Hot answers tagged settings
74
Somewhere between 250 and 950 people, assuming that you don't need to run it for more than a couple of watches. Your best option is a crew of droids, as they don't need the downtime a normal crew does. This presumes that normal PC-centric options (social engineering, being Jedi, being Sith) are out of the picture and that the party actually wants to be able ...
42
I would do the following. Note this is also found on my blog here .
Using one page sketch a world or continent mapLabel important regionsWrite one page of background giving no more than a handful of sentences to each region.Pick an area roughly 200 miles by 150 milesGrab a 8.5 by 11 sheet of hex paper. The scale should be so that it represents a 200 by 150 ...
40
If you can get them to read novels in the setting, that's ideal. But it may take some time and I've never met a full group that would all read the same books, even when bribed with XP.
Here's more of a quick and dirty method. A few games ago I gave the players cheat sheets about the city they were in. I limited them to a page each because the more I give ...
39
My first encounter with a D&D sorcerer class was 3E. The 3E PHB says on p51:
Sorcerers create magic the way a poet creates poems, with inborn talent honed by practice. They have no books, no mentors, no theories -- just raw power that they direct at will.
In religious studies, "charisma" sometimes refers to the inner personal power in an ...
34
You've got a blank sheet of paper, and you want to play ASAP. Excellent. This is what I've done successfully:
Decide with your players what kind of setting it should be. You can skip this if you're playing in the assumed setting of your game. Otherwise, find out what elements your players want to explore. Should there be firearms? Political machinations? ...
21
Look for ways to introduce exposition into your flavor descriptions of scenes, and your mentions of characters and objects. Try not to restrict it to plot-relevant stuff for your game, but this can definitely become a way to put 'common-sense' information into your players' hands unobtrusively.
Consider:
"You are traveling down a road between Atowne and ...
20
"Show, don't tell" is always the most relevant advice. If the background is important at all, then it should surface in the real world via books, statues/ruins, cultures and common sayings, etc. You know, how we find stuff out about our world and real life. Instead of infodumping, have it come in from various directions - someone shooting the bull in a ...
20
Looking at the cleric as a bundle of resources for a moment:
Both wells and clerics generate water. A well accesses underground aquifers* and can generate larger and smaller volumes of water depending on local circumstances. Furthermore, most liquid intended for human consumption is vaguely alcoholic as a purifying measure.
A human will consume 3-4 liters ...
19
They give a very good impression of the setting, and they also give a pretty good background for understanding how the rules work.
The game was designed to very closely emulate the fiction of the books (Evil Hat and the author worked closely together for about a decade, and much of Evil Hat's work on developing and refining Fate over the years and multiple ...
17
Start with what you know you and your friends like.
You should establish a basic setting and campaign focus, depending on the themes you know your players will enjoy. Decide if its going to focus on combat, investigation, exploration, etc, and if the setting fits or inverts that style of play. For example, a campaign that takes place in Rome during the ...
17
Telephones began arriving at the start of the century. At first, they were strikingly modern, available to the rich and well-connected. For example, in Connecticut in 1901, a hotel advertised "a telephone in every room" as a luxury.
(That "telephone in every room" is a nice marker. A hotel in London was advertising something similar around 1920.)
For cars, ...
17
Well, there's always the option of setting it "today" and beginning the power divergence ten years ago.
Besides that, just posit there's a couple small and not that important developments as a conceptual sop. Between 2001 and today there's not a lot of big changes that are that interesting from Joe Cop's level. Our cell phones are spiffier, mainly. Take a ...
17
Medieval peasants and most tribal cultures...
Typically, children under age 1 were nursed by mothers who nursed them frequently whilst doing other work. Children aged 1-2 might still be nursing, or might already be transitioned to the next group...
Ages 2-4 were supervised by aunts and grandparents, and had as much play as they would ever see; the basic ...
17
Most everybody else is focusing on the cleric creating water; I'll focus on the military tactics then. Especially since I played not too long ago in a 3.5 campaign that heavily used -- in my opinion -- rather clever and realistic tactics that made use of spell casters.
Basically, it all boils down to one simple principle: Think of offensive mages as siege ...
16
Run a one shot during the "better days" you mention. Tell the players it's just to get them used to the system. Give them pre-made characters who actually do know a thing or two about their technology. Then it'll actually mean something to the PCs when the characters they make 200 years later are less skilled, less powerful, and wonder how their ancestors ...
