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How Much World to Build?


Michael Hopcroft

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If there's one thing fantasy GMs in all systems love to do is build "rich" worlds with complex histories and backstories, often stretching back millennia. Give them a map and in no time it will be populated with a vast array of places, names, and notations like "Here Be the Gates of Hell!".

 

All of which players will frequently blithely ignore unless said GM literally throws it in their face.

 

So what I'n wondering if it may be more sensible as a GM to be somewhat less obsessive about world-building, especially if the players pull in a different direction. After all, what is the point of your campaign? Of you are playing in a published setting, for example, your players will never encounter 90% of what's there (less if it's a more confined area, more if it's Ptolus or someplace equally excessive). In fact, depending on where the story takes them what they do encounter might well be completely unexpected.

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No GM - no matter how dedicated, no matter how obsessive - can completely detail a whole world. It's taken billions of people thousands of years to do our one :)

The question then is simply how much detail you want to put in your area of focus and how much in the area outside your area of focus.

 

My rule of thumb in that in both cases, I need to have enough detail that I can answer most questions without breaking the flow of the game. That often means making something up on the fly, but making something up is far easier if you already know the background.

 

So in the area of focus (that could be a campaign city, a country or a region) that means more detail than outside the area of focus (things far away are almost necessarily going to be more vague). How much detail that needs to be is going to vary from GM to GM and group to group, but for me in the area of focus, that means at least a rough history/timeline, a reasonably detailed geography, a political structure/influence map, a magic system (or systems) a religion (or religions) and a basic economy/technological level - plus a cultural "feel" to tie that lot together and explain it. That might sound like a lot, but in fact, it can probably be summed up in a dozen pages or less. The actual detail is adventure/story related: specific NPCs, specific locations, specific events.

 

The last campaign I fully wrote up had maybe 16 pages of maps and background, 120 pages of actual adventure and about 80 pages of NPCs - so background was maybe 10%. That was quasi-historical, but even in a purely invented setting, the background material for me is at most 15-20% of what I write up, and it's probably closer to 10% overall anyway.

 

cheers, Mark

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For me, a rough map of the world and a rough idea of the timeline are enough.  I can design stuff -- locations, items, spells -- as I need it, or wing it on the fly.  Better for me is a way to come up with generic NPCs quickly (farmers, innkeepers, craftspeople, city guards, and so forth) and flesh them out, but even so I can do a lot with "incompetent normal," "competent normal," and the like, and professional templates.  Names, personalities, conflicts, needs, and ways to get the PCs roped into those are more or less my bread and butter.

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Michael you are asking some good questions.  There is an interesting Google Community, World Building, that I would recommend.

 

In my own case here is what I did in order to build my current fantasy world, Nyonia.  By nature I am a person who creates plans and is detail oriented.  I have to manage those tendencies so I don't go off the deep end and try to create everything about the fantasy world I am building.

 

The following world building steps took about 3 or 4 months including loading creating/stealing graphics/css and loading it all up into the Obsidian Portal site.

  • The most important thing I did was separate the idea of a fantasy world from a campaign setting.  A fantasy world is all about the geography, climate, historical ages, races, cultures, countries, etc.  It is the very big picture of the world.  The campaign setting is a small slice of that fantasy world.  A particular place and time in that world.  I did this because when I ran the Valdorian Age as a campaign setting when we got to the end of the campaign there really wasn't any point in continuing to use the setting.  And it would have been very hard to do a 'reset' and reuse the Valdorian Age as a fantasy world.
  • I started with what I wanted the world to be like.  I wanted a large world.  I wanted a world that had a variety of races.  I wanted a pantheon that people knew existed but didn't necessarily get that involved in the world.  I wanted magic to be available at varying levels of power and I wanted magic to be different for different races/societies.  I wanted there to be a few races the players could not use for PCs.  I wanted all of the player races to be from 'somewhere else' - not of this world.
  • I did a bunch of research on world sizes that could potentially support life and then I found a software package that let me put some parameters into the software would generate a world with landmasses and oceans.  It might have been TerraJ.  I generated quite a few until I found one I could tweak and then I use HexOGrapher to create a world map.
  • Then I worked on a 'big timeline' which I used a couple of tools to start the creative juices flowing.  http://tripleacegames.com/Downloads/HellFrost/Hellfrost_A_Brief_History.pdf and http://www.fantasist.net/timeline.shtml were useful for me to help with being creative about the timelines.  The resulting timeline can be found here.  And if you click on one of the ages you get more details but not a lot of details.
  • Then I decided on Gods and creation myths. I freely admit that I stole the Harn pantheon.
  • Followed by Elder races and their creation myths and then the younger races
  • Then I worked on the nations, magic and technology

