Mindless Pap of the Worst Kind

There seems to be something in the air, because this month has seen the release of not one but two inspid, uninspired, hackneyed, crappy, poorly executed fantasy spoof series - and the BBC has its hand in both of them. First up is Krod Mandoon and the Flaming Sword of Fire, which is by all accounts godawful and which made me want to kill myself out of sheer boredom and hatred when I saw some clips of it on YouTube. And second is ElvenQuest, a "hilarious" programme on Radio 4 whose first episode aired today. To call it bad is perhaps unfair. Unfair to the concept of badness, that is. It was not only one of the worst radio programmes I've ever heard; it was flat out one of the worst things I've ever experienced. Ever. It wasn't so much that it didn't make me want to laugh; at times it actually made me think that I would never be able to laugh at anything ever again. Like sense of humour kryptonite.

I don't mind people spoofing fantasy - there's so much ammunition. But does it really have to be this unutterably terrible guff that the BBC is currently serving up?

The Knowledge Economy and the New Cyberpunk

I was flicking through my old Cyberpunk 2020 rulebook again last night while listening to the football. Fascinating how different the world looked in the 80s. According to the timeline of the 'Night City' setting, there should by 2020 have been a nuclear apocalypse in Australia, a unification of Korea, a collapse of the United States, and a domination of the world economy by Japan and the EU. Meanwhile many events that were totally unexpected have occurred - in Cyberpunk 2020 the USSR is still a major power and China is still a Maoist backwater. (A lesson in epistemic arrogance if ever there was one.)

Of course, it's not really fair to criticise the predictions of a gang of RPG designers and cyberpunk novelists. They never made any claims to be soothsayers - or at least most of them didn't. But nowadays it seems incredible to think that people actually believed Japan would one day be the world's most important economy - especially if you know anything about the huge demographic nightmare which is fast approaching that country.

I have a friend who's something of an expert in economic migration, who did his PhD on the growing knowledge economies in places like Singapore, Mauritius, and the Seychelles. He was telling me over lunch about how the governments in those countries are attempting to create new economies based on human capital: essentially, because (in theory) anybody doing knowledge-based work can nowadays work from anywhere in the world (thanks to the internet), they are hoping that they can attract researchers, scientists, thinkers, from all over the world to live and do business on their territory. This is seen as the perfect developmental model for places like Mauritius, the Seychelles, even possibly Fiji and Cape Verde (not to mention tax havens like the Cayman Islands whose days are likely numbered).

In a future in which cyberspace is even more dominant than it is today, should we not be considering places like Singapore - high tech, agile, expert - to be the kings of the world? They'd be rich and advanced enough to employ armies of cyborgs and elite mercenary units to defend themselves; powerful enough in cyberspace to use it as a security tool and a weapon of war (teams of military programmers scouring the net and eliminating enemies with wetware); and insulated from crime and social decay by strict authoritarian government, communitarian values, and the sea. Food, material goods and menial labour would be imported from the developing world on vast oceangoing liners. Major corporations with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo would set up home there, rather than the chaotic and violent North America or the politically unstable Latin America and Eurasia. These tiny islands, isolated high-tech paradises, would be the utopias of a dystopian world.

Nice beaches, too.

Colonialpunk

I've been wanting for a long time to come up with a campaign setting for Cyberpunk 2020 - a kind of alternate history of the future. Nothing like as detailed or out-there as Sirlarkins' fantastic Rifts setting idea, but perhaps vaguely in that vein, imagining a world in which Something Big happened at some point in the 20th Century that radically changed the course of history.

I have a lot of nostalgia for nuclear apocalypse as a trope of sci-fi/fantasy. Perhaps it's because my generation was the last to grow up in a world in which it was a genuine possibility. (I vividly remember in primary school - probably at the age of about 10 - me and another kid were chosen to debate the advantages and disadvantages of spending tax income on Britain's Trident nuclear programme, compared to the NHS. Being 10 year old boys, we naturally came down on the side of Trident.) However, nuclear apocalypse is too decisive an event for a cyberpunk world; cyberpunk is about malaise, about decay, and about slow decline. A nuclear apocalypse is a watershed. In cyberpunk, there is no watershed - just a steady worsening.

I enjoyed the concept behind The Arabesk Trilogy, John Courtenay Grimwood's cyberpunk future, based in an Ottoman Empire which never fell. The execution was lacking (Grimwood, like Neal Stephenson, is one of those writers whose prose I actually actively dislike), but the idea was there. However, World War I what-ifs are a too familiar a point of deviation for alternate history, just like World War II and the American Civil War. There needs to be something less obvious and less obviously world changing. Subtle difference.

