A Eulogy for the Heavy Setting...

Heavy settings are all but dead.  Few still exist.  Mostly Harn.  Technically Rifts.  But once we had heavy settings all over.  I spent several fortunes getting many of the heavy settings I wanted from my youth like Scarred Lands and WFRP2.  The heavy setting began to die in the year 2000.  WotC saw it was not profitable so avoided actively creating settings for 3E beyond Forgotten Realms.  White Wolf picked up the slack with Scarred Lands, what is the unheralded best 3E setting.  Fuck Eberron.  Eberron is for retards.  Mostly because Eberron wasn't actually a reaction to 3E, it was a setting being built from the days of 2E and converted over.  Obviously they bolted random shit on to it like steampunk and terminators.  And that chrome veneer is all it took to get the normie gamers to dance.  That along with 3E's twinkability.  All the "good shit" in Eberron came with Eberron, the "good shit" in Scarred Lands came from 3E.  That's the difference.  Ingenuity.   

The shift had begun though.  During the later 2E era more and more player-side products were being sold.  Less adventures and more random shit to bolt on to the system.  3E built this as a core design feature.  It was made to be able to create additional classes, prestige classes, and feats in later products.  The bloat could not survive.  The game was destined to die, and it only lasted 5 years.  5E lasted twice as long.  It only devoted 2 books maximum to any given setting.  Most got one.  Or a boxed set which was still one book, just spread over three and put in a box so they could charge 3-4x the price.  

Why I bring this up is that the plight of heavy settings, the focus on character options instead of world options, is the thing that killed D&D.  Or rather changed it into something unrecognizable.  And as goes D&D so goes the entire hobby.  Even in the OSR, settings are extraordinarily light or non-existent.  FGG has dropped the Lost Lands.  C&C mostly pushes... player options.  They're playing the same stupid game as WotC for the same reason (quantity of players' wallets vs GMs' wallets).  I can't blame them but I also won't play.  

Even the incomparable Kevin Crawford started out his venture into the fantasy genre with a relatively deep setting in Red Tide.  Or at least the beginnings of one, expended in lore mostly by The Crimson Pandect, a strange window into that world based on it's spellcasters.  But even he has succumbed to the lure of core products and keeps producing similar games over and over, now with baked in micro-settings rather than the deep settings of yore.  Even Atlas of the Latter Earth is somehow a full length book of a micro-setting.  So many words used to not say much.  

In 1988, a little 102 page RPG came out of Canada called High Colonies.  As far as I know it was never supported.  It almost didn't need to be, it was a fairly light game and fairly dense on setting material.  Was it playable?  Yes but took heavy investment by the GM.  This is something that flies on the wayside.  

In 1992, a little 240 page book came out and was later revised in 1997 called Over the Edge.  It was fairly well supported, but didn't need to be.  The core book contained a deep setting of The Edge, the city on the crazy island of Al Amarja.  

I am talking pagecounts because it's not required that deep settings have lots of pages or copious amounts of supplementary materials, but it doesn't hurt.  What they do need is stuff.  Specific stuff.  Not general 10,000 ft view stuff.  The OSR is littered with this low effort bullshit.  It promotes laziness in GMs and even more laziness in players.  We don't need either to be lazy.  While this is a leisure activity, a universal truth is that effort makes everything better.  In fact, potential and genius don't mean shit without effort behind it.  

And we seem to be out of effort.