Design Journal: Adventure's not quite my thing

In case it wasn't clear, I'm developing this fantasy world and supporting rules for (hopefully) paying customers.

So I've really been thinking about this and trying to decide if "adventure" is the best approach for me to develop a fantasy world. The big problem Dragonlance had was that it had a very strong and deliberate story… if you took a "hard right" at module DL3 (the third in the series of twelve or so), the rest of the series of modules could get thrown right out the window. The world material is still useful to the GM, but the core adventure material might be totally useless.

Recently, Rob Donoghue (co-author of FATE and Spirit of the Century), talked about "What I Want From Setting" on his LiveJournal. And I found it really, really interesting. So interesting that I printed it off and saved it to study, which is something I very rarely do with blog posts.

To boil it down to the core, when a setting isn't merely backdrop but is supposed to be interesting in its own right, Rob wants a setting (or the portion of the setting in the supplement to hand) to have Focus, Faces, and Flashpoints.

• Focus - The material presented should be appropriate to the number of words. Don't waste words on things that don't matter to the story at hand. Don't fiddly around with "neat things" about the setting if they won't influence play.
• Faces - Good NPCs, not necessarily detailed, but iconic characters that represent the sides of the conflict. "Put a face on the important ideas of the game."
• Flashpoints - "Clear pointers to stuff that's begging to happen."

Let me pull out a quote that ought to show this clearly…

So, if there's a city state that keeps gladiator slaves to fight at the whim of it's mage princes, then the default narrative of that city is the inevitable rebellion of the gladiators and some awesome gladiator vs. mage fight scenes, with my players caught in the middle.

Now I can dig this, and more importantly, I can dig writing "adventure" material this way. Not with a pre-defined story or path to follow, but with flashpoints laid out and ready for the GM and players to tell their own story around, if they choose to. With everything the GM needs to tell that "default narrative" available.

Now the one place I run into trouble is trying to develop a setting piecemeal and meeting Rob's criteria that this piece of the setting's story cannot be dependent on some book coming out later.

An example of this is writing a sourcebook about the city-state of Foo, and stating that they are at war with the city-state of Bar… but Bar is to come in a later sourcebook. Obviously, the "default narrative" of Foo is wrapped up with that of Bar, and you cannot tell Foo's story (with the PCs caught in the middle) without the Bar sourcebook.

On another level, without writing a great big guide to the basics of the world, it's hard to say, "There are elves, but we're not going to really tell you about them until the Elf Book." Because players want to play elves now, and they're going to make up what they need… and then when the Elf Book comes out, it's going to conflict with what the players have already done. This used to be pretty common in the old days, with fantasy worlds being built by 16 page adventures or Traveller coming together piece by piece in the little black books. But more recently, SJ Games has done Traveller 140 pages at a time and still it has seemed like things were missing when the major PC alien races weren't fully detailed in the core book, and you "couldn't" have a trading campaign until Far Trader came out.

I think the latter is a trap… there is so much material in the GURPS Traveller line that will never see the light of day in a campaign. So much that just doesn't matter to telling a good story. (So much that I gave up on buying it all, or even reading what I had bought. It became clear that I was just never going to run a game that used even a significant fraction of all that information.)

So the trick I'm struggling with is just how much do the GM and players need to get started telling stories in the world? As far as geographically-based material, one city and the surrounding region at a fairly high level is enough. But what about the detail on the elves and dwarves and even the men?

It's interesting to look at old D&D and realize how much it relied on the players just figuring it out for themselves… either you just knew what an elf was, or you figured it out as you went. The thing is, now, when I want to develop a world in which the elves are a lot like D&D elves, but are different in certain ways, I have to be rather explicit about what they're like… I can't leave it up to the players to be mind readers.

Maybe I don't really need the elves and dwarves to be all that different, or different in a way that really matters to potential stories. Maybe I just need good location books with good Focus, Faces and Flashpoints to make telling good stories a breeze.