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Post by Deleted on Mar 2, 2012 9:45:43 GMT -6
I've condensed the history for my campaign down to about a page (12 point font, single-spaced). It covers a lot of history, but I want to communicate to the players some sense of depth without being too specific. The result of the latter often being a new player throwing is hands in the air and saying "never mind." Do players really care about the name of the tyrannical despot who murdered the beloved leader and usurped his throne in a dead kingdom 2,000 years ago?
I'm now working on committing the in-campaign deity to paper. I've added them slapdash over the years, but I've always had a general arch of history for them, as well. Fortunately, this is is easily covered in one or two sentences ... nobody really knows and even the legends are vague.
Unfortunately, there is so much to say about the various deities. Preferred method of worship, places of worship, various names/aspects, symbols, the list is rather lengthy.
So, here are the questions:
Regarding campaign history, is a page about right? Or, should there be more or less? Why?
Deities: A short line of description? There are nine major deities IMC and one or two paragraphs apiece would be 2-3 pages of text, is that too much? Not enough? An example (not from my campaign, I made it up on the spot) appears below.
Short: Hermione: Goddess of potters and magic wands. Symbol: Hippogriff.
Long: Hermione is the goddess of potters, weasels, magic wands/artifacts, and time travel. She is the most intelligent of the pantheon, and is responsible for disallowing mere mortals from travelling through the time-stream and mucking up reality. She prefers her places of worship to be built of stone on the highest spot available, and her clerics must dye their hair red (etc.)
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Post by mgtremaine on Mar 2, 2012 10:09:01 GMT -6
It really depends on the players. Details are great if you have players who will spend the time researching and using the history to influence the present. That is the usurper of 2,000 years ago is a nice target for the tomb robber of today. Even more details get uncovered when trying to find ancients magics and hidden knowledge. So details are great if the players play that kind of game.
The other side of it is the GM, world-builder, as the author you will always have the drive to know "why". This is huge, authors struggle with this all the time, they need to know the why about characters, places, and things, but sometimes these piece of information are distracting or irrelevant to the story. They get left out, BUT, the author still needed to know.
I say when you are compelled to write it down go the long route, but reveal only as much as your players want to know. Those who ask more questions get longer answers.
-Mike
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Post by Mushgnome on Mar 2, 2012 10:12:28 GMT -6
One option, which may or may not be appropriate to your campaign and play style, is to split up the background info and give each player a piece of the puzzle.
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Azafuse
Level 5 Thaumaturgist
Posts: 245
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Post by Azafuse on Mar 2, 2012 10:44:46 GMT -6
As always, there could be different approaches but with a shared purpose: underlining just the most important details (I am talking about those details able to affect in a certain way the current campaign). IMHO you should insert no walls of text: they cast Sleep upon the reader after 4-5 lines almost always. I usually prefer a timeline solution for history events, with a list of 1-2 lines for each of this events: in this way you can focus on the core informations with no waste of space. Hermione is the goddess of potters, weasels, magic wands/artifacts I hope you have also a god called Snape, worshipped by potion-makers. ;D Exalt!
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monk
Level 5 Thaumaturgist
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Post by monk on Mar 2, 2012 11:12:04 GMT -6
I like to give out details because they imply a complete history that the players don't know. As they try to figure things out, research stuff, etc., I will fill things in. I do this because I've found, for myself, that I can waste a lot of time coming up with a long, comprehensive, complex history before play that never gets fully revealed anyway. My players like details (a short explanation of why Pentastadion, a desert city, has an ancient sewer system below it), but they don't particularly want to hear a ten minute presentation from me about the entire history of the city. So I choose to spend my time developing scenarios and locations, and a small amount of history that the players might discover while playing, rather than writing up a long back-story for everything. For my players, and it could really just be my players that are like this, there just needs to be a solid-looking veneer of depth. I will freestyle things most of the time, if they actually delve into it.
Just my 2 cents.
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Post by snorri on Mar 2, 2012 13:26:14 GMT -6
Short: Hermione: Goddess of potters and magic wands. Symbol: Hippogriff. Long: Hermione is the goddess of potters, weasels, magic wands/artifacts, and time travel. She is the most intelligent of the pantheon, and is responsible for disallowing mere mortals from travelling through the time-stream and mucking up reality. She prefers her places of worship to be built of stone on the highest spot available, and her clerics must dye their hair red (etc.) Nice ! I'd like to see all your potters deities
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Post by keith418 on Mar 2, 2012 15:29:19 GMT -6
Zak S. says that the details that are the most vivid and that you can remember the easiest are the only ones that are important. On the other hand, if you - the GM - LIKES working like this, then why cut yourself off from that fun?
