What kind of world to build?

[Zeropoint]

We've already got a thread asking "how much", and I thought that this warranted its own thread.

 

In the real world, we have to deal with the world that reality gives us. If we're creating a fantasy universe, we're under no such restrictions, which raises the questions of what kind of world do we create, and why?

 

My initial instinct, for example, is to create a fantasy world very much like our own in most respects: an approximately spherical planet with a size, density, and composition similar to Earth's, spinning about once every 24 Earth hours as it progresses in its Newtonian orbit around a fairly standard gravitationally bound ball of fusion-powered plasma.

 

NONE of those details have to be true in a fantasy world.

 

Sir Terry Pratchett's Discworld is one well-known example of a non-realistic cosmology. We've also got all kinds of incorrect pre-scientific conceptions of the world and universe from our own history. Science fiction authors have given us alternate physically possible configurations like ringworlds (which have been around LONG before Halo, kids!) or Alderson disks. We can imagine even stranger things with a little effort; all sorts of crazy setups could look just like home at the local level, and there's no requirement to have a world that COULD be mistaken for Earth by someone standing on it.

 

So, I just wanted to get the conversation started. What have you done? What have you thought about? What kind of especially interesting setups have you read about?

[DShomshak]

Well, the game Exalted uses a flat world anchored by five Elemental Poles (Fire, Water, Air and Wood, with Earth at the center). The Sun is not a ball of fusion-powered plasma. The Moon is not a satellite. The stars are gods, and the Five Maidens who walk among them really do reveal clues to the future in their perambulations. The world runs by the whims of gods, somewhat constrained by a Loom of Fate.

 

The otherworldly regions of Exalted, such as the Demon Realm of Malfeas and Autochthonia, the mechanical Realm of Brass and Shadow, are even stranger.

 

I rather like it all.

 

Dean Shomshak

[Old Man]

Yeah, the spherical planet would be the first thing to go if I were to create a fantasy setting from scratch.  I'd stick with something more mythological. 

[Nolgroth]

Yeah, the spherical planet would be the first thing to go if I were to create a fantasy setting from scratch.  I'd stick with something more mythological. 

 

Like that pic you posted of the edge of the world? An awesome pic that was.

[Nolgroth]

I like my Earthlike fantasy worlds but...

 

Of the alternatives I wanted to run was based on the idea that Nirn (the world of the Elder Scrolls) is actually a Westworld like theme-park that either went way wrong or is simply a long-term toy/experiment of the creators. It has a very small scale to it, so I had this vision of a terraformed large asteroid or small moon with "magical" artifacts that keep gravity much like Earth. The races were all genetically engineered to have different abilities on purpose. The gods of such a setting are nothing more or less than the advanced beings that created this fantasy playground. My idea isn't exactly Elder Scrolls, but based on those concepts.

 

After seeing Dark City, I wanted to run a fantasy city campaign where there is literally only city and a few miles outside of it. The city itself morphs based on the dreams of an ancient, otherworldly being that slumbers underneath it.

 

I wanted to run a Dreamlands fantasy where the setting flopped back and forth between the "real" world and the dreamlands. The tone I had in mind for the Dreamlands was along the lines of the Neverending Story meets Lovecraft's Dreamlands meets Ravenloft. The real world would be completely mundane but required because a lot of the "architecture" of the Dreamlands requires symbology attached to anchors in the real world. Preserving those protects the Dreamland's equivalent. As the campaign progressed, there would be bleed over from the Dreamlands to the mundane world.

 

I wanted to run a Planescape campaign. Come to think of it, I still do. Tone would pretty much be more along the lines of Star Wars than Lord of the Rings. Portal technology/magic would be like Stargate (as I understand it from the movie - never watched the series). I would also do my best to avoid the D&D core races, using angelic, demonic, magically mutated, and similar races. 

 

And of course, Ravenloft itself or a really close homage. Like my envisioned Planescape campaign, I would put my own spin on the forces that make up Ravenloft (or whatever I call my home-brewed homage setting).

