Your World Sucks

I can't find it now but I vaguely remember reading a blog post once that made the statement that your world sucks. The basic point was that the blogger preferred his own, home-brew campaign world to any commercially available product. Essentially, the blog post espoused the creative process of making your own rather than slavishly adopting someone else's handiwork. This argument has come to my mind recently because of two developments:

• Over on TMP (and elsewhere, I'm sure) there has been a lot of hand-wringing about the Age of Sigmar, the new set of fantasy rules by Games Workshop. The big issue is that they are discontinuing their venerable Warhammer Fantasy Battle (WFB) rules. Fans of WFB are up in arms about the change, partly because GW is completely re-doing the setting, making all their old army lists obsolete. Of course, this does not bother me a bit. I never really was interested in WFB, to a large extent because I was never all that crazy about their world. I much prefer playing out battles in my own imagi-nations.

• Last weekend, I ran an RPG session inspired by Colonial Gothic. While I like the general concept of the setting (supernatural horrors during the American Revolution), there are many aspects about the setting as described in the rulebook for which I don't particularly care. What did I do? I tossed out the "official" backstory and substituted my own. Once again, I am essentially creating my own world rather than using a commercial product (although I like to "borrow" ideas from commercial games).

Anyway, I just find so liberating not to be tied to some official setting but to use my own. I also love the creative process. So, from my perspective, other people's worlds do pale in comparison to my own.