Things to Avoid In Set Construction

[RyanW]

Originally Posted by malloyd

Not quite. There's direction of rotation relative to direction of revolution, and the difference between the same and opposite directions there isn't one you can interpret the other way by flipping an arbitrary sign.

Ah, right you are. So you would probably get something like Venus, which is sometimes recorded as spinning backward, and sometimes as spinning right way around but being upside down.

[ak_aramis]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

Yes it never ceases to annoy me when television and movies treat "herbivore" as "harmless" when the most dangerous large land animals are all herbivores.

Amongst the worst: moose. They do millions in damage annually. (Some of it to airplanes, most of it to cars.) Despite what Mythbusters tested for, moose rarely get hit from their side with the front of the car; the usual point of contact is the side of the fender... often just in front of the front door. (Yes, they run into the cars. Sometimes head-on, sometimes ramming the side.) They're too stupid to realize that big thing charging in their general vicinity is NOT a competing bull moose...

Oh, and they can kill pedestrians with a single kick.

http://www.nytimes.com/1995/01/15/us...in-alaska.html (Note: The professor is Dr. Bruno Kappes, not Dr. Bruce Kappes. I know him. I was a student at UAA at the time, and had taken Psych 101 from Dr. Kappes a few years prior.)

[Hans Rancke-Madsen]

Originally Posted by ak_aramis

http://www.nytimes.com/1995/01/15/us...in-alaska.html (Note: The professor is Dr. Bruno Kappes, not Dr. Bruce Kappes. I know him. I was a student at UAA at the time, and had taken Psych 101 from Dr. Kappes a few years prior.)

"Cet animal est tres mechant; Quand on l'attaque il se defend."
("This animal is very wicked; when you attack it, it defends itself.")

Hans

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by Nymdok

Avoid Reinventing the wheel - If you want elves, throw em in there and call em elves.

One can do the same with religions. Instead of inventing shallow fictional copies of real-world religions such as Christianity and Norse polytheism, use the real ones, to benefit from their depth, richness and diversity.

[The Colonel]

Originally Posted by Peter Knutsen

One can do the same with religions. Instead of inventing shallow fictional copies of real-world religions such as Christianity and Norse polytheism, use the real ones, to benefit from their depth, richness and diversity.

One of my bugbears (and not the 3HD type) is when setting creators spawn the traditional fantasy henotheism by trying to create a polytheistic culture based on their own experience of monotheism (or at least monolatry) ... it is (at least in my experience) highly dissonant to have congregations worshipping only one deity from a pantheon and thus having religious experience limited to a very narrow portfolio.

[Anders]

Originally Posted by ak_aramis

Amongst the worst: moose. They do millions in damage annually. (Some of it to airplanes, most of it to cars.) Despite what Mythbusters tested for, moose rarely get hit from their side with the front of the car; the usual point of contact is the side of the fender... often just in front of the front door. (Yes, they run into the cars. Sometimes head-on, sometimes ramming the side.) They're too stupid to realize that big thing charging in their general vicinity is NOT a competing bull moose...

A Møøse once bit my sister... No realli!

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by Peter Knutsen

One can do the same with religions. Instead of inventing shallow fictional copies of real-world religions such as Christianity and Norse polytheism, use the real ones, to benefit from their depth, richness and diversity.

Personally I can only stomach that if you are actually using Norsemen. Either you've set your game in historical Europe plus fantasy elements or you've abducted a bunch of Norsemen to live in your fantasy world and you still need to account for the religion of the natives.

Even then, I've never once seen an RPG setting who went that route and actually used anything more than a shallow fictionalization of a real religion. I've seen more depth from the "shallow fictional copies" than the "real" ones.

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by RyanW

Ah, right you are. So you would probably get something like Venus, which is sometimes recorded as spinning backward, and sometimes as spinning right way around but being upside down.

The observable effect is "is the solar day longer or shorter than the sidereal day?". This doesn't matter a great deal, especially if the difference isn't large (i.e. when there are a lot of days to a year), but at least it's a difference you can see, and imagine matters to somebody, if only the guy trying to construct the calendar.

[Whitestreak]

Frankly, when it comes to building the physical world, there are quite a few game supplements and other sources that spell out most of the things mentioned above.

I know that the various iterations of Traveller have step by step instructions for doing this.

[lwcamp]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

Don't draw rivers on your map that cross mountain ranges.

The Columbia River cuts through the Cascade Mountains. The Snake River cuts through the Blue Mountains and Salmon River Mountains. The Colorado River cuts through those bit of uplift mountains at the Arizona boundary of the Colorado Plateau. The Rio Grande flows across part of the Sierra Madre Occidental. Note that some of these rivers are associated with some of the world's most spectacular canyons (Grand Canyon, Hell's Canyon, the Columbia River Gorge), as would be expected.

Luke