Aside from its annoying habit of start the names of all the cultures and characters with either A or Z, I’m still struggling to get the tone of the Forbidden Lands setting to gel in my head.

The size of the land and the supposed isolating effect of the Blood Mist effect just don’t make any sense. I can see why they made that decision (apparently late on in the design) to be more like the other Year Zero games, but it just doesn’t work for me.

It’s supposed to be a land where people barely know where the next village is and where mighty armies took 10 years to conquer one part of it, but you could ride across it in a week. Plus…I don’t know what exactly. It just feels weirdly disjointed.

I’m mining The One Ring for a load of content and that’s giving me more of a structure to build tone on. I’ve also made hexes 20km across instead of 10, as a token gesture to environmental grandiosity.

Other than focusing on procedurally generated content rather than the adventure sites, I’m really interested in how you’ve approached it.