What settings can be described as "Wide as an ocean and deep as a puddle"?

I mean you're right. 40k is so expansive that it's basically pointless to flesh anything out. It's a perfect example of your desu. Case in point: how do average imperial citizens go about their day to day? What do they even wear?

>What do they even wear?
At least we know the answer to that, and it is potato sacks.

40k

>not that shallow.

How delusional can a person be.

cape comics

Wouldn't the average experience be that of hiveworlders simply due to their numbers wrecking the curve?
>wake up
>get shot
>faint
>repeat
>shove sex into that somewhere for offspring

Golarion.

We've seen it here and there and in plenty of cases it's easy to guess at, especially with clothing. I'll give you a better one, Chaos government. Even if 99% of their planets are slave labor, there still has to be some kind of administration or bureaucracy and I've literally never found a SINGLE source talking about it, even from BL's official fanfiction.
Somewhere there must exist Gary Murderfuck, 43 year old Chaos Accountant. He's got chameleon eyes, goat hoofs, a wife, 3 kids, and a complicated relationship with his mother. He prays to Khorne before he goes jogging, Tzeentch to make the numbers add up, Slaanesh whenever his blues rock band plays at the local bar, and Nurgle when he gets a bad cold. He likes his nutrient-enriched gruel mildly salted, his wife in the missionary position, and sometimes he wonders if he'd be happier if he'd become a priest of Slaanesh like his parents wanted. Because without Gary, Warlord Gorefist's troops don't get ammo, his ships run out of gas, and his big showdown with Heroicus Selfinsertius never happens.

LOTR

It's not shallow at all, it has accumulated in-universe explanations for almost everything that you can find in the setting. Haters gonna hate.

Absolutely this.

Everything not having to do with magic in Shadowrun is this.

wew lad

Mystique being there annoys me more than it should

>Chaos government.
have you ever run a Black Crusade game? (in fact those books do go into detail on how those chaos worlds function, it's not pretty). It's pretty obvious that if it's not slave labor, it tends to be either a despotism with an unhinged lunatic in charge, or an oligarchy with a bunch of unhinged lunatics in charge. A typical day for any chaos leadership is "Situation normal: spiraling out of control"

or to put it better, everyday is Somalia, all the normal fucks left years ago.

Dragonlance and Ravenloft. Both have huge worlds that are really simple and barebones once you play a campaign in them.

Veeky Forums

HFY fags please go and stay go.

Came to post this.

>HFY fags please go and stay go.
did, did you even read my post? at what point does anything in that say "Humanity: Fuck Yeah" to you?

but thanks for posting a .pic of exactly what I'm talking about.

Strangely Bleez was the first thing that stood out to me

You weren't talking about a planet that is a better place to live than 90% of the imperial worlds.

>You weren't talking about a planet that is a better place to live than 90% of the imperial worlds.
Q'sal? I did, its the "oligarchy with a bunch of unhinged lunatics in charge" planet.

A 40k planet that's 90% better than any imperial world is still a shit-hole by IRL standards.

>and it all boils down to x must fight y

And everyone knows how feared the Somali military is, right? Besides, Somalia has government, just not a functioning one at the national level. And the logistical and administrative needs only scale up exponentially when you go from a single country to even a handful of planets, let alone what Abaddon has got. You can meme about Failbaddon all you want, he still has the ability to wage crusades, where even unsuccessful ones would be literally, physically impossible without a few million Gary's. They may be inept, overworked, and constantly given hopelessly unrealistic demands, but they MUST exist.

most homebrew

“Now you see that Order will always triumph, because Chaos is complete shit at logistics.”

It may be shit, but it still has to have it. See

Harry Potter

Not having every little bullshit detail specified does not equal "shallow as a puddle" I'm not going to argue that 40k is deep as fuck or something, but those elements of it about which majority of its fans care about the most are pretty damn extensive. If anything I would say it's the opposite of OP's statement, it's not wide as an ocean because despite taking place in a seemingly huge area(both in time and space) it really focuses and fleshes out a relatively small number of its aspects, but it does so quite deeply and extensively.