One possibility which I've often considered is that imperialism never failed. (I'm no imperialist, quite the opposite; but remember, this is about dystopia.) There is every reason to believe that it might not have, had the first and second world wars - its death knells - never happened. The major powers in the fin de siecle period were extraordinarily self-confident and strong, and ruled practically the entire globe. Without the wars, which broke down the great powers' economies and ushered in concepts such as human rights, that strength might have proved unshakeable and we might still live in a colonial world.

The key to all this is Austria-Hungary. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries two ideas were floating around Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his cronies, who were well aware of the problems which faced them (and which would eventually boil over with catastrophic consequences in Sarajevo in 1914). The first of these ideas was the complete reform of the Dual Monarchy into an entity known as the United States of Greater Austria - a federal state comprised of 15 separate autonomous entities for the various ethnic groups found within its borders. This may have served to satisfy the nascent nationalist movements within the empire - whose main complaint was lack of political representation - and placated terrorist groups such as the Black Hand. Hey presto! - no World War I.

The second idea was the elevation of the Kingdom of Croatia to the same level as Austria and Hungary - creating a Triple, rather than a Dual, monarchy. This would have been accompanied by greater regional autonomy within each of the three monarchies, and a far greater balance of power between all of the empire's ethnic groups.

The glory of alternate histories such as these is that they don't have to be particularly plausible. I have no idea if the United States of Greater Austria would ever have worked. All I need, however, is the knowledge that there was a slim chance it could. And then work from there.

Implications of this idea in another post sometime, maybe.

Societies of the Yellow City

The Yellow City is famous for its many cabals, societies, philosophical groups, and guilds of sages. Some of these are detailed below.

The Ipogo Philosophical School, mentioned here. This group aims to catalogue and categorise everything in existence, in order to create a new and more efficient language based on the fundamental properties of reality. They have at various times enjoyed patronage from the rich mercantile clans, and have grown wealthy and powerful from shrewd investments.

The Assemblage of Demarchists. This group, comprised entirely of slugmen, agitates for political reform - namely a governing council for the city with members randomly selected via lottery from the slugman populace. This form of democracy was long ago postulated by the political philosopher Fuhik Wè, who called it "democracy through sorting". The 'Sortitionists', as they are sometimes known, are considered little more than a nuisance by the powers-that-be.

The High Hunt. This secret society is said to be made up of some the sons and daughters of the wealthy elite. Bored, debauched, and dissolute, they raid the crabman ghettos along the coast for their own amusement, with the aim of cooking and eating whoever they can capture.

The Brotherhood of Celestial Interpretation. This group of human and slugmen sages study the stars and planets, believing that celestial movements influence the weather, tidal systems, and natural disasters. Their prophecising is currently much in vogue amongst the elite, and its members exert considerable influence over Yellow City politics.

The Clayshaper's Guild. Long outlawed, the practices of golem-making and re-animation have an ancient pedigree in the Yellow City. Its chief practitioners have grouped together into this loose federation, and in small clandestine meetings they discuss new techniques and methods. Rumour has it that its members have developed far beyond mere clay-shaping, and can now animate water, blood, light, and even the air itself.

The Blood of the Clam. There are dozens of gambling syndicates in the Yellow City, mostly focused around the practice of club-fighting. The Blood of the Clam is one of the biggest and richest. It achieved infamy some years ago when the son of one of the chief plutocrats of the Twelve Clans was found by the harbour with all of his fingers and limbs broken and a large clam's shell forced down his throat. His gambling debts were well known, and it is an open secret that The Blood of the Clam were responsible for his killing.

The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth

This is one of my favourite of Zelazny's short stories. It's set in a futuristic, semi-terraformed Venus with mighty oceans, where extreme sportsmen chase after gargantuan fish. (Gargantuan as in, kilometers long.)

From this story stems my abiding love for huge monsters in large bodies of water. (Although I believe there is also some deep psychic human terror of the sea, the ocean, and big lakes, which makes the Sea Monster trope especially interesting and frightening. There's a reason why things slumbering at the bottom of the ocean are scarier than those slumbering underneath a mountain.)

The best huge-monster-in-large-body-of-water is of course the kraken.

