|
Recycling Your Old Setting Ideas One thing that I think may not be evident to a lot of people is that you don't have to start from scratch every time that you make a new setting for a game. Like with music, iteration, sampling, and refinement of themes is a way to add developed concepts to your new setting. Oftentimes, revisiting or re-using scrapped material will help you save time and If you're worried that the groups you've presented similar settings to will care, I doubt they'll take offense, as long as the setting is still fun to play in. Like with many recurring elements in long-running video game series and within game companies, this can give comfortable or fun/annoying touchstones, like Trusty Patches, the Zenny Currency in Capcom games, or Chocobos. Stealing from yourself acts as a way to revisit and refine material, speed up your writing process, and will give you personal easter eggs in your work. My Setting's Development Process: An Exercise in Recycling I guess I'll go ahead and rant about the development of a setting for one of the (very, very) long-term projects of mine, which I've sometimes obliquely mentioned in other posts on TG. Like a lot of people, I grew tired of standard Eurofantasy and I wanted to also make a system of my own. A lot of articles on the internet back then (and now) talked about setting design as being more about drawing proper plate tectonics than actually, you know, making compelling fantasy settings to play in. The "guides" written out there really weren't helpful for approaching anything outside of an established "meta-setting" that had dungeons, dragons, sword-and-sorcery cities and castles, and loot tables. Setting #1 What were my starting inspirations way back then? The most primal version was just a reactionary inversion of what I saw as regular Eurofantasy tropes, with the addition of Dark Sun elements and, as I'm a 90s kid, JRPG elements. The world is pretty messed up, with the destruction of magic overthrowing the Elf Empire and sending them into decline. The earth is stalked by titanic Land Kings, monsters unleashed by the apocalypse. A giant structure that used to basically be a magical arcology is now a cracked-open blister of a ruin fought over by human kingdoms, which descends deep into the earth's mantle. Humans are magically inert but developed alchemy, Dwarfs are all dead and their souls condensed into solid phantoms, Goblins live in a chaotic under-empire, Trolls are basically humanoid elephants with solitary male trolls causing trouble, and the "gilled ones" are fish people that continually mutate as they age. (I'm going off of very sparse old Word documents here, so I apologize for the brevity.) So, the setting aspects of the first attempt were:
I promptly got distracted and worked on other ideas for games and also running D&D, but soon came back and completely revised the setting, as one would. Setting #2 The second draft removed a lot of the vestigial euro-fantasy elements like elfs and dwarfs, and it was reborn as more of a sword-and-sorcery setting. The focus was on humans interacting in a post-post-apocalyptic world they inherited. Hundreds of years ago the gods were destroyed by the Great Beasts, who ruled the world and covered it in their Land King spawn while the last humans huddled inside the Sanctuaries, which were very much not like bronze-age versions of the 2300 AD Domes in Crono Trigger. Seven heroes managed to reunite humanity, go to the afterlife to meet the last two gods (The Judge and The Pursuer), use their secrets to kill all but one Great Beast (who is now being chased through space by The Pursuer), and then established a new divine law, associated with the cosmic spheres that appeared when the heroes made their promises to The Judge. In the actual present of the setting, the game looks at one of the new countries made by one of these heroes and centered around one of these Sanctuaries 800 years later. The country’s ruled by a bunch of holy orders that are each devoted to a particular planet / metal / set of laws/ hero: The Iron Order (Mars) handles war laws, blood money, and violent crimes, the Tin Order (Jupiter) handles class and inheritence laws, etc. These translate into forms of magical edicts that a given Judge has. The Land Kings still stalk the earth, and a faraway plague is turning its dead victims into undead. Along with Edict magic, there’s also Hermetics (summoning, astronomy, and alchemy) and the Occult (curses and warlock stuff). A colony was established in the north, but it’s been taken over by a dictator and broken off from the theocracy. The Mercury Sphere has also just disappeared from the sky, which is bad news for 1/7 of the Sailor Squad Talmud Jedi. Setting aspects of the second attempt:
