This was the first campaign where I’ve fully embraced a campaign setting.\u00c2\u00a0 Before this I usually bit off a section of a campaign setting and ignored the rest.\u00c2\u00a0 We’d stick to a city or town and have an adventure there, but ignore the rest of the world.\u00c2\u00a0 It makes the game seem small and severely limits the scope of what you can do, which is why I preferred it for my 8-10 session long adventures.<\/p>\n
I should add the caveat that when I say ‘campaign setting’ I mean something explicitly written as a campaign setting.\u00c2\u00a0 The game before this was set in George R.R. Martin’s Westeros.\u00c2\u00a0 I spent a lot of time rereading the books and finding resources for world info.\u00c2\u00a0 Going into this game, I expected my experience with Westeros to be similar to using FR as a setting.<\/p>\n
The biggest difference between the world from a book and a campaign setting, is that the book world has a built in timeline.\u00c2\u00a0 I was willing to diverge from the timeline where necessary, but I still put effort into keeping it intact as possible.\u00c2\u00a0 I tried to make sure that divergences happened due to player choice, as opposed to changing things because I feel like it.\u00c2\u00a0 But world events could still ripple out to the players.\u00c2\u00a0 I didn’t want to change or remove world events on a whim, just because their effects were undesirable.<\/p>\n
What’s more is that even though GRRM has written a huge and detailed world, it’s still a world that holds just one story.\u00c2\u00a0 Countless books have been written about Forgotten Realms.\u00c2\u00a0 While there isn’t any active plot, there’s a whole lot more history.\u00c2\u00a0 Martin writes some pretty sizely books, but I have friends who have entire bookcases dedicated to their FR material.<\/p>\n
I guess what I’m getting at is that running a game in a book world felt like I was retelling the books, but adapting to the players’ point of view.\u00c2\u00a0 Running a game in a campaign setting felt like we were exploring the setting.<\/p>\n
The biggest effect of the setting was Elminster.\u00c2\u00a0 After some misadventures in the Underdark, the players found themselves trying to get back to the good guys.\u00c2\u00a0 I picked a point on the map and set them there.\u00c2\u00a0 On the way home, they crossed a city called Shadowdale.\u00c2\u00a0 I didn’t know a damn thing about Shadowdale, so I read up on the place.\u00c2\u00a0 According to FR lore, that’s where Elminster lives.<\/p>\n
I usually frown on using setting characters in games.\u00c2\u00a0 I take source material as canon and find it offensive that I could imply that my D&D game is important enough to interact with canon.\u00c2\u00a0 But this was the game where I tried new things, so let’s have Elminster, why not.\u00c2\u00a0 Besides, why use a campaign setting if you’re going to throw out bits and pieces of it.<\/p>\n
Elminster’s plot worked.\u00c2\u00a0 It wasn’t the best thing I’ve ever done, but I wasn’t really planning on him being there.\u00c2\u00a0 The players called him back into the game later on and he played a pretty big role in the finale.\u00c2\u00a0 What I appreciated about the campaign setting was that it put Elminster into my game for me.<\/p>\n
Creatively I’ve always been more interested in how than in what.\u00c2\u00a0 If Shadowdale had been a clean slate, I’d have agonized for days to figure out what belonged there.\u00c2\u00a0 But when the setting hands me an Elminster and says to use him, I can work with that.\u00c2\u00a0 Figuring out how is fun.\u00c2\u00a0 In my opinion, a campaign setting exists to provide the whats.\u00c2\u00a0 How you piece these together is the job of the GM.\u00c2\u00a0 I enjoyed using the setting because it provided a whole lot more whats than I would have put into the game on my own.<\/p>\n
Using Forgotten Realms did have an unfortunate impact on the player narrative I mentioned a few posts ago.\u00c2\u00a0 The players were all well versed in medieval fantasy.\u00c2\u00a0 Asking them what goes wrong with teleporting into a castle is perfectly fine.\u00c2\u00a0 But putting them on the shadow plane and asking where the big bad boss guy’s inner sanctum is located drew a lot of blank stares.\u00c2\u00a0 It goes without saying that the player who handled player narrative best was the person who was more familiar with FR than everyone else at the table (myself included).\u00c2\u00a0 As long as I stuck to generic fantasy this kind of game play worked.\u00c2\u00a0 But setting specific narrative made some players feel like they were locked out from contributing.\u00c2\u00a0 I could have explained the planes and locales better, but then the players are still choosing game elements from a list I handed them.\u00c2\u00a0 The whole point of player agency is that they can import things into the game that I’d never have thought of.\u00c2\u00a0 Oh well.<\/p>\n
I think for player narrative to work I’d need a more familiar or accessible setting.\u00c2\u00a0 It would have worked better for Game of Thrones.\u00c2\u00a0 Or better still for a real world game.\u00c2\u00a0 Real world is a perfectly good campaign setting.\u00c2\u00a0 Hell, even a twisted real world works pretty well.\u00c2\u00a0 WoD and Dresdenverse are 100% backwards compatible with the world we live in.\u00c2\u00a0 They just add a layer of the supernatural on top of what we have.\u00c2\u00a0 I can outsource any number of plots to the players, and they’ll instantly come back with ideas, without reading any source material.<\/p>\n
Alright, I’m clearly on player narrative.\u00c2\u00a0 That means I’m out of campaign setting discussion.\u00c2\u00a0 Up next, travel.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This was the first campaign where I’ve fully embraced a campaign setting.\u00c2\u00a0 Before this I usually bit off a section of a campaign setting and ignored the rest.\u00c2\u00a0 We’d stick to a city or town and have an adventure there, but ignore the rest of the world.\u00c2\u00a0 It makes the game seem small and severely […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,8,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-275","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gm","category-observations","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/gm.sagotsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/gm.sagotsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/gm.sagotsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gm.sagotsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gm.sagotsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=275"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/gm.sagotsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":282,"href":"http:\/\/gm.sagotsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275\/revisions\/282"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/gm.sagotsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=275"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gm.sagotsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=275"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gm.sagotsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=275"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}