Saturday, July 9, 2022

Defining a setting in Four Images

Adding detail is easy; taking it away is hard.  There's a value in distilling something down to its simplest elements, stripping away all else to reveal the bones underneath.  One of the hardest posts on this blog to write was the very first one, where I tried to summarize the entire concept of this setting.  Like it says above, this is:

A 1700s post-apocalyptic hopeful frontier fantasy setting for roleplaying games.

I saw a post from The Theoretical GM where he distilled his entire setting down into four images, and I thought that made for a great challenge.  So here's Signs in the Wilderness in just four images:

I'm not sure if these images convey all the concepts I was hoping for, but here's what I wanted to get across: the era of muskets, ambush and skirmish warfare, contact between different kinds of people, a big world full of wilderness to explore, canoes and travel by water, religion, ruin, and a North American setting.

If you've got a setting of your own, I'd love to see what four images you'd pick out.  Drop a comment below or send me a message on Reddit.

2 comments:

  1. Hey, thanks for the shoutout! I think you picked some great images to correspond to your setting, too. The first, with the ship in the ice, is especially evocative of exploration being both dangerous and alluring.

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  2. Hey! I did this for my setting after reading your blog post. I couldn't decide on a 4th image, so I just picked 3. Here's the link: https://asunnygreyhawk.blogspot.com/2022/07/a-setting-in-3-images.html

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