How Much World to Build?

[Scott Baker]

Fate Core had an interesting take on the subject, in that much of the world setting literally comes into being based on decisions players make in character creation. If one of your players comes up with "I am on the run from the Holy Killers of Catavia!", then suddenly your world has an order of monastic assassins called the Holy Killers of Catavia, and you are suddenly obligated to include it in your party's adventures.

Interesting, but not original. I've been doing this for decades with Hero. Admittedly there was often a campaign equivalent that we would substitute, but if someone had something new, that was great.

[Vondy]

World building is a rabbit-hole too easily fallen into.

 

As a rule, I tend to stick to what is necessary for the story I'm telling and nothing more.

 

I only sweat things like trade routes, macroeconomics, natural resources, neighboring kingdoms, distant lands, and strange new cultures if they are actually relevant.

 

Otherwise, a general idea of such things is more than enough to handle weird questions that come up.

 

I want to tell stories - the words are ancillary to that aim.

[DShomshak]

I’ll work out some details that never turn up in play, such as a country’s population and how people feed themselves, just to help create verisimilitude and have answers ready if players ask questions. Like, for the lost city (well, fragment of town) of the medusas and their slaves hidden in a rift in the mountains, I took care to mention the terraced gardens built up against the cliffs. I also knew what they used for money and many other social quirks. Although such details played no part in the adventure as such, they were meant to subliminally tell the players that this a community of people – if rather unpleasant people – rather than a “lair of monsters.” Which was very important for the adventure.

 

I’ve also had bits of world background that I thought were pure self-indulgence on my part turn out to be useful. In my second Super-Mage playtest campaign, I had a story arc set on the sword-and-sorcery/Dying Earth homage world of Loezen. (See The Mystic World, p. 41.) Since one of the PCs could do time travel, I decided the story arc would include traveling back into the past to steal a magic artifact needed to save the world from its current doom.

 

So I wrote a page about Loezen’s past ages: the Age of the Road Builder before the current epoch, the Age of the Cloud Lords before that, the dark and terrible Age of Red Shadows before that, and the Age of the Six Sovereign – when the PCs would go – before that.

 

And because I never know when to quit, I tossed off a series of Ages so far in the past that their very existence was conjectural based on slight evidence: the Age of Towers; the Arcuate Age when people wrote using glyphs of short curved lines; the Trefoil Age dominated by a religion that used a three-loop symbol whose significance is no longer known; the Anaglyphic Age, inferred from some very ancient buildings with pictures carved on their walls, including the indestructible tomb-city of Necropolis; and the Trilunar Age, when Loezen apparently had three moons instead of the current two. Pure world-building wankery!

 

Only… when the time came for the PCs to travel back to the Age of Six Sovereigns, the guy with the time travel spell blew his control roll. A lot. Our Heroes were in an Age a few million years before when they wanted.

 

On the spot, I improvised a bizarre society for Loezen before the sun faded – pretty much throwing out whatever cultural or magical non sequiturs popped into my head. (How the Ancients made the "wizard spar" crystals that later Loezenian mages incorporated into magic items? Martial arts, of course!) The PCs managed to obtain help, though: The magicians(?) of the city of Stelladan-5, that would later become Necropolis, proposed to put the PCs in suspended animation and launch them into orbit in an indestructible capsule, timed so the orbit would decay and deliver them back to the ground at the time they wanted. (They weren’t willing to try time travel magic again.) The PCs agreed, and it was done.

 

At which point, one of my players smote his forehead and said, “We caused the Trilunar Age!” It was one of my best Gming moments, and I swear I never planned any of it. When I dashed off my list of Ages, it was just details to suggest a very long, obscure, bizarre, and partly misunderstood history for Loezen. I had no way of knowing the player would blow the control roll. I stole the orbital capsule/suspended animation idea from a story by Cordwainer Smith as an expedient to get the adventure back on track. I wasn’t even thinking of my list of Ages, since I was just pulling stuff out of my ass as quickly as I could. By pure good fortune it all came together.

 

All I can say is that chance favors the prepared mind and, sometimes, the over-prepared GM. So while I focus my world-building more than I used to – provinces rather than continents – I make sure to design bits of random evocative detail, in hopes I may find a use for it later.

