Sunday, March 30, 2008
Stop the Sanity!
At a certain point in my real-life world building I'll need to stop with history and allow fantasy to begin taking over. It's really interesting to me that Phoenicia had a vibrant trade in cedar and cloth, but it's pretty boring when put next to the fantasy of D&D. I'll have to begin meshing fantasy with reality. The key, I think, is not defining reality too sharply, to leave it fuzzy, using the "points of light" concept. Reality will be a framework that fantasy will be overlayed upon. I don't want to push out the fantasy with too much real-world stuff. I think my last act of real-world world building will be a private map for myself. My latest book on the Phoenicians includes more inland areas and their purpose. I'll keep those to myself for later exploration.
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2 comments:
For the most part I'm really liking your background, and wishing I could play in it. Since you bring it up though, the one thing that bugs me about your setting involves the whole fantasy vs. reality problem. It's the Halfling/Elf backstory. Maybe it's only because I know quite a bit about the real life problems that inspired it, but it really draws me out of the setting when I read your background documents.
Of course, what matters is what the people actually playing your game think, it's just something that's been bugging me about the setting, and your topic gave me an excuse to bring it up.
The halfling and eladrin (really high elves) conflict was originally at the heart of the setting.
Now that I'm just about done with the design work, it doesn't seem necessary and probably, like you're alluding to, it's a jarring distraction. If this were a published setting, we would probably have this kind of discussion and I would just remove it.
I still kind of like it as a little sub-plot, but it could be too much of a historical burden to drag into the light without a good reason.
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