How to make a playable fantasy world - or a world in general

[Christoffer Lernö]

I recently had an insight in regards to making good worlds, and not just fantasy world. What I'm gonna talk about might be obvious to some of you, but considering a lot of commercial games has this wrong I can't be the only one who hasn't been thinking enough about this.

What I decided to make a world for my game I sat down, drew a map, thought of some neat countries, wrote up some basic history...

I had the basic premise of the game thought out of course. What kind of geography, what kind of tech-level, monsters, magic, all that stuff I had already decided on.

It was just the task of creating a world which incorporated all those neat ideas. And so I tried, and then I scrapped that idea, and then I tried again and found it still wasn't good enough, it still wasn't reflecting my premise.

A friend of mine kept asking what kind of adventures I would run and stuff like that, and I waved some general concepts at him. Despite reading up on the world he said he didn't know what adventures one would make.

I simply thought that was because I hadn't conveyed the basic premise of the game enough, and the world was not very detailed.

Later I made a short adventure to GM. It wasn't a typical adventure in my world, instead the players were children who had to flee when an evil army attacked their village.

The fact that I had to set up a major plot involving wars between countries (affecting the world I had constructed so far) didn't strike me as odd at the time.

Only a few days ago I had an insight though. Call me slow-witted but at least I figured it out.

I had made a world which wasn't really for adventuring. Sure, I had wilderness with lost temples and stuff, but those were hard to find. To set up any adventure the GM would have to create a complex plot to motivate the anyone employing them for such a mission (if the GM wanted to stick with the created world).

In such a world, why would there be adventurers at all? It didn't make sense.

I realized that, and also figured out the way out. To let the kingdoms of the world to be locked in a war that already lasted a hundred years (following a brief period of time when the "whole world" was united under a single ruler.
That would give me a lot of abandoned towns, little infrastructure and so on. Monsters could prowl the lands because armies were busy waging wars rather than protecting people.
It would be a world where people who stood up for what they believed in could be heroes. Adventures suddenly became obvious. I could think up standard adventures each which could have a hundred variations.

For example the basic: "You come to a town oppressed by x, the villagers plead with you to destroy x for a small monetary compensation (but there is a promise of maybe finding x's treasure as well)".

You could run that scenario in any game of course, but how many times can you do it until it becomes unreasonable.

So anyway, now I'm thinking of just produce a setting, maybe detail a small small kingdom where the adventurers can start their careers.
More kingdoms, villages and places can easily be added by the GM without risking that they be overruled by later world supplements because the world is so big and the "known areas" are so few. It would be a world where the GM has the chance to build his own campaign and come up with a new kingdom just because it would be convenient for his/her next adventure.

That, however would be in sharp contrast to many games out there which produces more and more detail, practically forcing the GM to only play within the pieces of the world described by the appropriate supplements or risk running into all too many contradictions.

I think even a "Map of the World" is a really a thing one might want to avoid.

If I make a game which is has a lot of background on races, gods, magic, stuff like that, but only a brief sketch of a kingdom, would that work? The GM should be able to pattern his towns and villages from those already described fairly easily I hope.
And then further supplements would only be adventures, but the adventures would provide a lot of setting (the feeling should be: "oh this adventure is set in the town of xxx, if I don't like the adventure I can always use the town for my own adventures because it's fairly detailed. It can also be moved around a little so it fits with the geography my players already have discovered")

Do you think this works?

Cause I've been struck by how difficult it can be to figure out adventures in Shadowrun (to take an easy example) no matter how many sourcebooks you have. You got more detail, but all that detail does is really restricting you.

This is not really limited to world building. If you think about the same thing in a "political intrigue"-setting, there are again two options: Describing all important political figures, leaving the details (and the unimportant players) to be worked out by the GM, or only give a pretty solid look at a part of the the scene (including less important NPC) and provide a lot of room for the GM to work out his/her own important NPCs without having to worry how such additions break the complex weave of intrigue the sourcebook (or whatever) describes.