 

Dean Shomshak

[tkdguy]

If I ever get to run a setting I've been working on, I'm going to start small and stay small. I have a map of the basic campaign area, which is a group of islands, and keep the entire campaign there. I may even just keep the campaign in one of the major cities. I can always use a city map from one of the many modules I have and save myself a ton of work.

[Vondy]

If I ever get to run a setting I've been working on, I'm going to start small and stay small. I have a map of the basic campaign area, which is a group of islands, and keep the entire campaign there. I may even just keep the campaign in one of the major cities. I can always use a city map from one of the many modules I have and save myself a ton of work.

 

After years of running massive geo-politically involved globe-trotting campaigns, an intensely local, episodic, character centric game has huge appeal for me.

[Old Man]

It's possible to have a campaign with almost no campaign world at all, if you confine it to a city or boat.   But where's the fun in that? 

[tkdguy]

I know there's one setting where everything is set within a single city. Expanding it to the surrounding countryside may not be a bad idea, though.

[Cancer]

If your story arc is to save the Universe from ravening cross-dimensional Cthuloid quasi-deities, there's going to be some stuff you need to define.

[bluesguy]

If I ever get to run a setting I've been working on, I'm going to start small and stay small. I have a map of the basic campaign area, which is a group of islands, and keep the entire campaign there. I may even just keep the campaign in one of the major cities. I can always use a city map from one of the many modules I have and save myself a ton of work.

Which is how I ran my first campaign when I started running again.  I just used Valdorian Age because it had the great city of Elweir and the surrounding territory for a long time.  Players loved it.

 

Current campaign takes place in a very small corner within a corner of one of the city states that is part of a confederate nation.

[DShomshak]

I may even just keep the campaign in one of the major cities.

The last FH campaign I played in worked that way, or at least it started out that way. The PCs were the neighborhood watch for a district in the city... but an unexpectedly tough and competent neighborhood watch that had a knack for stepping into the escalating conflict between the city's nobles and merchants, and interfering with both sides. (My character, Jervon Cutler, was a knife-maker who'd become an expert fencer -- and an uppity streak that led to him challenging arrogant young nobles to duels.)

 

The campaign didn't last that long, though, due to GM life-&-work scheduling problems, and he hasn't evinced interest in re-starting it. Too bad; I liked it a lot. But it shows such a campaign can be done.

 

Dean Shomshak

[Vondy]

The last FH campaign I played in worked that way, or at least it started out that way. The PCs were the neighborhood watch for a district in the city... but an unexpectedly tough and competent neighborhood watch that had a knack for stepping into the escalating conflict between the city's nobles and merchants, and interfering with both sides. (My character, Jervon Cutler, was a knife-maker who'd become an expert fencer -- and an uppity streak that led to him challenging arrogant young nobles to duels.)

 

The campaign didn't last that long, though, due to GM life-&-work scheduling problems, and he hasn't evinced interest in re-starting it. Too bad; I liked it a lot. But it shows such a campaign can be done.

 

Dean Shomshak

 

I've run two Harn games that were very narrow in focus. One was focused on the City of Tashal and its immediate environs.It worked like a charm. The cast was a landless, somewhat impoverished knight appointed as "crowner" for the city and his entourage. The other wasn't location-centric. It was focused on a group of key retainers to the King, who travelled with the Royal Court. I only had two locations (the royal seat of olokand and tashal) that really needed to be worked out. The other pit-stops the royal court made just needed thumbnails on the fly. Most of the work was fleshing out the major courtiers.

[tkdguy]

A few years ago, I bought the Lankhmar supplement for AD&D. It includes a large map of the city that has a few areas left blank for the DM to develop (there is a booklet with some maps and notes the DM can copy). If I run an urban campaign, I can use that map. If my campaign isn't set in Leiber's world, I'll just change the name; the players won't know the difference anyway.

[DShomshak]

Getting back to the original question of the thread title... It's a cop-out to respond with, "As much as you need," but honestly, I can't think of any rules to say How Much World To Build. It'll vary too much with the details of the campaign.

 

Take maps, for instance. I love making maps. I've mapped continents just because I didn't know when to stop. OTOH, for my Scion game the only map I drew was a sketch of a section of a shopping mall. The campaign was conceived as a teen supernatural action/soap opera TV show in the mold of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, so I didn't design locations so much as design scenes, whose special relationship to each other didn't matter much.

