Dungeon Fantasy needs a bare-bones setting

[Kromm]

Originally Posted by Rob Crawford

A question about the DF 12 Ninja (I don't have that book, because I don't care for the whole "ninja mystique") -- would the assassins from the "Assassins's Creed" qualify as "ninja" according to the book's criteria?

If you like! As written, the ninja in DF 12: Ninja aren't Japanese. All the Japanese terms, including the word "ninja" itself and the gear names, are really just code for "the secret language of assassins." It was easier to use Japanese – a language that author Peter Dell'Orto knew – to provide the necessary contrast in an English-language book than it was to make up a whole language! This doesn't imply that you need Japanese society, culture, language, etc. in your game world before ninja will make sense. As written, ninja will never make sense, and the only thing you "need" is a secretive brotherhood of assassins.

Put another way, you don't need a Celtic culture and people running around speaking Goidelic languages to use bards and druids. Your knights don't have to ride around on horses brandishing lances, nor do your martial artists have to look like Bruce Lee. Clerics and shamans aren't in tension, and don't imply "settled temple-builders" vs. "tribal mystics and psychopomps." And wizards don't have to wear pointy hats. DF is kitchen-sink fantasy, so ninja are just there. They can be Middle Eastern-looking guys who write their names in script like this الطائر ابن لا أحد instead of East Asian-looking chaps who write their names in script like this 小杉 正一 if you want!

Originally Posted by Sunrunners_Fire

The DF books come with an implied default setting.

Yes, they do. The implied setting has at least one feudal polity headed up by the King; is dotted with quasi-medieval towns that feature inns, temples, Merchants' Guilds, Thieves' Guilds, halfling gangsters, and Town Watch; includes a Frozen North for barbarians to come from, a Mysterious East for martial artists, mountains for mountain elves, forests for wood elves, deserts and swamps for lizard men, etc.; is home to dragon-blooded descended from dragons, elder-spawn descended from Elder Things, and so on; holds ruins associated with Elder Things, Evil Runes, and Squid Cults; and supports a cosmology that includes an Ethereal Plane, an Astral Plane, a Spirit Realm, Dream Worlds, Elemental Planes, a Heaven, several Hells, and an Outer Void. Among other things. More detail than that is likely not wise, as it's kitchen-sink fantasy, which always works best when left vague.

Originally Posted by gjc8

So given that there's an implied default setting, where's the harm in making that setting explicit?

Of course, the other question is whether there's sufficient demand for that. On that, I'm inclined to defer to SJGames' experience in the industry.

Our experience selling settings has been terrible. The critics like to say, "Wah! That's because we don't like your settings!", but of course we have no guarantee that they would like our DF setting, either. As for harm, see my response to Greg 1 at the end of this post.

Originally Posted by demonsbane

Greater specificity inevitably conveys greater limitations.

There is much truth to that, although it's possible to be specific in the window dressing (see my big list above that mentions the King, dragon-blooded, etc.) but vague in depth.

Originally Posted by Sunrunners_Fire

Forums are sound and fury with little substance.

This is quite true. I cannot and will not name products, but several things published in recent times were tests to see whether we could use forums feedback to justify publications. Let's just say that there were far more failures than successes. The 5-10 people who can get excited about any arbitrary topic you could name here do not seem to be very interested in/good at selling the game to 20-40 gamers apiece. If we have to do the selling, then we'll aim at the market we know we have, which is chiefly people who buy crunch (systems, stats, etc.) rather than specific settings and adventures.

Originally Posted by Greg 1

As long as the setting is optional and other books in the series are not written around it, it isn't a limit but optional detail.

Things aren't that simple, unfortunately. If we don't write future material around a setting, then we face accusations of "not supporting the setting"; in fact, the standard criticism of most of our settings is not that they're bad but that they're unsupported. If we do write future material around a setting, then the detail is no longer optional, and we get the limitations that demonsbane mentioned and may well do the DF series real harm. And if we try to be all things to all people, we have to greatly increase series output so that we can publish generally useful content alongside setting-specific content . . . and frankly, we lack the resources to do so. Having no setting does the least harm here, as our sales records clearly show GURPS players rarely putting their money where their collective mouth is when it comes to settings. And that isn't surprising: Why would any real percentage of customers who've chosen a generic system get behind one specific setting?