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Aplus
Level 6 Magician
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Post by Aplus on Mar 2, 2012 17:34:42 GMT -6
As a player, I just want to know where I can find adventures. If some setting info is revealed while I'm playing, that's cool, but please, no long expositions and no reading assignments.
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Post by thorswulf on Mar 2, 2012 19:38:23 GMT -6
Honestly as one who took 8+ years of creative writing classes, the only people you game with who will appreciate it is YOU! Background is nice, but most gamers just need a rough area map, and some hard and fast basic background. Use NPC's for flavor, or found items. However you may get fortunate enough to havea creative player who appreviates your prose! By the way timelines are good as in between level information, and can be slipped in later.
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Post by geoffrey on Mar 2, 2012 19:47:31 GMT -6
It depends on the players. For my players, even a mere 100 words of background information is too much. I remember one time giving each player a 100-word background to read over the next week or two. When we met again, NONE of them had read it. "I didn't have time."
When one of my players plays a cleric, he can't even be bothered to remember the name of his deity.
It's only just: I am the laziest DM in the world, and I have the laziest players!
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Post by DungeonDevil on Mar 2, 2012 19:54:39 GMT -6
Basic brushstrokes. No need to bore anyone. K.I.S.S.
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Mar 2, 2012 21:22:51 GMT -6
In 1977, George Lucas pulled the entire world into his universe with 93 words of backstory.
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Post by kent on Mar 2, 2012 23:47:35 GMT -6
Give them less than they need. Have npcs converse with their characters assuming the characters know the rudiments of campaign history and mythology. This puts pressure on the players to ask you for information so that they avoid appearing foolish, both themselves and their characters. It depends on the players. For my players, even a mere 100 words of background information is too much. I remember one time giving each player a 100-word background to read over the next week or two. When we met again, NONE of them had read it. "I didn't have time." LOL In 1977, George Lucas pulled the entire world into his universe with 93 words of backstory. And it shows.
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Mar 3, 2012 0:13:38 GMT -6
When one of my players plays a cleric, he can't even be bothered to remember the name of his deity. Just curious: have you ever imposed a divine judgment upon a PC for such a lapse? Nothing severe, something like a -1 CHA from a bad case of acne or flatulence, or -1 to saving throws, or randomly forgetting a spell ... something like that?
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Post by Finarvyn on Mar 3, 2012 5:16:31 GMT -6
My trick (cheat?) is to name people and places after people and places in books so that players already know some of the backstory without me giving them so many details, although I warn then that what they have heard may or may not be 100% accurate.
Your example of Hermione is a good one, because the players already conjure up their own idea of who she is and what she looks like. My notes might look more like the long version, I supply the short version.
Imagine if the characters find Moria, and the players all think "say, there could be a balrog there" but really it's a rumor or legend. Only I know if this world's Moria has one or not.
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Post by cadriel on Mar 3, 2012 5:54:23 GMT -6
What you need, IMO, is what I've seen called "impression of depth." This is a method of worldbuilding in broad strokes, allowing the imagination to fill in gaps that you leave by alluding to a vast backstory. The earliest D&D modules were very adept at creating this, with things like the Great Stone Face Enigma of Greyhawk. Names of things and places are left vague, or with a detail or two that indicate a much deeper story.
For instance, you might say that a dungeon has been unexplored since Eodred's March against the Orcs. Who Eodred was and why he marched against the orcs is never explained, but it fills in a broad backstory. Or you could say that the sword Arvistan has sat waiting for a master ever since the death of the last of the Aristeis clan. You don't give it as a background story, you just add details that your players can fill in with their own imagination. Your cleric's player might not know who St. Valoric was but you can tell him that the tomb he has found marks the place of Valoric's martyrdom.
The technique still works if you have a real backstory - but only tell it in hints and allusions. Tolkien did this to great effect with Lord of the Rings, it's positively dripping with an alluded backstory that is mostly told later in the Silmarillion. But you don't need to have one, you can just add the impression that a much deeper world is there.
