Dungeon Fantasy needs a bare-bones setting

[Peter Knutsen]

At the very least, Dungeon Fantasy needs a list of the languages within the setting, both living culture languages, special languages (Elemental Language, e.t.c.) and ancient languages. It's the kind of thing that some players will demand to be told about up front before they create their characters, and the kind of thing that an inexperienced GM will be unable to deliver.

I'm thinking the best solution would be a pseudo-European setting with a few major countries analogous to England, France, Germany, Spain and Italy, each with their own language, and a few common ancient languages (analogous to Latin, Greek and Arabic) and half a dozen obscure ancient languages (analogous to Egyptian, Babylonian, Sanskrit and so forth). Largely similar history as Europe, with an old empire that split into two parts, then collapsed due to barbarian invasions.


Likewise, a master list of all Hidden Lore specializations would be good, because it prevents the GM from inventing new ones to thwart the players. The DF1 and 4 PDFs already refer to a lot of specializations in their templats, but a definite statement that these are all that there are unless the GM explicitly says so before game start, would be good. Or if a few more are needed, then include them in the list in the setting PDF.


Basically, there are a bunch of character creation questions that aren't answered in the PDFs published so far, and leaving it up to GM decision is doing a disservice to inexperienced GMs, because either they don't know that they have to make those decisions before gamestart, or else if a player demands it they will not be able to make good decisions that can stand throughout the campaign.