How Much World to Build?

[L. Marcus]

It's in the VA GM's Vault.

[Ninja-Bear]

It's in the VA GM's Vault.

Thanks- I have nothing of the VA.

[bluesguy]

Really? Wow! Never knew. Thanks!

 

Drindrish (elves) became a cruel and 'evil' people in VA.  By the time the setting is expected to be used all Drindrish were gone.  Someone in my group said "I want to play an elf (Drindrish)..." and I told them well about 5 or 10 minutes after you walk into any sized human community the humans will try to kill your character on sight because the Drindrish had enslaved and tormented humans for generations before the humans threw off their overlords.

[L. Marcus]

That's the official story.

[Old Man]

Unofficially, since the player would no doubt quit if he doesn't get to play an elf, the elves have been secretly living among the humans the entire time...

[Steve]

There is possibly a tribe of desert-dwelling orcs in VA. They cover themselves completely, but mention is made of their pea-green eyes. That made me wonder if they were orcs.

 

Now that I think about it, I suppose they could be Drindrish or half-Drindrish. A tribe of halfbreeds might be interesting.

[Ninja-Bear]

Then what is the name of the book that has elves and dwarfs and such?

[Nolgroth]

Turakian Age

[bluesguy]

When I ran VA there were a few tribes living in the Nylsen Forest, trolls in Oceanshore Mountains, and a Drindish wizard who lived in who was well hidden in the Three Fingers area.

 

I had a player who wanted to play an elf (my daughter) and I told her no.  Instead she played a Cynthian and had a blast

[Barwickian]

To go back to the original question, "how much world", the only answer is "slightly more than you think you'll need".

 

Let me explain that better. You often hear of top-down or bottom-up approaches to world-building. Bottom up is the most efficient, as you create only the place where the characters are and the surrounding area, and detail more as they move outwards. in this case, it's fairly easy to incorporate charatcer background ideas. However, it also runs the risk of inconsistency, and in the absence of other evidence, people tend to fall back on default assumptions - for example, unless you tell them otherwise, they assume elves are good, if stand-offish, and favour woodlands.

 

I favour what I call the towards-the-middle approach. Make your big decisions about the world - is it round or flat? How did it begin? What are the main religions? What races live in the world? What's the technology? How does magic work? Then draw a world map and sketch in the major physical features, cultures and nations. Are there any notable events at this scale (such as national rivalries, wars, a lost continent)?

 

Once that's done, crank right down to the starting area and proceed with the regular bottom-up approach. You might even want to go so far as a more detailed map of the kingdom/region outside the starting area, but probably not much more than that.

 

The work you've done with the larger world can be filled in with extra details later. I suppose it's like a painter creating the whole image with sketches and broad brush strokes, then moving in to work on specific areas with the detail brush.

The Kobold Guide to Worldbuilding is a pretty good book on FRP world-building (if you don't have it, you should get it), and it spends a lot of time trying to persuade people NOT to get into too much detail, but to leave 'creative spaces' for later ideas (or, if intended for publication, for GMs to personalise the world).

[Ninja-Bear]

I think another factor is how familiar of a game world are you going to build? If its a more traditonal fanatasy you can probably expand a great deal however if its completey original and alien, then perhaps keeping it smaller would be the best choice.

[Christopher R Taylor]

Here's an excerpt from the blog post I wrote on this subject:
 

 

 START SMALL

Don't start with a map of the world, then start filling in the blanks.  Start very small.  One farm, one fishing hole, one canyon, one meadow.  Start in an area you can imagine standing in and looking around.  Imagine what is there and spread out slowly and reasonably from that place.

 

For example, start at the fishing hole.  A pond, fed by a stream, beneath a waterfall.  People come there to catch fish.  A simple little spot, right?  But you can gain so much from just a little location.  What kind of fish?  How big is the stream?  How tall is the waterfall?  Who comes to fish there, and how many?  What kind of plants are nearby?  What is the climate of this fishing hole, is it arctic, jungle, temperate? Is it in the mountains, the plains, close to the ocean, deep in land?

 

THE FISHIN' HOLE

 Just answering a handful of these questions brings even more to mind.  Let us propose that this fishing hole is in a lightly wooded prairie sort of area, one of those areas where a line of trees and plants grows along the stream but the rest is grassy and lightly hilly plains.  The stream isn't likely to have a very high waterfall, but the fish can be abundant.  Sometimes those creeks in the plains can be quite deep, with the sides digging under the edges, so that the banks overhang the water.

 

The fish in this stream are good eating, so the locals come here to catch a meal.  What if they have some other property?  Lets say their liver oil is very useful medicine, and used to treat local illnesses.  Lets further say that the area because of its water, food, and medicine is contested, because it is an abundant source of all three useful commodities.

 

So who is competing for all of this?  Local human settlements?  Other creatures such as orcs and goblins?  Does anyone gather the oil in bottles to sell?  Maybe there's a larger settlement down the road from this area, a market to sell the oil in.  How do people get to this settlement, is there a road?  How safe is the road?  How often do they go?  Maybe they can only make it a few times a year; harvest time, when the grasses are cut for hay, grain, and even firewood?