Or to put it a little differently: Does the GM need to rip up the world to put in his/her own adventures, or is the GM encouraged to add to the world?

[Bankuei]

I think your major issue in setting up the premise of your game is setting conflict.  You can come up with a world full of detail, but there isn't a reason really to go do anything.  Conflict is what draws people in, makes them care, makes them want to play.  Whitewolf has become a marketing master at doing this with Clans, Tribes, Traditions, etc.  

Do you always need a cliquish political squabble to create conflict? No, look at Star Wars, there's two sides, and one ain't good.  Sorcerer focuses the conflict into an internal one "How far will you go?"  Conflict doesn't always have to have a choice, just look at how far the setting of Warhammer 40 K has taken it.  You just need to have 2 or more forces, ideals, concepts, groups, or somethings in conflict, and the players have to take a side.

So you have political conflict in your game world, why should we care for one side or another?  You need to seed the setting with conflict, regardless of the size of the setting.  Over the Edge is focused on a tiny banana republic island country, and really just about one city.  In movies, Dark City is a tiny city in space, and the Neverending story is about the destruction of an entire dimension.  In conflict, truly, size doesn't matter, its what you do with it.

Chris

[Mike Holmes]

What you refer to and what Chris elucidates is exactlly what we call premise around here. Not, what are the characters? But, what do the characters do? More games actually have it than don't, actually.

In MageBlade, you've been looking at "What's it like to be a Mage?". Well the reason people have been telling you to focus is that is too much like the first question (who are you) and not enough like the second (what do you do). (We could call this the Sorensen dichotomy)

This is yet another reason why I said that your setting was generic. Your solution was to have a war torn fantasy land so that there can be monsters about, and political conflict. Have you ever looked at EarthDawn? Lesse, it's a game world where everyone has magic, and the peoples have just emerged from hiding from demonic terrors which ravaged the land for a long time. So there are lots of new burgeoning political conflicts about the power vacuums, and lots of ruins to explore, and people to help be rid of the demons that still haunt the land in places.

Sound familiar?

Orkworld is about the conflict of men and orks, taken from the Orkish perspective. Fading Suns is about political conflict in the shadow of cosmological failure. The first edition of Traveler had the problem you described, so they made a second edition that included a titanic political rebellion. And then other conflicts in later editions. Glorantha (Runequest, Hero Wars) is a fantasy world defined by conflicting politics and parallel myth. Talislanta is a fantastic world defined by the clash of a zillion cultures and races. Pendragon is about complications of the lives of Arthurian Knights brought about by their own internal virtues. I could go on all day.

Even in many games without an obvious conflict for the players there is still a good layout for what they are supposed to do. InSpectres is layed out so carefully, that you'd have to be playing another game entirely to not know what to do. Same with Whispering Vault, in a more serious vein. These games provide the "what to do" through game structure. Even primitive Call of Cthulhu makes it pretty obvious what the players will be doing by the sample adventures and text (if not always giving them a good reason why the characters are involved).

Other than structure and conflict, there are probably other methods as well of defining what the characters will be doing in a particular game. Even D&D through it's reward mechanics makes sure that we understand that the premise of the game is all about killing and power climbing.

So, you are right, essentially. You've hit on one of the main tools that we use to design games around here, and one that is used in most games, IMO.

Mike

[J B Bell]

Congrats, Pale, on stumbling across several techniques that are generally considered "advanced" in the world of rpgs.

Making a sketch of a map without much detail, and just working out the arena the PCs start in, is exactly how it's done in Sorcerer & Sword.  I personally am taking that a step further in an online game that's in the pre-run stages right now, where the players are also detailing the world right along with me.  This way, I know they'll find at least some of the cultures, kingdoms, species, and so forth interesting, since they designed them.  (They're experienced players, so it's easier, though I don't know why it wouldn't work for any players that happen to also enjoy world-building.)