Kraken in Yoon-suin are demigods, worshiped by the squid men of the Great Blue Reef. Many are hundreds of metres long. They drift through the ocean, feeding on anything they can find - insatiable, horribly intelligent, cruel. The innumerable prayers and sacrifices sent their way by the squid men give them energy and power, and they grow fat with divine puissance. They grant fear- and pain-causing spells to their followers, and delight in the destruction these powers cause. And sometimes, when the call is strong enough, they can be summoned to the coast to feast on their worshipers' enemies.

Exoticism

In a post the other day I mentioned that I liked settings with non-European influences. This is mainly because, like many people, I'm just sick to death of what have become the 'standard' fantasy tropes, and since those tropes are (superficially) European in flavour, the desire to get away from cliche manifests itself in a liking for things that are not European.

On reflection, this is a mistake. Actually, it's pretty stupid for two reasons. First, 'Europe' is historically a geographic entity and not a geopolitical one. Second, medieval Europe is as exotic to European people today as medieval Timbuktu. In fact, modern English people probably have more in common with people living in modern Timbuktu than they do with people who lived in 11th Century England.

This was brought home to me yesterday, when I was reading through the Internet Medieval Sourcebook - specifically, the Formula for Conducting the Ordeal of Boiling Water. In case you haven't read it, I'll summarise the gist: the ancestors of modern Germans used to decide the guilt of an accused man based on whether or not his hand was burned by being submerged in boiling water.

The other legal texts make for equally fascinating reading. We have rules for marriages between a freedwoman and a serf, on the sale of daughters as concubines, on the murder of slaves (punishable by two years of penance!) and on, er...what to do about Jewish people. This was another world, and to claim it wasn't exotic is utterly bizarre.

And on its outskirts, parts of Europe probably had more in common with other continents than they did with the supposed 'European culture'. Consider the Highland Scots, tribal and stratified along clan lines, who seemed to fit in better with the Creeks and Cherokee of North America than they did with their Lowland and English neighbours. The Hungarians - Central Asian nomads transplanted to Central-Eastern Europe. The Castilians, culturally more similar to the Moors than to the French. The Lithuanians and Prussians, pagan tribes sandwiched between Christian powers.

It ought to be perfectly possible for people to come up with fantasy settings based on 'Europe' that are just as, if not more exotic, than Rokugan or Kara-Tur or any of the other 'non-European' inspired stuff that's out there. See, this is why I need to know more about medieval history...

The Monsters and Manuals Interview [#2 - Brian Murphy]

An occasional series of interviews with other RPG bloggers.

Brian Murphy is a wolf-breeder and turkey-shoot-stall owner from the town of Dead Weasel in Minnesota. As well as his many other pursuits, he is a reknowned expert on tobacco pipes and the author of the nonfiction bestseller Spitoons of the Wild West: 1854-68. His favourite food is marzipan and he once killed a man just to watch him die. His dream is to be the first man to travel from pole to pole via zeppelin, and he is the current butter-eating world record holder.

1 - Let's begin at the beginning. Can you remember your first gaming session? What happened, and why did it suck you into the hobby?

My first gaming session was December of '81 (I think). I was DM, after having read Moldvay's Basic thanks to leaving the light on in the hall outside my bedroom the night before. It was just bright enough to read by even with the light in my room out. My mother, brother, and father rolled characters, but my dad was the only one who really played. The guy has a PhD in Chem E, so I got right into the whole lateral thinking deal. When I described the black veins in the rocks of the Caves of Chaos, he asked what they were. I had no idea, so I asked him what they could be. He floated some suggestions, and the one I latched on to was coal. He then proceeded to powder the coal and use to, in effect, create a bomb to blast in the doors of the goblin warren.

My father decided he never wanted to play D&D again, because the game was too violent for his tastes. He did, though, do some free-form gaming with me on airplane trips later, mostly sci-fi stuff. I can only claim that first session as a moderate success, but even then I got a hint of the game's potential. And honestly, at the time I was crazy for anything with knights and dragons and all that in it. I'd already devoured C.S. Lewis’ Narnia books, and from there launched into The Hobbit, King Arthur, and Robin Hood. If the game had utterly sucked, I still probably would have played the living daylights out if it.

2 - Tell us about your first ever character.

Ho boy! I don’t remember his name, but I do remember he was a ranger. Yes, I started with Moldvay/Cook, but I didn’t get to actually play until I had AD&D. In his very first adventure, he barely survived the Palace of the Silver Princess, and I was quite annoyed when the awakened princess wanted the loot we’d gathered. And I remember thinking there was something fishy about the story she told us. I was probably twelve or thirteen at the time, so this guy didn’t have much personality. He did have a very cool magical repeating crossbow (we were ignorant of the Chinese design at the time) which fired bolts like a machine gun, and poisoned them on the way out. I just told the DM how many seconds I kept the trigger down for and he rolled dice behind the screen to tell me how many died.

