269779" data-attributes="member: 26473">The adventurers.Every setting and adventure is nothing but stats and wishful thinking - it's the players' characters that bring the setting to life. As GM I try to facilitate that with interesting NPCs, landscapes, and cultures.Some GMs, in my experience, spend a lot of effort trying to be 'original', however they choose to define it. Personally I strive for interesting archetypes, particularly in terms of the challenges presented by the game-world to the players. A princess captured by bandits, a city attacked by pirates, an unearthly monster stalking a dark forest - none of these are original in the least, so I strive instead to bring the setting to life by populating it with intriguing and memorable characters, by creating a landscape that is rich and textured, by developing a thoughtful backstory, and by pacing the action so that the players develop their own sense of urgency or excitement, thereby bringing tension to the narrative that develops as the game progresses.All of it counts for nothing without players who create characters from whole-cloth and invest the effort to explore the setting and adventures. It's how they interact with the setting that determines if it's compelling or not.The question is open-ended, but I imagine most people would instinctively respond based on their fantasy homebrew experiences. There is of course much more than that. My fantasy homebrew is straight-up swords and sorcery in the tradition of Howard and Leiber. My fantastic history homebrew is mythic Africa in the age of exploration. My historical homebrew is modern military versus insurgents in 1950s Algeria. And my fantastic modern game is...purposefully left undefined for the moment... <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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