Setting Shift

[Mike Holmes]

OK, so I'm putting together a Hero Wars game, but I want to do something terrible with it. I've never been a fan of the Glorantha setting, you see. Well, actually I very much appreciate the detail and scope of the setting. Very cool. But it's not a setting that I want to run a game in. Nuff said.

OTOH, since I've gotten into this Narrative stuff, I've been itching to see what it looks like in a "standard fantasy" setting. I think that I'm very inspired by such settings but have always been somewhat dissapointed in them in play in some ways. Ways which I could fix by using a good Narrativist system to get at the best part of the setting in question.

In fact, one setting in particular always struck me as having a ton of potential, but not well suited to it's system. I'm speaking of none other than Shadow World, the "stock" setting for Rolemaster.

--ducks--

No, please, don't throw rocks.

The setting is laid out quite a bit like their Middle Earth supplements. Which means that it has the same sort of epic feel to it. Lots of potential, IMO. I am hoping that Narrativists are mostly giving "standard fantasy" a bad rap because of their bias against the systems that were used for these settings almost universally. Then here comes Glorantha, definitely not "standard fantasy", armed with a great Narrativist system. No surprise that people are saying that "standard fantasy" is bad (I'm sure Ron'll be along here momentarily to correct this perception of mine one way or another  ;-)  ).

In any case, I'm bound and determined. I've often said that I think that HW could work in other settings (even other genres). Now I'll be put to the test.

The most obvious potential problem is that I don't have any keywords worked out, and can't really use the Gloranta ones other than as inspiration. My question is, do I need to make ones up for every culture and occupation? I'm thinking that we can just wing it, and I can work out with the players what a given culture or occupation should have. I'll be playing with very narrativist players, so I'm not worried about abuse. But might there be other problems with winging it? Lack of input?

Any other problems that spring to mind? Magic actually maps pretty neatly from HW to the SW setting, and since it's fairly abstract anyhow I'm not seeing a problem there. Anything else?

Mike

[Blake Hutchins]

I've looked at transposing HW into Exalted, eventually gave up because I couldn't figure a satisfactory way to mimic the anime feel of Exalted Essence expenditure and management.

However, I think HW will translate very well into another setting.  You'll likely have to do SOME keyword generation unless you want to take a Universalis-like approach and let the players simply pick their own stuff and make it up as they go along.  Likewise with Magic.  If you have a particular vision of how magic should work, then you'll have to do some retrofitting.

Best,

Blake

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Mike,

Ha! I've been using the maps and stuff from that game-setting for years now.

Anyway, I think that this post of mine, in response to a similar question by Max a while ago, says pretty much what I have to say about it.

Best,
Ron

[Mike Holmes]

Thanks for the responses guys. I agree with your assessments. Blake, it had not even occurred to me to do a Universalis like development, but I may do exactly that. GM moderated. I don't want things to get too far off of the cannon, but I don't think that there's too much to worry about there.

What I'd so is put down one or two obvious keywords for any chosen right off the bat. Then have a cap on the total number available. So a player can burn them up right off if they want, or they can play it a bit more cagey and add slowly until fully developed.

That sounds pretty cool to me.

Mike