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| Day 15. |
Frame.
The best campaign settings are frameworks with space for the GM to explore.
The best scenarios are full of sharply focussed, easily parsed details.
Both of them act as a frame for a GM to build their game upon.
When the spaces between the frame are all filled in, the space for creativity is stifled in a campaign.
When the spaces between the frame are all filled in, the scenario risks being lost in a wall of information that inhibits its use at the table.
Taken to extremes, you end up with the intimidating wall of canon that well-developed settings such as Glorantha and Traveller can present to new GMs and players. Of course, the solution is to start small and make it your own, but there's always that fear that you may be doing something wrong.
Chris McDowall makes a very pertinent argument that the setting should serve the game, and not the opposite, in a recent blog post. His recent RPG, Electric Bastionland (which I reviewed here) is a great example of the setting lore being presented through the characters, a framework for creativity rather than a straightjacket of detail.
Give me campaign books like Rim of Fire, rather than the Spinward Marches. The former is a framework full of ideas and inspirations, the latter a detailed gazetteer that creates a vast, fully defined area (and actually contradicts other sources because there's so much detail checking it is a nightmare).
Give me a framework to excite my mind, to inspire creativity, to build upon.
15 August 2020
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