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drrockso20 has gotten me thinking: what makes for a good presentation of a setting? This is definitely going to be a matter of personal preference, but I'm curious to see if we can pull any best practices together for pitching a game world, whether it's to our groups, to internet at large, or for publication. The peak of "let me tell you about my setting" has to be the Guide to Glorantha and its ilk: whole books that are pure setting, presented in almost academic detail. It's the dream of every gamer who's ever played a great homebrew and wanted to share it with the world, but the sheer volume of information is so intimidating that it seems better suited to being a reference volume than to selling new players on the setting. Bailywolf of the aforementioned Long Stairs, Mythos Supers, and dark psychosexual forest faerie tale commentaries on gender essentialism always hooks me with what are essentially a series of evocative 1200-1500 word essays that spiral deeper and deeper into the setting details, until you realize you've consumed 15,000 words on surreal Underdark spec-ops teams fighting P-zombies. I'm a sucker for these, but because they have no real structure and are at the end of the day just the musings of the author about whatever in the concept catches their fancy, they rely heavily on the reputation of the author. There's god knows how many "Setting Riff" threads posted weekly on RPGnet, for example, but unless they're started by someone I can trust to go somewhere good, they rarely make it to my reading list. On the other end of the spectrum, Robin Laws' Hillfolk has its ~5-6 page "series pitches" with a strict format: two-paragraph nutshell setting pitch, list of example characters, half-page to page-and-a-half setting overview, brief discussion of themes, another page of "tightening the screws" scenario hooks, a list of names, and occasionally some miscellaneous bits filed away at the end. This is professional stuff, well-organized and focused on getting you precisely what you need to jump into the game ASAP. They do that well, and for some of the pitches all you need is that page of setting details: I've consumed the necessary media to do a game centered around a modern emergency room or a fantasy thieves' guild without doing too much extra reading. But that strict format really chafes when you want to present something drawing on more obscure sources, or that's just plain weird. Reducing Glorantha, Ehdrigohr, or Tenra Bansho Zero to a series pitch format would suck them dry. That's especially problematic for me, because aside from being a fan of truly weird worlds, the setting I'm considering writing up for public consumption is exactly that sort of high-context thing that demands an easy "in" for new players, but loses what makes it special when stripped down. So, what hooks you into someone else's setting? And if you've written up something for the public that was well-received, link it. Shameless self-promotion. Do it.
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Aug 4, 2015 19:46
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Alien Rope Burn posted:I think the true spirit of AW could very well be to ban background writing at all. Just have players do a one-line high concept and a playbook, maybe an art piece, and gently caress all else, answer any backstory as you play and call it a day. This. You're doing a disservice to yourself if you have much more than a paragraph of concept to start with, and probably a short paragraph at that. Leaving your character room to be tied intimately into the setting and the lives of the other PCs leads to much more interesting - and playable - results than fixing their place in the world in advance.
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Sep 1, 2015 05:52
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