 

Dean Shomshak

[assault]

The smallest area I've used was a village and the area a day's walk or so around in all directions. This included a market town, a castle, a monastery, some other villages, various manor houses, and of course some eerie forests, marshes and moors.

[Altair]

I think, again, it comes down to group composition. My S/O spends years detailing her campaign settings, I don't so much. But, if she's in a game I'm running, I know that certain things not being there will break her immersion. Like say, if the economics of a region don't make sense (a problem we bumped into in Monte Cook's Numenera setting most recently), or what local industries will be. Whereas with other people, they adhere more closely to the so-called "rule of cool;" essentially, their ability to willingly suspend their disbelief is positively correlated to how badass/sweet/wicked awesome something is.

 

How much world do I need? A more useful question for my purposes is "how much world do we need."

 

/communist lecture  

[薔薇語]

I play a lot of Civ5 and one thing has always struck me about it: it does a great job at map making with varied terrains, resources and even establishing population centers. I think if I were to run another Fantasy game, I would just open up a random game and make a hand copy of a random digital map. I could define it as being large or small, heavily or lightly populated and such and ease up on most of the front end work.

 

Foreign Orchid.

[massey]

Our fantasy games are mostly D&D/Pathfinder, so I tend to think in terms of those games.  I have been tinkering with an idea in my head in regards to world-building.  In an rpg fantasy world, where adventurers are common, and you can have an almost endless supply of new characters to replace the last guy who got eaten by a gelatinous cube, you'd need some sort of system that would almost generate new low-level PCs.  If player characters are "one in a million" types, then I've had games that would depopulate China with how quickly the players managed to get themselves killed.  One guy kept bringing in the brother of his previous character, who had the exact same stats and would just show up to claim his now-dead brother's equipment.  "How many brothers does this guy have, David?"  "He came from a big family."  "And they're all 6th level wizards?"  "Yes they are."

 

What I've been thinking is that a fantasy world would have patterns that generally repeat across the countryside.  From nation to nation and continent to continent, you're going to see the same types of things repeat again and again.  Most towns probably have a grumpy old hermit living in the woods a half-day's ride out.  This guy is probably a 2nd or 3rd level Wizard or Druid or something.  There's probably a crazy old witch who lives nearby, and children are afraid to go near her cottage.  You have a bartender or a blacksmith who was once the town hero.  He's a 4th level Fighter and he killed that ogre that wandered into town ten years ago.  Every generation, you've got a few youths who are dissatisfied with living in the town (their family has no money, their older brother is inheriting the farm, etc) and they decide to go out and adventure.  Maybe one of them studied under the grumpy old hermit enough to become a 1st level wizard or something.  Basically there's enough opportunity in the village (and the nearby villages) to churn out a 1st level party every 10 years or so.  And there is probably a 1st level dungeon, abandoned temple, or orc encampment nearby where they can go and level up.  Or get killed.

 

There would be probably tens of thousands of low level adventurers and low level threats scattered across the land.  Every village is going to have their own local heroes and local legends.  Most of these reach some sort of equilibrium.  Every once in a while, however, the local dungeon / grumpy hermit / evil monster is significantly more powerful.  Most of the time the hermit is some 3rd level guy who just brews potions and sells them in town on festival days.  But every 200 or 300 miles, the hermit is a 9th level guy who turns people to stone if they come near his tower.  And every great once in a while, it's an 18th level archmage.  Most of the time, the big threat is a troll living under a bridge or something.  But sometimes it's a great red dragon that set up shop in the nearby mountain and won't leave.  That's where high level adventurers are needed.

 

Now the point isn't to create a perfect repeating pattern like a video game.  It's not some sort of meta-rule for the players to discover and then wonder why the universe works that way.  It wouldn't be rigidly enforced or anything like that. It's a guideline for the GM.  Generally, 1st to 5th level characters are local heroes and deal with local threats.  Orcs are attacking the town, there's an ogre in the woods, there's a dungeon over there with a few wights at the bottom.  6th to 10th level characters fight more regional threats.  While most of the caverns and dungeons in the area are fairly small, the Crypt of the Black Knight is 10 days ride from here, and has an undead 8th level Fighter in it.  11th to 15th level characters go off and save the kingdom.  They fight dragons and things.  And characters up to 20th level face worldwide threats.

