I wonder when DF will do non-European fantasy

[evileeyore]

Originally Posted by Mailanka

What are the chances that the GURPS setting writers will now hit exactly the right tone? Or is there a right tone? Sometimes it seems to me, as Kuroshima points out, that some people want Phil Masters or Bill Stoddard to write their campaign for them, but that seems, to me, an impossible task.

That's also why I think it'd be best as Pyramid articles, quick lenses, short setting descriptions, light rules touches.

[Phil Masters]

Originally Posted by Mailanka

So it's either colorful cultural background, or you're a numeric artifact?

Uh, yes?

Well, a cultural background of some sort. "Colourful" is a bonus, because colour sells better than black and white.

Originally Posted by Mailanka

Given that DF has not had "colorful cultural backgrounds" up until now, how well has DF faired without "colorful cultural backgrounds?"

Totally false assumption. DF has a cultural background; cod-medieval Europe with some Renaissance bits and a few classical twiddles. Which is a perfectly good and fairly colourful cultural background, but doesn't preclude offering a few alternatives. It may well be that having more than one of these in play helps people come up with unique snowflake characters, because even if Fred's Zulu warrior and Jim's Viking warrior have nearly identical stats, everybody's mental images of the two warrior guys will be very different.

Originally Posted by Mailanka

Citation needed. I do this sort of thing all the time, so I'm either underestimating my skill, or there are quite some people overestimating the difficulty of GURPS.

Ah, proof by personal incredulity. I can do that too.

The fact is, if you do this thing all the time, then you spend quite a lot of time doing this thing. Many people don't have that sort of time. Other people may have the skill and the time, but lack the confidence. Other people again may just want worked examples to get them started, or be interested to know if they've missed any tricks.

If SJGames never published any material that people could do for themselves, they wouldn't publish any GURPS material at all. Very little of what's written for the line is all that intellectually demanding to create, once one gets started and does the research. Getting started, doing the research, and putting the results down in comprehensible form, is what GURPS writers get paid for.

Originally Posted by Mailanka

But given that it would be a pretty small document, how does this fly with your previous statement that it would be "harder than I think?" Given how trivial you make it sound (that sounds about right to me), and given that books like GURPS Japan already have revised spell lists, a bunch of fun monsters, and GM advice for getting the flavor right, all you'd really need to do is adjust the templates (and there's example templates right in the book to guide your modification) and the monsters to suit the power-level of DF. Is that really as hard as you said it was in your previous statement?

For a start, 20-30 pages is simply a commercially viable minimum. Actually, I think a decent attempt at this sort of subject-matter would run to the high end of that range, or a little longer. But I'll leave the numbers there for the sake of argument...

Small is not the same as trivial. The GURPS PDF line is full of small books, and actually I gather that the company would like more. Each represents less work than a big book with similar information density. They still represent some, non-trivial amount of work, for which, it turns out, a reasonable number of people are prepared to pay money.

Originally Posted by Mailanka

I don't think so.

I do. So there.

Re-engineering the sort of quasi-realistic, low-key cultural specific material that appears in most 3rd edition culture/setting books into the high-power, action-oriented framework of 4th edition Dungeon Fantasy really doesn't strike me as a small task. Maybe you can adapt three '90s GURPS supplements to DF use before your first coffee of the day, in which case, good for you. Other people are different, and their money is just as good.

Originally Posted by Mailanka

As an aside: I'm worried that the GURPS line is beginning to divide: the standard line, which has books like Monster Hunters and Action, where people borrow them and modify them for their given campaign needs, and the DF line, which seems full of people who need books, specific for DF, for everything. They need a monsters book, because the piles of monsters published already for GURPS aren't DF enough. They need setting-design books, because GURPS Fantasy isn't DF enough. Now we need a DF Japan and a DF Arabia, because Japan and Arabia aren't DF enough.

Worry as much as you like, but judging by the sales figures I've seen for my own work, the DF line sells rather well by GURPS standards. Clearly, people want this stuff, and don't regard creating for themselves as trivial. Well, not so trivial that they aren't prepared to pay someone else to do it for them.

Originally Posted by Mailanka

Given that settings don't sell well at all, I'd be surprised. I will give you this: DF has something the other GURPS materials don't, and that is assumptions. Since you know what you're writing to, and what you're writing to is popular, a DF setting might sell better than a vanilla setting. Still, given the troubles THS and Banestorm have...

Settings don't sell that well, and there's good reasons why the company's submission guidelines discourage people from bombarding them with proposals for new setting books. (Most of them would probably be cookie-cutter jobs with one implausible twist each. I don't blame Kromm for not wanting to spend all his time explaining why people's pet campaign worlds really wouldn't turn into the next big thing.) But that's not the same as not selling at all.

