Best way to manage and advance RPG setting metaplots

[Blicero]

If you're making an RPG setting, is there a best strategy for advancing the setting's metaplot / what companies and creators have handled metaplot advancement the best and worst?

I've seen a few classes of strategy that all have positive and negative aspects.

• Forgotten Realms style: Have your setting advance regularly in time, with major events and changes communicated in adventures and setting books.
• Pathfinder style: Have a single setting book that establishes canon, but the setting doesn't change much beyond that. Adventure paths and the like don't have any official consequences, unless the setting as a whole gets redone.
• OSR style: There's no common setting, much less a metaplot. Products might reference each other, but it's assumed that different groups will use different products and make different adaptations in different ways.
• Others?

"Forgotten Realms style" has the advantage of being appropriately grand, but it's also the one most likely to create conflicts between published material and individual tables. The only full solution I see is to only ever run extremely linear adventures with preordained outcomes, and those are lame.

"Pathfinder style" ensures that most groups should be able to use most published material. The issue is that players might get annoyed that, even though multiple campaigns took place in the same setting, they can never see consequences down the line. It's pretty fun to start an orphanage in one campaign and then revisit it years later in a different one.

"OSR style" allows for the greatest possible continuity between games, but it also puts the most onus on Mr. Cavern in terms of either coming up with a lot of original content or spending a lot of time adapting published material.

[Dean]

Others: Warhammer 40k Style: There is a very dense and singular metaplot but it never moves anywhere and all of your big campaign events end with "Everyone tied! Buy these 8 new models"

Honestly most metaplots and settings seem to advance none at all and then suddenly totally overhaul. L5R had a metaplot that seemed more gradual in my memory but most of these things seem to stay almost perfectly static until some big book comes out that declares everyone died and now a new character is god.

[OgreBattle]

Yeah I gotta say I've paid way more attention to 40k megaplots than anything D&D

RIFTS, I do enjoy each world book giving you more of an idea of what other places are doing, but their advancing the plot that involved "The good guy Lord of the Rings style city a lot of PC's live in became baby killer demon summoners vs the now morally ambiguous Republican Skull Party" was poorly received.

So yeah, have a points of light setting with huge swaths of darkness to add points of light and pits of darkness to, that's more fun than having one point of light that has biggus dickus npc's running the show.

[Foxwarrior]

You could do forgotten realms style but go backwards instead of forwards, describing earlier and earlier time periods as you release more books. Ultimately, if an RPG doesn't admit that your campaign is supposed to diverge from everyone else's due to the actions you do, it's missing out on the possibility that the player characters could ever be in positions of actual significance to the setting.

[OgreBattle]

You could do forgotten realms style but go backwards instead of forwards, describing earlier and earlier time periods as you release more books. Ultimately, if an RPG doesn't admit that your campaign is supposed to diverge from everyone else's due to the actions you do, it's missing out on the possibility that the player characters could ever be in positions of actual significance to the setting.

That sounds fun for 'fallen empires, lost history', then the nameless kings and legendary swordsmen can 'turn out to be the PC's in this adventure set in the past'

[Blade]

You can also imagine a modular setting. The world is defined, but you offer different eras/variants.

For example you have a broad description of a city, its neighborhoods, its populations, etc. And then have different variants like "ruled by the Council of Mages", "ruled by the Evil Necromancer", "rise of the Bandit King", and for each of them you have a small blurb about how these affect the city. Then when in the campaign the PC help the evil necromancer take control over the council of mage (or the other way around) the GM has the information he needs.

[Thaluikhain]

Others: Warhammer 40k Style: There is a very dense and singular metaplot but it never moves anywhere and all of your big campaign events end with "Everyone tied! Buy these 8 new models"

And lots of blather beforehand about how everything is going to change.

Particularly annoying, as they could have done a lot of the promised changes, but kept them localised. If you don't want to have things changed, stay away from Albion or Armageddon, everywhere else is fine, if you do want to see changes, go over there.

[Chamomile]

40k has changed its approach to the meta-plot over time. Right now, it's angling more towards Forgotten Realms, and that's to its detriment, because back in 3e, plotlines like the Twelfth Black Crusade and Third Armageddon War got it right: Localized conflicts for a single sector still gives you a hundred-ish planets to fight over, which still allows for a war that is a hundred times bigger than WW2 in absolute scale while still being small enough that its outcome one way or another does not have drastic effects on the overall galactic scene.

