RangerWickett
Legend
I'm about to co-DM a new setting, a sort of Steam & Steel kind of fantasy. With the aid of my friend Michael (Stahn Li on these boards), I'm coming up with nations, adventure ideas, villains, and all the necessary stuff to make a game run great for years. Michael has played in two of my previous games, which were in the same world that I'd been running games in for the past 8 years, but with him coming on as co-DM, I felt it would be a great chance for me to come up with a new world, and get something fresh.
But my subconscious apparently really likes my old world.
True, all the nations, peoples, and plot lines of this new setting are fresh. I have no dark Elves, no strange dreamborn monsters, no ancient Orcish empire that conquered the world, no Renaissance-esque patronage of adventurers. I dropped all my old naming conventions. I brought back halflings and dwarves, which I had once sworn I'd never use again. I even got rid of all my heavily metaphorical mythos, including all its emphasis on storms and elements.
But there were all these luscious little plot threads dangling from my old world. Things I'd wanted to do, or ideas players had brought up. I found myself trying to find places to use them in this new setting.
A few examples:
Should I just tell Michael that, hey, that other land is my old campaign setting, 3000 years after the game he played in? Right now I'm not even sure if the party will go to that distant land, but if they do, will it be cool to the players to see old sights, or will they think I was just copping out? I mean, now that I have this idea kicking around in my head, I started to realize how I could weave the low-level adventure arc we have in mind into a more grandiose plot that would show up at high-levels, involving an interweaving of the two worlds. I know how I could make it cool. But I wonder if I should force myself to sever the ties and come up with something completely unrelated.
I know that stagnancy is bad, and that it shouldn't be hard to come up with new ideas. I'm afraid that, having been running the same setting for 8 years, bringing it in again, even if I do it from a completely different angle, might come across like remaking an old movie and doing it badly.
Anyone here ever experienced that sort of worry? Do you have any suggestions? Heck, wanna help me and Michael brainstorm? Right now we have a great opening adventure, and a great villain, but almost no idea of how to bring the party into it all. *nervous grin*
We start in two weeks.
But my subconscious apparently really likes my old world.
True, all the nations, peoples, and plot lines of this new setting are fresh. I have no dark Elves, no strange dreamborn monsters, no ancient Orcish empire that conquered the world, no Renaissance-esque patronage of adventurers. I dropped all my old naming conventions. I brought back halflings and dwarves, which I had once sworn I'd never use again. I even got rid of all my heavily metaphorical mythos, including all its emphasis on storms and elements.
But there were all these luscious little plot threads dangling from my old world. Things I'd wanted to do, or ideas players had brought up. I found myself trying to find places to use them in this new setting.
A few examples:
- Ootah: Michael's old character Stanely, at the end of his campaign, traveled west over the sea, seeking the promised land of Ootah, where he would start the church of Zorok, the three-headed chicken god of everything. Stanely was a bit odd, and he was pretty much just parodying Utah and the Mormons. But I thought I could use some of his old idea, and thus I decided I ought to have a great desert land with a religious center on the edge of a great lake of salt.
- Forgotten Lore: The end of my last game resulted in the leaders of a world-spanning empire being locked away in tombs for all eternity, all knowledge of their past wiped out. That game took place three thousand years in the 'past,' if I use my very first game in my world as a baseline, and thus I knew that those tombs would eventually be explored, by PCs no less, with all sorts of fun consequences. But if there were some other land across the sea, even if it had once been conquered, there would be no tombs there, and the ancient lore could remain hidden. There might be old ruins buried under layers of newer cities, though, and thus I got a few plot hooks in mind that some ancient magic might be getting dug up by secret socities in this new world's equivalent of London.
- No Storms: Man, I love storms, particularly the thunder. I had a lot of storm-centric stuff going on in my last game, so I decided to make this world a bit dryer. I actually modeled one nation on the 'old west' you might see in a spaghetti western flick -- Italian cowboys and all. But in the mythology of my old world, the dragon (ancient fire spirit) nearly devoured the eagle (ancient air spirit), thus disturbing the balance of the world. If my old setting was the continent of the dragon, and this new one was the continent of the eagle, it would make sense that there was less storms, since most of the air magic is over on the other continent.
- High-Level Fallback: Michael and I decided that it'd be nice to come up with some place distant where the PCs might go once they got up past 10th level. We want this world to have a more down-to-earth feel, with more technology and less magic, but we wanted to give the PCs a place to fight monsters that wouldn't make sense in this setting. So we decided that, somewhere across the sea, there's a land of high magic.
Should I just tell Michael that, hey, that other land is my old campaign setting, 3000 years after the game he played in? Right now I'm not even sure if the party will go to that distant land, but if they do, will it be cool to the players to see old sights, or will they think I was just copping out? I mean, now that I have this idea kicking around in my head, I started to realize how I could weave the low-level adventure arc we have in mind into a more grandiose plot that would show up at high-levels, involving an interweaving of the two worlds. I know how I could make it cool. But I wonder if I should force myself to sever the ties and come up with something completely unrelated.
I know that stagnancy is bad, and that it shouldn't be hard to come up with new ideas. I'm afraid that, having been running the same setting for 8 years, bringing it in again, even if I do it from a completely different angle, might come across like remaking an old movie and doing it badly.
Anyone here ever experienced that sort of worry? Do you have any suggestions? Heck, wanna help me and Michael brainstorm? Right now we have a great opening adventure, and a great villain, but almost no idea of how to bring the party into it all. *nervous grin*
We start in two weeks.
