Lately, I've been thinking about the lore of my campaign setting and how it's already started to change from how I had initially planned. The main reason for this is that my current campaign began out of playing one-shots that I only placed in the World of Dragonwrath after a handful of sessions already occurred. This isn't a huge problem or anything but it has made me rethink a lot of the things I previously established.
The main difference between session lore and what I had typed up on my pc is that the various good races (humans and demi-humans) are much friendlier than I had initially wanted them to be. There's been some changes on how I view the gods and alignment as well. Originally, what I was going to do was restrict players from playing demi-humans until they had met one so that they'd have a general feel for what they were like and I wouldn't have to give them a handout on racial descriptions (I tried that before and nobody seemed to read it).
The problem is that I still wanted to run games while I was developing this campaign setting so I chose to run one-shots. However, these one-shots naturally grew into a campaign because the same cast of characters would return for different adventures. Eventually, I placed the characters in the World of Dragonwrath since I wanted the players to be able to visit the town, explore the wilderness, etc instead of just starting at the dungeon but by that time the World of Dragonwrath had become something else. Essentially, I retconned the lore that I had typed up on my pc.
So now my campaign setting has become much more generic since I've just been using the B/X rulebooks to run my game and haven't established many details about the world. Right now, the campaign scope is incredibly local and only 2 settlements have actually been visited, those being the town of Dragonwrath and the village of Badwater. Outside of this, the players have been kept in the dark regarding a majority of the lore other than what is implied by the rulebooks (elves like to frolick in woods, for example). This actually helps me quite a bit though since even though my setting has technically changed for me, to them they will have only known this version of Dragonwrath.
Another reason why I haven't had to establish a lot of my own lore during sessions because so far, the party has pretty much just been concerned with survival (and treasure) and when your primary objective is survival, you aren't always the most interested in the specifics of your religion or why humans get along with elves. All you're trying to do is to make sure you don't end up like one of the various corpses you find throughout the dungeon.
One more thing is that I've actually really enjoyed leaning into the generic side of fantasy. I read a blog post a while back about the implied setting of OD&D and I can definitely understand what they're talking about since I'm basically playing through the implied setting of B/X (although maybe not, since the Expert Rules do include a wilderness map that I'm not using but you get my point). I think the main benefit of it is how easy it is to just start playing. Before when I tried to run campaigns, I'd get caught up in trying to explain different things so that my players' characters weren't complete blank slates upon character creation and would understand parts of how the world worked. This way has been much more successful for me though and it's a lot of fun developing the setting both through and alongside play during sessions.
Plus, if I don't know all the details about the world it means my players definitely don't and so there's a bit more mystery to the world which I really like. Something I feel like a lot of really cool media ends up getting ruined by, is the lack of mystery. Eventually everything gets explained and there's nothing left to wonder about. Now, I don't want to have the setting be completely vague but I'm definitely learning to worldbuild in a different way than I normally have. Another thing I should point out is that my players and I are still pretty new to D&D so the generic or implied fantasy setting we're playing in is probably more fun for us than it would be for rpg veterans.
In the next blog post I'm gonna talk about some of the new ideas I have about the setting that I think fit a bit better with the way I've run the game so far.
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