The World Is Wide or In Media Res

You can write the most gripping and detailed setting document you want. You can record yourself singing ancient epics of your land. You can patiently sit your players down and tell them about the world. Yet you are still guaranteed to find that, at least a few times, there are players who just don't want to hear it or read it. These people aren't malicious and they aren't stupid, they simply don't find any joy in reading setting material that is unrelated to their own experiences. They may be a bane to your existence or you may in fact be one of them. The thing is, anyone can have this experience at any time.

I used to write very long setting documents. Rambling mythologies, I would take my players on long walks around my highschool campus and describe in gory detail the relationships of the gods and the world, how magic worked, and all that jazz. People who didn't pay attention I singled out as troublemakers, paying close attention to them and making sure I gave them more material to absorb on the theory that if they were paying attention less and I threw them more, at least some of it might stick.

Back in the OSSR

There seems to be a lot of controversy surrounding the OSR movement. Accusations of elitism or of neglecting core aspects of what makes Dungeons and Dragons D&D fly fast and furious. There is a whole blog devoted to picking apart OSR dungeon and module design (Your Dungeon is Suck) and almost everyone that gets sent to my own blog from rizon.net where we run 10th Age games comes back full of tales of woe about the future of the hobby because of how exclusionary and elitist the Frothing Mug is.

I think that's a misconception about the OSR as a whole. I wouldn't even necessarily consider the Mug to be part of the OSR movement as it is focused on things that are decidedly outside of the scope of most OSR sites. Is there are a Middle School Renaissance? Is there a Second Edition AD&D Renaissance? Not that I know of.

I read a lot of OSR blogs and one of the things that strikes me as a very common cord is humor. The games that most OSR people run are filled with jokes and light-hearted monsters that are clearly not meant to be taken at face value. Many OSR leaders reject verisimilitude in setting, others characterization, and still others the value of comprehensively fleshed out worlds. These are things that are very dear to my heart.

Flash, not substance

The mainstream rpg market, the one dominated by games like Paizo's Pathfinder and WotC's D&D, has changed a lot from the roots of the hobby. Where once most gamers would have been content with a photocopied manual made in their local library and purchased through the mail, the format of the books has become of greater and greater import to the people buying them. We want books that look good and have lots of pictures, presumably because our imaginations are no longer working on overtime, so we need to have illustrations on every page to remind us what our own particular fantasy worlds look like.

This is really an aspect of the DIY problem spilling over into book design. D&D, like most modern well-known and mainstream pnp games, isn't about coming up with your own stuff anymore but rather purchasing stuff that you find in a store. The shiny pages, the full-page artwork, and the strange layouts are themselves a selling point now with the content taking second place. The encyclopedic style of late-stage TSR  has been supplanted by a very simple and easy-to-read method of writing.

As the writing of the books has gotten less complex their layouts have taken up the slack. They are now shining examples of overdesign. Yes indeed! I said it once and I'll say it again! They have less content and more glamor than any books that came before them. Paizo is perhaps slightly less guilty of this (their Pathfinder book is as gigantic a paperweight as I've ever seen and I confess that I couldn't be bothered to read it thoroughly as I despise 3.x in all its incarnations) but WotC has taken this design schema to heart and so have many lesser companies following WotC's wagon train.