Re: Campaing Setting - strict adeherence?
Posted: Sun Jun 22, 2008 9:17 am
never let a few pages written by a stranger derail a perfectly good idea you have for friends.
As long as you are following the feel of the campaign, then do as thou wilt.
My ATB campaign has: Mutant fungal humanoids that ride mutant hunting spiders as mounts while flinging internally brewed chemical weapons. a sewer city populated by (mostly) mutant goldfish, not one but 3 'empires of humanity', one of which has started production of proto-crazies, while another is in fact mutant pigs that think they are human due to being raised by an insane Artificial Intelligence. Wandering sanitiser robots, and a cult of crystal manipulating monks.
None of these are canon as far as the book goes, but they all seemed like good ideas at the time so they got thrown in.
I use a bottom up design process, using the character's as the primary lynchpins for world design. If I get submissions for a fantasy setting and there are no eleves in the party, I might be tempted to say they don't exist, or are things of myth and memory. I am as likely to pull setting out of my arse at character creation stage as much as anything.
And, if I should stumble across an idea that sounds cool, I'll put it in that campaign's notebook, and wait for a good time to give it a reveal.
As a result, a lot of my campaigns are put togeher in a hurry, (though I am not above throwing a stored idea out to start characters concepts rolling or to pique interest) made up on the spot and ironed flat between games.
After the bomb and heroes unlimited allow me to get away with a lot. Rifts falls over itself and has never gelled well with me. I ran a mechanoids game very successfully with the idea that the PC's had caught a virus that stopped their ageing. I used Nigthbane to launch a psychics unlimited campaign that lasted 4 years. I have had ATB style mutants in Splicers and I have never run Palladium fantasy on the actual palladium continent.
So yeah, I play fast and loose. I consider it an ongoing exercise in creativity.
Batts
As long as you are following the feel of the campaign, then do as thou wilt.
My ATB campaign has: Mutant fungal humanoids that ride mutant hunting spiders as mounts while flinging internally brewed chemical weapons. a sewer city populated by (mostly) mutant goldfish, not one but 3 'empires of humanity', one of which has started production of proto-crazies, while another is in fact mutant pigs that think they are human due to being raised by an insane Artificial Intelligence. Wandering sanitiser robots, and a cult of crystal manipulating monks.
None of these are canon as far as the book goes, but they all seemed like good ideas at the time so they got thrown in.
I use a bottom up design process, using the character's as the primary lynchpins for world design. If I get submissions for a fantasy setting and there are no eleves in the party, I might be tempted to say they don't exist, or are things of myth and memory. I am as likely to pull setting out of my arse at character creation stage as much as anything.
And, if I should stumble across an idea that sounds cool, I'll put it in that campaign's notebook, and wait for a good time to give it a reveal.
As a result, a lot of my campaigns are put togeher in a hurry, (though I am not above throwing a stored idea out to start characters concepts rolling or to pique interest) made up on the spot and ironed flat between games.
After the bomb and heroes unlimited allow me to get away with a lot. Rifts falls over itself and has never gelled well with me. I ran a mechanoids game very successfully with the idea that the PC's had caught a virus that stopped their ageing. I used Nigthbane to launch a psychics unlimited campaign that lasted 4 years. I have had ATB style mutants in Splicers and I have never run Palladium fantasy on the actual palladium continent.
So yeah, I play fast and loose. I consider it an ongoing exercise in creativity.
Batts
