Paizo Backdrops - A new product line?

[Brent Stroh]

This came up in a thread on the AoW forum; since my reply was off-topic over there, and somewhat lost in the real topic of the thread, I thought it might be useful to get more opinions on it here in General Discussion.

Erik Mona wrote:

A dream situation would be not just to do a hardcover, but to do whole books based on the key locations (Diamond Lake, Free City, Alhaster) and fill them with lots of advice on how to keep the PCs on track and what to do when they wander off it. That's a lot to hope for, though, so it's almost not worth considering.

Hmm. This actually sounds pretty cool. I can't be the only GM who finds a lot of campaign worlds over-developed to the point of paralysis. I have no interest in running a Forgotten Realms campaign because of the sheer amount of canon, for example. (Yeah, I'm anal. Moving on...)

How about the Paizo Publishing Backdrop series - an ongoing series of 64/96 page softcovers that focus on creating a believable, fleshed out, specific place for a campaign? Include the major NPCs, and a handful of adventure hooks, but not necessarily any large-scale plots - this would be a supplement, rather than an adventure module.

The Styes, Diamond Lake, Alhaster - the first three entries in the series are already half-written.

As another fringe benefit to this, future Dungeon adventures could be set in these backdrop locations. Obviously, some amount of background would have to be included in the magazine for those who don't have the backdrop book, but for those who do, the adventure becomes deeper/more interesting, without increasing the magazine page count or the adventure size.

Just a thought.

Tangentially, it might be useful in the future to divide backdrops into player/GM sections; for something like AoW, where the PCs are ideally from Diamond Lake, it would be great to hand the players 5-6 pages of information they could use when developing their backgrounds.

[Fake Healer]

I would definately buy em'! I think this idea would be absolutely awesome! I only worry that Paizo would either have to hire on some help or purchase a bunch of +5 whips of "work til you drop" to use on its present workforce. But yeah I would buy em if priced in the $30-40 range.

FH

[Lilith]

This is an excellent idea. I'd like to throw in the "man on the street" idea from Ptolus/Monte Cook for city-based backdrops - what the average JoeBob on the street is likely to know when asked.

How much I'd pay for it depends on the quality and content.

[Great Green God]

A topic that is near and dear to myself. I love books like the old Campaign books for Middle-Earth Role Playing, and the 90's By Night books put out by White Wolf. I love fleshed out characters and factions with motivations and goals not directly tied to a concrete meta-plot.

Toss in a vote from
the Great Green God

Heck, I'll help you write it.

[VedicCold]

Here's another would-be buyer for a product line of this sort. This aspect of world-building is a major challenge for me, as I just always find myself getting buried in details. My mind dives into such minutia that I get lost halfway through. A product series like this would be a godsend (especially the Average Joe tidbit mentioned above). I'm already a well-satisfied Paizo customer, but if they want to nab even more of my cash, this would be the way to do it.

[deClench]

Great Green God wrote:

I love fleshed out characters and factions with motivations and goals not directly tied to a concrete meta-plot.

Toss in a vote from
the Great Green God

Heck I'll help you write it.

ditto

ditto

ditto

[Brent Stroh]

Looks like I'm not alone. :)

I'm reminded of the Flying Buffalo CityBook series - the books outlined a number of businesses that could be dropped into a city with minimal work.

I'd see Backdrops as something similar - cities, villages, districts, whatever, that could be dropped into existing campaigns.

Some ideas off the top of my head...

An underground dwarven settlement/mine, possibly with a recently cut entrance to an Underdark cavern

A nomadic halfling caravan

An elven settlement between the elven forests and encroaching humans

A fallen high-class district in a large city, now largely controlled by organized crime

An actual high-class district in a large city, including brief profiles of the major noble families

An island chain used as a stopover/resupply point by ocean-going merchants

Maybe a combination book including a few small villages - a farming village, a mining camp, a lumber town...

