Knights & Knaves Alehouse

Philotomy Jurament wrote:Don't know if this was posted earlier, or not, but there is some detail about what the actual campaign setting is like, here:
http://worldsofempyrea.com/what-is-empyrea/

What Is Empyrea web page wrote:

• Empyrea is based on three premises: magic instead of Technology, a sentient but indifferent Planet who knows how everything can be in balance, and royals who place quality of life (for all) above unbalancing mass whims (like war and wealth).
• These premises have far-reaching consequences, and I have spent decades extrapolating the results and applying them to an entire continental society. (I have over a thousand chatroom game logs, i.e. my laboratory.)
• Our story is about Empyrea at its height. It is geographically constrained on all four sides, and Evil wants to spoil the party. But at the moment it’s a comfortable Realm, the sort of world in which your current player characters have thrived. They’ll find a second home in Empyrea.
• Empyrea is on the mysterious and isolated continent of Aquaria, east of Gygax’s World of Greyhawk™ setting. Until now, knowledge of this portion of the world has remained largely a mystery, as the broad and dangerous Solnor ocean separates the two. The continent is briefly described in the Advanced D&D® adventure “Egg of the Phoenix” (Mentzer & Jaquays, TSR Inc., 1987).
• Unlike others, Gary approved this personally. Empyrea combines both traditional fantasy and science fiction elements. Magic is dominant, but technology lurks. And it’s one Realm… this isn’t a cluster of medieval city-states like Greyhawk.
• Empyrea was settled by demi-humans (elves, dwarves, hobbits, etc) who fled from Greyhawk to escape the warring human states. A century later, human colonists arrived in the style of Columbus, intent to loot and conquer the new continent. The demi-humans successfully repelled their invasion and the humans were forced to live by their rules. The demi-human rulers are benevolant hippie types, who want everyone to live in harmony with nature, care for animals, and so on.
• Orcs were at one point treated as slaves by the civilized races, but have recently been emancipated. They are now struggling to build their own society so they can be accepted by the other races. Some of them want to get along, others want to return to their savage ways.
• The present situation is unstable. There is an evil army to the south threatening invasion, while to the north is a race of hostile giants. To the west, contact with Greyhawk has been cut off by an empire of giant squids that now rule the ocean.
• The world will include a magical art gallery where the game master can provide portals to other campaign settings.
• The setting is designed to be easy to get into and start adventuring in, so that players don’t have to read lengthy setting guides before playing. The core areas are very standard fantasy like you expect from D&D, the weird stuff is hidden in the background.
• The setting does not include an original pantheon.
• SPOILERS: Additional sub-plots involve orcs trying to be civilized, dragons deciding not to be adventurer-fodder any longer, an undersea race of giant squid who actually rule the planetary ocean, a Lost World right next door, giants who may have an off-planet heritage, and Immortal beings who might just erase everything and start over. But that’s all in the background, and won’t affect you… much.

Wow. That sounds, literally, about one infallibly-wise deer away from being Blue Rose. I've heard most of that stuff before spread across various sources, but seeing it all combined together (and also remembering Frank's old RPGA tournament "Gypsy" wherein as he tells it the PCs help a group of doppelgangers integrate into society and overcome the prejudices of close-minded townsfolk who view them as "monsters") it's clear that this setting isn't just not Gygaxian in flavor, it's something closer to the opposite of Gygaxian. It's no wonder Gary both made sure to specify that it was on the other side of the world from his Greyhawk and was quick changed the subject to talk about something else whenever anybody brought it up in later years

As it stands, after the initial boom of backers on day one and the trickle on day two, I think this thing has about run its course. I'd be surprised if it even get to 100k by the end of the Kickstarter. Maybe I'm wrong but I just don't see enough momentum to take this to the dollar amount they want for their funding goal.

T. Foster wrote: it's clear that this setting isn't just not Gygaxian in flavor, it's something closer to the opposite of Gygaxian. It's no wonder Gary both made sure to specify that it was on the other side of the world from his Greyhawk and was quick changed the subject to talk about something else whenever anybody brought it up in later years

I recall a thread at DF where, when future plans for Greyhawk were asked about, Gary mentioned potential projects by several writers. None of whom were Frank and none of which were Aquaria. It's there for those willing to go dig through that thread.

Cloak n' Dagger wrote:As it stands, after the initial boom of backers on day one and the trickle on day two, I think this thing has about run its course. I'd be surprised if it even get to 100k by the end of the Kickstarter. Maybe I'm wrong but I just don't see enough momentum to take this to the dollar amount they want for their funding goal.

Many rpg kickstarters ultimately get to 3x their three-day dollar amount*, with around as much $ contributed in the last 3-5 days as in the first 3 days (and the rest trickling in-between).

