Setting, the Stage

I hate to do it, but I’m going to anyway.  Our last installment, by Jonathan, was about tabletop role-playing games and here I am going there again.  Oh well, I don’t feel that bad.  Things will get shaken up soon enough.  I’ve been itching to get back to the topic of tabletop rpg’s.  It’s been over a month since I’ve written on the subject and I’ve had these thoughts just sitting in my brain, festering.

What’s festering?  What topic is oozing icky thick puss out of my brain cavity?  I thought you’d never ask.

Setting

I’ve been thinking a lot about setting in rpg’s over the last few months.  Setting, not just in rpg’s, but in any fiction, has always been important to me.  Of course, that may just be because world-building is easier than telling the story, but I think setting can really enhance the story that you’re telling.  I don’t see setting as just an interchangeable skin that you can just lay on top of whatever story you happen to be telling.  I think setting can enhance and enable your story and make it truly sing.

A few months ago, Rob Donoghue wrote a little piece on worldbuilding.  I agreed with him then and I still agree that world-building is a whole lot easier than telling an engaging story, but the setting for your story can make it all the more engaging.  An example from the realm of video games would be Bioshock.  This game doesn’t have to be set in a decaying city at the bottom of the ocean.  And even without Rapture, the story is still engaging.  But the designers wove Rapture into the story.  The setting shaped the Big Daddies that roam the game.  The setting  also contributes mightily to the spooky atmosphere that permeates the entire game.  Also, the stunning visuals of Rapture tell another part of the story.  Seeing the crumbling buildings and leaky glass tubes in the distance tells us more about what happened here.  It also makes us want to know more about what happened here.

When I began playing tabletop rpg’s, the first setting that caught my attention was the World of Greyhawk.  I was young and fairly new to gaming, and was blown away by the maps, the history and the level of detail in the setting.  I still have a soft spot for the place, even though I realized as I got older that it wasn’t as well designed as I had originally thought.

I never really got into the Forgotten Realms.  Maybe it was a feeling of betrayal.  After all, it just had a more generic feel than what it replaced.  I did like the city of Waterdeep, though.  That was a setting that I could work with.  It wasn’t as big as a whole world, or even a continent, but it was a huge and very well detailed city.

Settings can be geographically small and still allow the GM and players plenty of freedom to move around.  While I loved the idea of Ravenloft, I never really cared for it as a setting.  It seemed too manufactured.  It had to many special circumstances that had to be followed to make it work.  It required way too much suspension of disbelief.  On the other hand, I did like Barovia and its counterpart, Mordentshire, very much.  I was glad to see Wizards of the Coast revisit Barovia for Expedition to Castle Ravenloft.  I think they did an excellent job expanding the setting, while staying true to the original.

There are a couple of other tabletop rpg settings I’ve been impressed with over the years.  Here are two of them:

Hudson City: The Urban Abyss by Steven S. Long

Hudson City is an incredibly extensive and amazingly well done setting for the Dark Champions rpg by Hero Games.  While it’s part of the Champions universe, it has a much darker and grittier feel because it’s for Dark Champions.  It works great as a stand-in if you’re looking for a Gotham City feel.  It has more detail than you could give a home-brewed without working on it for years.  Even then, I think it would be a challenge to come up with as richly detailed a setting as this one.  When I was using it, I was playing a D20 Modern Batman-style vigilante crimefighters game.  Unfortunately, I didn’t manage to communicate my expectations thoroughly to my group of players, as the characters quickly began to grow in different directions from the game and from each other, with some staying to the vigilante crimefighting theme, while others tried to go in a more high powered supers direction.  That game also exposed the flaws of the D20 system in a profound way.  I would love to use this setting again at some point, as I feel it is extremely versatile, with lots of space and atmosphere.

Pinebox, TX

The small town of Pinebox, TX is like a modern day Barovia.  It just has that feel to me.  I know, a lot of the material is written with a tongue-in-cheek wink and grin feeling to it, but it just works.  If you can find them, the maps and supplemental materials to this setting are extremely well done.  The setting has never gotten the full treatment from either its original publisher, 12 To Midnight, or its new home at Pinnacle Entertainment.  There are a number of adventures out there that can be combed for setting material, you just have to dig a little bit.  I’ve even run a few of them (in their old D20 Modern versions, with my usual heavy modifications) and they worked pretty well.  Another interesting addition to this setting is a collection of short fiction that was nominated for an ENnie Award (2010), Buried Tales of Pinebox, Texas.  This collection is great for giving the GM ideas to help flesh out the setting.  A huge bonus is that the Pinebox material that is still in-print can be picked up on the cheap from RPGNOW.

What are some of your favorite tabletop rpg settings?  Give ‘em to me!