I wouldn't get discouraged too much that your setting resembles others, at least not if it's meant mainly for you to play in, and not for publication.  Even so, as Mike has pointed out, a lot of published settings are quite similar, for the exact reason you mentioned--people need something to do.  Not only do they need to be able to act, they should be compelled to act--not railroaded into doing some particular thing, but the situation should be one that doesn't really allow the characters to just sit around.

I've been reading Lajos Egri's The Art of Dramatic Writing lately.  While it's a bit old-fashioned, I find a lot of its advice worthwhile.  He focuses on the other side, characters, and claims that they are the primary force--without characters who are up to handling and driving the conflicts that make a story, nothing can happen.  I think this goes for designing factions in a fantasy game too--they should have driving goals, things they are willing to struggle for that are more important to them than anything else.  So, the Drajkar Empire isn't motivated just by typical greed--they must crush the Varg tribal lands because their Gods have charged them with a holy mission to spread benevolent civilization and give peace to the world at last.  And the Vargs aren't merely resisting--they're carrying on their fight to regain their ancient territories where their ancestors are buried.  Etc.

So, you do end up with a very common situation:  everything is about to change.  Every faction is deeply invested in their goals, and none of these goals is compatible (at least not fully) with the other factions' goals.  They will not allow the PCs, once the PCs have any power anyway, to remain neutral.  This is meaty stuff, and that is why it's so common, not just in RPGs but literature generally.

All that said, "the world is about to change forever, countries are at war, and the Gods walk the Earth again!--what will you do" is getting a little tired, maybe.  There are many, many other kinds of conflict, and I don't just mean the genteel court conspiracies that are the other fantasy RPG stereotype.  Check out fantasy literature from before AD&D made it all so factory standard[*], and check out those few books that have avoided the taint.  I really enjoyed Tanith Lee's Night's Master (from Sorcerer & Sword's bibliography, thanks Ron!).  It has some vague countries, but the main conflicts are personal ones involving demons and the king of demons himself.  Larry Niven wrote a book called The Magic Goes Away where, well, the magic is, ah, going away.  It's running out and the world is scrabbling like mad trying to figure out how to hoard it, cope with its lack, try to get it to come back, etc.  Gene Wolfe's Torturer series is simply amazing for fantasy of gigantically epic scope with very strange cultures and a sense of history that is truly vast.

I hope this all is somewhat helpful to you and that you have a good game, however you decide you want to design the setting.

--JB

[*] That's not really fair, actually.  I should say, "AD&D and major publishers' 'thinking' around genre."

[Lance D. Allen]

Pale Fire brings up a very good point with this thread. I have been basing my world building efforts off of various patterns.. If you've ever read the Rivan Codex, David Eddings details the steps and processes he went through to create the world of the Belgariad and Malloreon. The world is believable and consistent.. You can imagine what a Cherek warrior or a Drasnian Sp- err, Merchant would be like, or a Mallorean Legionaire, or even a Nyissan trader. So I was using his guidelines in part... Which isn't necessarily a bad thing. Admittedly the plot of his stories are formulaic, but he doesn't deny this, and plainly states the formula he used, and how he adapted it.
 Another influence for my world is Lyran Tal, the setting where I roleplay on AOL. The setting is very rich, but it wasn't always that way. Once upon a time it was a much more skeletal setting, with only concepts waiting to be developed.. Then the players and writers came, and Lyran Tal has 4 years of reality built up.
 Yet another influence, (if you can call it that) is a template someone had for describing a land in detail. Some might say ridiculous detail, but it was what I was using to describe each and every of the 11 regions of Tuathinsul.
 This thread and the comments made thus far have made me realize a few things.. There is potential for conflict, but at present, the conflict is mostly small-time. I need to make sure that conflicts of all shapes and sizes are richly available in the setting, without making the setting just a powderkeg. In the still-developmental stages that I'm in, I am in a keen position to do just that. If I keep what I have, and add a bit more potential without changing everything, I hopefully will achieve the desired effect.
 Another realization I had is that sometimes, too much detail is a bad thing. While some might like to know that exactly three days north of the Capitol, they'll be within the lands of Baron Whosthatguy, many will prefer a much more flexible setting. The template I am using will be pared down to reflect this.

