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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Herpes Cineplex" data-source="post: 1774753" data-attributes="member: 16936">A little exaggeration for effect, but the complaint is genuine enough.  For example:Why does it have to be the last heir of a lost dynasty?  Why can't it be a charismatic and good-hearted general who was cast out of the tyrant's army and is now trying to muster up a resistance movement?  Why can't it be a new faith that's trying to establish itself in the world?  Why does settling strife between kingdoms require a lost golden age to be epic and cool?  Or uniting kingdoms against a common foe?  Or building nations?In other words, what makes you feel that an epic story centered on creating something grand or defending the world from something evil is improved by being set amidst the ashes of a fallen utopia?  Why is that somehow more noble and more heroic than simply creating something grand or defending the world from something evil anywhere else?And my answer to that is, of course, that it isn't.  I disagree with Zaruthustran that the only history which can add weight, import, and mystery is one where our ancestors were wiser and stronger and braver and cooler and wealthier than us.  I also disagree with the idea that the absence of a lost civilization of wonders turns adventuring into a tedious chore.Seriously, who thinks like that?  Isn't building a nation, inventing something new, or improving the world interesting in its own right, or do you REALLY need it all to be just a tiny step towards recapturing some lost knowledge that (better, wiser, stronger) people learned a thousand years ago, before the apocalypse claimed them and plunged the world into ignorance and despair?I'll give you the tombs full of untold riches, though.  You can't really have that kind of junk unless you have a rich civilization that died before it could tell anything about itself.  But yeesh, that's hardly the beginning and end of all epic, interesting, and involving storylines.  And not having had a Golden Age in the past in no way means that you are confined to simply playing IN the Golden Age...just because nothing before the current era was perfect in no way implies that the current era IS perfect, right?I'm really just saying that I'm sick of Golden Ages.  They infest these settings like a plague, and I'm starting to get a little ticked off at 'em.  Just a brief nod to the idea that, hey, societies tend to advance, even without magical ways of defending themselves, healing injuries, and making things easier.  A suggestion that the great heroes that the PCs are aiming to become will genuinely be among the greatest ever, instead of pale reflections of the TRULY great heroes of a thousand years ago.  A setting that focuses on how new advances and abilities are creating new problems which must be dealt with, instead of all the worst things in the world deriving from some unnameable ancient evil which destroyed utopia once and seeks to do it again.And if you disagree with me, that's fine.--of course, i'm right and you're wrong, but that's fine  <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>

Verification