Mark Galeotti wrote:
> On the whole, though, Greg was keen to say that Issaries
> would concentrate on *adventures* rather than background/
> location books, so that the world comes through the
> stories.
Whilst normally quiet willing to remain a lurker, this sentiment forces me to speak up.
The problem with this approach, which, while it may be fine for introducing the world to the players, is that it creates massive headaches for many gamemasters (where was that important piece of information I needed again?)
Secondly there is an innate assumption that players will want to play the side that the adventure is written for, which requires even more work for the gamemaster to extract the needed data which is presented in the wrong order. As the Reaching Moon Megagorp showed us in the RQ Rennaisance, it's fun to play a lunar.
And it's fine, only for as long as you are going to just run the published adventures. What about if you write and run your own adventures, as I presume most of us do. Without any backbone information to hang the adventure flesh on eventually the gamemaster is going to have to make decisions which removes their world from being canon, when many of us would prefer not to. I know I've run into problems with pick-up players because my world of Glorantha has some important non-canonical changes embedded into it before certain decisions were made.
Of course it is easier for the authors to write rule mechanics into adventures - that way they can tune them so they work, rather than having to greg them after the fact. <grin> And when you are a small press you have to be careful what you can print.
I think one of the reasons all the RQ2 Prax scenarios gained the praise they had was simply the fact that Cults of Prax existed to provide a framework to hang everything on, even if a lot of it was gregged after the fact.
This is not to say that Issaries hasn't been doing a wonderful job. It has, especially considering the financial difficulties it had (which forced the rush to production of the original Hero Wars rules with the resulting typesetting errors). But we really do need the cult books and equivalent.
Perhaps an approach similiar to Sanguine Productions Ironclaw series could be used, with each supplement consisting of a set area of the world, in three parts (1) History, Geography, and Culture; (2) any additional rules required to make that work; and, (3) a scenario that introduces the first two parts to players. All in comparitively small and cheap supplements that they can publish easily.
Ian
-- Ian Borchardt Who has choices need not choose, iborchar_at_... We must, who have none; Freelance Medical Physicist We can love, but, oh, what we loose, and Programmer/Analyst What is done is done.
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