 Finally... I used elves, dwarves and orcs (and a race which I later found out was similar to Draconians, called Drakken) because I *like* the fantasy races, and so do many others. Could the setting be ported to D&D? Probably, though conversion of the Magic Schools and the spells associated with them would take considerable time. The point is though is that the system reflects exactly the magic rich environment present in Tuathinsul, with the elemental connections, the different types of Magi (one of the rulers is a Null) etc.
 If someone wants to use the typical fantasy races, *I* say that's perfectly fine. Just make sure the setting fits the system well enough to make it worthwhile. Though, as a caveat, one shouldn't use the typical races because you just want other races, or because "everyone else does".

[Laurel]

In order to be successful beyond personal use, Mage Blade and any other new fantasy system is going to have to break the envelope and offer something that d20 can't.  I don't mean just a new way to serve eggs aka a different way to cast spells or manipulate points on a character sheet.  Its going to need to be unique at the core, not just the surface and the best way to start that is to offer a novel Premise.  But even that isn't going to be enough, because if you look at the list Ron offered a couple posts up, even really well crafted fantasy games with novel and inspiring Premises have had a tough time competing in the market.  

I almost think that the best way to create a stellar, well-received fantasy RPG is hook everyone on the world not just by doing a kickass job world-building, but by publishing novels that acquire their own following, and then offer that same audience the RPG.  Talk about massive work for minimal reward though- and its as hard or harder to get fantasy novels published as RPGs, particularly novels that are going to acquire the critical mass to support an RPG.  Wheel of Time d20 is going to be supported (well or poorly) by Wheel of Time novel fans.  If it was released just as a new fantasy world without a prior fanbase, I don't think it would have much hope of catching on.  Not because its not a highly developed, well-thought out, well assembled fantasy world, but because people who love high fantasy RPGing are pretty comfortable either playing with worlds they know or worlds they've self-created or are in the process of creating.   What can you sell the buyers who already have everything they want?

[Jake Norwood]

When creating a Fantasy RPG that's meant for distribution to other folks you need to give them something they don't have. Right now everyone has high-magic worlds, for example. One of the reasons d20 is doing so well is that you can play a non-magic god if you want. More than that, though, the world isn't enough. L5R and 7th sea did well largely because they were different. I bought L5R because I wanted to play a samurai, and none of the systems I had at the time catered to that as far as system and mechanics went. Sure, I could do a GURPS samurai thing, but it would lack the system-based atomosphere. It's like Deadlands...best damn system-supported atomosphere I ever saw. You felt like you were in the old west, with poker cards and chips and those dang cool character sheets.

But then there were the problems. L5R wasn't Akira Kurosawa, it was John Wick, and there were mages and a land-based (not island-based) empire, and the shadowlands, and all kinds of really cool stuff that wasn't what made me buy the game. All the clans drove me nuts. I just wanted to play a normal frikkin' samurai in normal frikkin' Japan. When I GMed I played the magic down as much as I could, but there's always that one guy that "wants to play a mage." Deadlands was the same thing. It was the wild west meets X-files meets the twilight zone, and as cool as it was, I struggled to re-inact the Good the Bad and The Ugly.

So when I put together Weyrth and The Riddle of Steel I thought hard about why I even played FRPGs to begin with, and what would make mine different. So I built a pretty normal, believable world and worked on having the best-researched, fastest-moving, highest-detail combat and magic out there. I wanted to play Mad Martigan and Merlin...not Caramon and Raistlin! If you create the game to serve what you, as a player, love to play, then that passion will be evident in your game, your world, and your system/mechanics.

