two things: the tyranny of the oracular setting
Okay, so there's this thing about indie games, which I'm going to call the Oracle Syndrome.

This is most clearly evidenced in In a Wicked Age, but it exists elsewhere in many incarnations. Dogs does it. DRYH does it. Hell, Mist-Robed Gate does it. My essay here might look like I'm calling it a problem, but it's not. It's rather a demographic gap.

The Oracle Syndrome consists of building an imaginary world around a latticework of axioms and derivations. This is easy for the author because it requires way less work, and it has a lot of good play effects. It gets good player buy-in, and it gets people thinking about the setting. Those are cool! But there are things that it does well and things it does poorly.

I think it's pretty bad for any setting that you want to have any more than superficial internal logic. Making up stuff off-the-cuff means that you get this sedimentary collection of information about it, which means that it's impossible to create the sort of subtle details that exist in the real world or a well-developed fictional setting. If you don't know in session 1 that the camel herders of Mekhebe exist, then you're not going to have Mekhebese rugs on the floors of the mead-halls of Thord. You're not going to have anything interesting to learn about the world, because you're making it up as you go along. That's fine sometimes, but sometimes you really want to luxuriate in the richness of a setting that's already built for you, and Oracle Syndrome means that there isn't a lot of that going on in indie gaming.

You're also going to miss out on what I call the 'good detail,' which isn't just a detail, but one that's meaningful and valuable on multiple levels, expressed in beautiful words and full of information. This is kind of the opposite of the richness effect, because a good detail can live in solitaire, but I think it takes some time and good writing to get to them. Not everyone's a good writer, and there aren't a lot of people who can come up with good details on the spot (or ever), good writer or no. (Now that's another thing, which is that there are like maybe three good literary writers and maybe like two good technical writers in indie gaming (No, I'm not going to say who, but suffice it to say that I don't consider myself a member of either set.) and that means we've got a very low bar on writing.)

So in short I think that there's a gap in our setting writing here, and it creates a gap in our play, and the fact that we don't do this writing work (And here I want to say that I'm putting my pen where my ...pen... is, and actually writing a big ol' rich setting, to fill that gap.) allows us to get away with slovenly prose and worse, because people will just read your rules anyway if you write like a knuckle-dragging subprimate, but they won't let you do that with setting, which is essentially fiction and thus requires better presentation to maintain engagement or focus.

The buy-in effect oracular setting also has a flipside: you need bought-in players to make it work, because creating takes a little more work than consuming, and generally players need to learn the system of axioms and derivational processes to get the oracle working: a system that is rarely communicated sufficiently through the text. There's a greater burden for education from the author (and part of this is because the 'mainstream' gaming tradition has really strong transmission of the processes you need to work with rich setting), and I feel like this burden is not always sufficiently carried. This isn't great.

This is an unfinished thought. I'll get father with it later.

edit: uh thing 2 was gonna be about izumo but i'll write it later i gotta do other stuff