u/Toerambler

What do you actually need before you can run a game in a setting you've never seen before?

Been chewing over this and wanted to ask people who actually sit at the table a lot.

Say someone hands you a setting cold (could be a published book, someone's homebrew notes, whatever) and says "run something in this." What's the stuff that actually has to be there for you to feel like you can do it? And what turns out to not matter as much as people think?

A few things I have going back and forth on in my mind:

Do you actually want the history of a place fully nailed down, or is it more fun when some of it is genuinely unresolved and up for grabs?

Does it bug you when names and slang in a setting feel randomly generated vs actually meaning something?

Have you ever picked up a setting that looked amazing on paper but was a nightmare to actually run? What was missing?

Mostly just trying to figure out where the real value is versus what's just padding. Any input gratefully received.

Not fantasy dressed up as history, an actual documented event, squeezed into one session.

Liudprand of Cremona’s disaster of an embassy to Constantinople in 968 is one I keep thinking about.

Guy gets humiliated by the Byzantine court, they even take his robes off him, and he goes home and writes this furious account of the whole trip. Could run it as pure court intrigue, nobody draws a weapon.

Dallas motorcade, Nov 22 1963, but not the shooting, it’s about the hour after. Everyone’s got half the story and there’s no way to check it.

Iranian Embassy siege, London 1980. Six days before the SAS finally went in. I remember being a kid annoyed that the John Wayne film got cut off for the newsflash. Could run the whole thing from the negotiator’s side, door stays shut the entire session.

Berlin Airlift too if anyone wants something slower. No fight at all, just whether the numbers add up before winter hits.

What’s your pick?

What are your thoughts on RPGs set around a single historical battle?

Instead of a long campaign, the whole game is focused on one battle. You play a commander or other important character and your choices before and during the battle affect the outcome.

Would you call that an RPG, a wargame, or something in between?

I’d be interested to hear whether you’d play something like that, or if you’d rather have a wider campaign.

It does strike me that characters advancement is difficult, but maybe not impossible.

Everyone knows Waterdeep, Minas Tirith and Ankh-Morpork.

Which real historical city do you think would make an amazing RPG setting?

And I guess that begs the additional question, what does amazing mean to you in this context?

I’ve realised years after a campaign I rarely remember the dungeon.

I remember the village.

The innkeeper. The local gossip. The blacksmith with a grudge. The annual fair. The old soldier everyone knew.

What little touches have made a town or village feel like a real place in your games?

I played Traveller at school in the early 80s and absolutely loved it. The little black and red books were probably responsible for many hours that should have been spent doing homework.

I spent evenings designing ships, creating worlds and dreaming up adventures. Ran my first campaign one summer holiday sitting in a friend’s garden.

Desperately trying to make them follow the hook I gave them whilst they did everything but.

I’ve recently come back to Traveller after all these years and the books are stunning. The artwork, production values and support material are leagues ahead of what we had back then.

But it got me wondering.

Is modern Traveller actually better, or am I just remembering being 14 years old with endless free time and a huge imagination?

For those who’ve played both, what do you think modern Traveller gained, and what did it lose?