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akooser
Level 4 Theurgist
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Post by akooser on Mar 3, 2012 7:43:20 GMT -6
cadriel - As a player and a GM I like that method you describe. When I am playing a PC I really enjoying figuring out the backstory through environmental clues, brief snippets in play, and exploration of the environment. When I GM I jot down some notes but I am not attached to how to player interpret these things. It's largely up to the other players to piece their own narrative together and how to use it. This short article by Russell Bailey (Dangerous Archaeology) describes what I use as a GM-player blog.fantasyheartbreaker.com/2010/03/25/dangerous-archaeology/ara
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Post by geoffrey on Mar 3, 2012 7:44:26 GMT -6
When one of my players plays a cleric, he can't even be bothered to remember the name of his deity. Just curious: have you ever imposed a divine judgment upon a PC for such a lapse? Nothing severe, something like a -1 CHA from a bad case of acne or flatulence, or -1 to saving throws, or randomly forgetting a spell ... something like that? No. I just figure that it is only the player (as opposed to the PC) who can't remember the name of his PC's deity. Otherwise I'd have to completely strip the cleric of all powers whatsoever. What kind of cleric could possibly ever say, "I am a priest of... of... Hey, what's my god's name again?" Ha!
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Post by llenlleawg on Mar 3, 2012 8:30:48 GMT -6
In a sense, part of what is being discussed here is the reason why departing too far from archetypes and standard tropes, one might even say in a non-critical way from cliche and stereotype, might not be a great idea. One of the reasons that "implied depth" can work is because the writer/director of a book/film, or the DM as world-crafter, can rely on the reader/player/viewer to do a lot of work. Indeed, the player in D&D who can more or less rely on the vague expectations of, say, what an elf or a dwarf or a troll is, on the kinds of things one would find in a Medieval-esque village, what a quasi-Medieval Church will be like, etc. is better able to negotiate the world put in front of him. The less he can trust his instincts, the less effective he will be as a player.
This is not to say that you cannot tweak a thing here or there. When these changes come up organically and players can actually discover them through actual play, there is nothing wrong in finding out, e.g. that goblins or trolls can be driven off by church bells or that sleeping in the ring of standing stones outside of town draws one into a dark realm of evil fey and undead. What is less successful is crafting a world where elves have blood based on copper and not iron and eat only rotten meat and diseased fruit and live in the corpses of purple worms while dwarves are master chemists who ride pterodactyls and reproduce through spore clouds and budding. It might be interesting as a concept, but how is an elf or dwarf player supposed to know what to do with that, especially if he is new to the group?
Put another way, consider The Hobbit or The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Very little by way of background is needed for either of these stories to work. Both can have quite evocative suggestions (e.g. what were the wars with the Goblins, what is Gollum and where did he get the magic ring, or why is there a lamp post in the middle of a forest, and who lived in Caer Paravel before now, or what led to the White Witch being able to claim Narnia 100 years ago, etc.), but neither requires the reader to know any of that to be immersed in the world. They both work well because they rely that the things one encounters (goblins, trolls, giant spiders, dragons, fauns, lions, witches' castles, magic wands, etc.) can depend on the reader's already existent expectations of such things and do not need more than the bits and pieces of actual, new specific information that personalize the story.
D&D can certainly handle a wide variety of styles, but if players need more than (as noted above) the text at the beginning of Star Wars to negotiate their world, one probably is asking them for too much depth, however much depth you have as the DM on your side of the screen.
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monk
Level 5 Thaumaturgist
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Post by monk on Mar 3, 2012 10:42:42 GMT -6
llenlleawg - I agree with your assessment for the most part. When I started my Lost Continent campaign we were starting off with the assumption that this was NOT standard northern European medieval backdrop--not Sir Lancelot and such. The problem with that, though, as you've pointed out, is that player's unconsciously fill in the imaginative blanks with imagery from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. One solution I found early on was to use pictures. They go a LONG way to helping the players start filling in the blanks more accurately. I showed them pics of moroccan alleys to describe the city they live in, for example. If you want to get away from tropes, you need to use imagery rather than just words, I think. Think of Vornheim...I have a really strong image of what Vornheim looks like because of the pictures.
