On: Rules System: Why Labyrinth Lord, Why Any Rules?

When you go about making a setting, usually you have a rules system in mind when making it, often one you're currently playing. And while this is partially the case for the remake of Deminar, it's quite a simple question to ask, "Why build the setting for any one rules system at all?"

While making it for a specific rules set means it's easy for a group using that system to just pick up the product and use it, you could potentially reach a wider audience with no rules in place at all. After all, we could easily populate the map, point out towns and say "Mostly humans live here, along with some elves (we're not using elves, but stay with me)," and let people take their favorite fantasy rules system, and put humans and elves stats there no problem. We can say "there are goblin tribes in those hills," and you can easily find goblin stats (of probably equivalent challenge across multiple systems) in every fantasy game.

So why choose a system? Well, for me, I think a rule system is actually the first step in setting the tone of setting. Hiding in every rules set is a sense of how the "default setting" works, even if the rules have no Proper Names anywhere in it. There's an implication on how things work within the very rules themselves.

If we were to design this for 4th Edition, there's a huge feel of the setting that changes, 4th edition has characters on par with superheroes, wizards can cast magic as often as they want, and there is a huge variety of PC species to choose from that all live and work together. LL and it's roots in B/X are quite different, characters require a lot of adventuring before they rise up to superhero level, all clerics have the same spells, magic is rare and it is hard to cast more then a few at a time. There are comparatively fewer races and they don't all mesh together in the same town.

While our setting could work in 4th edition, or indeed any fantasy game, the gritty low magic undercurrents that we want to establish, the large vast dangerous sky the separates nations, these things work best with LL. So the question becomes, did we start to build the setting this way because of LL or did LL come along and fit so nicely into how we want to build our setting?