[OgreBattle]

Cadia exploding was interesting

Also kinda showed that it doesn’t matter if Cadia explodes or not, stuff just happens and nothing matters

[merxa]

For pf2 I believe the devs have said they plan on advancing the metaplot, resolving the various APs one way or another.

The problem I have with forgotten realms is there is so much material and wacky, toril-rending events that it's very hard to get started, and some people get so invested in the metaplot it can be difficult to either deviate or make adjustments without getting contradictory outputs.

I always thought a collaborative wiki with different levels of Canon might be fun, but merging changes seems nearly impossible.

Another option would be letting sanctioned play resolve various meta plot moments.

[Libertad]

Be willing to retcon your own game when you inadvertently publish something just plain cringy. Hewing to the "canon" at all costs results in stale, artificial moneygrabs like Faerun's Sundering for 5th Edition. Wizards more or less wanted to return to pre-Spellplague er, but can't invalidate the Drizz't/Elminster wankfic already written cuz reasons.

If you just HAVE to have your cringy Sam Haight rip-off remain in existence, do what DC and Marvel do and make a Parallel Material Plane or something.

[souran]

So nobody is going to point out that all the information in the premise post is jibberish?

The Forgotten Realms setting doesn't advance in real time. The main setting book for 2e, 4e, and 5e uses catastrophe as the means to explain rules changes. 3e doesn't even bother to do that. The published adventures for FR have never interacted with the setting. In 5e it is the nominal setting for all the published adventures (except Strahd) and taking place in a similar area and yet as a published setting there is a strong "status quo is god" thing going on.

Living FR kept its stakes so low that it didn't matter what happened. Adventurer's league is nominally in FR too and also doesn't really cause setting change that is described in other D&D books.

The novels have major events happen all the time and do change and keep advancing. Especially Greenwood and Salvatore. However, all of that is typically excluded from the setting until its time to print a new edition book.


Pathfinder, on the other hand, actually does explicitly advance at a rate of 1 year per year. The APs take place during the "game" year in which they are published. The reference characters from previous adventure paths and assume the completion of each path. The characters on artwork for each path are the nominal heroes who participated (yes this means some characters have done the 1-20 several times)

That said, this isn't carried over into the suppliments very well, although the suppliments and the APs often have the same focus (so the book on Korvosa came out in the same month as the first AP in COTCT).


I actually don't know that either of these is that great. Pathfinder tends to avoid doing anything really interesting and the FR just doesn't do anything except in the novels.

[Ancient History]

The only games that vaguely try to advance in real time are Shadowrun and BattleTech, and even those have notable exceptions because of publishing slip, leaps, changes in publisher/edition, etc.

Part of the advantage of a progressive metaplot, from a game design point, is that advances in setting mean you have a regular excuse to bring out new books. The disadvantage is that it's impossible to bring out enough books to cover all the geographic/subject matters of interest and keep them current.

Part of the disadvantage is that metaplot tends to focus around the actions of stuff that's either big and exciting and status-quo upsetting (wars) and/or involves major NPCs affecting the world rather than the PCs. The latter is less of an issue in any game with a fairly realistic setting - the PCs generally aren't ask to start or stop wars, although they may still play a part in both, and they sure as hell aren't likely to be elected officials.

And wars themselves are tricky because most games don't have the mechanics to actually handle mass battles at all well.

Generally speaking, however, if Shadowrun or Forgotten Realms or whatever teaches us anything, it's that big event books suck. The metaplot by itself is rarely something interesting, and it's usually something big and far away and stupid, especially the behind-the-scenes shit that writers like to throw in there. Something like the State of the Art books for Shadowrun are better received, since changes tend to be packaged together.

Another alternative is the era approach - gamelines like Call of Cthulhu and the old World of Darkness had distinct period settings: Coc had Ancient (Cthulhu Invictus), late antiquity (Dark Ages Cthulhu), 1890s (Cthulhu by Gaslight), default 1920s/30s, 1940s/1950s (Atomic Age Cthulhu), 1990s (Cthulhu Now), contemporary (Delta Green/The Laundry), and a handful of odd-ball periods and future settings - hell, there's even a Wild West setting now, I picked it up last week. World of Darkness had Dark Ages, Victorian Age, Modern Nights, and some oddball in-between.

The advantage of going by historical settings is that you only have to plot events once, and then they roll out unless interrupted. The PCs are unlikely to be starting or stopping WWI if the campaign is set in Cthulhu by Gaslight...but if they do, so what? Your PCs aren't going to live long enough to see how they've fucked up history, probably. It's only when you have time-travel shenanigans or immortal characters that you get serious issues with "Oh shit, if I kill of this NPC then they can't do X canon thing and what happens now?"