The game skirted Monty Haul but never quite devolved into it. There were always challenges, but again, primarily of the lateral sort. Even after he had a castle/spaceship, my ranger was struggling to keep thieves out, convince his people they really needed to pay at least some taxes, and rid the sewers of annoying giant rats and zombies.

The moment I remember best was when he ended up finally facing down Loki, a character who had been a bit of a thorn in his side. Loki proved immune to poisoned crossbow bolts, but my ranger did have a girdle of giant strength at that point. So while grappling with the trickster god, my ranger ripped Loki’s arm off and proceeded to beat him to death with it. I seem to remember the attitude of the rest of the pantheon being something like, “Well, it was Loki, so I guess we won’t make too big a deal about it. But don’t get cocky!” ;)

3 - Have you been playing regularly ever since, or have their been long gaps in your gaming?

HUUUUUUUGE gaps. From about 5^th grade to 8^th I only got to play maybe once every few months. Mostly, I kept gaming alive by reading Dragon, mapping out dungeons nobody every explored, and daydreaming.

4 - What do you think attracts you to the hobby? Why this and not, say, cross-stitch or ice hockey?

Not much ice in south Texas and last time I checked out cross-stitch, there was a noticeable lack of scantily clad beauties and rubies the size of a man’s skull. ;)

Seriously, RPGs are a sort of crossroad for lots of interests of mine: reading, writing, puzzles, history, anthropology, fashion, science, nature, sex, mythology, sociology, architecture, travel, exploration, fantasy, sci-fi, and art. For the price of snacks, I can hit on all of those in a single four-hour session while wallowing in my joy of daydreaming, and I get to share it with other people, too. I really can’t imagine a better hobby.

And deep inside me there’s still a nine-year-old boy who’s just gaga over knights and dragons and Robin Hood.

5 - Is there anything about the hobby you strongly dislike?

Not really. There are some things I’d like to change. I’d like to play more, and get paid for doing so. But there’s nothing I strongly dislike about it.

6 - How would you introduce a newcomer to rpgs? Have you ever done so?

A few times, yes. The last time was with a girlfriend in college. I sold it to her as an Infocom game, but with a real person at the other end who wouldn't keep spitting back “You don’t see that here.” She created a whip-wielding magic-user for 2e who was heavily influenced by Indiana Jones, and I gave her an adventure that was all traps and puzzles. We had a blast, and last I heard she hadn't books and still had some interest in RPGs.

I think the old ways are best here. It *is* like a story or your favorite action movie, but you’re the main character, and you get to make the choices. How would you escape the cyclops, or sneak into Dr. Evil’s hidden undersea base? Does your character fall in love with the mysterious stranger with the jade green eyes or the childhood friend who has stuck by you through thick and thin? What would you do with your share of Smaug’s hoard? Answering those questions is fun. So is playing through the consequences.

7 - Do you hide the fact that you game, or do you live an "I am who I am" geek dream?

I couldn’t hide it if I wanted to. My new boss introduces me to everyone we meet as, “He was my DM in college!” ;D

8 - What would your 'desert island game' be? (That is, if you were marooned on a desert island with four other rpg players and you only had one set of rulebooks, which books would you choose?)

Define “set”. ;) If you’re going to hold my feet to the fire, I’d probably go with Moldvay/Cook, but I’ve always mixed it up. In my currently Labyrinth Lord game, I'm using a lot of Moldvay/Cook, the BECMI Creature Catalogue, 1e DMG and monster books (MM, MM2, and FF), yak folk from 3e, and my vast collection of Dragon magazines, as well as my growing collection of Fight On! issues. And that’s not counting all the resources on the web, like your page or Taichara’s Hamsterish Hoard, about which not enough good things can be said.

9 - Have you ever toyed with the idea of writing rpg material for money? Ever tried to get anything published? Ever self-published?

Thought about it and done it! I got my first rejection slip from Wolfgang Baur when he was at Dragon Magazine. It was for an article on designing adventures based around political intrigue. A lot of the ideas I talked about in that article are now are common practice in some games, things like relationship charts and paths of knowledge, but at the time I thought I was coming up with them for the first time. Mr. Baur was right to reject it; I was fresh out of college and wrote it like a college paper: dry and wordy. The friend I mentioned who made the Indiana Jones-esque magic-user later helped me whip that article into shape and it got published in KoDT. To date, that’s been the extent of my getting paid for RPG writing.

