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Post by mabon5127 on May 25, 2011 18:38:48 GMT -5
Bret,
Any plans to expand the Stormspeake Peninsula campaign setting?
Morgan
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Post by mister frau blucher on May 26, 2011 8:25:50 GMT -5
Hey Morgan,
Great to hear from you again! Thanks for your continued support of DCG!
This is a topic I have contemplated a few times. Since its publication I have expanded it a bit (and changed a few things) through my own gaming.
I guess the thing I am uncertain of, is whether it would be a good thing to add more detail? As originally envisioned, the Campaign Guide was a light sandbox that people could take and make their own, expanding or contracting as they desired.
I would hate to spring a bunch of new, "official" stuff that people might feel invalidated their own campaigns. Now the original structure is not much more than skeletal, so a lot of stuff could be added without affecting the play of most, but say if someone has gotten a campaign going with the decayed empire of Malgor, and then I throw out a detailed version that contradicts what they have been playing. That might leave a sour taste in that friend's mouth.
I remember a bunch of friends who were playing in the Forgotten Realms from the moment it was launched, and when supplement after adventure after novel came out that depicted things differently from how it had evolved in their own gaming, they were not too happy.
That is of course overstating it, no chance we would release that amount of extra material. But the situation might be similar.
So, as you can tell, I am torn on whether to expand it or leave it to everyone to do with as they desire.
Do you have any feelings one way or the other, Morgan?
Beuller?
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Post by mabon5127 on May 26, 2011 14:58:10 GMT -5
I prefer sketchy and sandboxie.
I don't want to feel like i need an advanced degree in "the world" to run the thing.
I don't on the other hand mind going wide and covering lots of area and diversity.
I think you can do this without drilling down to each grain of sand.
Morgan
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Post by mister frau blucher on May 27, 2011 8:44:00 GMT -5
Good points! The brief descriptions in the campaign guide can definitely be expanded and more locations added in without rigidly defining the entire peninsula.
I guess we could drop the adventure (maybe combining it with another later, or making it available as a download for buyers) and expand the guide to the full length of the book.
Would you feel cheated, like you were paying for the same thing twice, if we did this? This would certainly not be a gimmick, but I do not want to give that impression to people at all.
Without the adventure, there may not be a need for counters and map, which would save a little bit, so we could sell it for less with the new and expanded material.
Bret
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Post by mabon5127 on May 28, 2011 13:07:32 GMT -5
I don't think you would feel cheated if you know what your buying.
I like the Idea of planting the adventures in a common world with some common details. It helps transition to a campaign from a solo adventure atmosphere.
For me, it would be a quality add as I have always played the DC adventures with a group not as a solo.
On the other hand I also understand that the campaign world may not be that important to most of your customer base and that is is a hobby for you guys with the adventure writing being the most important.
Morgan
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Post by mister frau blucher on May 31, 2011 12:52:24 GMT -5
I agree 100% on the campaign vs. solo adventure feel.
George and I talked about this over the weekend, brainstorming a few ideas. The thing about this hybrid campaign background/adventure is that it provides a lot of bang for the buck, and it is a pretty popular seller. Is it because it has the campaign background, or because it has that and an adventure? Feedback is a little sketchy on the exact reasons.
But as I said, we are discussing this concept a bit. One idea we had was to focus on an area of the peninsula in greater detail, for example the Dayraise Mountains or maybe the Seddarin River. Examine those areas in greater detail that the Campaign Guide goes into, adding more locations, and and adventure (or maybe two small ones) as well.
This way the RCG/FITS is still a complete product, but we define a few areas in greater detail and keep our hallmark, the adventure. The Stormspeake is large enough we could detail a few areas without over-examining and officializing it, as alluded to above.
Bret
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Post by klingor on Apr 24, 2012 14:53:20 GMT -5
Hi, Bret and Morgan, I liked your posts. When I bought FITS, I didn't realise that it came with the RCG. Having read the RCG, it made FITS much more interesting as I realised that there was much, much more to each encounter. FITS also put more flesh on the bones of the RCG eg visiting the Maul and actually buying potions from people named in the RCG eg Sylvia Snarls. It also provides a firm economic foundation for the costs of items/potions/whatever. Thus when a pricing anomaly is found (as in COK) due to particular local circumstances (gold is abundant because it's a mining area) a whole new avenue opens up as a group could set up a trade route between COK and Redpoint. The only limits are your time and your imagination, but it all comes down to having a solid framework on which to build. I felt this again in TDV, where Stonefast was mentioned in RCG, but featured in TDV as an actual location which could be visited. There are many other such locations in the DCG, each of which could be the subject of a city guide, and if someone is running a campaign that featured a location that matched it and wrote to you describing it, everybody wins. Cheers Colin
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Post by jlv61560 on Mar 29, 2014 12:54:07 GMT -5
I'm late to the party here, but I'm very much with Klingor on this one. I think the background actually MADE the FITS adventure, and certainly expanded my understanding of the "implications" behind many of the other adventures.
