James's change of opinion on using Earth as the campaign world?

My own position on the matter is changing because pretty all I read these days pretty much is history books, and things like Three Musketeers to get non-historical "adventure history."

A lot of my ideas these days are real-world based (the whole time period thing comes from Solomon Kane is cooler than Conan, and I'm beginning to think it's not just because of the general milieu, but because Kane did things like sail with Drake), and some of the stuff I'm working on is civilization-based urban adventure rather than "dead" location-based adventures like most of my earlier stuff.

I think Vornheim gave me the tools to be confident to attempt more of that (note that Pembrooktonshire itself was a remote and isolated location itself), but in basic issues of culture and feel it's coming down to, "Why make up an entire civilization from scratch when there are rich ones from real life right there to use?" so I can just get on with the adventure itself. And if specific historical things are acting as triggers for ideas, why translate them to some imaginary land which, if the adventure ends up being published, someone would then have to translate into their own campaign?

If I set an adventure in a large city that's some imaginary version of London but not actually London, I don't assume somebody is going to use drop such a large city as-is in their campaign. In a home campaign cities of such size would already be placed and known so the adventure would be adapted to fit the campaign.

Why make that poor Ref go through the extra mental calculations of "Oh he's talking about sorta-London, but in what way?" instead of just saying "It's London!" which I figure gives a much better basis for home-campaign conversion.

(any of this make sense or am I babbling?)

And as I said in my con game yesterday (I did my first run of Monolith yesterday), "The biggest town nearby would be Boston... wait, was Boston even founded by 1633? Oh hell with it, who cares, yeah, Boston."

To answer the question, I'd rather have a module set in 16th Century Germany than "the fictional country of Augstrafen which feels like 16th-century Germany."

Pretty interesting direction for LOTFP.  Treading more and more in Call of Cthulhu's space with period settings and weird horror stories, but with mechanics that are familiar to a much larger audience.  Makes sense to me, I've felt this game is perfect for a low key Lovecraftian campaign (regardless if you use Mythos creatures or 100% custom HPL-inspired creatures).

Will we be seeing a LOTFP historical setting, or will the tweak to the direction just be more strongly implied in the future modules?

My head exploded with the awesomeness of a 16th century Weird D&D game in America - you've got border forts and small isolated colonies, foreign intrigue, hostile natives, and a whole wilderness frontier on the door step - and an area amenable to a blend of 'sandboxing' and 'urban crawling'.  You've got piracy on the high seas about to enter its golden age in the Spanish Main, and the exploration of distant jungles in Central and South America.  Decadent Europe is about to crumble under the weight of religious strife.

The "end-game" for such a campaign would need to be quite a bit different than standard D&D (look, we built a castle!).  It's not hard to envision lots of one-shot adventures in that kind of setting - I want to think a little further about how such a campaign could be structured.

Last edited by Beedo (2011-09-08 17:25:17)