New Official Content?

[DouglasCole]

Originally Posted by DaosusLeghki

To be honest, it's Viking flavored, not a historically accurate Viking setting. All the technology and religious assumptions from core DFRPG are satisfied, for example. It's very easy to port all the material to another setting, or to downplay the Viking aspect. Replace "Jarl" with "Lord" and so on.

This was pretty much the mission for the Viking-flavored "paint" used for the setting. Some DFRPG stuff isn't satisfied 100% of the time - towns aren't ALWAYS safe, but there's usually "this one settlement is Town; everything else is potential adventure-land" that's around somewhere. In the area around Nordvorn, for example, Town is Longbru (Long Bridge).

But it was definitely supposed to be "buy boxed set, and here's a shiny viking wrapper to put around your box to make it more flavorful."

Or, your characters could come from or visit the undefined lands in to the south, which could very well be a homebrew setting.

I think Nordlond is a really good setup for homebrewing. A lot of the base assumptions are set and there are some hard-coded locations to reference. But if you wanted to drop in a town in the Hunted Lands or the Dragon Grounds (or anywhere, really), it won't upset anything.

In fact, there should be a LOT of smaller settlements on your way from place to place. The official nordlond map only labels towns of 1,500 people or more, or cities of 5,000 or more. Anything smaller than that (and most are) are left as an exercise for "what do I want here?"

[mburr0003]

Originally Posted by sjmdw45

But the other versions sound like enough fun that I would gladly pay $30 to read someone else's random tables and ideas and maybe run DFRPG Oregon Trail or DFRPG After The War in parallel with DFRPG Dark Lands.

What you're positing is a kind of After the End 2 The New World's chapters 1 and 2, where the book would go over the basic Fantasy genre settings briefly and then give advice on how to build for them in a DF/RPG campaign.

Someone put out the PKitty signal and let's get him thinking on this! (Or Kromm, he's spent a long time thinking about the DF setting, but PKitty wrote AtE2TNW...)

[sjmdw45]

Originally Posted by mburr0003

What you're positing is a kind of After the End 2 The New World's chapters 1 and 2, where the book would go over the basic Fantasy genre settings briefly and then give advice on how to build for them in a DF/RPG campaign.

Someone put out the PKitty signal and let's get him thinking on this! (Or Kromm, he's spent a long time thinking about the DF setting, but PKitty wrote AtE2TNW...)

Disclaimer: I do not own After The End 2 so maybe I've misunderstood you and you already know everything I say below.

I actually am talking about something more concrete than merely "advice." Advice on building a setting isn't a setting. Worked examples are better, hence the emphasis on scenarios, lists and random tables. Ideally you want something that someone could sit down and play a game with, an hour after reading the book.

Obviously the reader is invited to tweak to their heart's delight, but... it's the difference between advice to make curses interesting, and Goblin Punch's list of curses (https://goblinpunch.blogspot.com/201...20-curses.html) and how to break them. The general advice is still given, as an introduction to the worked example, but having the specific list of gameable ideas such as being cursed to be "Delicious. Monsters that enjoy eating people will prioritize attacking you. Can be cured by eating an entire manticore." is extremely valuable.

Dungeon Fantasy Companion 2 did a great job of this with villains: we can all make villains, but it's still useful to have King Drogo right there on paper with a ready-made rationale for why he doesn't do delves himself and how he's eventually going to stab the PCs in the back. A King Drogo and Lady Aimara have gone right into my own stable of Mr. Johnsons, and a hypothetical settings book could use a condensed version of their hooks with a page ref to DF Companion 2 for more details.

Imagine one paragraph a la

King Drogo: powerful, wicked, and greedy thug. His two brothers died in a dungeon delve but Drogo walked away rich and unharmed, albeit secretly cursed. He used magic to redirect the curse onto his own father, killing him, so he could inherit the riches of the whole kingdom. Is still obsessed with the riches of the underworld, but is genuinely loyal to his own underlings (as opposed to his subjects in general) so would prefer to have hirelings do the delving instead. He can always tax away the best of the riches, or even take it by force. See DFC2 page XYZ for more details.

Now imagine a whole book stuffed with ten paragraphs like that per page, eight pages for each of three different potential variants on the basic Dungeon Fantasy town-is-safe trope: town-is-tyranny, town-is-sick-of-war, and town-is-frontier. (Or maybe you can come up with better variants!)

If I had that book I think I'd be running three different campaigns concurrently and loving it. :)