As we progress through developing and designing Catalogs based on our archives of existing materials and exploring other ideas, it became apparent quite quickly that Scope management is an issue.
By Scope I mean the breadth and depth of time, organizations, lineages and background details that can make a setting feel overwhelming for a new Game Master or Player. It’s also the core of what makes a setting feel alive.
Our group matured exploring Greyhawk and Realms. Both were deep lore developed using two different philosophies: small-to-large and large-to-small.
Small-To-Large
This is the classic hexcrawl standard. Start in a small area, explore and detail it through play and move to the next neighboring hex. This grows a world and setting slowly without requiring the macro details important in connecting everything right away. Greyhawk grew from the titular City’s immediate vicinity and expanded as players journeyed to other locations. Start in your village, draw the map as you go.
Large-To-Small
This is the classic whole onion style of creating a setting. Start with creation build a detailed history connecting everything and drop the players into an already live-in world with legends, villains and world level movements of power. Realms began with well established histories and regional nations with defined political interactions. The world map exists, you’re quest could take you anywhere.
Our Quandary
Because much of our experience and homebrew materials began as AD&D 2 Ed, our current revisions cover the full gamut of large and small settings. We needed a way to track how deeply they might inter-relate in our development cycle. Then you have settings that have logical breaks that would justify ‘sourcebook’ treatment or seemingly stand alone details that are actually a deep dive into a nested catalog structure.
Digging into these we came up with a few specific examples.
Catalog + Sourcebook
The Hidden World Catalog leverages a huge list of inspirational material and our existing homebrew information to generate a massive setting with interconnecting lore across 6 Lineages, 10 Organizations, 24 Professions, 6 Power Traditions and 48 Threats. We added a disclaimer indicating that “Not every lineage, power, organization or threat has to exists in every version of this setting” as a sanity check.
Game masters should probably not try to run a game with every option enabled by default. That would likely become unmanageable and frustrating. Currently, the default state of GHW would indicate that every option is on by default forcing players and game masters to cope with the mountain of details involved. This led to the idea of the classic ‘sourcebook’ style breakout for options and the creation of a few ‘Campaign Loadout’ criteria for option combinations that create manageable starting points.
This is a pretty standard TTRPG tactic to break up large ‘core’ content into separate optional ‘sourcebooks’. It should work well for the Hidden World Catalog and will help us keep from overwhelming early adopters. For early publishers sourcebooks were a financial driver, for us it’s just a logical organizational breakdown.
Spatial Relationships
What if you have a massive continent or world covered in peer nation/regions that are each a justifiably dedicated Catalog on their own? Keeping the relationships and timelines straight would be pure chaos. This will require a ‘Setting’ or ‘World’ master Catalog where the separate but connected Catalogs can be designed and coexist. This is a very relatable Realms/Greyhawk style issue. With all the nations and even City States becoming their own Catalog while the overall World Catalog tracks every interaction.
Chronological Relationships
The World of Andrus has three very specific Eras that inter relate but can be considered as wholly separate Catalogs due to cultures and events taking place. Like the Spatial Relationship above, this requires a ‘Setting’ or ‘World’ master Catalog with Era specific Catalogs offering details for the state of the World when one Era ends and another begins. It sounds like a small distinction, but it’s actually quite significant.
These situations required us to expand our development framework allowing for more involved design elements and deeper details in more compartmentalized topics.
Coming Changes
Expect to see some deeper breakdowns of our Catalogs as we work back through the current content and make decisions between ‘sourcebook’ or sub-Catalog style break downs.
Of Note: NONE of this will alter accessibility to any of the existing content. We actually hope it lowers the entry threshold for those interested in exploring the settings and our system.