[maglag]

Cadia exploding was interesting

Also kinda showed that it doesn’t matter if Cadia explodes or not, stuff just happens and nothing matters

To be fair there had been plenty of 40k campaigns before that ended with "and then the planet exploded/was rendered into a toxic useless wasteland", but then the Empire does have plenty of planets so one more or less is always ok for them.

At least we got rid of Creed and his memes.

More interesting is the whole 30K metaplot that's been happening in the past, filling in the holes of the Horus Heresy if not outright retconning stuff left, right and center.

Also that they're moving things slower and slower, at this rate we'll reach year 30k in real life before they actually get to the Siege of Terra campaign.

It would still be interesting to see it done with other settings. "You know that time when everything was more awesome and then there was some big disaster and left only ruins? How about you play during that period?"

[Emerald]

The Forgotten Realms setting doesn't advance in real time. The main setting book for 2e, 4e, and 5e uses catastrophe as the means to explain rules changes. 3e doesn't even bother to do that.

That's because the Die, Vecna, Die! adventure was supposed to be the in-universe explanation for the 2e-to-3e update across all Planescape-connected settings, so no FR-specific rationale was needed.

The thing where 3e FR officially used a new "World Tree" cosmology instead of AD&D's Great Wheel was, as far as I know, an out-of-universe retcon that was never explained in-setting aside from "Oh, look, we found this massive cosmic tree connecting random chunks of various planes that has apparently totally been here the whole time and nobody ever noticed!"

The published adventures for FR have never interacted with the setting.

The effects of FR adventures are incorporated into later adventures, novels, and setting books all the time, actually--or at least they were prior to the 4e clusterfuck. Characters and events from Marco Volo's original adventure trilogy from mid-2e were referenced as recently as 3e's Waterdeep splatbook, City of the Spider Queen ties in heavily with the War of the Spider Queen novels released later the same year, Daggerdale from the Doom of Daggerdale adventure became a very popular and fleshed-out location, obscure monsters originating in adventure modules like the lichling and tako showed up in later monster books, the late-3e Cormyr/Shadowdale/Anauroch adventure trilogy is chock full of old lore, and so forth.

However, many adventures are either tie-ins to games and/or novels so their effects on canon aren't obvious or set in remote locations that only have minor effects and references elsewhere in canon, and adventures are included in the canon assuming that the PCs succeed in their quest (because, y'know, otherwise one of those many world-ending threats would have ended the world by now), so the adventure integration definitely isn't as obvious as the Golarion approach is.

[Thaluikhain]

To be fair there had been plenty of 40k campaigns before that ended with "and then the planet exploded/was rendered into a toxic useless wasteland", but then the Empire does have plenty of planets so one more or less is always ok for them.

Cadia's not just some new planet nobody has heard of though, it's been noteworthy since at least 2nd ed. I do think that's upping the stakes a bit, even if nothing much really changes.

[maglag]

Well Rowboat finally got off his chair after 10 000 years, time to conquer Earth and trying to pick up the pieces. Magnus and Mortarion also finally stopped mopping around and started getting (some) shit done.

And the map literally changed with that giant chaos rift meaning the empire is split in two halves, one an hopeless fuck up, and the other an even more hopeless fuck up.

[Chamomile]

The problem with the current 40k metaplot (well, one of them) is that the fall of Cadia didn't accomplish anything except to demolish a major location of the setting. Previously, "war on Cadia" was a setting that existed in 40k, and now it is not. This kind of metaplot removal of setting elements can be a worthwhile price to pay, but the current 40k authors don't seem to think of it as a price at all, instead using this lore turnover, where old setting conceits are replaced with new ones that force everyone to update their armies' backstory and etc., is treated as an end unto itself. There are a lot of related problems in all media, where creators want to cause dramatic upheaval simply for the joy of wielding power and consumers might even be caught up in the moment as big events happen, but after the dust settles what you have is an interesting piece of the setting demolished for the sake of some immediate thrills and nothing left to replace it.

[Iduno]

The problem with the current 40k metaplot (well, one of them) is that the ...current 40k authors don't seem to think

Accurate.

[Blicero]

So nobody is going to point out that all the information in the premise post is jibberish?

...

Emerald already made a number of responses to your point. I want to emphasize their point of

The effects of FR adventures are incorporated into later adventures, novels, and setting books all the time, actually

because it also holds true in my observations. The 3E setting book, as I recall, literally gives the conversion rate of "years passed within FR setting" to "years passed in real life" that new material is supposed to adhere to. Note that I'm not claiming either that (1) the metaplot advancement for FR was well-implemented, or (2) FR is a worthwhile or interesting setting as a whole. I'm just using the FR approach as a central example of a category of metaplot advancement strategy.