I think an expanded background book would be very helpful, and if you made the FITS adventure itself available as one of your free downloads, you could hardly be accused of re-selling the same thing. Plus, the FITS adventure would lead to more interest in the entire setting, thus hopefully increasing the sales of the background -- which, in turn, would lead to more interest in the other adventures as well as you could see how they fit into the whole continental scheme of things (your campaign map on the DCG's website gets this concept started, but only barely whets the appetite).
Like most of the replies on this thread, I prefer a more skeletonized, sand-boxy kind of outline with lots of room for DM individualization; but that doesn't mean you can't create an adventure (and some background) for the "Lost Hold of Dwarvenhame" or whatever without detailing every square meter and living being on Stormspeake. Heck, you could probably even do a "hex-crawl" type adventure a la Barbarian Prince without completely overwhelming the GM and forcing him or her to hold a Doctorate in Stormspeake in order to play the games. Though, admittedly, that would be a bit of a balancing act between providing enough detail to make the game playable without completely shutting down alternative visions....
I've commented elsewhere (in the Sewers of Redpoint thread to be precise) on just how well done I thought the RCG was, and I want to encourage you to expand it a bit without turning it into the kind of stuff pumped out by the ton for things like Forgotten Realms or City State. Those are nice, as far as they go, but I don't actually want to spend as much time studying the background in order to fight rules lawyers over petty details as it would take to become a certified medical doctor. A nice bit of background sketch, a few details to help me bring everyone together on the same sheet, and a good map are really all I need. If you wanted a more detailed MAP of the world, you could do a lot worse than simply following the "sandbox" concept as you go. In many ways, the original Wilderlands of High Fantasy by Judges Guild was the benchmark for this kind of thing since it focused on one-sentence possibilities in specific hexes (and not all of them) without all the detailed nonsense being produced for other "worlds" by TSR, et al. Your RCG actually is more of a Player's Guide than anything else, since it lets everyone get on the same sheet of music for the background by providing "common knowledge" for the players and GM without tying the GM's hands in any way. (Perhaps that's an idea you can use as well -- providing on the DCG's web page an "outline format" that would allow other GM's to create their own "Campaign Guides" for their own worlds that could be provided to the players for background without overwhelming everyone with tons of information. It'd be a huge contribution to the process of RPG playing, all by itself! Just an OT thought.)
Plus I have the ulterior motive of encouraging you people to start thinking about what a LAW version of ITL, etc, from The Fantasy Trip would look like and how things would be modified to work more elegantly and effectively within the LAW framework. I think that it is definitely time to start pushing the envelope with this brilliant system a bit more and moving towards a more "comprehensive" view of magic and so on, and clearly you guys are the right people to be doing this. I much prefer the way you've modified the system to some of the others out there (almost all of which I own). This is not to detract from the many bright people doing those things, but frankly their systems always seem too klunky to me -- too many exceptions to this or that, too many "stacking" characteristics, lacking in consistency, etc, etc. One of the things that made TFT the ultimate system for me and my friends was that it was internally consistent, did NOT have multiple exceptions to every rule, and was SIMPLE enough to play that everyone knew the system and didn't have to be flipping through ten different manuals, all of them the size of a small phone book in order to pin down a specific feature of their specific character. LAW has held to that premise and done so very well. I don't want to see that changed (nor, as an almost irrelevant aside, do I particularly want to have to buy 47 different shaped dice in order to play it).
So, if it matters, you have another fan that suggests and encourages you to "go for it" and start pushing that envelope a bit. The nice thing about it is that you can do it piecemeal if you like, adding a bit here and bit more there as you publish various adventures, and then combining it all into one big Campaign Guide with some additional magic rules and spells, and maybe some off-time events tables, or whatever else seems useful to developing the kinds of rules necessary for a more in-depth RPG.
