No, I’ve never applied it to a published setting, because I’ve never used one – all home grown stuff. But it would work just as well, generating a list of divergances from the published setting to accommodate your fundamental change. It’s that “smoothing out of the inconsistancies” that the second half of the article is about. And, fundamentally, Yes, what you end up with is a customised version of the original setting that incorporates the changes that you want to make – a version that is unique to your campaign and contains the changes that you want to make – your “original vision”.

You mention the vision working logically back to your central campaign premises. Can you describe what a campaign premise is, and what it looks like? Or link to where you’ve covered this in the past?

For example, the premise of a book, according to Ray Bradbury, is to ask What if? And write a 200 page-long answer. :)

Just wondering what you do for a premise and how you record/organize/refer back to it.

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Have you ever used this overall method of relations, logical consequences of elements, and justifications of circumstances with a published setting?

Thinking about the current published setting I’m using, and others I’ve used over the years, I suspect your systems and these products are incompatible, unless one took the time to smooth out all inconsistencies. And I bet this process would take a long time and result in a wholly new setting in the end.

Without having done it using the methods in this series though, I’m just guessing.

@Lugh – Yes and No, Lugh. I do follow this meticulous process, it’s not an April Fool’s Day joke; but I don’t normally do a chart, just a list of events each of which lead logically to the next – more like what’s in the example.

I’ve never had any experience with shared setting creation, though it’s been mentioned a time or two, here and there; I find the idea fascinating but it’s not something that this process generally takes into account. If such a collaborative process was viewed as determining the various core elememts of the campaign, though, this process could still be used to explore causes and effects.

It might also be worth mentioning that I chose the example that I used because it illustrated the process of making a change and then wanting to change one specific consequence. Actually, a number of changes. The Drow in the campaign have an established but fragmented history, the elves have an established but fragmented history, and the Dwarves have an established but fragmented history, and none of them completely reconcile with each other; the only solution was to have the nature of each group evolve over time. Since it had been established in the first Fumanor campaign that the Drow tunnels were located beneath the Dwarven Mines and seperated from them by a long and dangerous journey through regions inhabited by a number of weird and dangerous creatures, it seemed beyond belief that the Drow – who have been established as plotters and schemers – would not at some point try and use the Dwarves as pawns. Doing so gave me the opportunity to explain a number of other contradictions within the campaign, like where Adamantine and Mythril come from, and what turned the Dwarves from something more typical of what you would read in the PHB into a martial race closer to Star Trek: Next Gen Klingons – and isolationist Xenophobes to boot. So, every time they cozy up to another race, they get kicked in the teeth and (eventually) betrayed; and they are trapped in between two hostile forces. That works for me as an explanation! Which is not to say that there can’t be glimmers every now and then that things might have gone down a different path, such as the the peace treaty that is reached at the end of the slice of history used as the example.

I also find it interesting that you assume that the “initial vision” is almost solely the province of the GM. Have you ever tried a game with shared setting creation? Prime Time Adventures is one of the most extreme examples of this. When you all sit down, the only pre-conception is that you are working to create a TV show. Everything about the show is decided as you play the game.

For a less extreme example, you can look at the city creation rules for the upcoming Dresden Files RPG, available in abbreviated form as a PDF currently. Yes, you can argue that the “initial vision” is the licensed Dresden Files universe. But, the rules explicitly have the players create the city they are going to inhabit as part of the character creation process. Maybe I should wait to see what you place in the “evolution of vision” box before going any further with this argument.
.-= Lugh´s last blog ..Bestest. Wife. EVAR!! =-.

It’s “pursuit” not “persuit.”

Otherwise keep writing, it is fascinating.