Worlds are a dime-a-dozen. I'll admit it, and as much as I love my game world, I know that most GMs love theirs. I thought the comments on Shadowrun's seattle and over-detailing of game worlds were excellent (I, too think the best way to start a campain is little, and draw the map as the characters move through it...like a dungeon crawl in the days of graph-paper). Unless your world is really something new (which is very hard to accomplish nowadays) then no one will notice. And if they do notice, then a detailed "special" world will only appeal to those that "always wanted to mix the old west with x-files..." an (unfortunately?) limited audience. Otherwise, without a system or other innovative idea that allows players to re-enact their favorite book/movie/comic/bedtime story your product won't stick out, and all its quality will get left behind.

Wow...I just ranted there, didn't I?

Jake Norwood
Driftwood Publishing
www.theriddleofsteel.com

[Ron Edwards]

But it was a great rant, Jake, and I agree with every word. I highly recommend putting it in big letters on the Riddle of Steel website - not kidding

Recommendation #1: Sorcerer & Sword, my first supplement for Sorcerer - the book that brought "build your world through play" explicitly back into fantasy role-playing. (Yes, this is ego, but Sword is the one RPG thing I've written that has my guts on the page.)

Recommendation #2: Dust Devils, by Matt Snyder, which I'm playing right now. It's linked through the Resource Library, or if not, via a link or two at Indie Design. Costs less than Sword (ie it's free).

Regarding your final comments, I'll take it a step further - the goal, for me anyway, is not a matter of re-enacting so much as providing tools for creation that might - even - surpass the inspirational material.

Best,
Ron

[Christoffer Lernö]

This is yet another reason why I said that your setting was generic. Your solution was to have a war torn fantasy land so that there can be monsters about, and political conflict. Have you ever looked at EarthDawn? Lesse, it's a game world where everyone has magic, and the peoples have just emerged from hiding from demonic terrors which ravaged the land for a long time. So there are lots of new burgeoning political conflicts about the power vacuums, and lots of ruins to explore, and people to help be rid of the demons that still haunt the land in places.

Yeah, I played (not GM) ED and since you brought it up... I think it's a bad example of a fantasy setting. Why? Because you have this really complex world and the players need not only know the basic premise of the game (what you detailed above) but really get into the depth of the world to avoid doing certifiably stupid things.

Our GM had us start (as most of us weren't very familiar with the game) as nobodies living in a small village in the outskirts of anything.

Sounds like a good idea, right? I had had the ED rulebook for a few years and I knew most of that material.

He did all he could, writing short stories to introduce us to stuff in the world and getting other stuff for us to read to get into the feeling of ED.

Depite all that, and despite him being a usually excellent GM (and he's GMed ED before many times, just not with us), we didn't catch on to anything about the world.

Ok, we vaguely grasped that 1) there were some guys called Therans and 2) they were the bad guys.

10+ adventures and that was it. I've read the ED rulebook and still he claimed I was the one who understood the world the least ;)

So is ED a good world? I'd say NO! to that, just the same way I'll say that Shadowrun sucks. Is it because they have a bad premise? No the premise is excellent, it's how it's set up which is the problem. How you need to know unimportant details to be a good PLAYER. That you have to have the supplements to start understanding the world.

That is what I think sucks so badly I wanna cry.

In my case, I want to be able to create a world which doesn't only have a good PREMISE, but where the execution of that premise is done well too.

If we go back to Shadowrun, which I'm more familiar with, you can set up a good campaign in four ways that I can think of:

1. Have players who love SR and have read every sourcebook page to page so they can help you out.

2. Have a GM with amazing stamina who can figure out adventures and find the energy to keep going even though the players keep doing the wrong things.

3. Only play adventures others made.

4. Only play with the seattle map, forget there are sourcebooks or anything else. Rip out the stuff in the system you don't a) understand and/or b) feel like learning and/or c) you can't explain to the players easily. Or in other ways, make up your own Shadowrun game.