I'll admit to maybe being wrong about Pathfinder, since I haven't done anything more than skim through some of their adventure paths. But the impression I got from this and other forums was that the events of one adventure path are never referenced in other adventure paths, even if the ending of one path is likely to substantially upset the status quo in a way that people outside of a local area would definitely hear about.

[Iduno]

However, many adventures are either tie-ins to games and/or novels so their effects on canon aren't obvious or set in remote locations that only have minor effects and references elsewhere in canon, and adventures are included in the canon assuming that the PCs succeed in their quest (because, y'know, otherwise one of those many world-ending threats would have ended the world by now), so the adventure integration definitely isn't as obvious as the Golarion approach is.

Agreed. Forgotten Realms hasn't done the "advance a metaplot" thing, because your options are "Duke Boringass who you don't know about kept his dukedom, but you aren't a serf, so you don't care" or "Oops, the world ended again." They could kill off Elminster or...the other NPC literally anybody has heard of, and have an interesting plot about the fallout from that, and his apprentices, and what happened to all of the treasures he's accrued...But they've never made another important NPC, so the story can't change.

Battletech replacing a big-name NPC matters because a) they killed off someone you may have heard of and b) you're a soldier, so political instability/war "might" impact you.

Shadowrun replacing the police with a different company mattered, because you're criminals/"freedom fighters", and it matters if the guys chasing you are willing to take a bribe to let you get away. New governors and sometimes presidents get elected, which matters. They even did a crazy "what if" with the world, where an insane racist was elected a few years ago. It's fantasy, anything can happen.

Bringing it back to the OP, if you want to advance the timeline, you need to do it with things that affect the players (even if you usually just have stuff in the background to fill in the gaps), but can't really do much about. If the players can just pull up roots and walk/drive/fly to the next political area, the government doesn't matter. In 40k, one planet doesn't matter much. The Ecclisiarchy would have to find, and admit to, documents that showed "oh, the emporer was a geneticist, and was cool with human mutation, turns out mutants are okay now, as long as they're human." or "I guess the Horus Hearsay was a misunderstanding, those guys can come back to the empire." to change the setting in any way.

Also, you have to have characters who change, so relying on NPCs who were written before I was born isn't going to fly, for the most part.

[JigokuBosatsu]

They could should kill off Elminster

FTFY

[Dogbert]

They could kill off Elminster or...

Didn't they do that in 4E along with all of the other iconics because whatshisname-that-writer wouldn't bend knee to WotC?

[OgreBattle]

Been thinking of different eras for my hypothetical "Those PSX franchises mashed together" setting

Modern Resident Evil era: Umbrella and Wesker global monster virus

Gunnm Solar era: Transhumanism via engineering, cyborgs, spreading through the solar system and launching colony ships beyond the Sol system. Earth exloded due to something, but the Great Blackout erased all records of those events.

Xenogearshammer Galaxy Era: Thousands of years into the grimdark, Emperor-God Wesker is a stylish glasses wearing husk on his golden throne, his space tyrant legions conquering the stars. The various branches of humanity and mega deadly monster viruses that spread beyond Sol are now space dinosaurs, space elfs, space orks

[Thaluikhain]

The Ecclisiarchy would have to find, and admit to, documents that showed "oh, the emporer was a geneticist, and was cool with human mutation, turns out mutants are okay now, as long as they're human." or "I guess the Horus Hearsay was a misunderstanding, those guys can come back to the empire." to change the setting in any way.

They do have those damned Primaris marines everywhere, though. Which is a great way of changing the setting (Marine armies are now forever different to what they were), just they didn't do that in a good way. Better than pretending everyone always had Centurions and grav guns and just never mentioned it, I guess.

Going on a bit of a tangent, but would the best (or at least a decent) way of changing the setting be to change the way the game works, as the way the setting is viewed depends on the game? You're going to change the game to some extent every edition anyway.

Way, way back in a previous Black Crusade "event", they were saying stuff like if the Imperium wins people would talk about reforming the Space Marine legions. A few editions later they changed the ally rules so that you could have marines from different chapters from the same legion work together without fiddly ally rules (in that all Imperial forces could do that). If you ran the two things together, you could say that the Black Crusade makes a difference, and now you can have, say, Imperial Fists and Black Templars in the same army.