A setting for our work

[ghost]

Now, call me strange or old-fashioned, but I believe that even a work as generic as this needs some kind of 'default' setting for people to play in. It would also help us understand things like the tone of what we're aiming for, as well as what kind of classes/species/monsters/etc we need to (and want to) include. While I don't mind contributing, I'd like to find out what you all think about this and how we should approach it.

[SqueeG]

If we're talking straight-up, transitional, Tome material... DnD 3.5 and what ever it's "setting" is. Which I had initially thought was Greyhawk, but Frank or K... or some other RPG historian may have said something to the contrary.

In general Fantasy Kitchen Sink... since that's what the Tomes are based around anyway.

For a "New Edition"? Hmm...
People are _comfortable_ with some semblance of High Fantasy European... but I like the idea of cultural mash-ups. Eberron sort of touched on that by making some starkly different cultures as background history.

Is that what you mean?

[ghost]

Well, for the Tome material, the setting was basically undefined. Even 3.5 had some setting (it was just super-sketchy). If we wanna leave it the same way, we need to do at least as much as 3.5's core books gave us. Wasn't much, sure, but it does need to be there. Even some deity writeups or something.

To be honest, I guess from my questions, I've misjudged the scope of this project. Oh well, I'll keep an eye out.

[SqueeG]

As I mentioned, I have no problem with throwing in for another edition with a larger scope, but since that involves a LOT of hashing out our IMMEDIATE focus is essentially an up-to-date Tome resource, including SRD and associated changes.

I've noticed a few people would like to move in a larger direction and I'm okay with that, as long as it doesn't get in the way of the smaller, easier, task at hand. Just my opinion though.

[Tarkisflux]

We're going to have some of that from SRD transcriptions of environments and planar things and the ToF, Dungeonomicon, and RoW articles. We're also going to want some deities for clerics and whatever, though the idea of converting a bunch of Den personalities to deities is somewhat amusing to me. But past that we're back into lots of writing land for setting stuff, and we don't have volunteers to write that up at present.

[SqueeG]

What's wrong with the DnD schlock for 3.T?
I mean, that's basically what all of this is/was written for; just a bunch of fixes, patches, updates and errata for 3.5.

Writing _custom stuff_ is really work for a second edition; or "The Evolution" of Tome works.

[Lokathor]

There are some essays about general setting things, we can use those and maybe add some more here and there. What we need to be careful of is not using any IP names by accident (Greyhawk, Faerun, etc), and not ever ever ever using the actual term "Dungeons and Dragons" anywhere in the text.

[ghost]

I don't mind doing a bit of setting writing. Like, for instance, I can give you guys a whole bunch of deities somewhere, in nicely-LaTeXed form.