Fantasy Atlases

[Dav]

Okay Willow, having read over your setting info, I have a thought or two.  1) read Ron's Fantasy Heartbreakers article(s)... that, kiddo, is you.  2) This sounds like a plenty-fine campaign to run for some group you have out in your college town, but this is not going to be a start product. 

If you are hellbent on making this setting and trying to sell it, for cash, get a couple of your friends that "draw well" pretty drunk, and extort their lowered inhibitions for art.  Then layout your setting and edit it, and what-have-you... then make it a .pdf and either sell it for a couple of bucks, or give it away and post a "please donate to my world" button.  Either way.  This way, you don't lay out big money, you don't get stuck with unsold inventory, and you don't wonder why no one wanted to play in your Ultimate World.

I know this sounds harsh or mean, but I'm really not trying to be.  I am being deadly serious.

Dav

[Ron Edwards]

Now Dav.

All right, there are some serious dangers in this project, and yeah - the linked material is not what I'd recommend as the primary selling point or content for it. But notice what Willow said about goals: not to lose money. We're not talking about the usual "oh God get my game out there on the shelves" that characterizes heartbreakers. I think you're being too alarmist.

Piggy snort-snort capitalism, remember? If Willow really wants to see how this thing sells (and remember, neither you nor I has seen the instructions-part yet), then off to the market it goes, and we shouldn't diss it.

Best, Ron

[pells]

Willow, sorry to insist, but I think this is important. When provinding content, you have two things : the content (the setting/plot in itself), and the container (how you present things). To provide a different, useful, non bogus content, I believe you have to think over the container as much as the content. How do you present things ? And I believe this is where the forge might be the most useful.

And I also belive the container is the thing that will make your setting a non heartbreaker !!!

[Willow]

Geez Dav, you couldn't find a way to say that constructively without dumping on me and my friends?

[Dav]

Willow, man, I'm not dumping on you... everyone has been there.  I've written TONS of stuff that is FAR worse than anything you could even crackpipedly dream of.  I'm mainly saying that your product is an add-on to an existing game, which means a license fee, and is a very detailed map (geographical, political, agricultural, etc.).  Your market, while not strictly limited to that game's audience, will likely be quite highly focused.  I don't know the popularity of the game you are looking at, but to print, publish, license, edit, and ship your game, you are looking at laying out some good cash.

I'm saying you sidestep that, place it as PDF, add a donate button (that way you avoid license fee, as you aren't selling the item), and voila!  No money down, therefore no money lost, therefore success.

I'm not making fun of you, I make fun of people I know... and those blonde buffy bitches with their dogs and suvs... and, well, just about anyone.  But trust me, I'm not being mean, I'm just very low on the "padding it" idea.

I do, however, 100% think that your product would do better as an electronic distribution medium, complete with zoomable point-and-click maps that get all detailed mapquest-style, rather than as a "traditional" gaming store shelf product. 

Then again, I've been wrong a whole mess of times, so, hell, this is your gig.

Dav

[Willow]

I want to clarify:  I am not intending on releasing this as a licensed product of any kind, Savage Worlds or otherwise.

Anyway, for Dav and Ron, what specifically are you seeing in the setting writeup that's turning you off?  I will admit that the thread over there is more inspirational than presentational, but statements like "this is not going to be a good start product" or "the linked material is not what I'd recommend as the primary selling point or content for it" don't help me any.

[Eero Tuovinen]

Anyway, for Dav and Ron, what specifically are you seeing in the setting writeup that's turning you off?  I will admit that the thread over there is more inspirational than presentational, but statements like "this is not going to be a good start product" or "the linked material is not what I'd recommend as the primary selling point or content for it" don't help me any.

I'm not Dav or Ron, but I'll answer anyway. They're both very right in what they say, so I suggest listening to them.