Unless this really, really loses steam, my money is on it reaching at least $150k. The wild card IMO is how many patron whales jump in. There's one already with a 10k+ contribution. Right now the contribution curve looks bleak, but it's super early, and whales (or any other backer spike) could push this over the top at the last minute. <Shrug>

* there are notable exceptions:

AS&SH 2nd ed never saw another spike like its opening day, and ended up at less than 2x its three-day dollar amount:
http://www.kicktraq.com/projects/180610 ... hart-daily

Numenara had a massive spike in the last week, ending at over 7x its three-day dollar amount:
http://www.kicktraq.com/projects/143390 ... hart-daily

Here is what I could find from the ENworld Q&A (Part 2):

Col Pladoh wrote:The would would be a complete globe with more continents and states thereon with contributions from Len Lakofka and Francois Marcela-Froideval/

johnsemlak wrote:This is very interesting. I wonder, would have you used the 'R" series (R3, Egg of the Pheonix, et. at. (republished as 112)) by Frank Mentzer and others to develop a continent opposite the Flanaess? My understanding is those modules were intented to have taken place in an undeveloped part of Oerth.

Col Pladoh wrote:The exact form of the remainder of the globe was not settled upon. I wanted an Atlantis-like continent, and possibly a Lemirian-type one. Likely two large continents would have been added. The nearest would house cultures akin to the Indian, Burmese, Indonesian, Chinese, Tibetan, and Japanese. Another would likely have been the location of African-type cultures, including the Egyptian. A Lemurian culture would have been based off the Central and South American cultures of the Aztec-Mayay-lnca sort.

Yes, that's it.

Another thought that occurs to me thinking about Frank's descriptions of Empyrea: he talks a lot about how his campaign world is 40 years old and has been playtested for the last 25, how he's detailed hundreds of years of history and has thousands of detailed NPCs and how much thought he's given to the ramifications of his scientific extrapolations, and so on, but one thing that I've never once (that I can recall) seen him mention is the players.

Stories from Blackmoor are literally all about the actions of the players, with Arneson seeming to have served mostly an administrator and referee. The memorable Greyhawk stories are also all about what the players did - Robilar and Tenser and Teric and Melf and Otis and Lessnard and Erac's Cousin and so on. Ed Greenwood's stories heavily feature the exploits of the Knights of Myth Drannor and the early explorers in Undermountain. Even Tracy Hickman talks about how Raistlin's personality came from one of the DL1 playtesters. And of course any of us when we talk about our games talk mostly about what the players did - all the crazy and unexpected stuff that screwed up our plans and forced us to improvise.

But not Frank. I don't think I've ever seen him talk about his players or anything they did during a game. In 25-40 years of play it doesn't seem that any of them has made a memorable or substantial contribution to his world or thrown him for a loop or caught him off-guard and caused him to rethink anything (except perhaps the balance-level of individual encounters).

Of course if you've seen any of his adventures that's not too surprising - none of them allow for any significant player-agency, they're all fetch-quests with the PCs doing the bidding of more important NPCs, and they all have fixed linear structures with no room for deviation. Even in he 80s Frank was infamous for filling his adventures with encounters that required the characters to use one specific spell or magic item to solve them as a test of "rules mastery" - literally, at Glathricon '87 when I played in Frank's "Dwarven Quest for the Rod of 7 Parts" as the featured AD&D tournament the DM warned us up front: "this is a Frank Mentzer module, so that means most of the encounters are going to require you to use one specific spell or item to succeed, so be sure to study your character sheet carefully."

I met a couple folks who were players in Frank's online group at NTX2010 and the only info I got from them was how lucky they were to be able to play with such a legend and how epic and detailed his world and adventures were. No in-game anecdotes, nothing about their characters, or any of the other stuff you'd expect to hear from someone who'd been playing in a multi-year campaign. Apparently these guys are all so awed and honored to be playing with The Frank Mentzer that they're all content to just be a passive audience and do what he tells them to.

The best thing about rpgs, at least to me, is that they're a group activity - that they're collaborative and improvisational and unpredictable when you get several people's imaginations working at once. That's the magic that Dave Arneson stumbled upon and that blew Gary Gygax's mind. But it doesn't seem to be that way for Frank. For him it seems to be all about his own thought-exercises and the story he wants to tell, and everybody else is just along for the ride.

Excellent post, Foster.

Yeah, my players have never given a rat’s ass about any setting details I provided, whether they were from a publication or lovingly constructed by me. But they forget nothing about what actually happened in the game—the spontaneous, the hilarious, the triumphs, the TPKs. Get them together and they will raucously recount the adventures.

In a way, I think that’s why we almost never talk about setting, here. Sure, we talk about Middle-earth and Hyperborea, and how they may flavor the game thematically; we talk about Judges Guild’s Wilderlands toolkits as eminently useful; you’ve got mini settings like Griffin Mountain or FGG’s Lost Lands which are aggressively built around adventure opportunities; and, yes, Greyhawk—but not the WoG folio/box itself with its map and politics and history, so much as, again, the adventures (though WoG does whet your appetite, especially the tantalizing hints of happenings from Gary’s home campaign, as well as the awesome adventure outlines in the ’83 Glossography).

