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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Desdichado" data-source="post: 1336808" data-attributes="member: 2205">There's always a problem with "epic" stories being turned into game settings in that you have to sacrifice one of the important elements of the book/movie/etc. that gives you the setting in order to get the rest of it.DL, Star Wars, the Wheel of Time, Lord of the Rings, etc. all have the same problem.  Namely, that the epic nature of the original tales the setting is based on can't be maintained if the details of the setting are also maintained.  In DL, the heroes of the Chronicles novels are the ones doing the most epic plotline by far that can be squeezed out of the setting.  Trying to have someone else have a plot just as epic that happens concurrently stretches the bounds of reasonableness.  Because the actions of the heroes drastically change the nature of the world, you can't just move the PCs in time or place from the action in the books either, unless you want to lose out on all the detail that makes the setting interesting in the first place!The same problems happen with Star Wars; you can set your game after Return of the Jedi (I would) but then you don't get to take advantage of a lot of the setting as seen in the movie because it's no longer relevant.  Or, can you imagine a Middle-earth game without the threat of Sauron?  It wouldn't feel like Middle-earth, but nothing anybody does can compare to the quest of Frodo and Sam.  The only way to pull it off is to make an alternate timeline, or make do with PCs that aren't as epic as the "PCs" who are the stars of book and movie.  For instance, I'd do Star Wars after all the main characters from the movie are old and gray (or dead) and have some kind of Sith menace pop back up.  For Lord of the Rings, I'd go with the alternate that Tolkien himself proposed in which Gandalf takes the Ring, otherthrows Sauron and puts himself up as the new Dark Lord (meanwhile Saruman completes his own Ring research and sets himself up as a viable rival -- this is from the author's Forward wherein he describes how the plot might have differed had Lord of the Rings actually been more allegorically connected to World War II.)  I'm not familiar enough with Dragonlance to know exactly how I'd get around that problem, but I'm sure there are ways to do it, but not without excercising a bit of creative problem solving.</blockquote>

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