[tkdguy]

If you want an unrealistic fantasy world, How about making the world shaped like a doughnut? The sun can rise and set through the hole.

[Cancer]

If you want an unrealistic fantasy world, How about making the world shaped like a doughnut? The sun can rise and set through the hole.

Or if you like a flat world, sort of, make it a Mobius strip.

[Old Man]

Like that pic you posted of the edge of the world? An awesome pic that was.

 

Not as awesome as the selfie stick I needed in order to take it.

[IndianaJoe3]

I usually build a spherical world, but don't always. The furthest I ever got was heavily influenced by Spelljammer, where each, "world" was effectively an island with a small star orbiting it. 

[bluesguy]

I have never played in or created a fantasy world where the world was anything other than spherical, orbited a sun, and had moon(s).

 

My mind would want explanations for how things worked for some of the worlds that people have described (donut world with sun orbiting through the donut hole - what are the tidal forces like; sunshine amounts; does the planet spin; etc)

[tkdguy]

I have never played in or created a fantasy world where the world was anything other than spherical, orbited a sun, and had moon(s).

 

My mind would want explanations for how things worked for some of the worlds that people have described (donut world with sun orbiting through the donut hole - what are the tidal forces like; sunshine amounts; does the planet spin; etc)

 

I tend to do that nowadays as well, since I'm more into low fantasy than high fantasy.

[sinanju]

If you want an unrealistic fantasy world, How about making the world shaped like a doughnut? The sun can rise and set through the hole.

 

Or as Larry Niven suggested, a world shaped like an LP phonograph record. Imagine it as big as the solar system, with a sun-sized sun bobbing up and down thru the hole in the center (the sun is definitely the junior partner in this orbital dance). If the disk is thick enough to have earthlike gravity, you could have an atmosphere across the whole thing, though of course it would lethally hot near the sun and lethally cold as you move toward the outer edges. But you could have Things from the inner or outer reaches wandering into human-habitable space, and endless assortment of human cultures on a living space that large.

[tkdguy]

If you really want to get weird, make the sun a light bulb that turns on and off at pre-set times instead of rising and setting.

[NuSoardGraphite]

I'm boring and I go for spherical worlds. I would however go into great detail on the way that it differed from the earth we know and its own unique cycle of evolution or creation which formed its ecosystem.

[assault]

If you want an unrealistic fantasy world, How about making the world shaped like a doughnut? The sun can rise and set through the hole.

 

Wizards enjoy flying through the hole at high speeds.

[assault]

I never use spherical worlds. A preposterous idea.

 

The sun passes through one set of gates in the morning, and another in the evening. In between it passes through the underworld, where, amongst other things, it drops off the spirits of the newly dead. Many of the gods like on the top of a mountain at the centre of the world.

[DShomshak]

Apropos of nothing, the last two fantasy worlds I built actually were Earth with magic. My Fantasy Hero campaign was set in a magical alternate history Europe, while my "Magozoic" D&D campaign was set in a fantasy future 250 million years from now, on the supercontinent of Pangea Ultima.

 

Dean Shomshak

[tkdguy]

I never use spherical worlds. A preposterous idea.

 

The sun passes through one set of gates in the morning, and another in the evening. In between it passes through the underworld, where, amongst other things, it drops off the spirits of the newly dead. Many of the gods like on the top of a mountain at the centre of the world.

 

This reminded me of a couple of images.

 

Gates of Morning

 

Door of Night

 

In Egyptian mythology the sun went through the Underworld every night as well.

 

Edit: While we're on the subject of gates, here are a couple for the afterlife

 

Gates of Paradise

 

Gates of Hell

[Vondy]

A pulp fantasy world with an early medieval culture that drew on pagan anglo-saxon, celtic, and Viking cultures for inspiration. By pulp I mean that I'd have ancient artifacts, lost cities, legendary creatures, and fantastic elements without ubiquitous spell-casting, magic items, and the like. Magic would be in the form of ancient rituals with specific criteria like the book of the dead in the mummy films.  I'd basically run a pulp game in a medieval analog setting. King Kong, The Mummy Flicks, Etc. 