What's turning us off in your material? Nothing! Compare with the rpgnet comments you get, those are positive and enthusiastic, right? And why shouldn't they be, the setting framework seems nice and ripe with adventuring possibilities. However, this is not enough for a commercial product. Every roleplayer creates equally intriguing fiction most every time we play, so your content is not exactly a marketable product. We are not into roleplaying because we want fiction. We as in you, me and everybody else. You can't assume that an average roleplaying group would consider simple setting material vital in any manner, when simple setting prose is a most unlikely contributing factor in a successful gaming experience. Verdict: your setting is no doubt nice and of high quality, the problem is that settings are a red herring in roleplaying, and ultimately of little consequence. Consider Exalted: WW has been trying to sell us a setting-based game for what, five years, and frankly, it's not working. If WW can't convince us that setting is the miracle drug of roleplaying, then I doubt anybody else can.

That is why Ron quite correctly focuses on what would make for a product worth money to buy: give us the tools to actualize the setting in a meaningful way in the game. Don't be a writer of setting fiction, be a game designer who just happens to use setting as his foremost gaming tool. To give you an idea of what I mean, check out this thread on Avalanche from a month ago: http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=19572.0. The point: you have to be able to compete on Sebastien's level when you decide to write a setting nowadays. Read the latest version of his teaser (what, is it third or fourth?) to see that he's not just writing reams of fiction about mountaintops and dragons, but that he has at least a tentative system in place for changing that general setting material into situations of actual play.

That's why "the linked material is not what I'd recommend as the primary selling point or content for it". Before you can sell a setting, you have to sell tools for using it. Note that our tools for utilizing settings in roleplaying are primitive, so primitive! What, usually it's the GM reading and internalizing the setting alone before the game starts, and he's supposed to transmit the setting in some meaningful way into a character experience for the players, or something to that tune. Doesn't work, simple as that. Before a really viable setting product can emerge, you need to get conceptually to the next level by delivering your setting in a form that makes it significant.

I should note that this is a topic near and dear to my own heart, because I'm currently designing a game with heavy setting materials myself. Actually, my game will be pretty much only a ten or twenty pages of rules, with the rest of the rulebook an extended setting description. To manage that without falling into fiction writing and literary wankery is the key to making usable setting material.

In case you want to study the topic, consider the following keywords: The Shadow of Yesterday, Glorantha and Dogs in the Vineyard. Each of those has important lessons to deliver about setting, actual play and situation creation.

[Dav]

Willow:

What Eero said.

I promise I'll give you a better resopnse in a bit, but, in the short, what Eero said.

Dav

[Larry L.]

That's why "the linked material is not what I'd recommend as the primary selling point or content for it". Before you can sell a setting, you have to sell tools for using it. Note that our tools for utilizing settings in roleplaying are primitive, so primitive! What, usually it's the GM reading and internalizing the setting alone before the game starts, and he's supposed to transmit the setting in some meaningful way into a character experience for the players, or something to that tune. Doesn't work, simple as that. Before a really viable setting product can emerge, you need to get conceptually to the next level by delivering your setting in a form that makes it significant.

Eero,

That was so excellent, I am printing that paragraph out and sticking it on the wall next to all the game books I'll never use.

[Black Iris Dancer]

Euro and the others are saying true things, which I sortof disagree with.

I rarely buy setting books, because they rarely contain enough interesting material. “Interesting material” here means either new mechanics and techniques, or fiction that just grabs me (even gamers buy novels). I don't know (and, I mean, I actually don't know) if relying solely on the fiction for grabbyness is a good idea.

(If you were selling just to me, I'd be much more inclined to buy a scrapbook of stuff from that world than a complete annotated history. Something which suggests lots of stuff, but never paints a complete picture. Fragmential life stories of the sort that make us go, “I want to play a character like that!” Half-torn photos of cities, which make us wonder what the rest is like. Pictures of glass-pressed flowers from the highlands region. That sorta thing.)

Consider Exalted: WW has been trying to sell us a setting-based game for what, five years, and frankly, it's not working. If WW can't convince us that setting is the miracle drug of roleplaying, then I doubt anybody else can.

White Wolf seems like a uniquely terrible example of this. I'd kill for Exalted's popularity, and given the eagerness with which White Wolf is making books, I doubt they exactly see it as a languishing line. In a way, this shouldn't be taken as evidence either way, as White Wolf is in a rather unique position.

