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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8616840" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Since "I picked homebrew because that let me do it myself" is a bit lacking as far as useful answers go, I'll go a bit beyond that into, "Why did you choose the specific themes you did for your setting?"So, to start out with, the absolute bedrock core of Jewel of the Desert is Al-Rakkah, known by the titular epithet (when one waxes poetic, anyway; it's not commonly used in everyday speech): a mid- to high-magic Arabian Nights/vaguely "sword and sandal" city. I chose an Arabian Nights theme because I wanted my players to intuitively feel like they HAD to ask questions, that they couldn't presume things work the way they would expect in a typical fantasy game. Normally, my go-to would be wuxia instead of Arabian Nights, but everyone I play the game with is a fellow Final Fantasy XIV player, and generally is pretty into Japanese RPGs, so that aesthetic runs the risk of having a little too much familiarity, a little too much presumed background knowledge. By framing it with Arabian Nights, and actually doing a moderate amount of research on Golden Age Islam, Al-Andalus, pre-Islamic Arabian mythology, etc., I have been able to cultivate a setting where everything feels just a little bit unfamiliar without feeling totally alien, which encourages the right mix of imagination and questioning.The second core theme I wanted to pursue is the playstyle sometimes referred to as "Paladins & Princesses," or as a "bright" and "clean" fantasy. More accurately, brighter and cleaner, because there are absolutely dark and dirty things in this world, they just don't predominate here. The 4e setting refers to itself as "Points of Light," a world swathed in darkness with small, quavering bastions of the light of civilization and prosperity, under threat of being snuffed out for good, but not down for the count just yet. I didn't want things quite that problematic, but I still wanted a world where adventurers matter, where heroism actually has an impact, where the choice to be good and noble or ruthless and efficient has lasting consequences. As a result, I think of Jewel as being more chiaroscuro, rather than "points of light": it is an interplay between the bright and the dark, a stark contrast between sunlight and pitch-black shadow. Overall, it's a pretty bright world; slavery is socially unacceptable (the result of the civilization of the area having arisen by throwing off their former genie-rajah enslavers), sexism is fairly minimal (in part because the two main faiths of the region, the Safiqi Priesthood and the Kahina shaman/druid combo pack, are purely egalitarian when it comes to gender), literacy is high, and the city-states of the Tarrakhuna are in a period of peace and prosperity. But on the flipside, there's an assassin cult finally rising up from the shadows again to cause trouble; there's a black dragon trying to take a stranglehold on the city; there's a subversive Cthulhu-esque cult causing trouble; there are creepy eco-terrorist druids who want to become one with death. And if it weren't for heroes stopping them, these people could do VERY bad things to the world. Hence chiaroscuro, light and dark going head to head, with victory possible but never assured and never truly permanent.The third theme I wanted (as alluded above) was somewhere my players could feel safe to be who they wanted to be, to explore the stories they want to explore. As a result, although dark things do exist, I have labored to include silver linings and other angles. I have worked very hard to ensure that, although there is very strong faith, even beings like celestials will straight-up say, "You have no way of knowing with absolute certainty whether these things are true, or not; you must decide for yourself where you put your faith." They do generally agree on various things, but perspectives are many and varied. Beyond this, though, I have worked to demonstrate that race has little if anything to do with alignment. A bandit is just as likely to be an elf or a human as they are to be an orc (quite common and well-integrated in this setting), and the party has met minotaur shopkeepers, ogre caravanserai masters, and a variety of other races in all sorts of social positions. (Some pure-evil races do exist, but it's only stuff like mindflayers.) Through both these "internal to the story" choices and other, "external" choices (like "characters don't permanently, irreversibly die unless the player and I agree that that's how the character's story should end") I have labored to give them a setting where they can be who and what they wish to be, without having to worry about whether they'll be made to feel bad about that. There are, of course, people who dislike, fear, or even hate them, but random bigotry etc. just doesn't happen.Fourth and finally...I wanted a world that was fantastical and VERY actively embraced player involvement. At least 75% of the time, I'm on board for whatever my players want to do, no need to even sell me on it--the roll might be tough or might require a sequence of events or the like, but I'm there for it. And for almost all of the remainder, I just need to have them walk me through what they want or why they want it and I'll almost certainly either give it to them outright, or tweak it very slightly. In the very rare occasions I have to put my foot down about something, I do it as gently as possible and work to make up for it in some other way. As a result, I have cultivated a relationship with my players where they're willing to throw out ideas that come to them, and more importantly, talk with me about them, as opposed to keeping all those thoughts locked in their heads. We have gotten so much truly excellent content specifically because my players have spoken up about their ideas and have truly impressed me with their creativity in the doing. My players know that if they're excited about something, I want to be excited about it too, whatever it may be, and that has helped make this game really, truly delightful for all of us.So, to TL;DR that, I chose the homebrew elements I did because:<ol> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Arabian Nights induced my players to actively ask questions and seek answers, rather than acting on presumed knowledge.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">A chiaroscuro world has the right balance of "beautiful, bright things to protect" and "horrible, dark, destructive things that must be stopped."</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">I wanted to give my players a space where they could safely act out their fantasies while still having to grow and make tough choices.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">I like high-fantasy, high-action stuff, and I am deeply committed to cultivating player enthusiasm.</li> </ol></blockquote>

Verification