I was really excited about the OGL, but could never get into 3e. Without playing it, I really didn’t feel qualified to write anything, so I never did anything with it. I regret that a bit, but I don’t regret at all sticking with the 1e/2e mash-up I played.

10 - What would be your ideal soundtrack to a session of your favourite gamee? Pick three songs.

- 1: “The Road To La Coruna” from the Seville Suite by Bill Whelan

- 2: ”Riddle of Steel/Riders of Doom” from the “Conan the Barbarian” soundtrack by Basil Poledouris

- 3: “Sea of Miracles” from the “Record of Lodoss War: Chronicles of the Heroic Knight” soundtrack by Yoko Kanno

11. So your favourite game seems to be Moldvay/Cook (or mixed up Moldvay/Cook). Can I ask why? Is it just nostalgia, as your first game? It seems that most people tend towards citing their first game as their favourite, though of course there are exceptions.

Nostalgia is part of it. Just looking at that Jeff Dee, Erol Otis, and Bill Willingham art puts me in the mood to game. But I probably wouldn't have given the game a second look but for the old school renaissance. Like most, I couldn't see past the parts I was hung up on: race-as-class, hit points, the fact that an axe and a sword are almost identical in mechanical terms. The bloggers of the renaissance, especially Jeff Rients, James Maliszewski, and most especially Robert Fisher and Philotomy, got me to really see the potential for the old versions.

Now, that said, I think you can talk about old school DMs ranging across a spectrum. At one end are the purists who love the game just as it is. These are the folks who will argue for the beautiful simplicity of race-as-class and one die for all weapons types. At the other end of this spectrum are the tinkerers. They look at all that simplicity and see it as an invitation to treat D&D as a fantasy RPG construction set. I fall firmly on that latter end of the spectrum. When Mr. Maliszewski was talking about a swords-and-sorcery D&D project, which led him to start his Grognardia blog, one of his mantras was take what old D&D gives you, and then turn it up to 11. He was the first one I'd read who suggested that memorizing a spell should have side effects, which led to my list of secondary-powers and “leakage” effects for the magic-user spells. And it was in that same spirit that I started to think that if I was going to use descending AC and the combat tables, there was no reason for the numbers to march in order, 18, 17, 16, etc. all the way down. That was the inspiration for my rogue's funky to-hit tables. Wanting to play more with henchmen and loyalty was the inspiration for my gnome class. I've just about got a hierodule class written based on some tinkerings with the morale system, though that one has a few major issues that still have me stumped.

I love this ability to tinker and make the game your own. Based on some stuff from your blog and David Larkin's writing about Pendragon and other high fantasy themes, my LL game was originally going to be set in Cerilia of the Birthright setting. But I kept finding myself drawn to the artwork of Frazetta and Elmore, the mythology of ancient Mesopotamia and Babylon, and the sword-and-sorcery literature of Howard and Leiber and Wagner. As much as I've been enjoying Erikson's Malazan novels, finding a copy of Christopher Silke's Tooth and Claw set my brain on fire. I devoured it over a weekend and after that my course was set. The cool thing about D&D is how easy it was to change gears. With a system like True20, which I'd been tinkering with previously, that sort of change would have required a lot of work, but with D&D I just fiddled with the equipment lists and deities and I was most of the way there.

12. Ripping off Loki's arm and beating him to death with it! I've never heard that one before. How much damage did one blow of Loki's severed arm do? Are your games that wacky these days?

I think the arm did only 1-2 points of damage, but it counted as magical for the purposes of harming a god, and with my girdle of giant strength I was probably doing +6 to +8 on every hit. And 1e gods had like 100 or so hit points before they have their arms ripped off. ;)

As for being wacky, I dunno, honestly. Talking about the way I DM is difficult sometimes because to me it's like saying the sky is blue. A lot of my style started with that first game, with my dad powdering coal and turning it into a bomb and stuff like that. I don't think it's wacky, because to me that's what playing D&D is supposed to be like. So when Oddysey's Rukmini led the tarantella into the bed of amber lotus, I was more than happy to roll with it. It was a cool idea. Was it wacky? I didn't think so. I thought it was clever. Are hedonistic elves and dragon-worshiping pirates wacky? What about carnivorous riding-birds and hierodule PCs? They're certainly not any wackier than clockwork modrons or the Lady of Pain. To me, that's just D&D turned up to 11.

