"Shallow and Indistinct" as a Design Aesthetic

One of the primary goals of the Great Dungeon was to create a setting that emulated OD&D campaigns. And my understanding of those campaigns comes primarily from reading reprints of the Dragon magazine, where OD&D campaigns appeared fundamentally wild, unruly mixes of different sources and influences. So you have lizard-men, samurai, druids, hobbits, and clerics all rubbing shoulders with each other. The one coherent element was incoherence.

But another important aspect: the settings tended to be shallow and indistinct. That might sound like a knock, but it's really a feature, and probably a necessary one if you are going to have wild, unruly mixes of sources and influences. Setting detail is inversely correlated with GM flexibility. The more detail provided, the less flexibility afforded, as new pieces will be expected to mesh with the established setting. It's hard to drop a ninja into a milieu lovingly detailed to evoke 12th century Aquitaine. Conversely, the less detail the easier it is to drop anything you want into the game. A priestess of Poseidon, a were-bear, and a paladin? Cool. A half-orc, archer, and insectoid warrior? Cool. Cool. Cool.

Perhaps counter-intuitively, less details might make it easier for players to engage in the setting. I think that the hobby has generally assumed that the more details are provided, the easier it becomes for players to immerse in the setting. So we get huge guidebooks, centuries of fictional histories, glossaries of invented languages. And these can be fun to write and entertaining to read. But all of this information might actually be making it harder for players. Think about staging a house for sale: your realtor will insist you remove as many of your personal items as possible, no matter how tasteful or interesting. They want prospective homebuyers to see the house as a tabula rasa, so they can better imagine themselves living in that space and filling it with their own things. It's harder to do that when they are looking at pictures of your grandparents, your old tennis racket, and so on.

In many contemporaneous accounts of OD&D campaigns, the NPCs are given relatively little personality or even a name. Usually just a title will suffice: It's the EHP, or the Chaotic Superhero, etc. Although written slightly later, the Keep on the Borderlands is a perfect example of this phenomenon. The lack of detail makes it much easier to transport the Keep into all sorts of different campaigns, but I also think it captures the wargaming culture that spawned early D&D: NPCs are basically just glorified wargame counters, and counters are really just a unique collection of wargame statistics.

I think keeping details light also gives the setting a more mythic, story-like feel. Consider fairy tales: characters might have at most a first name, or a nickname, but might just as often have only a title or description. You have "the King," rather than "King Otto the Blasphemer, of House Gorgo, which claimed the throne in the Sidereal Year 13,322." Or "the miller's daughter," rather than "Miss Kimber Marget-Coleman."

So I made a conscious design aesthetic is to keep social details light. Thus, it's "the Great Dungeon of the North" rather than "the Black Maze of Yalu-Morath."