If you make use of published settings, how much do you spindle, fold and mutilate them?  Are there any particulars that you typically change, add or remove?

Oh god, I mutilate the hell out of them.

My default world, the one I go back to over and over again, is Mystara.  Sometimes I call it Mythara simply to reflect how very much modified it is.

Some of my alterations (it helps to be familliar with the setting):

* Glantri is ruled by a secret cabal of Elan that are attempting to awaken the psionic potential of mankind, as part of a plot to destroy the gods and ened the perpetual war between Good and Evil.

* The Elves of Alfheim have ceded the world to mankind, built a massive starport in the middle of their forest, and have been slowly migrating off world for centuries.  They form the core of the Elven Armada (re: Spelljammer), and are currently engage in a long war with the Neogi, who seek to conquer Mystara.  the whole world is completely unaware of this.

* The Dwarves of Rockhome have achieved early industrial revolution era technology, have trains, cars, steam cranes, etc.  They have begun building Warjacks and are interested in selling humans the technology (re: Iron Kingdoms).

* Gunpowder exists, as do Arcane Pistoleers (re: Iron Kingdoms).

* The outer planes work entirely differently than D&D standard.  Mytharaspace is geocentric, and the elemental planes are actually other planets in fixed orbits around the world of Mystara (so one of the moons is a gas cloud, another a big chunk of rock, another a shimmering globe of water, and the last a ball of fire).  The Sun is actually the Plane of Positive Energy, and the night sky is dominated by a large dark hole that is actually the plane of Negative Energy.  The higher planes are an idealized version of the "Middle World" that co-exists in the same space called the "Pure Realms," while the lower planes are debased version of the real world called the "Shadow Realm."   Devils and Demons are all native to the same world, the Shadow Realm.

* the Postive Plane is known as "The Source" and is considered to by all to be the equivalent of modern conceptions of God: an all-powerful, loving intelligence that is ineffeable to the human mind.  All Good clerics draw their power from the Source, some through the mediation of a "deity," but the illsuory nature of divinity is well understood.  The default Good religion is akin to Buddhism, with a bit of Manichean duality thrown in. The Negative plane is called "The Abyss," but can be tapped in the same way as the Source by evil clerics.  The Source and the Abyss are both thought of as intelligent and as having motives.  The Source wishes to create endless life and joy tat fills every possible space.  The Abyss simply wishes to destroy everything that comes from the Source.  No one knows which came first.

* There are no deities, only very powerful beings who are closer to one of the  two planes who are better able to understand their ineffable purposes.

* Physics works nothing at all like Earth.  Darkness, for example, is not the absence of light, but an actual elemental force.  Only your basic mechanical laws function as one would expect.

Depends on the setting.

For example, I love Kingdoms of Kalamar and the WFRP Old World as is, so I run them with practically no modifications. On the other hand, I can't touch the gotten Realms without mutilating it into some new creature barely recognizable as the original beast. Unlike the Realms, which I modify out of a dislike for a lot of its components, Greyhawk gets modded out of love: I dig the setting, but it's so dated in some ways that it needs to be brought up to date.

So it really depends on the setting.

-=Grim=-

I mostly homebrew, so when I do use a published setting, I actually change it very little. I emphasise the elements I do like, and reduce the importance of elements I don't, but I'll usually otherwise leave it intact, because I'm trying to capture the feel of that setting in the first place. For example, I really find the Realms ridiculous and awful, but if I played a game in the Realms, I wouldn't throw out the Zhentarim or the Dales. I just wouldn't use them or talk about them at all unless someone else brought them up.

I like published settings so I have pre-made material to use, no need to totally wing it. Then I cherry pick the bits I like and present stuff as the players need to have it. The rest gets discarded. Flavor to taste and add in my own spice as desired.

I typically change NPC motivations, timeline (or place a campaign at a different time/place), move some stuff around. Traveller I've done a best of mashup from Interstellar Wars on to 1248 which worked just fine with people unfamiliar with OTU "canon". Greyhawk I tend to merge original time with current but downplaying the Wars and adding in locations from Scarred Lands and also Freeport.

Tekumel I treat my campaign as an alternate branch off of Ur-Tekumel's main trunk. Instead of Nothing Much happening in the Empire of the Petal Throne after the civil war, the PCs uncovered a plot which successfully brought back the Usurper (finding where will be the next campaign). I've scrapped Barker's Tekumel 401 College at the End of Time thing and come up with my own answers for why Tekumel is in a pocket dimension and so forth. Much more satisfying for my plausibility, allows me to use my own sci-fantasy influences (esp. UK sci-fi) and not reliant upon esoteric Barker references.

Oh and ditched the Enemy #1 translucent giant ants riding translucent even bigger giant ants. If they show up, Enemy #1 on My Tekumel will be more Barsoomian. (yes I'm ramping up to return to Tekumel )

Within months I've usually blown up, replaced, or corrupted the foremost organizations and most troublesome characters of any pre-made setting.

When I was running Star Wars I basically retconned the entire universe to eradicate everything I found objectionable about the universe, in true nerd style.

I tend to do quite a bit of modifying of any setting I run.

RPGPundit

I have a rather nasty impulse to want to break the fuck out of most any established setting put in front of me.  

