And it’s with great pleasure that I congratulate Mr. Bob Dylan to finally get what he has deserved for a long time now. He has probably had more influence on modern culture than the last 20 winners of the nobel prize for literature combined, so it was time he got the prize.

But that’s not why I choose this title. It’s because of the changes my ideas went through the last few years, which I wanna talk a bit for now. It’s been nearly 8 years ago that I started thinking about creating a new setting called Tetheril which was basically it’s own demiplane shut off from the rest of the multiverse by certain events that brought it into existence. I’m somewhat vague here because I still plan to use this idea, which originated in my dislike for planar travel ( I love the D&D planes for all they add to the game, but hate to see heroes trying to conquer Hell or the Abyss just because they are high level enough). Nothing much came out of this, because real life took a wrong turn and I had other problems to solve first.

Two years later, Paizo piqued my interest in hexploring with its Kingmaker Adventure Path, and I started thinking about using this to introduce players to my setting when I finally had enough material together. I also had read a cool Image comic called Impaler about the world being suddenly overrun by vampires and this together with some articles I had read in the online Dragon magazine and with what already had stewed a while in my head eventually was the source of what I tried to do with my setting:

What if a great cataclysmic catastrophe had destroyed the human lands, forcing the few survivors to seek refuge with the elves. And what if, in an coming age, tensions between humans and elves would lead the humans to leave their refuge and return to what was once their home? With no memories, only myths, of what had happened ages ago, so they had to rediscover what was once theirs?

So when I started last year’s edition of Johnn’s Adventure Design Workshop, I originally intended to have as my first adventure the landing of the humans at their new/old home and the events following. But this bit with the elves giving the humans shelter kept nagging at my mind and I thought it might be a cool idea to start with the events around the human’s departure from the elven shores instead. This way, the players would get a bit of perspective of the setting and of the motivations of their characters. Problem being that now I hadn’t only to think about a new continent for the PCs to explore but I had also to create the elven city they lived in before the exodus. Or at least so much that I could make play in this city interesting. Even then, I thought it a bit a waste of time to create a home base just to leave it as soon as possible (and I remember Pathfinder players being not to happy about getting such an interesting location as Sandpoint in Varisia is – only to take extended leaves during the rest of the AP). But the was the prize I did have to pay.

Or didn’t I?

Come this year, and here I am, picking up where I left and continuing my journey, already having rolled for my elven metropolis and still being not too crazy about having to built it from scratch. Maybe I should take some time with my PCs before them leaving for new lands, just to make the effort worth it? But what should I do with them? Not much to explore in a city humans have lived in for quite some time (around 5000 years, I thought), and I also didn’t want to do too much stuff which didn’t connect with the overarching themes of my setting. Building on the tensions between elves and humans? Might be a possibility, but wasn’t actually what I wanted to do, because I didn’t want to put the players‘ focus on that too much. Looked a bit like a dead end to me, and when that happens, I like to shift my attention somewhere else to give my subconsciousness time to work on the problem. And as I had nothing better to do, I took a look at the next video in line, in which Johnn talks a bit about the pre-planning stage of adventure design and about the concept of the “Razor”, a mechanism which allows the designer to make informed decisions about the inclusion of design elements based on certain themes the adventure is built upon. To give an example: When Paizo announced their new Starfinder setting (to come next year), “they described it as meeting half way between BattleTech and SpellJammer.“ Which already gives you an idea of what Starfinder will be about.

I started to ponder what my razor would be this year. I intended to let the players explore cool elven ruins, so Indiana Jones came directly into mind. Then I envisioned this elven city and the isle it is located on as kind of a prison; not as in a real prison but more as an enclave the human’s should not leave without the elves permission (maybe they even can’t without the elves help). But there was still the disconnect between the exploration I’d like the PCs to do and the fact that they already might have done that in the millenia past.

And then something clicked. I had already gone back in time once, so why not doing it again? If I went back to the time the humans arrived at this city, I could actually let them explore the city and make it their own. I could actually use all the stuff I had thought about in actual play instead of using it as background material. I could let them help developing the relations between elves and humans AND I could let them experience the prison-like character of the sub-setting they’re moving in (in time that is, I don’t expect that it will play as much a role in the beginning). So in the end, this is what I came up with as a razor (and man, how is that different, from what I had in mind during my first experiment with the workshop, the times are really a-changing):

The Ruins of Myth Drannor (elven city exploration and rebuilding)

meets

the Pathfinder Society (organized investigating and treasure-seeking)

meets

Gothic (the great CRPG, where you first have to settle in what’s basically a big prison and eventually will have to find a way out; and yeah, as in the game, there might be a BIG endboss waiting for you *whistles innocently*)

Keep in mind, though, that this is more the razor for this part of the setting. The adventure I try to develop for this workshop will mostly concentrate on the first aspect, I guess. So a sub-razor would be something like:

Bard’s Tale meets Kingmaker

combining the city exploration with the city rebuilding aspect .