And Back Again

Whew! I've been gone for the past two weeks in New Zealand, enjoying my honeymoon. It was awesome. I could go back there tomorrow. If it weren't so impractical on many levels, I'd even move there. If you aren't there already, go -- and if you are there, isn't it awesome?

Anyway, this isn't a "personal" blog, so I'll get to the point: Going to New Zealand has really had an effect on how I think about "the setting", a.k.a. The Unnamed Lands, as it's called when Andy isn't around (when he is, it's Aarde, because that's what he wants to call it). Maori culture is fascinating and criminally underused, if you ask me, in RPGs, and the landscape is... well, you saw it in "The Lord of the Rings," and yeah, it looks like that. Untamed temperate rainforest, imposing mountains, geothermal craters, glaciers... we took literally a thousand pictures. So out the window are all my narrow-minded ideas about European-style kingdoms in a European-style landscape, because New Zealand's is way cooler.

Before I left, though, I had this idea for swashbuckling FATE games that put a lot of emphasis on duels and fencing and that sort of thing, so I'll review that, run it by a friend or two, and post it later this week. I think it's pretty nifty, which leads me to suspect there's something dire and obvious about it that I'm missing.