I wasn’t sure what this means (from the Kickstarter):

Philadelphia PA, 1978: Singles and spouses gather to tell stories together in a game that has run for 2 years, half as old as the rules themselves. These are the new Role Players, choosing cooperative games over competition. They love the epic tales from Frank’s D&D® game...fun and exciting, the dawn of an era!

But, if I had to guess, I suppose it means Frank wanted the players to forfeit their creative agency in order to go along with his narrative, and he claims credit for popularizing that style of play.

This all brings us full circle back to DungeonDork’s early posts, in which he wonders WHY anyone would buy a campaign setting. A campaign setting devoid of adventure and anything really to explore.

One of the things that caused a big stink between Frank and DF years ago was EOTB's thread about how thieves should be played. Frank thought that thief PCs should play cooperatively (as opposed to lining their own pockets first on the sly), which is a fair opinion. Unfortunately, I think Frank could not stand the thought of anyone disagreeing with his opinion.

(I thought of this when I read "choosing cooperative games over competition")

I thought it was a valid question then and I still do now.
But I have to agree, it sounds like a cooperative storytelling sightseeing platform.
Everyone join hands and we'll walk with Mr. Wonka while he tells us about the wangdoodles and the vermicious knids. Maybe we'll catch a glimpse of the Oompa Loompas as they pour sugar into the chocolate river. It's mixed by waterfall, you know.

Here are some more quotes:

Imagine a game world that we all share, and one that you can shape. All subscribers can add their own designs to the official Worlds of Empyrea—realms that are mostly empty, waiting for you.

See your own inn or tavern come to life! Or is it a shop within a Royal City? Maybe it's an entire dungeon!

Your PCs will have plenty to do, despite the apparent ‘vanilla’ easygoing nature of the setting at first. Things are in motion, out there in the background. You’ll have time for a few dungeon adventures before issues land on your doorstep.

No weird or oddball stuff at first; as ‘vanilla’ as we can make it (up front). Later, you deal with Orcs trying to reach civilized status, Dragons who are fed up with being hunted, Giants who may be offworlders, and lots of other lurking challenges.

It seems to me he envisions that you will run some B-series module, or maybe a dungeon contributed by a subscriber, a nice vanilla D&D adventure, when all of a sudden you will be bombarded with wave after wave of some serious social justice issues. Not a lot to explore in these mostly empty realms, unless the subscribers write them, but plenty of socioeconomic situations to grapple with.

I cast Safe Space (10' radius - grants immunity from logic and dissenting opinions)

This is actually turning into something brilliant. All anyone needs to do is to sell a map with a fantasy-like name and then fill it up in a half-assed way. Then you tell those that buy your world that "they" have to fill in the gaps. It would be like selling comic books with blank pages...but include some colored pencils so the reader can draw the rest. Bravo...bravo...

RFlowers wrote:One of the things that caused a big stink between Frank and DF years ago was EOTB's thread about how thieves should be played. Frank thought that thief PCs should play cooperatively (as opposed to lining their own pockets first on the sly), which is a fair opinion. Unfortunately, I think Frank could not stand the thought of anyone disagreeing with his opinion.

(I thought of this when I read "choosing cooperative games over competition")

All this info makes that dust-up much less opaque now, actually, with Foster's post as a prism. There are lots of points of difference in how the two of us run campaigns, but this particular point of difference (cooperation uber alles) is critical for how he runs his.

If the PCs aren't cooperating in using their respective talents just right, they fail. There's no room for a thief as I advocate, because the victory conditions for the adventure are digital instead of analog; it's either picture or static.

On Writing: Kickstarter is a method by which you can help finance the creation of a product. If anyone is really concerned because this product has not yet been created, please wait and purchase it via your game store or online, which will be months after everyone else has it.
Time required: In practical terms, this may involve 400,000 words (400 pages). I can write 5,000 in an afternoon if I'm working from my notes (extensive and well-organized in this case), with a straightforward typing speed of 60-100 wpm. Thus, I can write the entire set in about 90 days or less, allowing for delays. But we actually have twice as much time (180 days roughly), and 3 or more staff writers, plus 10 legendary author contributors (several thousand words each plus location maps).
-- Frank

Apparently the time of some is so valuable that they will only do a first draft after absolute certainty of a level of demand they expect.

Which is absolutely fine. But then don't complain when people decide that's pushing too much risk into their court, and choose to wait those months. Who gives a rat's ass about a few months? "Ooooh...if I pledge money now I can maybe get it six weeks ahead of the gen con folks and everybody else. Or get nothing if any fail point occurs. Yep, I think I must have this vanilla fantasy world six weeks ahead of everyone else."

Also, I don't believe for a moment that Frank could tear himself away from Facebook to put in 90 straight days of manuscript development. I haven't been on FB for quite a while, but his timeline was prolific when I was.