 

After I got that all done I just let it sit in my mind for about a month or two.  I tweaked and modified things a bit.  After that I asked my gaming group to look at the world information and tell me what kind of campaign they would like to play in. 

 

Once that was decided, I picked the appropriate age in the timeline and location.  I detailed out one corner of one country with more detail.  The detail found at the world level is this, but the campaign takes place in one corner of the Soke City State within the Land of Five Spices and the detailed map is here.  I use material where I can find it to fill in the gaps.  I also use a bunch of customized random generators.

 

The Campaign setting only took about a month to be fleshed out enough to start playing in.

 

Nice randomizing tools for world building:

  • http://chaoticshiny.com/
  • Inspiration Pro is a must have tool for any GM.  You can use it to create the most amazing random generators for just about any purpose.  I have a set of tools that generates what to expect in a particular type of shop, depending on the country you are in, level of wealth in the area, and a couple of other factors.  I also have them for generating weather, treasures, and outdoor encounters (again depending on where you are at).

 

Hope that helps someone.

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Nowadays, I mainly do my world-building as a way to pass the time. Since I don't game regularly, most of my work will not be used. But it's a way to pass the time and exercise my imagination. The level of detail I put into my worlds depends on how motivated I feel. I may work a bit on a setting, leave it for a few years, then return to it. On the other hand, I have written extensively and borrowed a lot of material for some settings.

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I've lately taken a more "video game" approach to world building. Instead of trying to build an exhaustively big world, I am developing chunks of it. Right now I have an area that very vaguely resembles a western European territory that once belonged to a now-failed empire (much like the withdrawal/dissolution of Roman forces at the end of that empire) and a barely developed desert section. Part of the reason I went with that method is the map making method I used for the first section. Then it dawned on me than an entire campaign could be contained within that section of a larger world.

 

Of course players will look to the edge of the map and boldly pronounce, "I want to go there." :)

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So what I'n wondering if it may be more sensible as a GM to be somewhat less obsessive about world-building, especially if the players pull in a different direction. After all, what is the point of your campaign? Of you are playing in a published setting, for example, your players will never encounter 90% of what's there (less if it's a more confined area, more if it's Ptolus or someplace equally excessive). In fact, depending on where the story takes them what they do encounter might well be completely unexpected.

Sensible, perhaps. On the other hand, I enjoy the world-making, and I find I can make up stuff more coherently on the fly (and there is always stuff I have to make up on the fly) when I have done the more extensive top-down thinking. Also (to refer to a different thread) it is MUCH easier to give appropriately intriguing teasers and hints to players of intelligent/loremaster/detective/etc. characters when I have done that thinking and have a coherent global picture.
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Adding to the above, as an example, I found a file on my thumb drive from the last time I participated in anything like whole-cloth world-making. This was a bit more than a year ago, as we were working collectively on a high fantasy sort of game-world for a FATE rules campaign. [if you haven't seen it, FATE leans heavily on "Aspects" as a mechanic, where "aspect" is a phrase somehow descriptive of a character, scene, or other piece of the game scene at that moment.] I appointed myself to creating the pantheon and overall cosmology, while keeping in mind that there was no point in defining stuff that would never get used.

 

Note that this piece of world-making came up AFTER character creation, so there's a preamble about what certain character traits in the characters the players already said they wanted to play require in terms of gods, etc. That means this wasn't really a top-down creation the way I usually think of it, but the creation was only weakly shaped by those choices.

