Through a Different Lens

There's a game called Kuro that was released some time back. It's a futuristic posthuman J-Horror game. It's got cybernetics, genetic engineering, and the kind of horror you can only get from Japanese films. It was a very interesting setting for a tabletop roleplaying game. And it stopped at three books, because 'the story had been told'.

Except it hadn't. It ended the story when the PCs came into their full capabilities, and then stopped. It told the game master about how the event could have spread to other countries -- but didn't go into any detail.  Sure, you know what Japan is like within this time frame and setting, but it tells you nothing about what the rest of the world is like.

This has often been my beef with RPGs that focus on a culture or country and tweak it into something new. They either ignore the rest of the world, or simply allude to it and leave it alone, so that if you want to have the characters go elsewhere, it's up to the GM to do 100% of the work with no help from the game.

Shadowrun on the other hand, explored all sorts of locations and cultures and shared it with the game master, so that the characters could go anywhere, and there'd be at least something to provide the group with information and lore.

There's been plenty of other games, however, where I feel it would be interesting to see what's beyond the borders provided by the game:

In Nomine.  What's the world like in Asia?
Kuro. Ditto. What's the world like through a lens other than Gnosticism?
Vaesen. Scandinavian faeries. Neat. What happens if you go to North America?
Castle Falkenstein. They had a sourcebook for the USA, but what about other regions? What would the world look like in Japan, or India, or Brazil?

When you're dealing with medieval fantasy, it's easy to localise - though people can and did travel far and wide -- I mean, they found Buddhist icons in Viking graves, for example -- but the more you get to the present day (and even more so if you get into the future), people can and will travel, and this means figuring out how the world ticks in these new locations.  Kuro had Japan sealed off from the rest of the world through supernatural means - but that ends at the end of the third adventure, meaning the characters could go anywhere.

Of course, the argument could be made, "that's outside the scope of the setting" - but that isn't going to stop players from wandering, or the game master wanting to add elements from elsewhere into the game. At least give some idea of what's going on - enough information for the GM to draw from, at the very least, I feel.

Maybe not necessarily in the first book (which is usually a zoom into a specific area), but later on, as the world is expanded upon.