I think the key for success with something like this is to avoid any world-specific stuff; no warforged settlements in the Mournland, for example. Also, avoiding any sort of metaplot is important, at least to me - the books should be self-contained. I'd be more interested in seeing described NPCs than stat-blocks - "Tarl is a successful merchant, skilled at driving a hard bargain (Cha 16, Diplomacy 9 ranks)" - since that will save a lot of space. Plus, most NPCs aren't combat-fodder anyway.

I think it would be great to be able to leverage this sort of background when writing adventures for Dungeon.

[baudot]

While we're on the topic, I'd like to see a settings 2-page article format for the magazine the same way we have Critical Threats.

The format would need to include suggestions on how to use the setting, with possible plot threads and ways to drop it into a campaign, the same way critical threats have a Development column and are required to have suggestions for fitting the NPC into the campaign. Each article would cover just a single scene: a tavern, a woodland shrine, a country manor, etc.

[Brent Stroh]

baudot wrote:

While we're on the topic, I'd like to see a settings 2-page article format for the magazine the same way we have Critical Threats.

The format would need to include suggestions on how to use the setting, with possible plot threads and ways to drop it into a campaign, the same way critical threats have a Development column and are required to have suggestions for fitting the NPC into the campaign. Each article would cover just a single scene: a tavern, a woodland shrine, a country manor, etc.

Now that would be cool. I'd imagine finding an extra two pages could be tricky, though. :) That's definitely CityBook drop-in type material.

[deClench]

baudot wrote:

While we're on the topic, I'd like to see a settings 2-page article format for the magazine the same way we have Critical Threats.

The format would need to include suggestions on how to use the setting, with possible plot threads and ways to drop it into a campaign, the same way critical threats have a Development column and are required to have suggestions for fitting the NPC into the campaign. Each article would cover just a single scene: a tavern, a woodland shrine, a country manor, etc.

How about organizations too? Same style and frmat you're suggesting. I would be terribly interested in that.

[Lilith]

Indeed! Drop-in cities and organizations I think would be awesome. Definitely no overhanging metaplots or world-specific details (though a sidebar could work, I think).

[Phil C.]

These cities are technically Greyhawk, aren't they? If not, is Paizo slowly but surely creating their own campaign setting?

[farewell2kings]

Backdrops and campaign plug 'n play villages, factions and organizations are cool, but I'd be wary of only a 2 page format. I would want them to be detailed enough to play right out of the box, since I can "summarize" my own campaign world pretty well enough right now.

[JaenChronicler]

Brent Stroh wrote:

This came up in a thread on the AoW forum; since my reply was off-topic over there, and somewhat lost in the real topic of the thread, I thought it might be useful to get more opinions on it here in General Discussion.

Erik Mona wrote:

A dream situation would be not just to do a hardcover, but to do whole books based on the key locations (Diamond Lake, Free City, Alhaster) and fill them with lots of advice on how to keep the PCs on track and what to do when they wander off it. That's a lot to hope for, though, so it's almost not worth considering.

-snip some of this out of the middle-

Brent Stroh wrote:

Just a thought.

Tangentially, it might be useful in the future to divide backdrops into player/GM sections; for something like AoW, where the PCs are ideally from Diamond Lake, it would be great to hand the players 5-6 pages of information they could use when developing their backgrounds.

There are other roleplaying games that don't publish adventures; they publish setting books like you've described with a couple of adventure seeds in the back to support the work that's gone into it.

A specific example would be _Griffin Mountain_ for RuneQuest; this was originally a boxed set with a 96 page book for the DM and another, smaller, book for the players so they could create useful interfaces between their characters and the setting.

Griffin Mountain is the standard to which i hold books like this. It's fantastic.

Erik Mona: if you are reading this, i appreciate the fence you're walking with the Adventure Paths "set in" Greyhawk. i understand that WotC has issued standing orders about Greyhawk, and i really respect the fact that you're publishing adventures which you didn't try too hard to file the Greyhawk serial numbers off of...

Gygax may have the right idea here.

::peace is for the conquered::