 

And so on.  Start small and spread out, building as you go.  Answer questions that come up and they lead to other questions, and it all comes together naturally and organically rather than a jumble of cool stuff you thought of and read in other sources.

[Ninja-Bear]

 

Here's an excerpt from the blog post I wrote on this subject:

 

 

And so on. Start small and spread out, building as you go. Answer questions that come up and they lead to other questions, and it all comes together naturally and organically rather than a jumble of cool stuff you thought of and read in other sources.

I've been hinting at a simular approach for my brother. Alas he is dead set on trying to create a world in which depending on where you hail from, you get different information. Add to that that he feel he myst get certain modules to see how they do things. And he has had limited experience playung in the hero system, let alone build anything in hero. Oy vey!

[assault]

Coastlines can be challenging. As soon as PCs see the sea, they are likely to start asking: what is beyond it?

 

Of course you can usually get away with a sketch map and the name of a couple of relatively nearby ports, but then there is the risk that they want to visit them. Which is fine if you are ready to run the resulting pirate scenarios.

[Old Man]

what is beyond it?

 

TPK.

[bluesguy]

I have started to blog on world building, using my current world setting and campaign inside that setting.  There are two articles now, one on why I created my own setting and the other on how I got started.

 

And I am with Barwickian and doing the 'middle approach'.  Big picture to provide some consistency and then drill down to one particular spot and work out from there.

[DShomshak]

I don’t have a convenient spacial metaphor for how I build worlds. It isn’t “Top Down,” “Bottom Up,” or even “In Toward the Middle,” because I constantly flip between levels. I try to stay on the level of actual play and adventures, but every decision on that level has implications for higher levels of design; and high-level design decisions can be meaningless unless you pull out implications and effects that can appear in play.

 

For my last campaign world, “Magozoic,” I took the shortcut of designing a D&D world. Okay, 80% of the top-level design work is already done because no matter what you design, it’s D&D: The character races, classes, types of magic, etc. are already decided.

 

For macro-scale geography, I used geologist Christopher Scotese’s geological projection of Pangea Ultima. (Map: http://www.scotese.com/future2.htm) However, I had no intention of using very much of this geography: My first campaign took place entirely within a relatively tiny area. Look for the Australia/Antarctica landmass to the lower right. Narrow down to the northern extension, what used to be New Guinea. My campaign took place in a section of the northeastern coast: The map fit on a single 8 ½” x 11” sheet of paper, on a scale of 1:4 million (1 inch = 64 miles).

 

My chief use of Pangea Ultima was for the setting’s theme and tone: The world is ancient, soaked in history. The past is oppressive, crowding into the present.

 

But I am not writing out 250 million years of future history. On the top level, this enormous span of time functions to explain how Earth becomes a D&D world: There has been time for multiple singularities to change the local rules of existence and so create magic, gods, etc.

 

Scads of intelligent races and bizarre monsters are a further consequence: If only one wizard (or bio-alchemist, or genetic engineer, or stranger profession) in a thousand years is crazy enough to think it makes sense to create an Owlbear, why, in a million years that’s a thousand similarly deranged creations.

 

On mid-level design, I blocked out the last thousand years of regional history for New Guinea + 250 Million. Politics and culture are shaped by the decay and retreat of the Zaavian Empire that once ruled the region (thus giving everyone the oh-so-convenient Common Tongue). As the empire crumbled, crime syndicates led by medusas grew, hooked up and eventually took over the campaign region (more or less for lack of any competent opposition), creating the brutal Medusan Empire. After a century of fighting, the rump Zaavian Empire managed to invoke its gods and destroy the medusas with the Month of Wrath – a long period of hourly powerful earthquakes that toppled the cities and rearranged the landscape as mountains rose and fell. But Zaav damaged itself too much to reclaim the region. Result: A region of little kingdoms, city-states and wilderness just right for adventure.

 

For recent history, the most important event is the rise of a new power, the empire of Shavos. In this sub-region, the dilettante prince of a minor city-state suddenly became a megalomaniac genius, conquered the local city-states, and is now gobbling up the kingdoms one by one. The PCs are associated with one of the last little kingdoms to stand against the Conquering Empire and its Evil Overlord – I decided to make a military campaign, using the war to generate and link the PCs’ adventures, bringing it all down to the bottom level of actual play.

 

Connecting the midlevel design to the bottom level of play, the PCs’ quests repeatedly took them to long-lost, buried ruins of the Medusan Empire and treasures lost in the Month of Wrath. The final story arc dealt with a quest to find the last remnant community of medusas and their slaves, who had lived in hiding since the cataclysm. (And let me pull out my “Lost City” chops.) Not only was this key to obtaining the tools they needed to fight the final battle against the Evil Empire, they even convinced the medusas to come in on their side, as the only way to avoid their own final conquest and extermination.

