The Business: Official Settings? Bespoke Or Be GONE!

Jeffro said this yesterday:

I was puzzled for decades about how early referees ran campaigns with no modules or campaign supplements. However, when I actually went cold turkey, what I found out is that it is EASIER to run a continuing campaign without any supplements.

Spartan random table results git fleshed out with whatever is in your and your friends' imaginations. Later, they are easier to adapt to whatever your game has already established. You'd spent so much more time reworking modules or just trying to comprehend them it's terrible.

Of course, when all of your poorly conceived campaign ideas get going and stew a bit and then there are 3-4 sessions that are completely stupid, somehow everything comes together anyway and odd things that were half-jokes in early sessions become weirdly endearing and important.

Allow me, gentle reader, to show you The Great Setting Ever for Dungeons & Dragons- any edition.

I see you there, Anon.

That, Anon, is your campaign setting.

"That's a blank hex map."

Correct, Anon. It's blank because you and your boys haven't done anything yet.

Last weekend at the Clubhouse I made use of the procedural generation tools in the Dungeon Master's Guide for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st Edition to generate an entire hex ready to go for gameplay. I did this in answer to a creative challenge.

If you did that, Anon, you would put that hex somewhere on that blank hex map.

You would use the tools in the DMG to generate the nearby dungeon as players took their mans to it and engaged in delves. You would sketch out a local map exactly as players took their mans out across the wilderness to explore it. You would generate local NPCs of note as they needed to be so detailed.

When their mans leave that starting hex, you use the procedures in the DMG to generate what's in the next hex. You would fill in that blank hex map slowly, over time, not knowing what is there until you rolled for it- and thus you would be as surprised, perplexed, and excited by what's discovered as everyone else. The thrill of discover can be yours even when you are in the Referee's chair.

Who's in charge? No one knows until he shows up. Who's ruling what? No one knows until someone, somewhere, says "I rule this!"

Who are the gods? No one knows until they are encountered, which means that players can answer those questions as they generate their mans if the NPCs and monsters that you roll up do not.

What does this mean? Each setting is a bespoke creation generated by the actions of those participating in the campaign. Many Worlds, One Game.

And that is why no one needs Official Settings. They are the fast food of the hobby, the very worst of the corporatized and Americanized stuff (i.e. filled with cheap dogshit that gives you all sorts of health problems and are illegal in other countries), and through that comes all of the other crap concepts that definie the deleterious business model servicing Conventional Play.

Fuck that. Just as healthy people learn to cook from scratch, so do #EliteLevel players learn to roll their own settings from raw inputs and in so doing get far better and more satisfying adventure gameplay than anything that the Cargo Cult could ever produce- and man, they have tried and failed, FOR DECADES!

And again, videogames do all of that cheaper, easier, faster, and with superior quality of both product and experience. Tabletop Conventional Play sucks ass by comparison.

No wonder folks heavily invested in Conventional Play fear the #BROSR.