Setting design evolution

For fun, I'd been tinkering for a little while with archiving all the fantasy settings I'd played around with since the release of D&D Third Edition, when I got more involved with RPGs again, particularly fantasy RPGs, and, well, started developing settings for use with the game.

While this probably isn't a comprehensive list, it does include every setting that I developed at least enough that some element of it carried down to the current iteration of DARK•HERITAGE, either in terms of a houserule, a setting element, or even just a theme that's explored. And it's not 100% homebrewed either; the Freeport Homebrew is so named because at the core of the setting is Green Ronin's Freeport modular setting element. Which I then took and placed in a homebrew setting of mostly my own design, of course.

I did this in an almost flowchartish approach, with approximations (or estimates, where my memory is not sufficient) of when the setting was developed on a not-to-scale timeline on the left hand side. I've also tried to put settings into sensible "streams"--while all of them contribute in some fashion to DARK•HERITAGE Mk. IV, they also don't all do so in equal measures, and one setting sometimes evolved into another setting before being abandoned and cannibalized for what later became another setting in another stream. Although this also occludes the fact that sometimes what goes around comes around; despite the spider-web nature of the chart attached here, it's fair to say that the current version of DARK•HERITAGE resembles the old Bloodlines setting from nearly a decade ago more closely than it does almost any of the stages in between.