On making the pantheon

 

Having a character with the Aspect "... Friar of the Trickster God" automatically forces some things into the cosmogony of the game-world. Obvious things:

* There are multiple gods that actively work in the world, at least up to very recent times

* Rather more than one of those gods receive worship from mortals at present

* There is something other than fanatical intolerance for polytheistic worship in the active part of the game world, at least; the wars of conquest and extinction by the Christians and Moslems, and subsequent unabated hostility with the "idolators", either never happened in the game-world being constructed, or went very differently and the obligate monotheists never reached continent-spanning control

* The gods divide up domains and personalities in ways reminiscent of the pantheons of Rome, Greece, the Norse, the Indian subcontinent, the Meso-Americans, etc.

 

This is sort of how D&D's game-universe has been doing it since very early in the RPG industry and clashes with the more nearly historical flavor in the World of Darkness, for example.

 

We are leaving the actual cosmology undefined: how the world began and what the gods' part in that beginning was.

 

(Comment: This is easiest if we posit a Mayan-like cosmology where the universe is cyclic, with stages of history where the gods and inhabitants vary from stage to stage, and the denizens of one stage are more or less completely extirpated in the interstitial cataclysms. This removes the full origin of existence into a past that is irrecoverably lost, and also conveniently leaves undefined the real distinction between "mortals" and "immortals" since even the gods get swapped out at the end of each baktun.)

 

I made the decision, though, that I was only going to produce "good" pantheons. Evil entities are not my cup of tea in any event, and I would more or less be reduced to stealing Cthulhu mythos stuff and some of the showy evil gods stuff from M.A.R. Barker's Tekumel. A justification for this could be that "evil" gods are entities from other stages of history trying to force their way back into the world (if they "old gods") or invade the world before their time (if they are "outside" or "invader gods"). That thought is intriguing unto itself, but we don't need to chase that further for the purpose at hand. I assume that there may be a relation between demons and evil gods, but that does not need to be thought out yet.

 

We can use the nebulously-defined conventions that gods can exert influence by nonphysical means at distance at many points in the world simultaneously, that they have supernatural powers related to their "domains" which are generally but not quite insuperable even by rival gods or by other great supernatural entities (like D&D's primordials), and that gods gain something from the worship by mortals and they bestow favor upon their worshippers via some rate of exchange which is never explicitly set down. If we accept the Mayan-like cosmology it is inherent that gods can be killed, but it rarely happens (or at least has not happened recently) and, perhaps, the potential of overthrowing or killing a god is an epic-level driver of a game-world plot arc.

 

Leaving such global adventuring concepts aside, we must populate the world with gods so as to provide some structure for clerical power by characters in gameplay.

 

Here's how I am going at it. For the Fate system, we really only need aspects for the gods. I like a bit more coherent structure than just that, so I began with some common features of historical pantheons: (1) Names; (2) Primary domains; (3) Subsidiary domains; (4) Favored animals; (5) Flavortext aspects possibly but not necessarily related to any of the preceding. By "domain" I mean the X in the phrase "god of X".

 

(1) I collected a bunch of ancient-sounding names for gods (I can tell you where I got most of them, but it's just transcendent geekdom and it really doesn't matter). The names are the easiest thing to change anyway.

 

(2) I went through several pantheons as listed in Wikipedia (Greek, Aztec, a couple from sub-Saharan Africa, Mesopotamian, Hindu) and wrote down things that were listed as gods' domains. I note that in general there is strong overlap of domains even within a specific pantheon. This gave me about 35 domains.

 

This necessarily leaves out, however, something critically important to historical pantheons, and that is associations of gods with specific places. All the Mesopotamian gods seem to have begun as the patron deity of a big enough city for something of its history to have been recorded, for example. Another source pointed out that in the available historical record Athena and Athens were so inextricably associated that it is impossible to tell if even the idea of Athena as a deity existed before the settlement of the vicinity of Athens, or vice-versa.

 

Along with specific cities, though, it also reminded me that in fantasy worlds there are inevitable associations between the gods and the different races, and these racial domains are things we cannot leave out.