13. What prevented you from getting into 3e?

3e was a real heartbreak for me. It promised everything I'd always said I'd wanted in D&D: an end to level-limits and weapon restrictions, a robust skill system, and monsters who were as detailed as the PCs themselves. And I was just buzzing with the thought of the OGL. I was all ready to create a campaign and adventures and turn them into products for sale.

Instead, I found the game horribly unwieldy. There was so much stuff to work with, stat blocks that took up an entire page, characters who were supposed to be heroes but could barely demonstrate competency in skills I'd grown confident in by the age of 16, and that's not even getting into the unintended consequences. 3E was the last nail in the coffin of my trust in professional game design. 2E's Tome of Magic nearly derailed my college game. At that point, I should have seen the writing on the wall, but it was really 3e that finally convinced me there was no set of rules I could play out-of-the-box without some serious tinkering.

So I played some 3e but never ran it as a DM. It turned out everything I'd always wanted was nothing like what I enjoyed running. I'd play in a 3e game today with the right DM, but I don't see myself ever going back to run it. What I want these days are toolkits to make the games I'm excited about playing. That means games like True20, GURPS, and Moldvay/Cook D&D.

Brian would have us believe that he looks like this:

Spelljammer Star Trek

Apropos of my post the other day, I was thinking about how you might map the Star Trek: The Next Generation crew to D&D classes and races for Spelljammer. Sounds like the geekiest thing ever, I know, but before you get the urge to point and shout 'nerd!' I should stress that I was thinking about it while watching a game of rugby, drinking six pints of Guiness, making millions on the stockmarket and having sex with three cheerleaders.

Anyway, so, here's the original series crew:

Kirk - Human fighter.
Spock - Half-elf mage.
Bones - Human cleric.
Scottie - Dwarf bard.
Uhura - Human bard.
Sulu - Arcane.
Chekhov - Tinker-gnome.

NextGen:

Picard - Human fighter/mage.
Data - Thri-kreen.
Geordie - Tinker-gnome.
Worf - Giff.
Troi - Human (level 0).
Tasha Yar - Scro.
Guinan - Illithid.
Riker - Human fighter.
Wesley Crusher - Halfling thief.
Beverly Crusher - Human druid. (Yeah, I know this doesn't really work biologically.)

I think Klingons would definitely be giff. Vulcans and Romulans would be elves. Cardassians are dracons, and Ferengi are clearly neogi. The Borg could be beholders. Not sure what Bajorans would be, but they're boring anyway.

I didn't give much thought to DS9 or the horrors that followed, but Janeway was definitely a scro. And Harry Kim was a kobold.

Penetrating so many secrets, we cease to believe in the unknowable. But there it sits nevertheless, calmly licking its chops.

Things I'd like more knowledge of and/or skill in, so that I could generally Game Better:

• The probabilities of getting each score on each of the major dice and the common combinations;
• Geography in general - particularly how climate, ecology etc. combine in biomes;
• How to draw properly;
• How to make nice looking tactical maps;
• Mythologies of the world;
• Fantasy, scifi and horror literature;
• Linguistics;
• Medieval history and economics;
• Space.
  

My Magna Carta

Cool post at Uncle Bear the other day:

In the book No Plot? No Problem? author Chris Baty discusses creating two “Magna Cartas” before tackling a fiction project. One is a list of things you like about the genre, what makes you want to read it (or, in the case of a roleplaying game, play it or run it), the things you’ll want to include. The object is to keep you focused on the things that will make it fun to work on. The other Magna Carta is for things you dislike and want to avoid. You make this list to remind you where you don’t want to go, cliches to resist and paths of least resistance to avoid traveling. It’s a process I apply to worldbuilding and campaign building, and a topic I cover at length in the forthcoming Worldbuilding 101 book.

Here's my list of likes and dislikes in a role playing campaign setting.

Likes

Non-European influences
Capricious gods, spirits and suchlike
Characters who relax the way people relax in the real world (sex, alchohol, drugs)
A cold-hearted universe
Ancient ruins
Mutations of some variety, and/or fear of mutation
Good old British fantasy malaise/fatalism
Dwarves having disproportionate influence

Dislikes

Elves and their imitators
Anachronistic real-world modern-day politics/beliefs
Characters who kick ass all the time or who are overly awesome
Magic item economies
Gods who dispense quests
Giving new names to traditional fantasy races to try to appear innovative. If it's an orc, call it an orc, for God's sake!