[David "Czar Fnord" Artman]

Looks like most angles of this have been touched, but I would like to try to bring in the whole train (caboose and all).

Willow, you seem to have a strong idea about a setting. Like Valamir, I believe you need it to have as many "scales" as you can stand to write (and afford to print):
o  World-level information - The Big Map, weather info, broad cultural and historical backgrounds, flora and fauna.
o  Regional information - International conflicts, history of ruling class, trade information.
o  Local color - Major town maps and descriptions of city life, rural points of interest, typical and atypical "personalities."

Notice how, the more I "drilled down" in scale, the more situational elements came into the descriptors? That is what I think folks are hounding for: a setting which is ripe with situations that a GM can hook his characters into.

Also note that situation does NOT necessarily mean "backstory" or "metaplot" or any sort of future history for your world which the GM must try to use in his campaign... or ignore and fight growing incoherence as he uses "later" setting elements in his own story arcs. This is not to say you could speak some to how the setting will evolve (or, better, devise a setting-evolution system that makes it trivially mechanical to track major world changes).

Finally, it is not merely enough to devise a setting ripe with situation if there is no clear means to hang that onto a system of play. You want the game to use "any" system of play, then what you actually have to do is devise a "metasystem" that will let you quantify mechanical aspects of the world in a way that is quickly translatable to the GM and players' system in use. Consider: a TON of setting products want to tell the user about, say, "the wise and generous leader of the Flargenbargen" without giving a GM some kind of quantifier of that wisdom and generosity. Thus, when the players want the leader to, say, loan them some troops to fight off the Florid Fauna Frenzy, the GM has no clue as to where the "rubber meets the road" vis a vis the wisdom of the leader to manage his troops versus the generosity he will show to someone trying to help his people. It all ends up going to fiat.

And THAT's where I think others want to warn/berate your about your ideas: the more the setting relies on a GM "grokking" the pregnancy of situation out of this host of setting details--and, worse, the more the GM must "double grok" specific systemic applications of the "emergent" situations from that detailed setting--the less the GM-as-consumer will feel the value of the product. Hence, the "fun bits of being a GM" comment (Dav): you want to sell/promote a product that could, essentially, offload all the tough decisions to the GM (requiring a lot of reading and analysis to begin to make those decisions) while "freeing" that GM from all the fun decisions!

So...
Do not just make a portrait of a world: make an animation of that world alive, day-to-day, year-to-year, age-to-age. Imbue it with situation and conflict and factionalism and (if you can do so in a way that doesn't make it mandatory for coherence) a future history that evolves from those elements. To use a metaphor: be Tolkien, not Rand-McNally.

Do not just tack on a system from the Open License world; make a straight-forward, simple quantifier system that uses, perhaps, a chart in the back of the book to translate your "generic" quantifiers into the actual mechanics of several popular RPGs. If you recall TSR's old charts for translating, say, a D&D character to Gamma World, you know the type of thing that I mean. And the beauty of such a "metasystem" is that you will not clutter up your setting and situation materials with a bunch of gibberish from existing systems (unlike, say, many module designs which try to embed NPC stats into the narrative text or break it out into sidebar character sheets that one can never find when needed).

In closing, I think you could go for print and electronic deliverable: go with a free PDF (with donation request) and sell a hardbound or perfectbound book using Print-on-demand, with minimal or no profits. Both could be as beautiful as you and your artists can manage: it's all the same, in PDF land. In essence, you have no profit goal (only a no-loss goal) and this is a first product: treat it as a loss-leader. Get your work out there, advertise on game forums and at conventions, and hopefully your NEXT setting product will have an existing fan base that you can begin to charge. Also, I serious recommend you do a search here at The Forge on the concept of "ransom" for a product release. I think it's an ingenious revenue channel, once a designer has an established fan base that likes his or her stuff and wants more.

Hope this helps! I actually believe in setting materials. Too bad so few sci fi settings come out....
David