Would people buy this?

[Jarulf]

The way Outpost 19 is written and the way the background and setting are presented sparked my curiosity.

Would people buy books (adventures, locations) that are reasonably detailed about the specific topic (presenting the adventure and location), but leave the larger background (the rest of "Known Space") somewhat vague? Books would use the same same implied setting (as decided by Chaosium, and obviously dependent on genre), maybe with connections to earlier books, but the larger details would be left alone. In a way it would be similar to the Thieves World books and similar shared world anthologies. Books, or rather PDFs could be pretty much any size from a 4 page Inn to 120 page overview of a city.

I think this is something I'd be quite interested in seeing. I might not buy every book, but I'd definitely pick up some.

I probably didn't explain this too well, I blame wine and the lateish hour,

[Harshax]

I certainly would.

[rust]

I would buy "generic" or "semi-generic" adventures and campaign material,

provided I could fit the material into my own setting without too much

effort.

In fact, this is what I plan to do with Outpost 19, and I am glad that its

setting is "open" enough to enable me to fit it into my campaign easily.

By the way, there is quite some "generic" science fiction location material

available, from descriptions of starships or spaceports down to lists of fu-

turistic weapons.

Good adventures like Outpost 19, however, are very rare, and it would be

nice to see more of that kind.

[Jarulf]

Sometimes I get the feeling that published settings provide almost too much information. While a lot of detail can be great (and often makes for eminently readable books) it can also be a bit much to digest on occasion. It can also make a specific adventure or setting harder to adapt to your own campaign if it differs much from canon.

I doubt many buy Gloranthan adventures to run them in a different setting.

But a more loosely defined world would allow writers more freedom (and less need for brushing up on obscure knowledge) to produce fun and useful material. At the same time, GMs and players would find it easier to adapt the books to their own campaigns.

It would make writing books easier, hopefully resulting in more books that might have a wide appeal.

[tzunder]

Yes! Yes! and Yes! again.

Simple, local, and with enough gaps at the edges to bolt it onto, under, over or next to another similarly small package, or even into a more detailed wider setting.

It's the old D&D approach of building a world dungeon by dungeon.

[Jarulf]

It's the old D&D approach of building a world dungeon by dungeon.

I actually had the old Greyhawk pamphlet and various 1st ed AD&D modules in the back of my mind as I thought about this.

There are companies that make both generic maps and old style dungeon crawl "modules" for download and/or POD, so there is probably a market for ready-to-run or almost ready-to-run products. Not that I have anything against the big detailed worlds, but as Chaosium is lacking in that respect this could be away for them to generate a few extra dollars (which means more stuff to buy for us).

And making a new Glorantha isn't something you just sit down and do on a coffee break.

And with a large selection of shorter cheaper books, I'd very likely spend more money at Chaosium than I do now.

"Oh, a new nice looking little town book, 30 pages at $5. Yeah, sure worth a look."

[Ottomancer]

The monograph I am working on, Jovian Nightmares, although written primarily as a Call of Cthulhu supplement to support Cthulhu Rising, is deliberately structured so that if the mythos elements are removed (and this should be easy as I am trying to contain such stuff all in one Keepers-only chapter) then it could be used as a generic pseudo-hard sci-fi setting for BRP.

I will be buying Outpost 19. I love sci-fi me, especially if written for BRP. :thumb:

[rust]

I love very detailed worlds, but I prefer the ones I built myself. Unfortunately

my creativity is limited, and I like to offer my players background details in a

"style" different from my own, something I would not have thought of.

Therefore any "generic" material really would be most welcome as an option

to make my setting more interesting and rich than I could create it on my own.

[Al.]

Cool adventures? An open setting?

Isn't that what the old rpg magazines always promised us? And (with a couple of noticeable honourable exceptions) completely failed to deliver.

I've spent £s on (old) White Dwarf, Adventurer, Last Province, GMI, Arcane looking for these.

Will I buy Outpost 19? Hell yeah

Will I buy The God Machine? Hell yeah

Would I buy others? Hell yeah

Would they be more interesting and useful than another quirky gameworld tm? Hell yeah

Or a compilation of yet more rules which I'll only forget anyway? Hell yeah*

Is that man spot on about too much tedious detail? Hell yeah

Al

* Plus I like the look of what SQs turning into and there's less to remember so if I do run with d100s it'll be with that and any rulesmods for BRP will be no use to me anyway

Edited December 17, 2008 by Al.
honesty

[Newt]

Although not specifically for BRP, I'm designing the Shattered Lands and associated adventure books with this sort of fuzzyness in mind. Enough background if you want to run it in the native setting, but setting light that you can effortlessly translate it to your setting of choice.

I went along this road because I'm getting frustrated with how closed some settings (I'm looking at you Glorantha) are getting these days. Not only does overdetailing the setting make it hard for GMs to adapt it, it also makes it hard to get into and kills off the joy of improvisation.

[Jarulf]

Isn't that what the old rpg magazines always promised us? And (with a couple of noticeable honourable exceptions) completely failed to deliver

Maybe something like this could be started outside of Chaosium (with their permission obviously) as a pdf/pod magazine focused on a few shared bare bones settings.

For some reason I find myself looking directly at Nick and our Norwegian host. Magazines have been mentioned... Yes, yes, I know you're busy.

If not a magazine, someone really should try to convince Dustin et al that this would be a good idea.

What Ottomancer and Newt are doing with your respective books sounds very interesting too, and I is assume similar to Outpost 19 in that respect.