 

And the Evil Overlord? As the PCs eventually found, in his search for mechanical toys and trinkets from the distant past, Prince Bel Shanion found something entirely too powerful and dangerous for the latter Age: Magitech that took over his mind and is using him to re-create the age that gave I birth, whether anyone else wants it or not – getting back to the “oppressed by the past” theme, and bringing it down to the level of play. For the boss battle at the campaign’s climax, the PCs fought an Emperor Bel Shanion who’d become a sort of quasi-technological lich, kept alive by the machines interpenetrating his flesh, commanding the army from the back of a mechanical dragon-golem. Yeah, I went for the cheese!

 

While this description may seem to emphasize top-down design, the actual process was often bottom-up, or middle-out, or other “directions.” I didn’t start with a grand conception and work out local consequences; much of the time, I began with what I wanted for the setting and particular adventures, and figured out how the high-level design could be tweaked to accommodate it. This became easier, the more material I already had at all levels.

 

Dean Shomshak

[DShomshak]

For another example of level-jumping design, I currently work on updating my Magozoic setting to 5^th edition D&D. There are new classes to work in, calling for some top-level design to explain how they operate in my setting.

 

One such is the Warlock class. These spellcasters gain their magic through pacting with powerful supernatural entities other than gods. One option for this is a Great Old One – a malign but mysterious, nigh incomprehensible that exists outside the categories familiar to people of D&D worlds. As the name suggests, by this the game means Lovecraftian entities (the Player’s Handbook even lists Great Cthulhu as one of the possible Great Old Ones).

 

But I design my own gods and spirits, so I also design my own Great Old Ones. Here’s one of the Great Old Ones I designed as suitable for my setting of Earth 250 million years in the future:

-----------

Mahatamasa

AKA: The Great Dark, the Void Omphalos, Unmoved Mover, Center of Whirling Motion

      While the spiritual realms known to mortal folk center on the Earth, sages know the Earth and the physical planets orbit the Sun. Ancient traditions further say the stars are countless other suns, very far away beyond the Palisade of Night. It is good that they are so remote, for thence came the beholders, the mind flayers and other abominations. And at the center of all this vast congeries of suns and worlds and stranger things, the hub around which it all spins, there sits…

      Something.

      Something vast and dark; massive, yet empty; and ancient beyond imagining, a shadow born of the First Light. Something to which worlds and suns are less than dust. It compels them to circle It forever. In some future age when It shall unfold Its darkness, Its splendor shall outshine all the suns put together and all worlds shall burn in Its light. The forbidden Oblivion Sutra calls It Mahatamasa, the Great Darkness, along with other obscure and fearsome titles.

      The aberrations from beyond, which know more of It than mortals dare, say the Void Omphalos is in some fashion aware, perhaps even conscious. It hears no prayers, demands no sacrifices or observances, propounds no doctrines. To the extent these terrible creatures worship anything, however, they worship the Great Darkness as the ineluctable Supreme Power; quiescent for now, but impossible to resist.

      The mightiest among the aberrations claim to know Its secrets. From them certain rites and formulae pass to the folk of Earth. Whether these rituals truly draw power from the Unmoved Mover or were learned from Its consciousness, no warlock can say; for in this Age no creature of Earth has beheld Mahatamasa. But the spells work, and so it is presumed that the Elder Brains of the mind flayers, the arch-beholder Panopticon, and other nigh-legendary horrors know whereof they have spoken.

------------------

(To speak Lovecraftianly, it’s my Azathoth.)

 

Now let’s see how this top-level design element can be brought into lower levels of setting and play.

 

On the level of play, anyone who wants to play a GOO-pacting warlock has a name and a bit of legend they can use in designing their character. There’s even a Lovecraftian Forbidden Book, the Oblivion Sutra, they can work into backgrounds. (Who wrote the Oblivion Sutra? What’s in it? I have no idea yet, except that it tells how to become a warlock. It’s available for further development, though, it case I need it.) If anyone later decides they want to multi-class as a warlock, I can pull an adventure out of the search for the forbidden tome.

 

On the middle level of regional setting design, I’ve integrated two of the game’s principal aberrations, mind flayers and beholders, into the setting and implied that they are something more than monsters disconnected from everything else: They are sources of information (though perhaps not willingly); they have their own leaders, or at least divisions of power. (The Elder Brains are described in the 5^th edition Monster Manual. Panopticon is my own invention.) At some point, I may do more with these figures. IE, what did the arch-beholder Panopticon do? (Nothing good and nothing small; even a “basic” beholder is a powerful, terrifying monster that can dominate or devastate cities.) Are any of the Elder Brains on earth? Yes or no, how did anyone learn of their existence? This is another area where I can design outward – develop the presence of the mind flayers as a power bloc within the world, with possibly far-reaching schemes – and inward, using those schemes as fodder for adventures.

 

I hope this is in some way relevant to the original question.

 

Dean Shomshak

[Doc Democracy]

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.

 

  

 

John, welcome to the boards, folk are friendly and will welcome your input.

 

...

 A what?

 

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

They will also look to crack jokes whenever you provide opportunity. I am hoping that you understand the barb here was more self-directed by Massey than seeking to make fun.

 

It is the kind of map most young men had of that particular anatomy Massey.....

 

:-)

 

Doc