 

The idea is just to have a guideline for how common certain things are.  It helps me create an "ecology" for the game in my head.  Low level heroes, monsters, and magic are relatively ubiquitous.  You can run across that sort of thing almost anywhere.  Higher level encounters would be more rare, and things like dragons and beholders would be the dominant force over a very large area.

[Markdoc]

Our fantasy games are mostly D&D/Pathfinder, so I tend to think in terms of those games.  I have been tinkering with an idea in my head in regards to world-building.  In an rpg fantasy world, where adventurers are common, and you can have an almost endless supply of new characters to replace the last guy who got eaten by a gelatinous cube, you'd need some sort of system that would almost generate new low-level PCs.  If player characters are "one in a million" types, then I've had games that would depopulate China with how quickly the players managed to get themselves killed.  One guy kept bringing in the brother of his previous character, who had the exact same stats and would just show up to claim his now-dead brother's equipment.  "How many brothers does this guy have, David?"  "He came from a big family."  "And they're all 6th level wizards?"  "Yes they are."

 

What I've been thinking is that a fantasy world would have patterns that generally repeat across the countryside.  From nation to nation and continent to continent, you're going to see the same types of things repeat again and again.  Most towns probably have a grumpy old hermit living in the woods a half-day's ride out.  This guy is probably a 2nd or 3rd level Wizard or Druid or something.  There's probably a crazy old witch who lives nearby, and children are afraid to go near her cottage.  You have a bartender or a blacksmith who was once the town hero.  He's a 4th level Fighter and he killed that ogre that wandered into town ten years ago.  Every generation, you've got a few youths who are dissatisfied with living in the town (their family has no money, their older brother is inheriting the farm, etc) and they decide to go out and adventure.  Maybe one of them studied under the grumpy old hermit enough to become a 1st level wizard or something.  Basically there's enough opportunity in the village (and the nearby villages) to churn out a 1st level party every 10 years or so.  And there is probably a 1st level dungeon, abandoned temple, or orc encampment nearby where they can go and level up.  Or get killed.

 

There would be probably tens of thousands of low level adventurers and low level threats scattered across the land.  Every village is going to have their own local heroes and local legends.  Most of these reach some sort of equilibrium.  Every once in a while, however, the local dungeon / grumpy hermit / evil monster is significantly more powerful.  Most of the time the hermit is some 3rd level guy who just brews potions and sells them in town on festival days.  But every 200 or 300 miles, the hermit is a 9th level guy who turns people to stone if they come near his tower.  And every great once in a while, it's an 18th level archmage.  Most of the time, the big threat is a troll living under a bridge or something.  But sometimes it's a great red dragon that set up shop in the nearby mountain and won't leave.  That's where high level adventurers are needed.

 

Now the point isn't to create a perfect repeating pattern like a video game.  It's not some sort of meta-rule for the players to discover and then wonder why the universe works that way.  It wouldn't be rigidly enforced or anything like that. It's a guideline for the GM.  Generally, 1st to 5th level characters are local heroes and deal with local threats.  Orcs are attacking the town, there's an ogre in the woods, there's a dungeon over there with a few wights at the bottom.  6th to 10th level characters fight more regional threats.  While most of the caverns and dungeons in the area are fairly small, the Crypt of the Black Knight is 10 days ride from here, and has an undead 8th level Fighter in it.  11th to 15th level characters go off and save the kingdom.  They fight dragons and things.  And characters up to 20th level face worldwide threats.

 

The idea is just to have a guideline for how common certain things are.  It helps me create an "ecology" for the game in my head.  Low level heroes, monsters, and magic are relatively ubiquitous.  You can run across that sort of thing almost anywhere.  Higher level encounters would be more rare, and things like dragons and beholders would be the dominant force over a very large area.

