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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 4369090" data-attributes="member: 4937">I really dislike 'trope worlds', where the entire world can be summed up by a single catch phrase.For example: 'Arakis: Desert Planet' or 'Hoth: Ice World'.  Those are perfectly fine for a literary visit, but I wouldn't want to live there.My ideal setting is diverse enough that regardless of the sort of campaign you wanted to run, you probably could find a place to put it.So, the setting would need to have broad stretches of cultures at different technological levels: stone age, bronze age, iron age, steel age (feudal), and reinnaisance.The setting would need to have varied climates of all sorts.The setting would need to have cultures that are in a state of decline, cultures at the height of thier power, and cultures which are advancing toward a new golden age.The setting would need to have large stretches where the culture and setting was in many ways conventional, familiar and easy for someone new to the setting to relate to given a few broad guidelines and a little background, and other broad stretches were the culture and setting were extremely alien and unique and could only be successfully RPed by someone emmersed in the minutia of the setting.And despite this, the setting would need to be internally coherent with internal explanations for why this or that feature existed and why cultures hadn't dispersed so successfully as to homogenize the whole.  The setting must be believable and make sense on its own terms.  The setting should not be easily upset by anything PC's are able to do or imagine doing.  It should have a history which makes sense based on its assumptions.  The setting should not be geared toward a single story or event.  For example, Tolkien's 'Middle Earth' is IMO a pretty lousy setting for an RPG, whereas Iain M. Bank's 'Culture' setting is a pretty good one.   There should be no single epic event immediately on the horizon.  There should be lots of things to do for many heroes, and in parallel if necessary.  The PC's should never fear being upstaged by the NPC's. The setting should be filled with secrets.  Many if not most of these secrets should be so cool that they should never be publishable.  That is, no source book about the setting would ever reveal the big campaign secrets of the setting.  Secrets should only be revealed in play.   That means that each referees take on the setting would be largely unique, based on how they thought it most interesting to answer the settings big secrets and which ones that they thought to introduce.   As a result, there would be no canonical setting.Not directly analogous to any real world period or place.  No nation that is obviously 'Egypt' or obviously 'England'.  No land mass that is obviously 'The New World' or 'Arabia'.  The whole setting shouldn't obviously be '13th Century Europe, only magical' or 'Earth, circa 1919, only magical'.  It may take inspiration from Earth history, but it should not recreate it in detail and when necessary through culture in a blender to avoid direct analagies.  For example, it might be ok to have a nation partly inspired by 11th Dynasty Egypt (pyramids and modes of dress), if in many ways it also equally resembled 16th century England as a maritime colonial merchantile power with shared power between the imperial ruler an elected legislature, and for example its great naval rival wasn't across a narrow channel of water but a 1/3rd of the world away and loosely resembled say the Mayan empire blended with China.The cosmology should lend itself to serious philosophical, theological, or ethical inquiry for those so inclined.  This doesn't mean necessarily one thing, as for example Tolkien's Middle Earth meets this criteria for me, but also so does Bujold's Chalion Universe (which would make a pretty good setting all round BTW).The PCs should never outgrow the world, but at the same time the power level of the setting should not be so extreme that you wonder how normal people survive.  This is probably the only thing I've said so far that implies a restriction on the rules employed.   Either the PC's cannot advance too quickly in power, or thier must be some effective hard cap on the power level that they can attain and remain in the core setting.</blockquote>

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