 

(3) For the initial try I did not try to separate primary from subsidiary domains, or even figure out what I meant by that distinction. It comes from the example that, e.g., Athena was the goddess of wisdom, civilized war (strategy and structured armies, versus the "uncivilized" purely physical war of barbarians, though there's obviously a lot of overlap there), civilization, mathematics, and Athens, and a bunch of other stuff which smells like it's accretions of qualities that the Athenians liked to think of as theirs (courage, the arts, skill, etc). In that long list of quasi-related stuff, some feels more weighty than the rest, and that difference is what I was meaning for primary versus subsidiary domains, but I have not gone further than that.

 

(4) Animals are largely flavortext, though in mythology gods sometimes had creature forms they preferred (when they took nonhuman form), or had persistent animal companions of specific kinds (like Wotan's two ravens), so I collected animals mentioned in the various pantheon entries and added a few that I happen to like. These things are almost as easy to change as the names, really.

 

(5) Flavortext aspects is just whatever cool stuff I blundered upon or made up. I spent some time between my turns Friday night going through the Call of Cthulhu rulebook's section on the Old Ones and wrote down things from that which looked like aspects (e.g., The King In Yellow, The Render of Veils, The Black Goat of a Thousand Offspring, etc.). Most of those are too obviously malign (and too well-known to players) for use here, but it's food for the mill. Some I lifted straight from Wikipedia (one of these aspects for the trickster god in Aborigine lore is "the Bluetongue Skink", for example), some are from other game pantheons that I recall from games or books ("Tutor of the Gods" is from Empire of the Petal Throne; "Child of the Morning" is from one of Mercedes Lackey's Valdemar stories). With stuff I made up or can't remember sources, that gave me about 65.

 

Then I retreaded my old random room namer (the code that produced "The Sapphire Vestibule of the Old Gods" among others) and had it make batches of gods randomly associating names, aspects, animals, and domains, picking gender, etc., and barfing out these quasi-random pantheons out into flat-text files. Then I go looking for coolness.

 

THere's some bugs, of course. I have got some attempts to have sex-variable strings in the attributes, and while some work ("He Who Is Seen Yet Remains Unseen"), there are others which aren't working right ("The Whose Left Hand Gives Strength", "The The Many-Eyed")...

While interesting to see what came out (and realize that I wanted something more than a random structure to the gods and aspects, etc.), I ultimately abandoned the random assignment but assigned domains manually in the sort of distribution (i.e., what gods got how many domains of what sort of weight) that came out of one of my random generator runs.

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That's why you don't show them the whole map. :)

 

In my last game, I showed the players a map, defining "the world as they knew it". A year or two into the game, I showed them another map, and they went "Wait - that little island there? That's where we are?" A couple of years further in, I showed them another world map and they went " Wait - that little group of islands there? That's where we are?"  :)

 

Basically (see my comment above) I sketched out the general area where they were with kingdoms, timelines, etc, but only detailed one part of the one kingdom where they started. As time went on (and the adventure progressed) I filled in more of that kingdom and then in the fullness of time detailed several parts of the other kingdoms where their travels took them. The whole world outside that area (for them) never amounted to more than vague sketches and sailor's yarns :)

 

Having a decent skeleton to hang the lot on made it easy to add coherent details as I went along.

 

cheers, Mark

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World-building is just a part (not even an essential part) of GM'ing. I enjoy doing it, but the focus of a successful game is the game itself. The games I have most enjoyed have both an immersive world and a GM who is good at gaming (the ability to tell a story through the limits of the gaming medium). Those also tend to be the longest-lived.

 

If world-building takes priority over the game itself, it ends up being (in my experience) a less-than satisfying experience: it feels like a tour instead of an adventure. 

 

Of course, none of that matters if you don't have players!

 

cheers, Mark

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Of course, none of that matters if you don't have players!

 

Truth in those words.

 

EDIT: Of course, without players I really have no impetus to build worlds. Every time I built a homebrew setting, I had ideas based on the players and their personalities. Without that specific dynamic, I find it more fun to explore worlds built by video game designers. If I do have players, I have to be very cautious, as I know and understand whatever setting I build instinctively. I need to write detailed splat books, that players often don't bother reading, in order to convey a sense of the world. It's one of the reasons I have mostly defaulted to established settings like Forgotten Realms or Ravenloft when I run a game.

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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.

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