The difference between Marvel and DC is like the difference between shit and turd.

ASOIF. Oh, I know there are a lot of details added, but it's the sort of setting that the more you think about it and learn about it, the less sense it makes.

Presumably these Gary's exist in a permanent state of bitter resentment/poorly managed rage that they never get to experience the sort violence/perversity that Chaos societies glorify.

I actually use this to describe Skyrim often. TES lore is actually decently deep, but the game itself fits the description quite well.

I came here to say Golarion. Almost no thought it put into any of it, it covers all fantasy tropes, and despite mechanical space creatures existing within a short county drive from another country their is never any bleedover. Borders in Golarian are basically impossible for anything but PCs.

It's not that wide.

>One giant christian metaphor
>Generations of history by the end
Movie Narnia, sure, but by the end of the books it's not bad for what it is. Not really that huge in scape either, the books are usually fairly small scale.

My suggestion? ASOIAF. It's a huge world, apparently most of the size of eurasia+africa, but holy shit there's no thought put into any of it, GRRM has confirmed he's just been making up shit as he went along.
Think about how little information we have on 99% of this, and how what little we have makes no sense (westeros = south america in size, yet has one city every hundred miles and is somehow united into one kingdom for the last few thousands of years)

>Chaos is found in greatest abundance wherever order is being sought. It always defeats order, because it is better organized. - T.Pratchett

>united into one kingdom for the last few thousands of years
Aegon united them only 300 years before the books start (and Dorne was only incorporated 100 years before the books). Why do you think it's called the Seven Kingdoms?

The MtG multiverse
>A world for every hat, and a single hat for every world

>"War" is literally in the name
>complains that lore is based around conflict
Stop posting.

stole mine
Too many plots are being "corrupted" by demons/old-gods/radiation/whatever, and many ones that aren't are instead "you gotta forgive and not be racist dude", even though so many quests are "go to this tribe of creatures which have stone-age technology, language, religious beliefs, users of magic, and different roles in their society. Then kill 12 of them."

Agreed.
It's a shallow setting, but it's presentation, attention to detail, and characterization of certain individual characters carries it into being good.
Also, among losers who always do elves orcs and dwarves reading it is like a journey to mecca.

TES lore isn't even that deep to begin with. It's the way that it's presented (pre Skyrim at least) that makes it so remarkable.

>Little to no thought put into the toponymy
>"Realistic" and "Dark" even though it's incredibly obvious that Martin has a very shallow understanding of medieval history
>No sense of scale whatsoever
>History of the world is static with kingdoms lasting thousands of years
I'd say you're about right

Star Wars. Just look at the most recent movies, they had to set up the Rebels / Empire thing just to have a plot.

Forgotten Realms. Might actually be halfway playable if there weren't about a dozen mid-high epic NPCs per continent.

Eh, Morrowind is the only game that evoked illusions of depth, while in reality it wasn't that deep, it was just very original.

Do you mean that Morrowind is the only TES game to evoke an illusion of depth, or that it's the only game ever to evoke an illusion of depth? I assume you claim the former since the lore in Dark Souls, for example, seems at first glance considerably deeper than it really is.

Pokemon. Granted, that makes it pretty easy to flesh out and an easy skin to throw over pther things like traditional scifi or fantasy.

The Harry Potterverse.

It's literally the progenitor of autistic small details no normal human should care about.

>kingdoms lasting thousands of years

As in? I don't think even Valyria did. Perhaps Yi-Ti.

True that some should make the man do a week on a (very robust) horse and make him count kilometers, tough.

Do you mean how can dragons fly?

