Design Journal: Writing a fantasy world

So here's the deal. Fudge needs good fantasy support, and I think part of that is having a solid fantasy world to back it up. But writing a D&D-ish fantasy world that is interesting and captures attention is difficult.

Ideally, this world would draw people to Fudge. Which means it ought to be innovative, while at the same time familiar.

Dragonlance did that… it took a standard D&D world and innovated within that context by creating the dragon wars. They created an over-arching plot and actually created the world through a series of adventures.

Now there's an interesting point. Granted, it was a different era of gaming, but they didn't come out with a big world sourcebook first… they came out with an adventure. And also granted, they came out with a novel pretty darn quickly, and the novel had a lot to do with the success, I think.

But novels aside, they started with an assumption (typical D&D world), threw in a hook (the dragon war), and published a series of modules.

Perhaps that worked because they didn't have to define the basics of the world. The world was already defined through rulebooks and existing shared imagination. What the modules defined was a story.

Ya know, that's exactly what Paizo's doing with Pathfinder, too. Some people want to call Pathfinder unique, but it's just Dragonlance all over again with higher production values. A series of adventures that define a new world, based on the assumptions of core D&D.

So if that worked well for TSR, and it's working well now for Paizo, would that work for creating a new world for Fudge?

One of the problems is that we lack some of the assumed underpinnings that D&D had. But Dragonlance introduced new PC and NPC races as it went, just as Pathfinder introduces new world material as well.

Now, both of them are based on a preconceived storyline… something that a lot of gamers think is anathema. That approach may not work for this particular target audience. So I'm not sure a series of adventures focused around a critical story path would work, but what if we could come up with a series of adventures with a lot of flexibility built into them?

I'll have to think on this.