Very true. If you deviate too far from physical reality your players won't think you inspired; they'll think you're a freaking idiot! The other thing to remember is that many RPGers tend to be more conservative than they know and continue to play the games they first imprinted on. You'd be surprised at the number of players I had who would try to play D&D without knowing it when I was first running Superhero 2040 or the people who would try to play Top Secret or Traveler without knowing it when I was trying to GM them through Call of Cthulhu. So deviating too sharply from Earth-normal until they've played enough to become interested in whatever gameworld you're walking them through is only asking for trouble.
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> > We go on to describe the characteristics of each of the ranges. Much as Stew says,
> > take real world inspiration, but bear in mind its mythic.
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> Sure. Absolutely. But, but, but, unless you want your players totally alienated, what you're describing is *why* the place is more or less Earth-normal with spectacular exceptions. If it isn't more or less Earth-normal, then they have to think about all those differences every time they try to do something normal, and they will rapidly get bored, confused, or pissed off..
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> Gravity works for different reasons, but it works the same way. If falling off a 20-foot cliff will do X amount of damage in reality, it'll do the same amount of damage in Glorantha, and it doesn't matter whether that's due to mass*acceleration or because the Earth sucks, it'll hurt the same amount: unless you have unusual magic that everyone can point at and go "wow, what a hero". So unless we've tried this, we go and look it up to be sure we're being reasonable, because while we might not know it, our readers/players may well do.
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> Feeding people will take the same amount of food and water as in the real world: important, in a siege. So we go and look that up, unless we have personal experience of that sort of logistics (and remembering that our readers/players may well be wargamers or historians who do know this stuff). And then we try to find as many magical ways as possible of improving the odds...
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> Likewise, mountains don't generally get beyond a certain steepness in the real world, so they don't in Glorantha either, with a few spectacular exceptions. So, we go and look up the numbers for what "normal steepness" is, and travel times on foot through various levels of nastiness, since our vague intuitive feel from seeing pictures of pretty mountains is just that: vague, and we may have people in the audience who do know it.
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