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Post by llenlleawg on Mar 4, 2012 16:39:34 GMT -6
llenlleawg - I agree with your assessment for the most part. When I started my Lost Continent campaign we were starting off with the assumption that this was NOT standard northern European medieval backdrop--not Sir Lancelot and such. The problem with that, though, as you've pointed out, is that player's unconsciously fill in the imaginative blanks with imagery from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. One solution I found early on was to use pictures. They go a LONG way to helping the players start filling in the blanks more accurately. I showed them pics of moroccan alleys to describe the city they live in, for example. If you want to get away from tropes, you need to use imagery rather than just words, I think. Think of Vornheim...I have a really strong image of what Vornheim looks like because of the pictures. That is a fine point indeed! We want and need the players to fill in the imaginative blanks, and pictures are an excellent way of doing so. They can't pin down anything precisely, but they are evocative. Besides, D&D is by its nature a bit of a mix of styles and influences, and this ends up being its strength. It can handle the fact, generally, that the imaginative filling in by one player is not quite that of the player next door in a way that systems with a more detailed implied setting (e.g. Chivalry & Sorcery or Empire of the Petal Throne) cannot.
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Mar 4, 2012 18:23:34 GMT -6
In 1977, George Lucas pulled the entire world into his universe with 93 words of backstory. And it shows. It sure does; the only movie to sell more tickets than Star Wars is Gone with the Wind.
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Koren n'Rhys
Level 6 Magician
Got your mirrorshades?
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Post by Koren n'Rhys on Mar 5, 2012 16:15:06 GMT -6
cadriel: That's a fantastic summation. You're throwing out tidbits that you can expand upon if the players ask for more. By making the PCs do some research to find out, you can even buy yourself time to come up with the details! If you had the time and inclination beforehand then maybe you already have it written out, if not... get creating! @dubeers: To get back to the original point, I don't think a one page overview of your campaign world is too much. Maybe they'll read it, maybe not, but you should have an elevator pitch ready for them. As far as the deities go, I'd prefer a middle ground. the short version of who she is and what she stands for, then that bit about what makes her priests unique (hair color, dress, weapon use, whatever). Give me something to make my choice of deity meaningful, but still in just 2-3 sentences.
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Post by dicebro on Sept 16, 2019 19:06:22 GMT -6
In my campaign the players can give a backstory in one sentence or less!
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Post by Punkrabbitt on Sept 17, 2019 13:45:16 GMT -6
I offer my players as much backstory as is relevant to their character's background. A group of friends for a couple of villages under the protection of a manor house probably don't know much history past who the previous king was. If a recent war affected them, they probably know who the enemy is. A cleric probably knows a bit about the regional organization of their temple, and be well versed on the myths of their patron god/goddess, but probably only a little familiar with the rest of the pantheon's specific rituals etc. and almost nothing about other religions entirely. An apprentice to a mighty, learned wizard might know almost everything, while the children of minor nobility will know just a bit more than the villageers.
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Post by doublejig2 on Sept 17, 2019 15:08:06 GMT -6
The NG JG WLHF offers stacked epochs in text, including empires that have risen and fallen. Not so interesting for the players (meaning not a backstory, more like a general weightedness or what sages might know). It's useful as a fallback for a certain kind of DM, interested in placing temporally ruins in the sandbox. So you have the ruins of Oricha and the frontier forts of Kelnore as examples (both the industry of lost empires). There is also a time line.
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Post by Scott Anderson on Sept 17, 2019 18:37:15 GMT -6
Shorter is better. It is better to speak it rather than have it typed up although this is not always possible.
I am sure that your world, like mine, has a hundred different things that are important in context, but remember that the players do not need to know much at all to get a handle on how to start.
Here:
The prince of the fallen empire is dying in his castle as we speak. You are freemen who live within the capital city, a city which was once the envy of the world but now subsists within its own rotted husk. Seven great powers within the city vie for control once the prince passes on. The city and empire are on the brink of civil war.
Possible campaigns (players’ choice): 1. West Marches style 2. Megadungeon 3. Political and military within the city 4. Domain level play 5. Explore and re-civilize parts of the city that have fallen into ruin.
There is a ton of stuff I’ve put into the setting but that’s all the players really need up front in terms of backstory.
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Post by Red Baron on Sept 17, 2019 19:00:18 GMT -6
Having a page of backstory read to you is awful.
Discovering the backstory through exploration is wonderful.
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Post by dicebro on Sept 23, 2019 6:18:38 GMT -6
My character is elphonzo, an elf from elf land. Voila!
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Post by tdenmark on Sept 23, 2019 14:07:50 GMT -6
I believe anything more than an elevator pitch is too much. How much can you describe in the duration of an average elevator ride? After that you start boring your audience. The rest of the background can be fed to the players in small bite-sized bits during actual play.
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