 

My "rule of thumb" was that most reasonably experienced adult people had (on average) 10 points in assorted skills and physical attributes. In general, that would be things like area knowledge, a profession, etc. This would often simply be more points in things that fall into the everyman category - for example, most people will have a basic AK: for their home region, but some ordinary people might have more. I then increased the points by about a quarter for each halving in population, and just round to the nearest 25 points. So a village of a hundred people could expect to have a couple of 50-pointers, and about 30-40 25 pointers. A prosperous provincial town of a couple of thousand, would have one or two characters between 100-125 points, while in a city the size of Imperial Rome at it's peak, you'd expect literally thousands of people over 100 points and a few monsters in the 500-1000+ point level. These - naturally - are famous (or infamous) heroes or villains. I never let myself be shackled by this, of course, it was always a rule of thumb. But it let me decide on the spur of the moment what kind of resources were likely to be available.

 

cheers, Mark

[John Kuczwara]

Many years ago I played in a game where we were given the basics of the magic system, the technolagy of the age, and a very vag turain map.

We were the learders of villages. We each got to clam a piece of the plato in the midle of the map. we role played out how our villages got along and how we interacted with the pots cities to the East and the jungle comunities to the south. To the West was a vast Dessert that would spit out a trade carravan every few years from some far off lands. Now to the North there were these black towers that started to apear. In a few weeks of ingame time more were spoted closer and closer. The Magic system used elemental spirits captured by places of focused elemental energy. when you released the elemental from its confinement it did you a faver like a geiny wish limited to what the elemintal could do. So as the towers incroched on our plato we sent earth spirts to knock them down. The power of the towers made the defending earth spirits stronger and in short order the plato was over run by these towers and the spirts commanded by the owners of the towers were imposably strong. I was a hope less task to stop them once the towers had gained infulance over the whole plato the game secion came to an end with "And that is what has been going on in the world. Do we want to be refugies fleaing to the jungle comunities. Do we want to be freedom fighter on the plato? ... " We went with the venture off into the dessert. I felt I undersood where my charactor was coming from and enjoyed helping build the world history that molded my charactor and we could always reset and be freedom fighters or take our chances at sea. or warn the jugle comunities of the imposing Towers headed their way.

 

I would like to try GM'ing this technic on a Space Opera Campain leting each player be a galactic federation and letting them roleplay out the history of the univers 

[massey]

and a very vag terrain map.

 

 

...

 

A what?

 

I probably could have used one of those when I was 18.

[Ninja-Bear]

I think, again, it comes down to group composition. My S/O spends years detailing her campaign settings, I don't so much. But, if she's in a game I'm running, I know that certain things not being there will break her immersion. Like say, if the economics of a region don't make sense (a problem we bumped into in Monte Cook's Numenera setting most recently), or what local industries will be. Whereas with other people, they adhere more closely to the so-called "rule of cool;" essentially, their ability to willingly suspend their disbelief is positively correlated to how badass/sweet/wicked awesome something is.

 

How much world do I need? A more useful question for my purposes is "how much world do we need."

 

/communist lecture

Yes this is very true. In all my years of gaming and with the people I game with, economy has never been an issue therefore its a detail I don't concern myself with. However, if it ever became an issue then I would fill out more details.

 

As a side note when it comes to monsters I never understood the need of some people to have every scientific detail written up. In the real world, there are plenty of animals that we just don't know that much about. Granted more of these are deep ocean animals but still there are land animals too.

[Zeropoint]

As for where monsters come from, for my homebrew world, I had vague ideas that they arose as sort of a natural world-cleansing system. The evil that mortals do corrupts and pollutes the world, and over time that evil is collected and gathered and made manifest as a monster, which heroes can then destroy, purging the world of that amount of corruption. This would explain, for example, why monsters can be so . . .wrong.

 

I never really did much with that idea, or with the idea I lifted from Diablo 3 about spiders being particularly susceptible to supernatural corruption.

[Ninja-Bear]

Zeropoint-I''ve played with the idea that the Elves were more powerful in the past and like Atlantis got too powerful and arrogant and so there was a magical accident which altered the world and caused some wierd monsters. I also have an Elven group now which hunts magical items to keep away from other races.

[bluesguy]

Zeropoint-I''ve played with the idea that the Elves were more powerful in the past and like Atlantis got too powerful and arrogant and so there was a magical accident which altered the world and caused some wierd monsters. I also have an Elven group now which hunts magical items to keep away from other races.

 

And that was part of the description from the Valdorian Age concerning Elves.

[Ninja-Bear]

And that was part of the description from the Valdorian Age concerning Elves.

Really? Wow! Never knew. Thanks!