Introduction

I've been talking about starting this blog for ages.  Really as long as I've been running games and having opinions about RPG's, I've wanted to start this blog.  I had the named picked out and everything.

I picked the name rather deliberately.  It doesn't just express my opinions on thieves guilds (they are silly and anachronistic and don't make sense) but my broader ideas about fantasy settings: people, and societies, must be believable.  You can add daemons, elves, and all matter of wild creatures.  You can add magic and change the laws of physics.  But as long as you're dealing with people, and want to build a believable world, you should ensure that  they act like people and organize themselves like people do.




This is not to say that we can blithely appeal to some unchangeable 'human nature' -- the history of the real world shows us how mutable people are.  But one thing people haven't done is formed a guild of honorable non-violent thieving sorts that regulates the criminal element.  Societies do not create an alternate way of life around 'freedom' and eschewing material goods.  The Mongols were not the Dothraki, and there never was a Conan.  Moreover, there is a reason for this.  I could go on.

When world-building for RPGs, I strive to not just create a fun 'planet of hats' society based around some simple principle, but to figure out how things really tick, and to ask myself-does this make sense?

Now all of this is my own view.  It's predicated on my love for detailed and believable worlds.  If you're mostly concerned with a fun place to sling swords around and have adventures (and there's nothing wrong with that!) then by all means have Conanesque barbarians and priestly kingdoms where the whole populace is mind controlled.  That can lead to some fantastic fantastical stories.  But if you want to bring out trading tables and gazeteers and claim that you're building a -world-, not just a setting for a story, you need to ask yourself -- 'could this work?'

As a final aside, a lot of my posts will be about Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, because that's what I'm running now, but I'll go into general roleplay philosophy etc.