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This is a thing that's been on my mind for a while, compounded recently after a playthrough of Sunless Sea.
Specifically pertaining to homebrew settings and such, do things have to make sense, or even have an explanation?
Using Sunless Sea (a fantastic roguelike) as an example, on some maps, in the south, there is an unmarked location known as The Eye. It is literally a massive eye on the sea floor that opens and watches your ship should you draw near to it. Nothing else (aside from rapid terror increase), it just...watches you. It's never mentioned anywhere in any of the dialogue of the game, never brought up at all, and there is no explanation for WHY it's there or even WHAT it really is.
Now if this was in a Pathfinder game, should you, as the DM, have an explanation for what it is and why it's there? Or even if there is an explanation, do the characters (or even the players) need to know?
Sorry if the question is a bit wonky, it's like 4am here and I'm getting a little loopy.
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You as a DM should know what is and why it is there, but that doesn't mean your players have to.
Case in point, The Eye in the main game is a complete unknown, but you can interact with it in the Zubmariner expansion. So while you never find out anything about in the Core game, the developers did know what it was and why they put it in.
Other cool minimalistic examples would be the Souls series of games from From Software (Demon's Souls, Dark Souls 1-3, Bloodborne).
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You as a DM should know what is and why it is there, but that doesn't mean your players have to.
Case in point, The Eye in the main game is a complete unknown, but you can interact with it in the Zubmariner expansion. So while you never find out anything about in the Core game, the developers did know what it was and why they put it in.
Other cool minimalistic examples would be the Souls series of games from From Software (Demon's Souls, Dark Souls 1-3, Bloodborne).
Would it be acceptable to simply do the 'ol "It's a secret *wink*" dealy for some things but have no real explanation?
Like in a setting me and some friends are working on, there's a whole....kingdom? Continent? General landmass. Where all the creatures born there are made of living clockwork. No explanation of why it is that way, and most if not all people in the setting just sort of roll with it (because hey, super lucrative ranching).
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You as a DM should know what is and why it is there, but that doesn't mean your players have to.
Case in point, The Eye in the main game is a complete unknown, but you can interact with it in the Zubmariner expansion. So while you never find out anything about in the Core game, the developers did know what it was and why they put it in.
Other cool minimalistic examples would be the Souls series of games from From Software (Demon's Souls, Dark Souls 1-3, Bloodborne).
Would it be acceptable to simply do the 'ol "It's a secret *wink*" dealy for some things but have no real explanation?
Like in a setting me and some friends are working on, there's a whole....kingdom? Continent? General landmass. Where all the creatures born there are made of living clockwork. No explanation of why it is that way, and most if not all people in the setting just sort of roll with it (because hey, super lucrative ranching).
As long as it doesn't mess with your game or continuity then perhaps.
But for something like a whole kingdom, let alone a whole continent? Then you would need to know what's up, otherwise you might run into issues and continuity errors down the line when people start to interact with stuff.
For an example/exception there's the Mournland, formerly Cyre, from Eberron. Keith Baker has stated that there is no explanation for what caused it because he specifically chose not to come up with one. BUT, there are plenty of explanations for the things currently going on right now in the Mournlands, just not what originally caused it. All the monsters in there though have explanations.
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Well, I think there are several things to consider. First, I don't think that at the point you are designing your homebrew, everything must directly make sense for yourself. So if, to use your example, The Eye catches my imagination for some reason, I'd rather put it on the map and think about it later than to forget about it just because I don't know exactly what to do with it yet.
For me, that keeps things flexible and lets me add things faster to the setting as if I have to describe everything in great detail. And if I later find out that the Eye doesn't fit at all, I can easily remove t without having done too much work for it.
Also, depending on how much influence you're willing to give your players, it can sometimes be fun just to hear them guess about things and probably make their guesses true for the setting. Players can have awesome ideas too, and if you keep things flexible, you don't need to shoehorn them in what you originally planned.
On the other hand, most of us don't have the time to come up with all those details at just the moment we'll need them, so if you have something like this and you're players suddenly decide to go there, you'd probably be better off if you already knew what will expect them there.
So what I generally do is to have a part of the map (the part where our game will actually start) already detailed out, so that my players won't catch me unprepared whle they are busy there. That doesn't even mean that all things have to be completely fixed (that depends on how sandboxy your game is) but generally, when I put a dungeon in that part of the map, I want to know what it looks like and what's in there before the players decide to go there.
But around this part of the map, I have a more freeform approach and might just put a name on the map for future reference with some basic ideas added. But without having anything detailed out.
I guess it's kinda what Paizo did with their Varisia map when it got first published in RotRL 3 „Hook Mountain Massacre“. As players, we had already visited Sandpoint and Magnimar (and maybe Kaer Maga with D2, but I don't remember the timeline exactly, so I may be wrong there). And suddenly we got this map and a gazetteer with a lot of new locations and only the most basic of information. And for at least some of those places, my guess would be that the designers themselves hadn't decided over any additional details.