Setting #3: My Final Draft I soon got absolutely maddened by the demands that my detailed-skill-list based system put on writing the game, and started scrapping just about everything system related at this point, over and over. When I came back to working on the setting, I realized how much I actually didn't like it. The metaphysics weren't easily turned into the kind of rules I wanted to write, the concepts seemed to be all over the place without a central focus, the magic forms weren’t very well thought out, the history of the setting was high-concept and didn't have the kind of hooks or the implied kinds of stories that I wanted, and frankly I didn't like it. Writing the whole thing felt more like a chore than a creative exercise. Enter the Ancients, a concept that was part of some extremely abortive works at a fantasy novel– just a few things jotted down more than anything else. The Ancients were the last of a group of pre-humans that all died out in a mysterious supernatural cataclysm called the Change of The World that happened sometime before humanity was on the radar. They’re all squat, frail creatures with a head like a warthog, warty skin and a single large eye. Each of the surviving Ancients was meant to embody a form of immortality: for one, it’s through law and history as she became a sort of Nüwa - Yellow Emperor composite Culture Hero before her death. Another is kept alive by infernal machines he now barely understands in his senility, and the descendants of his old students revere him from outside of his massive Sanctuary. One is a quasi-Buddhist religious figure that’s dead, but his lacquered corpse still inspires visions and he can communicate through dreams. The last of the original four was a master of what was basically Dark Sun’s Lifeshaping, but he’s very reclusive after his human students tried to take over the world. Sticking the Ancients right into the center of my setting allowed for me to write a major driving backstory for the setting and start creating themes. Most of the Ancients interacted with humans as “culture heroes,” and an Ancient’s views of their dead society were superimposed on willing human students, like when parents use their own upbringing as instructions or warnings for their kids. At the same time, in the setting present all of the Ancients are out of commission or antagonistic (missing, senile, dead, hermit, evil wizard in tower), leaving humans as the major actors. Things started clicking into place after that, and the post-divine theocracy from the second draft morphed into a dysfunctional society created by an absentee Ancient. With the major “legend” in place for the setting, I decided on placing the focus of the setting on the large civilization made by that first Ancient I mentioned. The other Ancients seemed to have just inspired mystic orders rather than societies large enough to support a variety of character types. In addition to this, we at TG had been through another cycle of talking about John Wick’s eternal fascination with Doomed Highborn Manchildren and I figured that I could make the concept more enjoyable by including them while also widening the aperture of what were acceptable PCs. I also wanted to get back to what I really wanted to do with the game, and that was to make a system that supported low-fantasy adventure in a bronze / classical age setting. So, the Civilized Lands began to be modeled after ancient hierarchical warrior societies like the Mycenaean Greeks, Shang Dynasty China, and the Akkadians. An oppressed underclass made of conquered helot-ized tribal clans popped up, and so did the many, many barbarians in the wider world. Since I was already cribbing a lot from Ancient China, I decided to divide the world both culturally and geographically into a civilized center and four barbarian directions. I started to write out possible character archetypes people may want to play, contextualizing them in the setting. The radically different character types of Final Fantasy Legend II were an inspiration at first, but I eventually settled on only doing setting and mechanics for human PCs (for now). Setting started to interact back and forth with system, refining how I approached PC structure and reintroducing classes to my game mechanics. Elements of 4E D&D began to assert themselves more strongly then too. The rest of the writing started to come out of me more easily than the old versions, and I finally found a setting I could enjoy developing. I’m also taking care to leave enough of the setting details blank for players and GMs to add their own touches. Setting aspects of the final version:
Funnily enough, the only aspects that survived through the revisions were “fishmen” and “giant building as major landmark.” I’m not sure what that says about my setting preferences. So, that last segment all happened 4 years ago (oh god). What’s the current status? 100% of this stuff remains true in the setting today. I’m a major victim of procrastination when it comes to writing in my free time, so fleshing out areas and concepts in the world, not to mention the rules themselves, is a slow and random process. In addition to this, a modified version of my game’s system is being tested out in a dwarf-centric dungeon crawler, which also takes up writing time. But, the work still feels fresh to me, and I hope that when I finally try to small-print publish this game, others will find it fun too. Spiderfist Island fucked around with this message at 05:47 on Sep 13, 2016 |
#
¿
Sep 13, 2016 05:42
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 10, 2024 01:49 |
|