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"Everything I've Said So Far About the God Who Will Die" - Creative Director Luis Loza on Setting Shake-Ups Coming to PF2E in "War of Immortals".
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<blockquote data-quote="Staffan" data-source="post: 9247851" data-attributes="member: 907"><p>It doesn't invalidate a home game, but it does make future material less useful.</p><p></p><p>My "favorite" example of metaplot effing things up was the Lands of Intrigue box set for Forgotten Realms back in 2e. I had read the entry for Tethyr in the campaign setting box: a land where the royal family had been assassinated ~20 years prior, and none of the major nobles/warlords had been capable of taking the whole land over – ripe for adventure, maybe pitting the warlords against one another, taking over a part at higher levels, and so on. And then when I got Lands of Intrigue, apparently that whole thing was over now. Turns out Elminster's secretary had been the Secret Heir (tm) all along, and hooked up with one of the nobles, recruited a bunch of folks from Waterdeep, and spent about a year and three novels taking the country back and gotten rid of the bad nobles, so now everything was hunky dory.</p><p></p><p>And that's why I prefer the Eberron approach to metaplot: it doesn't exist. Seed your setting with lots of adventure and campaign ideas, but the canonical setting is frozen. So maybe my setting had Aundair deciding they should really try to reclaim the western part of their land (who are pretending they're an independent nation named the Eldeen Reaches), while in your Eberron the Dreaming Dark are using their sleeper agents in house Deneith to offer the Cyran crown prince in exile aid in carving off a piece of Breland because that will cause chaos and make it easier for them to step in and "fix" things farther down the line. These are both things that make perfect sense in 998 YK, but may or may not work fine ten years later – just like a plot set in the USA of 1920 might not work as well in 1930.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Staffan, post: 9247851, member: 907"] It doesn't invalidate a home game, but it does make future material less useful. My "favorite" example of metaplot effing things up was the Lands of Intrigue box set for Forgotten Realms back in 2e. I had read the entry for Tethyr in the campaign setting box: a land where the royal family had been assassinated ~20 years prior, and none of the major nobles/warlords had been capable of taking the whole land over – ripe for adventure, maybe pitting the warlords against one another, taking over a part at higher levels, and so on. And then when I got Lands of Intrigue, apparently that whole thing was over now. Turns out Elminster's secretary had been the Secret Heir (tm) all along, and hooked up with one of the nobles, recruited a bunch of folks from Waterdeep, and spent about a year and three novels taking the country back and gotten rid of the bad nobles, so now everything was hunky dory. And that's why I prefer the Eberron approach to metaplot: it doesn't exist. Seed your setting with lots of adventure and campaign ideas, but the canonical setting is frozen. So maybe my setting had Aundair deciding they should really try to reclaim the western part of their land (who are pretending they're an independent nation named the Eldeen Reaches), while in your Eberron the Dreaming Dark are using their sleeper agents in house Deneith to offer the Cyran crown prince in exile aid in carving off a piece of Breland because that will cause chaos and make it easier for them to step in and "fix" things farther down the line. These are both things that make perfect sense in 998 YK, but may or may not work fine ten years later – just like a plot set in the USA of 1920 might not work as well in 1930. [/QUOTE]
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"Everything I've Said So Far About the God Who Will Die" - Creative Director Luis Loza on Setting Shake-Ups Coming to PF2E in "War of Immortals".
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