Trash setting

Well of course it's trash: It's the Apocalypse, smartass ;-)

But what's in a setting, anyway? What distinguishes your Yoon Suins from your Creations from your Greyhawks from your Dark Suns from your All Under Heavens?

I've gone on-record about how the simple length and game-mechanic-relevance of a setting's presentation distinguishes a playable setting from bad prose. But we're digging deeper than presentation here. What makes a setting one you want to play versus one you don't?

I've been giving this considerable thought as I create playtest areas for the game. which, by the way, tease time:

Yeah I haven't gotten those typed up but they're comin', folks <3!

But I've found the settings that excite me as a player and GM aren't just cool places with interesting stuff and cool creatures/societies: they're places where some kind of intrigue is going down.

Which makes sense: every great fictional setting that I've ever encountered is ultimately just a backdrop to a well-constructed, character-driven plot. Castle Amber is a fantastic setting, but it's empty without the war for the throne going on. Gotham is a brooding gothic megacity sure, but it's impact is in its relationship to Batman and his fantastic rogues gallery.

Namek is the perfect example of this. Because it kinda sucks as a setting, but some of the most memorable stuff in DBZ took place there.

LAAAAME

The genocide of the Namekians tugs at our heart strings; we're thrilled by the tense game of cat-and-mouse the characters play with godlike Frieza and his terrifying henchmen, we're fascinated by the growing power of Vegeta, interested in his relationship with the rest of the DBZ crew, excited and saddened by Nail's futile heroics.

Cool shit is transpiring like a motherfucker in THAT trash setting.

Megadungeons share this feature in common with beloved settings in that things are happening there. The distinct topography of different areas, coupled with the mixing effect of encounter charts, allows a fascinating and living co-mingling of the game-elements. sometimes you encounter that werewolf roaming the ghostly halls, sometimes he's out of his designated room and you get a chance to wait in ambush. But there's a deeper layer to this that distinguished great dungeons from good ones: relationships.

Because the great megadungeon describes the relationship the werewolf has with the witches coven in the haunted reliquary, that he's feuding with the gorgon in the sickly garden, and that he's the loyal pet of the chief vampire in the throneroom.

So the context of encountering the werewolf serves the function of informing players about the living setting. It turns it from monsters keyed to room and randomly remixed to a living, vital area with a history and characters and intrigue.

That's the spark that LWF's setting has been missing. That vital layer of relationships, interwoven plots, mutually incompatible plans, hostilities, rivalries, unrequited loves... The human element isn't there. It needs to be.

The Method

An excellent discovery, but how to implement it? As usual, in lieu of pioneering my own innovation, I'm just going to steal from somebody talented. In this case David McGrogan and his gem of a book, Yoon Suin: The Purple Land.

Buy it, you hacks!

Yoon-Suin has an elegant little system for establishing a setting that is the opposite of trash. It works generally like so:

1. You choose a broad chunk of the setting (a Domain, in LWF terms)
2. Flip to that area of the book and roll/choose one of the broader areas within that chunk (roughly equivalent to a Tract)
3. Roll for what the terrain is and contains (including some history and adventure hooks, possibly treasures)
4. Roll up what intrigues and problems the inhabitants are experiencing (This often hooks them into neighboring or otherwise connected places and peoples)

It's very fast, but it provides not only the cool places, creatures and peoples of the setting, but vitally, their relationships and intrigues with one another.

I've already stolen so much from Yoon Suin that I'm not shy about going back to the well: in this case, I'm going to dip out that all-important layer of Intrigues and plunk it wholesale into my Content creation rules.

In this way, you'll now generate:
1. Stable Content, in the form of terrain, inhabitants, and features
2. Dynamic Content, in the form of events that can transpire (similar to keying content to hexes in D&D)
3. A relationship web, including hooks into both of the content types above
4. Volatile Content, which is the equivalent of Encounter Charts and derived from all the above

Now to type up my notes for that Domain I've been working on up there. Stay tuned, True Believers!