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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Envisioner" data-source="post: 7972445" data-attributes="member: 6749263">The campaign world I've been crafting for most of a decade by now is based on an inversion of the standard good-versus-evil paradigm.  In most settings, Evil is presented as an almost-unstoppable tide, a monolithic force rising up to crush everything, and the heroes are part of a ragtag Forces of Good which desperately has to struggle against the overwhelming power of darkness, in order to save the world before everything is lost.  It makes an easy way of giving the players high stakes to fight for, so it's a frequently-used cliche, but I find it boring.  Instead, in my setting, Good is inherently more powerful than Evil, so the status quo is that civilization is basically safe, and every individual tries to do the right thing as best they can manage it - a fairly realistic milieu, where the Celestials and the gods of Good take a kind of "Prime Directive" approach to running things, doing as little as possible to keep people safe, so that people remain free and their lives are still meaningful, rather than them just being the pets of far more powerful entities who do everything that actually needs doing. And against this rather stale backdrop, which is inherently a kind of creeping existential threat in and of itself, the forces of Evil are presented as either somewhat sympathetic individuals who are driven mad by selfish obsessions that the force of Good doesn't know how to deal with (effectively people who have fallen through the cracks of the system and been unable to get the help they need), or else they're truly wicked villains, but in that case they generally operate through deception rather than stealth.  Instead of a lich-king who raises an army of evil to march against the civilized world, you'll have a small cadre of spies who perfectly impersonate innocent people, and they'll scheme to sow discontent among the populace, exaggerating their petty gripes into vendettas and then shedding their stolen identities so that their patsy is blamed.  In this way, the villains gradually tear down over a year what has taken a decade to build, and then vanish into the shadows before anybody can even find out that a deliberate action was taken in order to wound the world.  All of this doesn't really lend itself very well to the D&D rules set, but that's less important than ever in the heavy narrative focus of 5E; I still like using D&D, because I like the specific vision of dwarves and dark elves and fallen angels and rising demons and beholders and mind flayers that the game uses as its setting backdrop, even if I don't agree with the mechanical implementation of day-to-day life.TL;DR:  I like less Lord of the Rings and more of a Batman-in-Metropolis kind of an approach - less spectacle and action, more intrigue and philosophical conflict.</blockquote>

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