Same with fallout 4. Bethesda wants you to keep moving so you don't have time to think about why what you're doing is retarded

>Case in point: how do average imperial citizens go about their day to day? What do they even wear?
Asking that is like asking what the average person on Earth does in their day to day or what they wear, and the answer in the Imperium would be much the same, just on a million different worlds with a million different answers. An Imperial world in Segmentum Solar would live very differently from a similar world in the Gothic Sector, likewise a hive worlder or denizen of a Forge World would live lives as alien to one another as someone in Afghanistan's life would be compared to someone in New York.

Even with as many authors and books as they have for 40k, there's only so many worlds they can flesh out, though they do a good job of it for several.

Did they ever explain why the dranai went from being ugly aliens to sexy aliens?

Fucking hell this is the best thing I've read all day. I want Gary Murderfuck to have his own TV show.

Star Wars.

Golarion.

Its the other way around sexy aliens turned into ugly aliens

I think the lore reason given is that the broken were rejected by the light (for some reason) and started worshiping the elements making them shamans. No idea why player dranei shaman arent broken though

What does that even mean?

In actuality, no, it just comes across that way. The PF setting guide is not an encyclopedia of the setting, it's a primer that gives the players just enough information to make a fitting character. The actual in-depth development happens during the campaigns. And there actually is some deep shit that binds the setting together, but you only get small pieces at a time.

It's an ugly looking setting, and it's not a settingfag's setting, but Golarion is pretty underrated.

The writers literally forgot they'd already made ugly dranai, and by the time someone reminded them, they were too far along to change it.

There has been a Stark in Winterfell since the Long Night. Even if the timeline is a complete exaggeration, this is still several times longer-lived than our dynasty. It's pretty ridiculous.

It's wide as an ocean, so if you keep it surface level, you can explore far and wide.
But if you try to dive in, you can't get immersed, with it being so shallow.

And all the kingdoms of Westeros are the same since then as well. The only exception being the Riverlands which just existed so that the other kingdoms would have something to fight over and Dorne which wasn't unified until the Rhoynar arrived and have been ruled by House Martell ever since.

Use your brain dude

>kingdoms lasting thousands of years
I have less of a problem with this and more of a problem with the absence of technological progress over said thousands of years.

> There isn't a lot of depth in it
>But there is an wide array of tropes you can work with and develope depth in you own game.
You literally just confirmed OP.
It's not a deep setting.

D&D settings.

>has a bit of everything in it
>nothing is fleshed out in depth

They're the sort of settings that go "we need a short human, a tall human, a bulky human, a short green, a tall green, a bulky green, etc" without any actual point other than covering all the bases.

>D&D settings.
No, D&D settings tend to have more details than that in them. The D&D system on its own doesn't, because it's not a setting.

>No, D&D settings
Yes, D&D settings are wide and shallow. Nobody said anything about the D&D system either.

>D&D settings tend to have more details than that in them.

And yet still they end up shallow. FR, Eberron, Mystara, Greyhawk - you name it, it's all surface-level shit. Even more lauded 2E settings like Dark Sun, Spelljammer and Planescape are more admired for their openness.

Dark Sun, Spelljammer and Planescape are not deep at all. They're just focused, whereas FR is a catch all setting.

Can you idiots define what you mean by "deep?" Because from some of the examples given here, it seems like you'd need a whole new spectrum just to categorize the autism needed to make something "deep" by your standards.

>Age of Sigmar.
All wargame settings. They only exist to give your dudes a reason to fight other dudes.

I am being confused as well, some seem to consider depth the level of detal, while others seem to consider it in a "that's so deep bro" kind of way.

>others seem to consider it in a "that's so deep bro" kind of way.
Those people are idiots though. Depth in this case would mean how well the setting handles players attempting to immerse themselves in it. If the setting expects players to not care what goes on in the viking land other than there being vikings there, it's a shallow setting. If there's an actual society there with laws, history, culture and traditions fleshed out there, then it's deep.