So as far as you as the GM are concerned, I'd say it depends on how comfortable you are with leaving things open and how much time you are willing and able to put into the work at your homebrew. Personally I like to have some secrets for mself as I don't know what I may come up with in the future and I've had it happen too often that I put a serious amount of time into an idea only to have it never come into play or (worse) to decide later on that I actually didn't like so much what I had done there and that I had to replace it with something else. And it enables you to integrate all the crazy stuff your players might come up with.
As far as the players go: it depends a bit on the style of your game but especially with a new world, they don't need to know too much apart from some basic knowledge. It's great fun to explore this new world, and most of the time, it's much more fun than having first to read a 200-page campaign book about it. Again, when the Pathfinder adventure started, we knew basically nothing about Golarion (IIRC, we didn't even know that the world was called Golarion at the beginning). When Burnt Offering started, we learned to know Sandpoint and its surroundings and we had a tiny little bit of basic knowledge about Varisia, the land it was situated in. And that was all we needed.
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Short answer: It entirely depends on who's playing in it.
Long answer: It's entirely fine to handwave everything... right up until a player wants to know more. Then you need to know more, or at least have a way to fake it. Say someone wants to come from the clockwork continent, do you have a handy race for them? Are they different from normal races? Do they breed true with the non-clockwork people? Do they make half-construct people? Similar issue with the eye. In the game it's mysterious. In a PnPRPG, nothing is stopping the players from deciding they want to put on their diving bells and go poke the eye to see what happens. Then it's not mysterious, it's a mystery, and one which better have an answer other than "it's secret" if the players are putting in their time and effort to solve it.
Thoughts on answers that don't really answer the initial question but simply raise more complex questions? Like the players decide to try and sort out the clockwork creatures thing but stumble upon like an ancient conspiracy/curse/pact/whatever that MIGHT explain the clockwork situation?
Personally I'm kinda loathe to give out explicit answers of "Well X is the way it is because of reasons A, B, and C."
I don't think player characters should know vastly more about the world they live in without personal experience with it than any NPC would. If there's a mysterious floating eye that shows up and peers at you for a while, a lot of people are going to know that it's there, but relatively few (if any) are going to understand why it's there and what it's up to. A lot of people are going to have incorrect theories and will never have any reason to suspect they're wrong.
You should have some idea why it's there, but it doesn't need to be completely fleshed out. If the PCs decide they want to look into the mysterious thing, you can flesh it out then. If they elect "okay, that's weird then" and move on, the 6-8 pages of explanation you wrote about it would be wasted. But you never need to tell the PCs any more about the thing they're investigating than they would actually discover through their actions; resist the urge to spill the beans, trust that they can put it together (or they might put together something weirder, then just go with that if you like.)
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The world is a mysterious place and it's quite fine to not give them everyrhing up front.
I mean, doesn't Golarion have a permanent, static hurricane in the middle of one of the oceans? I don't think the authors of the books felt obligated to spell out exactly what caused it, what's powering it, what can be done about it, etc. The locals just know "don't sail into it if you're not daft" and leave it at that.
If you *really* want to just give PCs answers, you can wait until they're high enough level to contact/summon/whatever some outside who could just tell them.
As a homebrewer, there are a few things might players will never truly know the answers to. They're not meant to. The objects or events are there, have been for so long or are so new that no one knows anything about them. They often give my characters the willies because they can't stand not knowing everything, which is fine by me.
I mean, doesn't Golarion have a permanent, static hurricane in the middle of one of the oceans? I don't think the authors of the books felt obligated to spell out exactly what caused it, what's powering it, what can be done about it, etc. The locals just know "don't sail into it if you're not daft" and leave it at that.
If you *really* want to just give PCs answers, you can wait until they're high enough level to contact/summon/whatever some outside who could just tell them.
The Eye of Abendego, yep that's a thing. Although I believe some sources point to spawn of Rovagug being at the center. Others believe it has something to do with Gozreh. And still others believe it has something to do with Aroden, since it appeared after his death.
Which is kind of a perfect example of what the OP is talking about.
I'm sure James Jacobs already knows what's there and what caused it...but as far as I know nothing has been confirmed for the rest of us.
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I'm sure James Jacobs already knows what's there and what caused it...but as far as I know nothing has been confirmed for the rest of us.
Specifically to the point, if since conceiving of "permanent static hurricane in the middle of an ocean, since that's cool" Mr. Jacobs has changed his mind several times about what's really going on there, none of us would know (likewise if he changed his mind tomorrow). As long as you don't contradict yourself, you're fine, and as long as you limit yourself as the GM to surface-level details (where it is, what it looks like, what it appears to do, etc.) until it's time to dig down and do the big reveal it's hard to contradict yourself.
You probably generate more interest for your players by saying "here's the phenomenon" and letting them construct their own theories than by spelling it out for them, anyway.