thread: 2005-07-05 : Setting and Source Material
On 2005-07-06, Judd wrote:
This reminds me of something interesting that happened at the weekly Burning Wheel game a few sessions ago.One player was just brainstorming on the kingdom of elves in the north where his PC hailed from and sent an e-mail, talking about an order of knights called the Order of the Grey Feather.
That week we played a one-shot set in an elven kingdom to the south. There were a few PC's and NPC's from that person's PC's northern kingdom. An assassin was contacted by a PC from the north, it was a member of the ORder of the Black Feather, the king's own killers, a myth, a scary story to tell elven noble children, elven ninja.
Another PC started in on the White Feathers, the diplomatic corps.
The player, after the game, expressed amazement that we took his idea and ran with it, making it into something new.
That, to me, is how players become invested in the setting, not by the longitude and lattitude dictated from the setting book but from the black spots on the map where they can throw in material.
Monte Cook's Diamond Throne setting is really interesting to me because while it has that definition and detail that d20 products are famous for the author purposefully left white, blank spots on the map for the players and GM's to come up with stuff all their own. There are areas left vague or not vague but flat-out blank. Neat.
A friend of mine was sick and I brought a bunch of gaming books to his bedside, asking him what he wanted me to run. He chose Midnight, a d20 setting that I had gotten as a gift and had no intention of running. But fuckit, he was bed-ridden for 3 months or more, I ran the damned thing.
He wanted to play a northman and was looking through that section of the book. We came across this coupla paragraphs about this NPC, Vildar Esben. Vildar had gone to the dark side before the dark side had even won the war. He was a bastard, given eternal life by the only god left, the god of EVIL.
The player liked Vildar immediately. I suggested he play one of Vildar's sons.
It clicked and we made up a whole world of story around Vildar and his many children, a really fucked up family.
I've written and said this before but I'll say it again, I want my setting material to inspire rather than inform.
The pictures giving inspiration can be just as valid. I've had good characters come out of someone looking at a pic and saying, "I want to play THAT guy."
