Currently the RBH setting is pretty loose. You play young professional adventurers in a strange land. You kill things and steal treasures for the purpose of going home and retiring as a rich and famous adventurer.
That's the important stuff. But the color is detached like an old boxer's retnas. I'd really like to do away with my lame-ass "Asian flavored like duck sauce on a porkchop" line and really have a solid setting.
Edit: Mark suggested a bit of setting in his post "Classes, Part II". I'm going to post here some suggested alterations. I expect we can toss this thing back and forth until we have a powerful little paragraph of a setting.
Edit: I keep reading and re-reading what I wrote there. And I like it less every time I read it. I think the problem is that I wrote up some legendary material that only tangently connects to the characters and the world. Lemmie try again, getting right to the heart of the matter this time.
Mark said:
Magic destroyed the world, so we developed Tech – and used it to destroy Magic. Ages later, Magic came back again.
I suggest this:
In this land there is both magic and tech. Both are ancient and poorly understood. Where they differ is their nature. Magic's nature is that of pure energy. It is both creative and destructive. Tech's power is information. In finding secrets and keeping secrets.
Now, that doesn't quite fill in all the color we're looking for, I think it hits the important part of the setting on the head.
3 comments:
I think I made Tech just as mystifying as Magic. I think both need to be either used as a Weapon or to Transform the Field of Battle but everything else should be a plot element.
I think the important differences for me are going to be the lack of mass production and how the general masses view technology.
I would want to start with the idea that the lost technology in the RBH world is not the technology of our world. It may be a dark reflection of our technology, but players would have to throw away any assumptions about what can and cannot work.
Then I would want some strong guidelines about what technology might be still out there. Guidelines that would both inspire players to come up with new ideas, but that would still comfortably confine them to the dusty-broken color.
And then all of that could inform how the Tech character class' abilities might work.
If my restrictions work for you, then I say we move forward.
Sounds great to me!
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