Who kicked the dogs out?

Someone in a forum asked for fantasy novels set in a world with a style similar to the old videogame Morrowind (so far we’re mostly drawing blanks) and that got me thinking some more about that particular setting again. Back when I was 18 I thought it was a bit daring in how different it is from “proper fantasy” and it was ultimately the gameplay of the series that never got me really deeply invested in the game. But the setting and particularly it’s aesthetics stuck with me ever since and these days I hold it in very high esteem precisely because it’s so different.

While the stuff I had been working with before I nailed down the original concept for the Ancient Lands was pretty generic standard fantasy stuff and I am not ditching everything of that just because it’s generic, I very quickly got excited about the idea of also drawing inspirations from some very nonstandard works to create a somewhat unique style for my own world. Among Morrowind and Star Wars, there’s also the two classic and very quirky Dungeons & Dragons settings Dark Sun and Planescape, the continent Kalimdor from Warcraft III and Xen’drik from Eberron, and at least visually I am very taken with the John Carter movie. And thinking about what makes Morrowind so unique and interesting that could be found in unrelated fantasy novels also got me to start looking for what things these settings have in common that I might incorporate directly into my own setting.

And one very destinctive thing thing is that not only the environments look somewhat otherworldly, the wildlife is also completely different from what we have in Europe and North America. There are no dogs and wolves. Also no bears and no wild pigs. And people don’t keep horses, cows, and sheep. I already created a good number of animal-like creatures, mostly based on reptiles and insects, many of which can serve quite similar roles. So how about kicking out the dogs? And the wolves and the horses, and the sheep? Horses would be the biggest immediate change as far as players are concerned, but being all forests, mountains, and islands they didn’t really have much of a prominent presence in the setting to begin with. Usually “nonstandard fantasy” means not having elves and dwarves and giving people guns. (Yes, not only is there such a thing as “standard fantasy”, there’s also “standard nonstandard fantasy”.) But going the opposite direction and taking even more real world elements out of the setting and replacing them with more made up things might actually be a really interesting direction to explore. It worked for Dark Sun and Planescape, and those are probably the two best settings ever done for RPGs.

Fantasy Flight Games Star Wars RPG – What were they thinking?!

So last weekend at GenCon the third and final rulebook for Fantasy Flight Games new Star Wars RPG has been released. Because they made the descision to split the game into three and have separate rulebooks for smugglers, soldiers, and jedi and the game is using funky dice, I had not really been excited about it from the start.

thBut now that all three books are actually there and you can play a propper Star Wars game, my curiosity returned again. At least a bit. First inconvenience I encountered is that there is no digital version of any of these books. Which means you have to buy the much more expensive hardcover book. And how expensive? 65€! Each! That’s a total of 195€! I can get a PS3 with a stack of games for that money. Who can afford that? I know that you’re not “supposed” to play with all three books and just one. But pretty much every single Star Wars movie, novel, and comic I can think of always has mixed parties of heroes. Narrowly defined parties go against the spirit of the setting.

But let’s assume you have 200€ and nothing better to do with it than buying a new RPG. Are the books overpriced? Well, it seems almost reasonable given that they are 450 pages. Each! Who creates a 1350 page RPG? And this isn’t Mechwarrior or something like that. It’s freaking Star Wars. It’s a pulp setting for pulp adventures. How much rules can you possibly need for that? A tenth of that page count would have been completely sufficient. What were they thinking?

misc-jackie-chanLet’s compare that to the Star Wars Saga Edition game by Wizards of the Coast from the last decade. I believe it’s a revised edition of Star Wars d20 (on which Knights of the Old Republic seems to be based), and while d20 certainly is not a good choice for a Star Wars game (or for pretty much anything other than D&D), it’s so much more reasonable in scale. One book, 285 pages, $40 cover price.