If there's any established "rules" I want to break them.  If necromancy is badwrong, I want to find a way to make it "good".  My Evenmorn campaign setting is basically all about what happened when some dumb fuckers tried to break the arcane/divine split in D&D.  

Or I'll go on apeshit deconstructive tangent.  Once I planned a Star Wars campaign, after some Internet flap about how Lucas/Lucasarts was "de-canonizing" a bunch of EU stuff, where large swaths of the Star Wars universe were disappearing in "the real", and the PCs had to hunt down clues involving an ancient cult to Lucas himself, and eventually find their way to our own world and stop the de-canonization before there was nothing left in the real SW universe but bloody Tatooine.

Really, I pretty much hate pre-established settings unless they're so utterly vague as to never really get in the way.

I've only ever run one game with a published setting, the Diamond Throne. I converted most of the land mass to a chain of islands, and inserted a sunken empire, destroyed by the dramojh, about which much of the campaign revolved. So yeah, mutilated.

This wasn't because any of it offended me, but because, at the time, I was on a bit of a pirate kick, and that seemed like the most expedient way to make use of the setting and insert some island-hopping shenanigans into it.

Quote from: Casey777I've scrapped Barker's Tekumel 401 College at the End of Time thing and come up with my own answers for why Tekumel is in a pocket dimension and so forth. Much more satisfying for my plausibility, allows me to use my own sci-fantasy influences (esp. UK sci-fi) and not reliant upon esoteric Barker references.

Oh and ditched the Enemy #1 translucent giant ants riding translucent even bigger giant ants. If they show up, Enemy #1 on My Tekumel will be more Barsoomian. (yes I'm ramping up to return to Tekumel )

Care to give a fellow EPT GM an insight into all of this?

My player's characters don't even have citizenship yet and they have only left Jakall once so it's going to be years before any of it becomes relevant.

I'm just curious on your take on things.

If I use an established setting I modify it, how much depends on how much we play the setting. (For instance in Shadowrun I have extensive revisions. In D&D I don't use an established setting.)

I became curious about this topic as I was laying out plans for an upcoming Warhammer FRP game that...well, I don't know how much it's WFRP anymore, to be honest.

Granted, I'm setting the game in an area (Tilea) that's not particularly detailed, but I'm making some fairly serious deviations from what has been detailed.

Partially, I'm being inspired by reading Mary Gentle's Ash: A Secret History, and partially because I'm just not terribly keen on certain aspects of WFRP's setting.

But here's the thing: If I were a player, I wouldn't particularly care if I played a WFRP entirely by the book.  This is fairly true for any game, actually.  It's only when I go to run the game myself do I find myself tinkering with the setting.

Quote from: -R.If you make use of published settings, how much do you spindle, fold and mutilate them?  Are there any particulars that you typically change, add or remove?

I tend to burn them to the ground and build up something with only the elements of the setting that I like.

So far I've done that with Marvel Superheroes, Shadowrun, and Deadlands.

Middle Earth didn't much in the way of changes, but I don't use much in the way of published rpg material for it either.

Quote from: -R.If you make use of published settings, how much do you spindle, fold and mutilate them?  Are there any particulars that you typically change, add or remove?

It really depends on the setting. For something like Jorune for instance, most of the changes (depending on POV) are merely cosmetic. I always thought the native Shanta were not enigmatic enough, so I take certain characteristics of creatures from other sources, in this case the Dabus  (Planescape) method of communicating through visual rebuses and attach it to the Shanta.

Or I may take something like Ravenloft ditch most of the material, combine elements of Masque of the Red Death and real world folk tales and power the whole thing with the old Amazing Engine system , specifically For Fairy Queen & Country . Of course the result is something akin to CoC, but I run CoC as is with no changes, so my version of Ravenloft is merely that itch to try out some ideas I have without contaminating CoC.

Of course there's always combining certain settings together. Like Werewolf Old West and Six Guns & Sorcery. I take certain elements from the former and ease it into the latter. Thematically both are poles apart. But with just the right amount of tweaking, I get something that is both interesting to my group and playable.

Then I participate in some discussion and think, "hey this might work". For instance take the Cyberpunk fantasy thread. J.Arcane mentioned something about the Roman empire. Nialls threw out some ideas. So, I think, maybe I could use Roma Imperious, add something like TSR (?) old Dream setting (can't remember the name at the moment) as a kind of Akshasik cyber/dreamspace and use some of the ideas in that thread to base a campaign on. Zombies as labour, access to the dreamspace as a form of entertainment and control.

Regards,
David R

Quote from: Casey777Tekumel I treat my campaign as an alternate branch off of Ur-Tekumel's main trunk. Instead of Nothing Much happening in the Empire of the Petal Throne after the civil war, the PCs uncovered a plot which successfully brought back the Usurper (finding where will be the next campaign). I've scrapped Barker's Tekumel 401 College at the End of Time thing and come up with my own answers for why Tekumel is in a pocket dimension and so forth. Much more satisfying for my plausibility, allows me to use my own sci-fantasy influences (esp. UK sci-fi) and not reliant upon esoteric Barker references.

What the? College at the end of time? I've not encountered any of this stuff, although admittedly my Tekumel reading has been very, very limited. Care to enlighten me as to what the Barker "party line" is on this?