One of the best things about tabletop roleplaying games is the freedom to imagine and present any setting that you can imagine. This is especially important to remember when it comes to making your own setting stand out from the generic.
For years, I’ve been a fan of generic roleplaying systems. During that time, however, I’ve always found it quite hard to tempt players to try something that was outside of either a known intellectual property (e.g. Star Wars or Conan) or disconnected from a specific published RPG setting (e.g. D&D’s Forgotten Realms or Traveller‘s Third Imperium). An additional problem has been that creating a compelling reason to come and experience a home-brew setting is also tied up with having the time and energy to do the home-brewing, so to speak.
With the advent of solo roleplaying in my life, I am discovering that I can overcome the problem nicely by home-brewing at my own pace and for my own pleasure. In the long-term, I can develop setting ideas that “float my boat” and potentially see them morph into playable social games over time. Worse case, I just have a game on my own: no harm, no foul.
Reality As Malleable
When I first read Mage: The Ascension, way back in the ’90s, one idea struck my imagination and profoundly changed the way I view games:
Reality is fundamentally malleable.
In my understanding, reality is not a fixed entity but rather an ever-shaping and re-shaping form; the perception of real is driven by consensus. Tracking this idea across to my gaming, settings and worlds for roleplaying became open (once again) to whatever I wanted to include.
This was not a new thing because the early Old School worlds had mixed all sorts of ideas and technologies… but it was revolutionary to the way in which I approached my Gamemastery because I was no longer afraid to experiment.
Recent months have seen me return to this idea all over again: is there a way to build something fresh by allowing that which is familiar to morph and change into something fresh? I believe that the answer is yes.
Re-Shaping Settings
Serene Dawn is my near-future SF setting. It’s quite innovative in some areas, such as the nifty FTL travel and the concept of Proving Teams exploring in the style of modern sports teams mashed up with reality TV shows. That said, it’s quite prosaic in areas too.
Reading through the Insight RPG rules, a rather nice set of generic rules that run on d10 mechanics (and, by the way, offering a great Kickstarter for the Insight Fantasy books), I was struck again by the strength of my personal desire to do a near-modern supernaturally charged conspiracy game. The rules resonated with my past playing World of Darkness (probably the d10 mechanics) but also clashed with my desire to get some laser fire laid down in the corporate halls of the future.
Bam! There it was: malleable reality!
Why not blend those ideas together? Mash it up. After all, creativity is 99% smashing unrelated ideas together to construct something new.
And that’s my point today – why not just reshape something you already know?
You can tell players the gist in the same way that movie directors pitch new films: it’s like X-we-did-in-the-past mixed with Y-idea-that’s-new. They’ll grasp the basic idea and you’ll be home-brewing before you know it. That’s what it boils down to. It’s no more complex than you make it.
Create some characters. Form a scenario. Have at it!
Game on!
