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Message: <blockquote data-quote="dm4hire" data-source="post: 5268970" data-attributes="member: 14848">My reasoning for going with an independent campaign is that if you tie the product to an existing world, such as Conan, Elric, Black Company, and such, you’re placing the product into a niche right off the start because you’re limiting yourself to the people who know the world or might be interested in it as a game.  A generic fresh setting should appeal to a bigger market, though I guess if you would choose the right IP if you went with an existing world you might get a bigger target than a fresh setting.Art is definitely the key no matter what.  As mentioned if you go too far then many will consider it porn and if you don’t go far enough then most would look at it as you’re just billing it mature to gather sales.  Thematic art with the right touch would more than work I think.  A good example of existing art would be in the Conan RPG we’ve mentioned.  Most of the artwork hallmarks toward Frazetta and Boris in nature with nudity being mainly exposed breasts if even that.If we use history as an example, say the ancient Greeks during the Olympics, public nudity was allowed under given circumstances.  Males competed in the nude at the games while single women were allowed to attend, wearing togas with one breast revealed.  If we switch to fantasy art we could have gladiators fighting to the death nude (which in some places may have happened historically) while nubile females watch on.  The point of the matter is these are elements of maturity art wise that seldom get addressed in gaming, and usually glossed over in back story.  How many times have we heard about priestess of a goddess of fertility or sex, but seldom do you see in game the real portray of these people, i.e. wearing revealing clothing, spreading their message in a form of prostitution on the streets, and so forth.  I’m not saying we need to see the sex, but showing a priestess half dressed trying to lure a prospective “convert” into the temple would be appropriate art in the section covering that god or goddess.I will relent on the evil aspect in that perhaps it should be presented as amoral and not strictly evil.  The themes and topics should address the hard choices we sometimes have to make and the way people will often take the easy way out of them.  I mentioned Dragon Age earlier which is renowned now for its presentation of amoral and hard decisions, i.e. choosing political sides in an attempt to gain people for an army where one side may have killed hundreds in order to gain more land while the other may deal with slavery (this doesn’t reflect actual DA decisions only serving as an example of what it might be like).  The reasons for killing an opponent in game are an issue of morality as well.  To many times the morality isn’t addressed if you think about it as the party ventures through the world, often killing indiscriminately, as to why they are killing other than survival.  Why don’t they allow the elf to live or turn him over to authorities after they were attacked in the back alley?  More to the point, why don’t they resuscitate and then turn them over or allow them to live?  Those are questions of maturity that that tend to get left out in regular games where a mature themed game pushes them to the front and demands they be answered.  Not everything mature needs to be addressed in detail, but if confronted I think it needs to be explored so that true character development can be discovered.So I guess my general intention in asking my initial question would be “if evil or amorality were presented in a mature way as the overall theme of the setting/products would it sell, especially if presented in a more generic presentation so as to apply to more game systems?</blockquote>

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