This new game seems like possibly the most ridicoulous game I’ve ever heard of. Though I don’t actually know anything about the rules or the content. Because I don’t have 200€ to indulge my curiosity. I love Star Wars RPGs, but even if I am not a huge fan of the Saga Edition or would be unable to find a copy of the out of print game, I could just as well go with Spirit of the Century or Stars Without Number. Which are free.

Dead bodies everywhere

Feeling not particularly happy today, I looked through all the books, DVDs, and games I have for something cheerful. And realized that the only thing I have that would somehow fit that description is Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Pretty much every other piece of entertainment is about a world that consists mostly of huge piles of corpses and is about a protagonist tryint to prevent those people who still live from being all horribly killed by monsters, aliens, or super evil soldiers as well. Even the funny stuff I have generally has the world in shambles and most people dead, like Zombieland.

There are a few things I’ve enjoyed that are genuinly funny and happy, but those are nonsensical comedy that doesn’t really has anything to say about anything. Except perhaps about the value of friendship and love in a nauseating corny way.

And it isn’t just that I’ve only bought dark stuff over the past 10 years. All the good movies and games of recent year that I know about are ultimately about endemic suffering and everything either being shit or about to become shit if the hero can’t prevent it. Isn’t there anything intellectually engaging that isn’t about suffering?

Main regions of the Ancient Lands

Earlier this week I wrote a post about rethinking my approach for dealing with the both physical and cultural geography of the Ancient Lands. I’ve never been anywhere close to happy with the geography of the setting and I think I now figured out why. The traditional fantasy campaign setting “satelite view” map very much conflicts with the sword & sorcery and space opera approach to setting design I am using. So right now I think I am not actually going to do a true world map at all. Instead there will be just a very rough and sketchy outline for the major landmasses. All the actual content regarding settlements and landscapes is confined to a number of relatively small areas, which get covered in considerable detail. These will be comparable to Icewind Dale, Ferelden, the Eldeen Reaches, Skyrim, Tatooine, Tuchanka, or any other of hundreds of “countries” you encounter in fiction outside of roleplaying games. The ones that I cover may not necessarily be the most densely populated or most representative regions of the Ancient Lands, but I am picking them by how well they are suited as places for adventures. Big fertile lands of peaceful farming villages are not really places either players or GMs would care about.

A good reason to have accurate world maps for fantasy settings is for judging travel distances and to see what kind of places and areas you’ll be passing through on a long journey to another region. This can be quite important information for some campaigns, but in a pulp campaign like Sword & Sorcery or space opera it normally doesn’t matter at all. Some weeks or months have passed and then you’re standing right next to the place you wanted to go to. The journey itself doesn’t really play any role in these genres. It’s the parts with the villains and the old ruins that matter, the rest is glossed over. Doing a good world map poses a lot of challenges (even if it’s just a continent or part of one), but for a setting like the Ancient Lands where it is not needed, it really isn’t worth the effort. And I think not having an accurate map actually enhances some of the themes and the overall atmosphere of the setting.

Currently, all the material I have crated over the years seems to come together very neatly in 16 thematical and geographical regions. The layout is very simple, consisting of a single long coast that runs from north to south with the land in the west and the ocean in the east. Similar to the American East Coast all the way from Greenland to Florida, or the eastern coast of Asia. Continue reading “Main regions of the Ancient Lands”

Witcher RPG in 2016?

So apparently there’s a Witcher RPG in production to be released at some point next year. It’s being done by R.Talsorian Games and will be using the Fuzion system the company has been using for many other games. I am not familiar with it, but having taken a look at the basic mechanics and looked up popular oppinions about Cyberpunk v3, Artesia, and Bubblegum Crisis I am really not impressed. Consensus about games using the Fuzion system seem almost universally to be that they are greatly done books but all suffering from a pretty bad system. Well, most people to whom a Witcher RPG will appeal will already be very familiar with the setting so wonderful presentation won’t be much consolation.

Looks like another case of “Great License stuck with a bad system” this year, after Conan and John Carter. If I’ll decide to run a Witcher game, I’d simply use Fantasy Age. That thing seems to be almost tailor made for that setting and is so much simpler and lighter.

