So I would not have thought of AH as a good game for kids but what do I know? Clearly less than some kids, which is heartening because we’re all counting on them to save us from pollution.

One thing I like about the game is how, since you’re playing with your friend(s or alone) against the board, there’s no reason not to experiment freely with variants and houserules; no one is going to get the shaft in the way that a 4e game wherein “elves are -15 to everything” is going to shaft people.

Fiance and I are playing a game now (it’s set up on the dining room table and we play a few turns whenever the whim strikes) which is interesting, inasmuch as there are two gates open up in Dunwich and one down in Innsmouth, but only one in Arkham itself. Arkham is monster-free, the terror level is at zero (which is good, as the Old One is Hastur) but the doom track has gotten up to eight, what with one thing and another. Carolyn Fern, Action Psychologist, is hitting Dunwich hard, while poor crazy Old Man Walters has been slumming it in Innsmouth, seeing things he shouldn’t… anyway, we’re using a few variant rules I read about online:

1) Gates are played face-down, and only turned face-up after someone passes through them.
2) You can elect not to pass through a gate — just because there’s a portal in the basement of the Science Building doesn’t mean you can’t visit the chem lab on the third floor.
3) When you close a gate, all monsters in the same location as that gate are returned to the cup.

It’s going pretty okay I think. There’s another pair of ideas I want to try for next time:

1) Shuffle out all the King in Yellow mythos cards and create a separate deck of just them. Treat that deck as the mythos deck until all the KoY cards have been played.
2) Whenever you put a token on the Deep Ones Rising track, also draw a KoY blight card; this is in lieu of using the KoY herald.

The KoY stuff will keep things local to Arkham, and Fiance really dislikes the way the existing mechanic for blight cards punishes you for doing poorly without punishing you for doing well.

When it comes to justifying your grotesquely large number of 4e options — races, classes, magic items — you can take basically three paths. At least, I can think of three off the top of my head.

1) The world is crazy huge with seventeen continents and eight parallel worlds and forty-odd fallen empires. Pick a race and there’s a spot on the map where they are the dominant culture (nonhumans get one culture each, chances are, because multiple nations of halflings would take up too much geography). This is the approach taken by the Realms, and Eberron — name a 3.5 PC race, there’s a spot on the map of Eberron where those guys live, even yak-folk and dromites.

This has all the usual disadvantages of front-loading.

2) The races and classes the players are interested in happen to be the handful available. PCs are natives of Threshold, in the Grand Duchy, and it turns out Threshold is a mixed community of eladrin, dragonborn, gnomes, and tieflings, with a noted bard college, militia, and cathedral to a god that grants the Skill domain.

This can work out great, but you risk running into trouble if and when PCs die/retire/are replaced. My first 4e campaign that I played in, it had this structure, and I endorse this structure. However it also requires you to know what your players want, and for purposes of our extended worked example (slash me amusing myself and/or burning off a little excess creative energy) that won’t be the case.

3) You can actively restrict some options. Monks are, because people are small-minded, the traditional top of the “banned in my homebrew setting” list. Screw that, though.

So let’s say that you don’t want to create a gigantic Eberron-sized setting, and you want to create a setting with specific races in it, and you don’t want to ban shardmind battleminds or deva assassins. Solution: you do what LOST and Planescape and GURPS Banestorm have known to do for years, and you bring in dimensional rifts.

Handled clumsily, dimensional rifts are lame. We all know this. But there are decent ways to work it, too. The advantage here is that any setting you need to pull a particular concept from can exist for purposes of someone/something from that setting being pulled through a rift. Deva assassin, check, there’s a whole world full of deva assassins, this deva assassin is one among many.

The disadvantage is that it’s easy to make this lame. In the posts that follow, I will attempt to make this not lame.

If I was going to run a game, it’d probably be a D&D 4e game. Now, I’m not about to start running a game. I moved to Wilmington about half a year ago, and it took me a while to get situated, and then my fiance and I tried playing LFR, and met some groups that we didn’t hit it off with, and one that we more or less did but which is about an hour and a half away, which makes making it out there tricky. My current plan is to finish buying a house and moving into it, then set up a one-off some weeknight, see who I can get to attend, and then repeat the process a few times until I have a shortlist of players.

When that’s done — if all goes well, by the end of May — then I’ll probably start running a 4e game. This leads to obvious questions about the game I’d like to be running, about the setting of the game and its themes and topics and bad guy and so on. Which, in turn, leads me to think about 4e settings in general.

You can make a case that Greyhawk is the definitive original D&D setting, that Dragonlance is the setting informed by 1e AD&D rules, that the Forgotten Realms are informed by the 2e AD&D rules, and of course Eberron was designed to work with D&D 3.5. Probably there is someone out there who will argue vehemently with those assertions, except maybe the last one, but certainly there have been a lot of D&D settings over the years, and many of those product lines have been long and storied, with boxed set upon hardcover guide upon adventure and adventure. 4e seems crazy-sparse by comparison — Eberron, for instance, has two books and an adventure and out. The Realms are two books and a huge pile of LFR adventures and some DDI articles and out, and you might think that the Realms are better-served thereby but you’d forget how terribly organized the 4e Forgotten Realms Campaign Guide is. Certainly it’s nothing like, say, Planescape got fifteen years ago, with its series of monster books, its series of adventures, its series of geographical guides, its series of boxed sets…

The best-described 4e setting is the “implied” default setting with the ruins of Arkhosia and Nerath, where the Underdark is Torog’s prison and tieflings are all descended from Wilbur Whateley: it’s written up in Manual of the Planes, and Underdark, and Planes Below, and the background/setting/flavor sections of all the X Power books and such.

So, if I was going to run a 4e game, would I be best-served using this setting? It’s the setting of my longest-running 4e experience, my friend Bryant’s sadly-ending campaign which is just barely limping along to the conclusion of H3: Pyramid of Shadows. It’s also a setting that I have some books talking about it. On the other hand, it’s a bit bland, and while I enjoy reading the books enough to buy them, it doesn’t excite me.

“It’s a bit bland” is a very common critique of 4e, of course. And looking at the body of output WotC has distributed, there are few striking visuals and arresting concepts. Dark Sun will, presumably, address some of that, but it’ll just be two books and out, too. I’m guessing in the same way that WotC of 2000 looked at how rulebooks outsold adventures and created the d20 license so other companies could support their rulesets with adventures, WotC of 2008 looked at how rules outsell settings (or at least at how the Complete Hammersword-Wielder featuring eighty new feats no one will ever take plus one everyone will take, outsells Volo’s Guide to Festhalls of the Northeastern Moonsea featuring discourse on how the Zhentharim are foully interfering in the honest silkworm trade of Melvaunt) and decided to punt. And you can’t blame them for trying to keep to a sound business model.

Still, no one has stepped up — as far as I know — to produce crunch-light, system-heavy 4e support. Partly maybe that’s a result of all the GSL unpleasantness, but the few third-party 4e products I’ve heard of are all rules-heavy (One Bad Egg’s product line is, in fact, about the extent of my knowledge here). I don’t know of anyone putting out product on par with Sword-and-Sorcery Studios’ Scarred Land stuff for 3e. And while I enjoy things that aren’t 4e, I like 4e enough, and I find the frameworks that 4e gives me interesting enough, that I’d want to run 4e.

But it’d be my 4e. I wouldn’t use Eberron (despite the big pile of Eberron books I have upstairs), or the Forgotten Realms, or anyone else’s setting. I’d make my own.

NEXT: Why making your own 4e setting is easier said than done.