Now I have a problem with stuff like the above, so I want to insist there is more to a game than making a good premise. It's about the execution which can be poor in the same way the rules can be poorly done.

This is also a reason why people will by the LotR RPG and why people bought and played ICE's version of it... because people knew at least the world was interesting.

[Christoffer Lernö]

Check out fantasy literature from before AD&D made it all so factory standard[*], and check out those few books that have avoided the taint.

Actually, I have a hard time stomaching modern fantasy. It seems like they're all starting out from an AD&D-world and then move from there. Those novels are too hard for me to digest. Not everyone feels like me though, a friend thought it was "a good thing because then people could be imaginative in other ways and not needing to worry about the basics of the settings" or something like that. I don't agree. Just for the record ;)

[contracycle]

Our GM had us start (as most of us weren't very familiar with the game) as nobodies living in a small village in the outskirts of anything.

Sounds like a good idea, right? I had had the ED rulebook for a few years and I knew most of that material.

He did all he could, writing short stories to introduce us to stuff in the world and getting other stuff for us to read to get into the feeling of ED.

Depite all that, and despite him being a usually excellent GM (and he's GMed ED before many times, just not with us), we didn't catch on to anything about the world.

What exactly was the problem you ran in to?  I mean, you read the book, the GM put in work, but you still were not happy - what was missing from your perspective?    I mean clearly this GM dude doesn't think there is a problem with ED if they are serially GMing for it - what, specifically, was the problem YOU encountered?  And why did it take you 10 games to come to the conclusion that something was wrong - was this not visible earlier?

I think the problem is probabaly sometyhing totally different, like style clash.  I doubt a a world rewrite would solve the problem.

[Jake Norwood]

I agree with palefire on this one. I've been reading the Wheel of Time for about a year now, on and off, and I never finished the last one...RJ is another topic, I suppose, but after going back and re-reading LOTR I just decided that too much of it was the same...I've been reading a lot of Polish Fantasy lately (Andrzej Sapkowski...I'm hoping to get the US rights to his stuff so I can make a Riddle of Steel book for it, 'cause DAMN its cool). The Poles have enough rich legends and history to really be somthing great.

Go back and read the stuff that started it...Tolkien (duh), Howard, Moorcock, the Brothers Grimm, Malory, yada yada yada...that stuff has lasted a long time for a reason. Campbell's book "the Hero with a thousand faces" (often cited as a major Star Wars inspiration) is a good one, too.

Dragonlance was (and is) fun, but another Krynn isn't going to capture anyone when they can have the original. It's like all those imitation animated movies that always follow behind disney movies, or the Hercules and Xena wanna-be shows...they just didn't work.

Jake Norwood
Driftwood Publishing
www.theriddleofsteel.com

[Christoffer Lernö]

What exactly was the problem you ran in to?  I mean, you read the book, the GM put in work, but you still were not happy - what was missing from your perspective?

Earthdawn is not your conventional world. There are a lot of odd things, like airships and whatever which in themselves ought to have a very distinct impact on the world. But the ED rulebook doesn't detail any stuff like that. Take weird stuff like ghost masters. Or even the concept of Adepts for that matter! They are very unconventional, and yet the only time you really get any info on them is when their rules are presented.

When you're looking through the chapter on training there's a section on ghost masters (or whatever their name was). It explains the basics on how to use them in the game rule-wise, but offers very little of background.

They are put there with something special in mind obviously. I mean, for some reason the ED world evolved ghost masters. But that reason is not obvious from what you read in the rulebook. I'm sure it's dealt with extensively in some sourcebook, but the fact that you need to rely on sourcebooks to be able to play the rulebook setting is a HUGE problem in my eyes.

Reading the rulebook I often get a feeling that they came up with a whole bunch of new and interesting ideas to put in a fantasy game but never really bothered to figure out how it would REALLY affect the society. Like in AD&D where resurrections and spells like that ought to eliminate most chances for assassinations or death by accident. Basically they took their ideas, figured out a little what it meant and then painted a PC generic fantasy world on top of it.

