The Game: Reconsidering The Implied Setting From Scratch

(Following on from this post the other day.)

Remove all of the presumptions that seeped into the game by way of adventure modules, campaign settings, etc. over the decades. Just use the rules, take what is given therein, and assemble the pieces into a functional machine. What do you get?

Answering that question has been a big driver for the #BROSR over the last several years. The results are now somewhere between "Anger" and "Acceptance", depending upon which grifting vlogger on YouTube attempts to steal credit for this week.

The demi-human races are not what many people believe them to be. Men are not hobbled by comparison at all; "Playing Human is for suckers" is a belief with no basis in reality. The rules of the game are not broken; they work as intended to deliver on the experience promised.

We have a fantasy wargame, where the Player-Characters perform the roles of Hero Figures in tabletop wargames in that they are able to move and act independently, while most NPCs are not. The language, and the rules, are all about planning and executing expeditionary war campaigns- complete with their political and economic components open for active play at the table.

What now is ready to address is the setting that Advanced Dungeons & Dragons implies. The aforementioned post gets into that, but I think it merits deeper disucssion, and it is in that direction that I will go starting on Monday next week starting with the cosmic level and working my way down.

It's going to be interesting to specify what is there in the rules, show how those rules play into procedures of play, and thus demonstrate how the machinry of the game operates in action. From there we can make inferrances about what the setting is, how it works, and why it works that way; then we can--and I will--put together a campaign scenario that uses this as its cornerstone.

I've been doing this implicitly for a while; it is time to make this explicit.