I only have access to my own sales figures, but going by those for my own setting books (which the company were happy to publish), some settings books do okay, some are a bit disappointing. It's presumably a matter of catching enough people's imaginations, and that remains a dark art. And I don't know where you got your ideas about Banestorm and Transhuman Space, but from what I've seen, Banestorm actually did okay, and the company is still happy to look at proposals for ancilliary books for that setting. Transhuman Space could sell better (I wish it did), but it's not a disaster; you'll note the the sub-line is still considered active, and indeed we've just published a new TS supplement within the last month.

But in any case, culture-books for Dungeon Fantasy wouldn't be "setting books" as usually imagined; they'd be ways of adding colour and variety to the fuzzy DF meta-setting, with the option for people to focus things down to settings for their own games drawing heavily on that cultural material. I personally think they'd do okay, if anyone wants to write them.

[Mailanka]

Originally Posted by Phil Masters

I do. So there.

And with that, you blow away all of my arguments. I tip my hat to you, sir. You are truly the king of the internet.

[Phil Masters]

You're the one who resorted to disproof by personal incredulity...

[Mailanka]

Originally Posted by evileeyore

That's also why I think it'd be best as Pyramid articles, quick lenses, short setting descriptions, light rules touches.

I wouldn't even bother with setting descriptions. I don't think DF Ninjas bothers to describe what world Ninjas exist in (if it did, I missed it). You put "Ninjas" on the front, people know what you're talking about. You create an article with a samurai (knight), geisha (bard), onmyōji (wizard), repeat the spell-list choices from Japan (possibly edited to be more appropriate to 4e and DF in general), and you're done. People already know what it is. They don't need a description of Not-Kyoto or Not-Edo. That's too much detail for a DF adventure anyway.

Where you run into what I would consider a serious problem, worthy of substantial word-count, would be monsters. Several people have pointed out that they need more monsters, and from what I understand, the monster books do sell well. And when you're going to an exotic locale, it's not enough to just see the sights and hear the descriptions ("The castles aren't big stony european things, but those Japanse castles with the sloping roofs! And he's not a king, he's a daimyo, and this is not a kingdom, it's a province" "Oh, okay, if you say so.") It's by interacting with the setting. Therein lies your problem with a DF setting book: 90% of the stuff you'd put in it, most people wouldn't care about. Villages are for selling stuff, landscape is for transversing to get to the dungeon, kings are just ways of getting quests, etc. Most of it doesn't matter.

Except the monsters, and maybe the loot. Monsters and loot are the way DF characters most often interact with a setting. You go into a crypt? You fight skeletons. You go into the sewers? You fight giant rats. You go into the cloud cities above the Titan mountains? You fight sky-giants. The history of the crypt, the logistics of the sewer and the geography of the Titan mountains are largely irrelevant. But the monsters are not.

And if you made the giant rats and the sky giants and the skeletons all basically the same, the players will be disappointed. They should feel different.

The same is true if they go from Not-Europe to Not-Japan or Not-Africa. This is a different realm, with different rules. It should feel different, and that difference will primarily be in the monsters, and monsters take a lot of work.

I suspect if you created bestiaries that drew from other cultures, and paired them with those little pyramid articles, 90% of your demands for this (to whatever level those demands are) would largely be satisfied. They would have the added advantage of creating more monsters, which would please those who just want more monsters for the sake of more monsters. DF players seem to have an insatiable demand for monsters, and creating a good DF monster is trickier than creating monsters for other games.

[evileeyore]

Originally Posted by Mailanka

Where you run into what I would consider a serious problem, worthy of substantial word-count, would be monsters.

Agreed, Monster Books should be books.

[The Colonel]

Originally Posted by evileeyore

Agreed, Monster Books should be books.

TSR seemed to do very well out of their compendia of setting specific monsters for AD&D2... I recall an Arabian one, a Japanese one, several for more pseudo-European settings and there may have been a Mayincatec one as well...

[Bruno]

Originally Posted by Mailanka

DF players seem to have an insatiable demand for monsters, and creating a good DF monster is trickier than creating monsters for other games.

One of the things I treasured the most about my D&D Insider subscription was Adventure Tools' big database of monsters. And then they stopped updating that, but I still love it and mine it for ideas.

[Tinman]

Originally Posted by tbrock1031

So if someone was to write Dungeon Fantasy Monsters: Monsters of the Orient/the Amazon/the Andes/the Himalayas/the Congo/Mongolia/Polynesia/India/the Middle East/Australia/etc, yeah, I'd snap those up in a heartbeat.

Yes. Me too!

I also would snap up Adventures or Mini-Adventures, like MoFD, with Beastearys of associated monsters. In fact I'd like the adventure books even more than "just monsters" books.

[LoneWolf23k]

Originally Posted by tbrock1031

So if someone was to write Dungeon Fantasy Monsters: Monsters of the Orient/the Amazon/the Andes/the Himalayas/the Congo/Mongolia/Polynesia/India/the Middle East/Australia/etc, yeah, I'd snap those up in a heartbeat.

Well, someone could just do an update to GURPS Fantasy Bestiary, and then do sequels.