16
A real lot depends on the campaign/setting/genre/system… and on the players -- indeed, as @valadil notes in a great comment on the Q. If your setting/campaign allows it, you might want to try an "oscillating" solution.
Introduce (carefully and cleverly) a parallel universe or some alternate plane to which your PCs can eventually travel and have a short ...
15
Some very simple things first...Understand the differences between 'deity' and 'religion'. If your character sheet has the listing, 'deity' on it, it is not doing you any favors. Cross it out and replace it with 'faith' or 'religion'. A religion is normally the man-made, socially organized, interpretation of the place of the gods or philosophy in that ...
15
Childhood is a modern invention. In medieval times, children were treated as little adults.
So, the idea of "play"? That's a modern invention, too, and especially a Western one. In medieval times, children were expected to work as soon as they could.
In some non-Western cultures today, the same applies. The child gets involved in cooking and caring for ...
15
Things I would emphasize in an Iron Age setting:
Lack of information. In medieval settings, while peasants might know rather little of anything beyond the next town over, scholars at least have a pretty good idea of "the big picture". Just one example: Maps of the continent you're on exist, and while usually being pretty bad as far as scale is concerned, ...
14
In Spelljammer and Planescape there's the "Mercane" (aka "Arcane" in pre-3e writeups) that are interstellar and interplanar magic merchants. They have writeups in the Manual of the Planes and the Epic Level Handbook and are in the d20 SRD.
14
The More respected ones:
Sengoku - available in a fusion system and Active Exploits (diceless) version. Named for it's setting: Sengoku period.
The Blossoms are Falling for use with The Burning Wheel RPG. Set in the Heian period
Legend of the Five Rings is in it's 4th edtion, but some 2nd and most 3rd edition books are still available readily. The ...
13
It is a D&D style fantasy setting where the adventure results from the conflict arising from the clash of culture, religion, and society.
The book itself is meant to do two things, first it is a collection of my house rules for Swords & Wizardry and all editions based on the original 1974 roleplaying game. second it is an overview of the Majestic ...
13
Professional Look
For the layout, learn and use a page layout program. Word is NOT a page layout program; it's a word processor with delusions of page layout capability. Word is excellent for doing the original files, tho'; generate the RTF files using the styles system in word or another styles-using wordprocessor (I use Pages; I used to use Appleworks and ...
13
I think it may be more a question of location rather than time. Up until the 1940s, neither cars nor telephones were common in rural southern areas of the United States (particularly Texas, Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana, Alabama, and the Southwest). My mother grew up in 1940's Louisiana and phones were not common in the area she lived, not even party ...
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The seamless integration of inspiration requires an inspiration's deconstruction into tropes, each trope being fitted into the narrative framework of your setting, given a surface gloss to match the elements that are not being innovated, and then the consideration of the combination of characterizations, motifs, narrative devices, plots, settings, and ...
13
In the past, I've developed histories, theologies, and factions with a combination of Microscope and Kingdom.
In the living history I've developed, you can see the records of a game of Microscope which developed the history of the world, and a game of Kingdom, which detailed the factions and history of one of the local towns they lived in. By setting givens ...
12
Dragon Magazine issue #352 detailed Bas-Lag for D&D 3.5.
The RPG publisher Adamant Entertainment has had the license for Tales of New Crobuzon since 2008. According to owner Gareth-Michael Skarka, the book is due for release in fall of 2011, and it will use a variant of Chaosium's Basic Roleplaying (BRP) system.
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Was going to avoid answering late at night, but this one begged.
A) I have a wiki for my campaign. And most pages contain a section on, 'What is common knowledge'. Yes, you end up rewarding your PCs who do their homeowrk, but by doing this, you will be amazed at the depth of knowledge some PCs get...as well as the amount of new data you will get answering ...
12
If I recall correctly in the 3rd Bounty Hunter Wars book (Hard Merchandise) Boba Fett single-handedly steals a Star Destroyer from the KDY yards. Granted it's debatable how canon the novel is but he does it nonetheless. So one, very briefly, would be my answer.
After re-reading the end of Hard Merchandise I can add this: it's completely unexplained how ...
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I like to work like this: I give the basic information to the players. One single page of 8.5 x 11 with all the info they certainly know. I tell them everything that is outstanding. How many moons, color of the sky, name of the main constellations if they are relevant. Any info about the basic religion, main genesis myth everything relevant for the first ...
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