The important questions:
>Have you ever hosted or played in a nonstandard setting? What are it's challenges?
The personal comments:
I've been toying with an underwater setting. I might claim writers block but I can't decide on some things. For humans I can imagine humans becoming what they are when they discover fire, and therein the ability to efficiently break down food outside their bodies. Do merfolk have a legendary moment like that? What allows them to become intelligent in the same or similar way? Am I asking the wrong questions, maybe I should have asked another board. I don't want to handwave this, but its at least interesting to think about.
On a more important note my potential Burning Wheel players are pushing for a mega-city setting. Ravnica springs to mind. I've not GM'd before, and I'm inexperienced (for lack of a better word) in that I've never really played with a good group. As far as I know everyone in my group is inexperienced in the same way. I guess I'm not sure what to ask in regards to this. I think I just want more stimuli roughly around these subjects so I have more to think about.
>>46241689
If you want a mega city, there's always Uberstadt.
Put /tg/'s collective mad genius to work!
>>46241799
I'm assuming this is it?
https://1d4chan.org/wiki/%C3%9Cberstadt
I'll give it a read to say the least.
Pic unrelated
>>46241689
At the end of the day it's events and characters that will make or break the experience for your group, not worldbuilding trivia.
My most honest advice is basically to avoid any setting that is so different from the average fantasy setting that a lot of the "experience" the players have of the genre becomes useless.
An underwater setting definitely risks falling under this category since the extra dimension of movement can be really tricky to wrap your head around (how to act like someone who is used to it) and it basically makes tons of fantasy tropes useless. All sorts of crafts and technologies becomes impossible underwater, visibility becomes low, it's a lot darker, castles are completely pointless, and so on. On top of that, the worldbuilding aspect of not only figuring out underwater "equivalents" of things, but also how they would make sense takes a lot of effort and work that doesn't directly translate into more enjoyment for people.
The more time you have to spend on teaching them about the quirks of your setting, the less time is spent on the good stuff.
A mega-city setting on the other hand keeps players in the loop, they know what cities are like, they can picture endless streets, inns, towering castles and buildings, bustling markets and crowds etc, just on an even bigger scale, and all the quirky setting specific stuff becomes a lot easier to "get". Street gangs are large and powerful, craftsmens guilds can be important political bodies with their own armies, the homeless are an entire people with their own customs and networks, the sewers is not some smelly getaway route but an entire underground realm of crumbling ruins from ages past, rivers and terrible dangers. Entire adventures can be had traveling along rooftops or exploring huge foundries or insect farms and stuff like that. The mega city keeps their genre knowledge useful while giving it a new spin, the underwater one will be tons of work without a proportional payoff.
>>46243008
Thats a reasonable answer about the underwater stuff, well thought out too, but something I'll probably ponder without using.
As far as the mega city stuff goes, my main concern is that if theres only one big city, the idea of travel might be restrictive, or somewhat strange. I suppose instead of separate towns there'll be districts.
When I imagine travel I imagine wide open areas, or deep forests. Long travel in a cityscape is somewhat alien to me or at least it loses some of its charm. Actually maybe if their characters end up feeling that way they'll try to travel outside the city.
>>46243275
>Thats a reasonable answer about the underwater stuff, well thought out too, but something I'll probably ponder without using.
I meant to say that I'd ponder the setting without using it. I'm tripping over my words.
>>46243275
There's no reason why traveling has to mean traversing wilderness or uninhabited places, but there are ways to capture some of that flavour even in a city setting.
You might be forced to move through whole regions or districts that have been depopulated or devastated by fires or earthquakes, gang rivalry or rampant epidemic. Some place might have been abandoned because it turned out to be unstable and buildings crumbled, so now nature has reclaimed it and it's full of outlaws and strange creatures. They might be forced to travel underground through giant caverns lit by glowing algae on walls that were once part of older buildings and temples. Maybe they're traveling by flying above the city and stopping at the tallest spires to resupply. Maybe districts of the city are separated by large bodies of water.
The only limit is your imagination and and there's no such thing as "it'll end up weird" it'll end up exactly how you want it to as long as you put in some effort.
I don't really see why you start threads like this if you don't want to use the advise you get or if you're already opposed to the city idea for flavour reasons though.
>>46243399
I didn't mean to discount or discredit what you were saying. I've listened, and its good advice. You've given good advice. Sorry if the confusion was because I tripped over my words.
I'm not opposed to the city idea for general flavor reasons. The characters my players made seem to have travel tenancies or forms of wanderlust, one of them without explanation other than "wanting to see the world". I'm hoping the cityscape if its a single mega-city can have a reason for being a single mega-city without being too resistant about traveling beyond it.
Thats my core concern.
>>46243517
Or I could scrap the idea of a single mega-city and just have one large city to begin with, as was intended. Conversing with them, they became convinced that was the only city in the world, so either their characters will believe that, or we can explore what a world with one city is actually like.
travel scenes in a mega-city could involve mass transportation. go watch The Warriors and then think about the equivalent of a subway system in your setting.
the underwater thing could work if you go simulation-lite and run a more casual game with your players. do a few things for flavor and don't spend fifteen years on some Tolkien-like project where you agonize over how the verbs in the Mer-kin language conjugate. and steal liberally from anyone who's done it before, like Rifts underseas.