When we first walked into a town I had absolutely no picture of how an ED town should look. What race dominated the market place? Where all races allowed there? What about airships? Where there landing places and things for airships in the town. What kind of food could you get? What races were more likely to do what? About the adepts, where there training guilds or what?

ANYTHING could be different in ED given that they introduce a multi player race society where humans are not the dominating species. They have airships and magical inventions like that, plus it seems to be a totally different planet.

Why would ANYTHING be similar to europe in medival times? Everything could be different and the only way of knowing for sure is to read every sourcebook there is.

So, anyway, we didn't know anything of the ED specifics.. we didn't know what our characters saw. So naturally we didn't pick up interesting hints or do stuff on our own. Because we didn't know what we could do in this world.

And why did it take you 10 games to come to the conclusion that something was wrong - was this not visible earlier?

It grew to be more and more of a problem the more we had adventures which relied on interacting with the specifically ED culture.

I think the problem is probabaly sometyhing totally different, like style clash.  I doubt a a world rewrite would solve the problem.

I don't think so. As I described in the case of Shadowrun, there are 4 ways to solve the problem.

The GM's other group solved it with method 1) - having players who read all the sourcebooks (more than once).

We kept on playing because we used method 2) - relying on the GM to serve up adventures - but it was not something which could be kept up indefinately.

ED is unconventional, but does a very poor job giving the players a good view of what's different and what's the same. Together with many inconsistencies that means you NEED those sourcebooks.

And I don't think that's right. Maybe if you're a big publisher you can get away with that, if the premise seems hot or new enough, but if you're gonna make your world with a small budget: get a game people can play right away instead of having to wait for the sourcebooks.

[contracycle]

Earthdawn is not your conventional world. There are a lot of odd things,

Quite.

Reading the rulebook I often get a feeling that they came up with a whole bunch of new and interesting ideas to put in a fantasy game but never really bothered to figure out how it would REALLY affect the society. Like

I think that is quite visibly, even ostentatiously, the case.

Was there some reason that you were expecting the world to be in some way realistic?

Why would ANYTHING be similar to europe in medival times?

I don' know - why were you expecting it to be like mediaeval times?  I do not recall ED ever billing itself as a historical sim.

Everything could be different and the only way of knowing for sure is to read every sourcebook there is.

Different to WHAT?  You mean, different to AD&D, don' you?

It seems to me that what disapoints you about ED is that it is not AD&D.

[Christoffer Lernö]

Reading the rulebook I often get a feeling that they came up with a whole bunch of new and interesting ideas to put in a fantasy game but never really bothered to figure out how it would REALLY affect the society. Like

I think that is quite visibly, even ostentatiously, the case.
Was there some reason that you were expecting the world to be in some way realistic?

Yes, for some reason I expect things to MAKE SENSE. I find it hard to understand how to visualize the world and understand it's mindset otherwise.

I don' know - why were you expecting it to be like mediaeval times?  I do not recall ED ever billing itself as a historical sim.

No, but it's supposed to be fantasy, isn't it? Then I expect to either:
a) be told how the world works in general
or
b) be told of the specifics where the world differs in from standard fantasy

You seem to say it's quite ok to present a setting without actually bothering to explain 75% of it. I don't know if I think it's fun to need to retcon half a campaign just to be able to use the new sourcebook.

But maybe roleplaying isn't meant to be fun. It's supposed to be a struggle to understand what the heck is happening in the world. And what world you're living in anyway. That's a little to meta for me thanks.

Everything could be different and the only way of knowing for sure is to read every sourcebook there is.

Different to WHAT?  You mean, different to AD&D, don' you?

*sigh* I DON'T PLAY AD&D. I mean different from standard fantasy.

I'd define standard fantasy as defined losely by a medival (or earlier) european setting (culture, technology, and so on) where magic exists in some form or the other.