Solar Worlds
Simon JB:
Since I used to rule at starting up ambitious projects (usually without finishing them) but haven't for a time I thought I would start one up now, or at least announce my intentions.
My group has just finished a year long campaign set in a post-civil war Sweden, a rather realistic setting but with superpowers à la Aberrant or Mutants & Masterminds Paragons called Stormarnas Tid ("The Season of Storms", loosely), and our chronicles on the Swedish Rollspel.nu forum drew some questions on how this very über cool setting would be presented in a setting book. We explained there that the setting was very much built around the protagonist PCs, and that a book fixed setting would probably not have produced that kind of campaign.
But now I'm thinking that maybe it would be a nice idea to put together some setting material in a tool-box oriented way, sort of like how the Solar System booklet is more of a campaign-running toolbox than a fixed game. I'm thinking of presenting a number of conceptual campaign settings, with modular content like organisations, major players and the like, thematic discussions and suggestions of focal points and a suggested crunch landscape for each.
I have some original settings I'd be happy to write about, and I want to include some shameless rips of a few popular settings that already exist but where I think the games come with uninteresting or unexisting RPG rules engines, like Shadowrun and 40k. I also think I could persuade some "indie" designers to allow their settings to be included in some form or other, especially where the games are out of print and no new version seems likely.
So, I'd very much like to hear your thoughts on this. Specifically...
How canonically should such material be presented? How much of "this is how it is, this exists, this doesn't" and how much of "this might be like this, you might want to include this"? Currently I'm a bit more in favor of the later, but I'm aware that too much of that might leave a reader without a strong feeling for the coolness of a setting.How much material for each setting? Theoretically one could include as much as was presented about Near in Nixon's The Shadow of Yesterday. Would it be annoying with different amounts of material for different settings? Like maybe three well-presented settings and a few more sketchy ones?Would anyone be interested in contributing to such a material? Either with complete settings or just with collaborative input.If there would ever be a Solar Worlds book printed, should it contain a chapter with the general Solar System rules, or should it "require" the Arkenstone booket? I know the license allows the rules to be included, so the question is more about taste, really.Would you like to hear about the worlds I'm already now thinking of writing about? ,-)
- Simon
Eero Tuovinen:
That sounds like a fun idea. My takes on your angles:
Canonical setting material
The method I'm going to follow with TSoY is to not harp constantly about how something might or might not be true; instead, I'll just describe everything equally, ignoring potential conflicting accounts in the material, and then have a lengthy discussion in the book about how this sort of extended setting is best utilized and how it's up to the playing group to sieve through the material and pick the parts that are constructive towards their own campaign. Part of that discussion are the benefits of actively ignoring the way the whole setting hypothetically hangs together. In other words, I'll write locally as if everything is canonical, but refuse to get bound by prior choices overmuch; it's just fiction, nobody is getting hurt if you ignore it. The book will also include campaign frameworks that actively utilize these discrepancies for punchier gaming; if you're playing a campaign that deals with Ammeni colonization of the Qek jungles, it might make sense to rejig the geography of the setting for that particular campaign into something where Ammeni has an extended northern coastline and bustling port towns in Qek.
Of course, that's TSoY, which I plan to deal with in a pretty extensive manner. A smaller campaign setting would probably be better served by a less multi-faceted approach; I might suggest that your goal would be to offer one, solid campaign framework per setting, with some ancillary suggestions for independent development if the reader so fancies. Reflecting this back to the old TSoY as an example: you might want to make your settings something like 70% of the size of Near's treatment and include an explicit explanation of the sort of campaign the setting assumes. Or, you might want to make it 100% like Near, which essentially supports 3-4 different campaigns. Or you might go to 130% of the scope of Near, at which point you might wish to follow the plan I outline above for my new TSoY. Whichever you do, being explicit about the campaign framework(s) will make it easier to design purposefully.
How much material
If I were in your shoes, I'd deal with each setting to the extent that they reasonably require to be playable, which depends on how many options you want to provide. There are two different issues here, the scope of the setting and the extent of the treatment. How much writing work and space each setting requires depends on how much fluff, ideas and play advice you'll include.
Scope-wise something as large as TSoY is probably too much for an anthology, as a setting that already supports several completely different campaigns is an anthology in itself.
Contributions
I very well might do something for your anthology, provided that the financial deal works. And of course I'll help with honing the material and whatnot in an informal manner. We can discuss setting up layout, editing and other particulars if it seems that you get inspired to work on this.
Including the rules
My idea about how the Solar System might be useful to distribute in the future involves keeping it separate from setting products simply because it's already such a cheap and easily found rules-set. You can get it from the Internet and the booklet is cheap, so printing the same stuff in a new book is largely a waste of space for everybody. If you end up making the book I'll even make you an affordable deal on a combo pack, so you can sell the rules and the setting anthology together.
Of course, others might have different aesthetics that require different solutions. To each their own.
Hearing about your worlds
Of course I want to hear about your plans, I love new Solar System settings.
d.anderson:
Hello! Long time lurker, first time poster; my name is Dan Anderson. I am very enthusiastic about Solar System, and also would like to produce material for it. I have not found mention of a central repository and so I am wondering if I (and others with the same disposition) should use the part of RandomWiki set aside for The Shadow of Yesterday alternate settings.
-Dan
Eero Tuovinen:
Hi, Dan! What sort of material were you thinking? I like hearing ideas people have in this regard.
I'm not currently responsible for any sort of repository thang, and I'm a bit bad using such, too. Most of the stuff I've made public in English is in Forge threads, probably. However, if I were to start collating material into a central repository, I'd use Clinton's wiki at tsoy.crngames.com (probably asking his permission before embarging on anything major, of course). That makes sense to me. Randomwiki is good for this, though, and I don't have any particular plan regarding centralizing SS material deposition... I could even see just a directory of links on a forum somewhere, like here.
Of course, if there are any practical weaknesses to any of these solutions, anybody can take the lead on something more elaborate. Perhaps Simon's Solar Worlds initiative could benefit from starting with an explicit, indexed and lightly editorialized depository of Solar System materials, which could act as as a platform for developing material for a print book at a later date, to coin an example.
Simon JB:
I'll answer more here later, but yeah, I'm setting up a wiki to use just in this way. Just need to decide what wiki system to use and so on...
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