Thursday, August 4, 2011

An Unprecedented Event

As the title says, I’m thinking of doing something I’ve never done before in my role-playing career: run a game in a published setting. Now don’t get me wrong, I’ve never “turned my nose up” at campaign settings, on the contrary, I’ve kept up with pretty much every setting published since 2e…but, I’ve never ran a game in one. I always felt it was “bad form,” as Captain Hook would say, to use someone else’s world. To me it was saying that their world was better than mine and that my ideas weren’t good enough…which is bullshit, of course, but I’ve always been a bit “off.” I have used published adventures in my campaigns before, I've made quite a nice BECMI campaign based around The Keep on the Borderlands and The Isle of Dread, but I've never used a whole campaign setting. Anyway, I’m bringing this up because I’ve been reading the 4e Forgotten Realms campaign guide (mainly to see if it is as bad as everyone says it is), and it has really sparked my interest in running a Realms based game…something other campaign guides usually fail to do. Now the Forgotten Realms and I have never been “close.” I always preferred Dragonlance, Ravenloft, and Dark Sun to the Realms, but I’ve always respected it as a nice, fleshed out world. I have to admit, I like what WOTC did with 4e Forgotten Realms (I will blog more about this later), and I think it’s a nice starting place for DMs to enter into the world. Not to mention, WOTC is releasing a new NEVERWINTER campaign setting which will just add more to the Realms.

So, next chance I have to DM a 4e game, I think I will run a campaign set in the Realms!

2 comments:

  1. Don't do it! I've started to use published settings before, but always after three sits in I change my mind when I start feeling constrained. Nothing wrong with published settings, but unless you are a setting person (and you don't appear to be, seeing how you've never used one) I don't know if I'd risk the investment.

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  2. That's a good point and something I'm sure will happen. I think I may just test the waters a bit using the Loudwater adventures from the campaign guide. Idk. Honestly, I do not plan to run a 4e game anytime soon, so I'll probably never get the chance to do it anyway.

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