Reconsidering the role of place in the Ancient Lands

When it comes to working on the Ancient Lands, probably the most difficult thing about it has always been the subject of places. Cultures, Creatures, and Cosmology have always been my greatest strengths and I am totally in love with what I have created over the last four years. But places have never really worked out and after all this time I still have no real map for the whole setting.

I think a major part of that comes from the Ancient Lands being in many ways the synthesis of two different kinds of fiction: Fantasy RPG settings and space opera videogames. I always had in mind a reincarnation of Knights of the Old Republic and Mass Effect in the form of a bronze age Sword & Sorcery world. A concept I still fully believe in. Mass Effect is born directly out of Star Wars (so they could continue their game series unbound by a license) and Star Wars is a direct descendant of the John Carter novels with a bunch of old Samurai movies thrown in. And John Carter really is the granddaddy of both Space Opera and Sword & Sorcery. They are two divergent branches from the same root and at their very heart they tick the same and follow the same logic.

The cognitive dissonance I am struggling with is how these two main sources deal with maps. Fantasy roleplaying games are obsessed with maps of very high detail, while space opera doesn’t have any. And it doesn’t need to. Everyone travels by space ship and using hyperdrive. When distance doesn’t matter, relative position is meaningless as well. Now you are here and next you are there. That’s all there is. Somewhat paradoxically, even with a whole galaxy as the environment, the setting always only extends as far as the eye can see. These universes are so mind bogglingly huge that trying to write down everything is impossible, so nobody tries. Fantasy RPGs are different. They very often opperate by the unspoken logic that you can indeed catalogue every single major settlement and prominent landmark of an entire continent on a single page. Which is of course preposterous, but nobody really thinks about it or questions it. When creating a fantasy world, the instinct is very powerful to start with a map. But in this particula case it completely doesn’t work. The most important Space Opera element I want to capture is the sensation of vast emptiness of space. Having a satellite view map of the setting directly contradicts that and cancels it out. I think I now realize that a traditional RPG map can not work for the Ancient Lands.

When you look at Star Wars and Mass Effect, “worlds” really just consist of space ports and landing sites. And perhaps a short footmarch away from those. For a while that was an approach I tried to work with. But the bronze age setting focused on tribal society is meant to deal primarily with the villages in the wild, with the big cities being more like fancyful stories that most people never get to see, so I soon abandoned that. Of course, how would you make a map based world the size of a continent that consists only of small and mostly generic villages? That also is completely doomed to fail, but I guess I never really thought about it until now.

It seems that a completely different approach is required to tackle this. One source I will be going back to for this are the two great sandbox settings by Kevin Crawford, Red Tide and . I think that seems like a very viable approach to what I have in mind. Maybe I’ll also give Stars Without Number another more careful look. It is clear that I can not create an encyclopedia of all major and interesting settlements. Instead I think I should rathe concentrate of creating a good but overseeable number of towns and villages that serve as examples of how these usually look in the Ancient Lands. Not just as templates for making campaign specific locations, but also as completely functional sites to be used for adventures. But I think the main focus should really be on describing both cultures and environments in sufficient detail to give a good sense of their identities and dynamics. Within reason, of course. Something like a 120 page book for each culture would be nonsense. But say perhaps three or four pages for each of the 20 cultures? Add to that a section on different types of wilderness environments, a good number of full page settlements, and a bit about technologies and magic and you got a good size setting book that is both complete and not overwhelming. Some kind of map is of course still needed, but it can be a really crude one that only shows major land masses, main ports, and the largest mountain ranges. Like actual ancient and medieval maps did. Sadly I don’t remembe where, but a while ago I read a good post complaining about the wrong assumptions that are being evoked by most fantasy maps and how they put players and GM in the wrong frame of mind, assuming a world of extensive and complete geographic surveying. This might be a great opportunity to try out some different, more “oldschool” types of maps and seeing how they affect the experience.