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Post by valthanis on Mar 9, 2016 0:51:56 GMT -5
Hello,
I have been playing Melee/Wizard/TFT since I was in Junior High. I also played off and on through high school and collage. Real life started interfering with my gaming habit and I quit playing role play and board games for a while. A few years ago, I found Dark City Games because of David Miller’s site when I was playing Heroscape.
I download and played The Soccerer’s Manor and I loved it. I bought a handful of other adventures from Dark City Games. Then real life started interfering with my gaming habit, again. So, I did not play any of them other then Little Black Book. A couple of weeks ago I found them again.
I decided to run a campaign with my oldest daughter and some friends. I read the Redpoint Campaign Guide in Fire in the Street over the weekend.
I think Redpoint Campaign Guide is great. I want to say think you to Bret for writing it. I liked it all and I wish for more. I think it had the right amount of detail for Stormspeake Peninsula. I thought the detail on Redpoint was awesome.
I have two requests. First, detail write up of other location like Upland Nations and Steel Gap would be at the top of my list. Second, I would love to be able to buy a pdf of just the Campaign Guide to give to my players. Even just the first 10 pages would be great.
Nathan
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Post by jlv61560 on Mar 9, 2016 1:48:20 GMT -5
I still want to voice support for some kind of expanded "campaign guide" for the world the DCG adventures are set in.
I think you can give broad brush overviews ("dragon's eye," if you will) without hammering down too many details. By all means keep it sandboxy, but provide some more general info, and some more background history if you can. I think most of us neither want nor need the kinds of things that happened to Forgotten Realms, but we would all love to have something a bit more developed to read about in the DCG world.
Perhaps you could approach it more as a series of "tales" or "legends" that get told around the winter fire and may or may not be true. They'd give the "flavor" of the world without necessarily pinning the players or GMs out there down into some "Elminsterish" kind of history book.
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Post by araman on Mar 10, 2016 13:23:20 GMT -5
I like the idea of myths, legends, campfire tales, and word-of-mouth history that are loose enough to fit into almost any campaign without major modifications to the Space/Time Continuum.
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Post by mister frau blucher on Mar 11, 2016 13:38:18 GMT -5
Valthanis,
Welcome to the boards!
Thank you so much for the kind words - they are much appreciated.
Bret
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Post by mister frau blucher on Mar 11, 2016 13:55:36 GMT -5
All,
Glad to see this topic revived. As some of you know, I had surgery the first of the year, and I am close to being recovered. I spent a lot of downtime writing. I had intended to focus on DCG stuff, but I ended up concentrating on my fiction instead.
But re-reading this thread has my gaming muse sucker-punching me.
Originally - like 2006 or so - I had hoped that all the writers would be collaborative in their adventures, but that never happened. So I focused on my own little corner of the world, making the adventures interconnected. Even my latest, Ebon Rebirth, takes place on the Stormspeake, in the eastern wilderness, and in some ways is a Wilderlands of High Fantasy-style crawl but with much more specific plothooks/action.
Valthanis mentions Steel Gap - would you guys be interested in a gazeteer/adventure combo centered here? It would be more intensely focused (ie, not the entire Stormspeake, but just Steel Gap and the area for fifty or a hundred miles or so around it). Some detail on the city and surrounding area, including vague plot hooks, and then an adventure about 80-100 entries that takes place in Steel Gap and maybe part of the immediate area. It sounds like there is some support for this. And I have about 10 partially completed adventures on my computer, but obviously given their incomplete state my muse for them comes and goes. But this is a format I like, and I could definitely get into it.
Thanks for your thoughts, one and all!
Bret
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Post by mister frau blucher on Mar 11, 2016 13:59:22 GMT -5
Perhaps you could approach it more as a series of "tales" or "legends" that get told around the winter fire and may or may not be true. They'd give the "flavor" of the world without necessarily pinning the players or GMs out there down into some "Elminsterish" kind of history book. Like araman, I really like this idea. I almost wonder if a booklet containg 4 or so short adventures in this vein is a good idea? Maybe from a single area, or from different points on the Stormspeake? Bret
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Post by ednote on Mar 11, 2016 16:19:19 GMT -5
Bret, With regard to your last pair of posts, yes. Please feel free to move on both projects or sets of projects. If your muse needs "motivation", I feel it is safe to point out that it could find itself haunted by Prootsnipes and Waddlenotes. Regards, One half of the Haunting Team.
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