Night Chalice, Swords of the Serpentine, and Default Settings

I am not, in general, a fan of the pre-made milieus (yay, it's fantasy, I can use milieu! The Gygax duck falls from the ceiling and I get a prize!) that come with most RPGs. That being said I have been doing more with them lately; for example, because the game at the library is for lots of random kids I wanted the game to mirror the source material the library had purchased for the kids to look at, so the Dragon Empire it is. That ones great because it's got lots of empty spaces in the campaign for you to fill in, and there's a nice detailed color map for the players to look at as they run hither and yon across the Empire. 

(It becomes problematic as 13th Age 2E comes out and they've, for reasons unfathomable to me, advanced the timeline of the "we are leaving lots of this unfilled for you to use and we won't add much to mess with it" specifically to remove the Icon who was the Big Bad of my ongoing campaign. So that's useless. But there's a lot in 2E that baffles me...)

Anyway, I'm also using Swords of the Serpentine more or less as written, which is something I didn't do in the playtest (which I ran in Ankh-Morpork). Again, it's because the players have very little time, I have a readily screen-shot-able PDF of the rulebook (and now after the Pelicon sale I think all the PCs own their own PDFs), and also because the players are huge fans of Scott Lynch's Gentleman Bastard series, which is such an influence on the setting Lynch is name checked twice. Since I've long wanted to run a game where the PCs were a thieves guild, Eversink makes a good place for that. 

Still, this means the milieu has stuff it that I wouldn't have put there: the existence ghosts and Spirit Sight as a default PC ability, for example, is really changing what I originally had in mind for the game. The importance of True Names in the setting I could skip - and almost did because they don't work quite the way they do in the Gentleman Bastards so there's a little confusion we had to get over (though I understand why because players would loathe the loss of agency in that magic system) - but didn't because it felt linked to the ghosts and spirits. These things make Eversink unique, but directly tying one of the class skills to those mechanics, and that class skill to one of the city factions, makes it feel difficult to genercize the rules set for other places. 

Which generally irks me. Eversink is fine. It's clever, it's colorful, it's got a nice flavor, its internally consistent. But would I be happier running this in Lankhmar? Or Shankill, my own prime milieu? Maybe. I just wish the system made it a little easier to do so. 

That being said, the rules for Laws and Traditions, or Forgotten Lore, where spending a point lets you define things about the setting and the setting being built to withstand that, is a wonderful thing. So there are plusses and minuses. Everyone's having fun! Next week, it's the Dragon Waiting Syndrome!