Forgotten Realms?

this is the issue with applying a /v/ phrase to Veeky Forums
with videogames, 'wide as an ocean but deep as a puddle' means that there's a lot of land to explore and theoretically a lot to do, but not much of it in any particular area, and it's likely very samey
for example no man's sky, which presents a mindbogglingly huge galaxy.. filled with virtually identical planets covered in virtually identical flora and fauna, with almost nothing to do besides mine and upgrade your ability to mine or follow a very poor storyline.

since Veeky Forums by nature means that you'll always have some depth of things to do in any particular area by dint of the DM existing, the phrase gets super foggy and it's hard to tell what anyone really means by it
best guess i have is that it's about how much detail a setting goes into each individual territory or town, and the interactions between factions.

>by dint of the DM existing
Which means that the question is, how deep is the setting as written, as opposed to how deep has the GM made it.

This is how you need to think of it.

>if a setting has 5 kingdoms but that's all you see, it's neither broad nor deep
>if a setting has 50 kingdoms of all different flavours, but that's all you see, that's broad but shallow
>if a setting has 5 kingdoms but there's history, culture, and backstory behind each one, that's narrow but deep
>if a setting has 50 kingdoms but there's history, culture, and backstory behind each one, that's broad AND deep

So, for example, JK Rowling's world is narrow and shallow, since it doesn't have much of a backstory and it's very limited in what sort of scope it has (there's just a few locations, all set in Britain).

GRR Martin's world is broad but shallow, because he has lots of different things but he rarely delves further into it with any focus, mostly just throwaway lines.

JRR Tolkien's world is narrow but deep, since it's very limited in the sorts of things available, but there's a hell of a lot of stuff working in the background to make it work.

But it's the truly autistic settings that command both depth and breadth. Normally, it's made by multiple people, who each focus on one particular aspect and zoom in on it, so that the collective work covers a lot but has a ton behind it.

That's literally what he just said.

Any from Dungeons and Dragons (literally just random brainstorming: the setting. analyze it or try to draw any meaning from it for 5 seconds and it falls apart, but there sure are a bunch of books to buy about all the stuff in the setting huh)
Warhammer if it wasn't for a few very specific writers salvaging everyone else's shallow fantasies
90% of all fantasy (generic Tolkien clones with tons of factual lore but no atmosphere, philosophies, or themes)

Detail does not equal depth. An extremely autistic Sonic fanfiction with description of a character's individual strands of hair does not mean it's a deep world being fleshed out. Depth comes from thought, immersion, design, etc. not complexity alone.

There are people today who still live in mud huts.
I don't get why Fantasy worlds have to make all the same technological breakthroughs and progressions as the real world.

If you have no idea what the fuck you are doing, the enemy cannot predict your actions.

>But it's the truly autistic settings that command both depth and breadth. Normally, it's made by multiple people, who each focus on one particular aspect and zoom in on it, so that the collective work covers a lot but has a ton behind it.
So the Big Two comicbook universes?

The difference being that the Somali military is not literally empowered by God and thrown across the ocean to go rape San Marino to death because it's a good time.

Every piece of fiction about how Chaos operates boils down to "autocratic rulers, empowered by their closeness to the Chaos Gods, in charge of screaming hellships and mutated planets that should not exist but do, that constantly struggle with each other until someone more powerful than them can force them all to go in the same direction for five minutes."

We know that Chaos harvests materials; go read Gaunt's Ghosts, 90% of the fights in the early books are, "Cultists have taken over the fuel refinery/promethium plants/industrial centers of this planet and are producing Chaos shit, we need to kill them without blowing up the materiel so the Imperium can use it again."

The Garys of 40k are schmuck cultists who die by the millions in the background, and explicitly exist.

The Japanese still claim direct descent from Jimmu. Doesn't mean that it's a real line. It's easy for the Starks to say, "There's always been a Stark in Winterfell" when they have been there for a thousand years, with no real idea of what happened a thousand years before that.