[sinanju]

What looks on the surface like a classic D&D fantasy world, but when you dig deeper you discover that Humans, Elves, Dwarves, Halflings, Ogres, Hobgoblins, Goblins, and all the other humanoid races are actually just different breeds of the same basic form, like dogs. They were all bred by the long-gone Ancients to serve them in various capacities (hence the various traits each species exhibits). And humans...are the mutts. Unless the various specialty "races" are careful to control their breeding, they revert to the mean (human in appearance and capacities) pretty quickly, and that where all the "half-whatevers" come from.

 

Why are the languages "Elven" and "Dwarven" and so forth? Because those are the languages spoken in the cultures where those races are purebreds (mostly), so cultures (and kingdoms) tend to form along racial lines for that reason. A human kingdom probably doesn't even exist. There are humans (i.e., mongrels) throughout the world, living in small communities in most towns and cities.

 

There are relatively few classic D&D monsters. Lots of animal-type encounters. But few Monsters . Mostly combat encounters take place between different tribes/nations/kingdoms or in fights with brigands and the like. When characters DO encounter monsters it's because they've gone poking around in the twisted landscapes that surround the blighted cities/ruins once inhabited by the Ancients (before they vanished in some kind of cataclysm). THAT'S when you encounter giants and giant animals, or Outsiders and so forth.

 

And poking around in such places is a good way to stumble across Cthulhuesque Things Man Was Not Meant To Know, and weird magics far too bizarre and dangerous for mere mortals to play with. The sorts of things that may require the importation of Sanity mechanics from the D20 Cthulhu game.... The standard D&D magic spell lists? Those are the APPROVED spells. Even the nasty necromantic ones. Nasty, vicious and possibly illegal in many areas--but not the sorts of spells that will drive you insane or are likely to set off an Apocalypse.

 

Or at least, if I ever run a D&D game again, that's what I intend to do.

[Markdoc]

I've always used a very earth-like world* (despite a fondness for weird-world design) because a a weird fantasy world throws up several challenges. It makes it harder to get players deeply involved, it's (a lot) harder for the GM to maintain consistency and all too easily it can distract from the story rather than adding to it.

 

When I do run weird-world stories, they thus tend to take place in other dimensions, on other planets, magical artifacts and the like.

 

cheers, Mark

 

*actually more than "earth-like" - the game world I use is actually a far-future parallel-dimension earth invaded by "fae" - creatures from another, much more divergent dimension - thus explaining all the cultural parallels that inevitably leak in. It thus also has a recognizable Moon, Mars and Venus, all colonised and (somewhat) terraformed long ago by daring wizards: that's often where I run my weird-world stories when I have the itch.

[Zeropoint]

 

I've always used a very earth-like world* (despite a fondness for weird-world design) because a a weird fantasy world throws up several challenges. It makes it harder to get players deeply involved, it's (a lot) harder for the GM to maintain consistency and all too easily it can distract from the story rather than adding to it.

 

That's basically where I come down, too. A world that's "Earthlike except as noted" is just a lot easier for everyone involved. It's not obvious to me what kind of stories or adventures would require, or would work better on, a fantastically different world.

 

. . . Aaaand I've just reminded myself that I like "My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic", which depicts a world distinctly different from ours (I mean, besides the fact that everyone is a colorful talking pony)--it's a world where much of nature requires manual intervention, to the point that the sun won't even rise if nopony makes it happen. They've gotten a few stories out of that. On the other hoof, for most of the stories, it doesn't matter much.

[massey]

I have always used an Earth-type world, right up until it isn't.

 

I am reminded of an old high-level D&D campaign (which lasted about two sessions) where the players had the opportunity to pick and choose their magic items, up to a certain price point.  We were supposed to be powerful nobles.  "Anything you can find in an official book is allowed" the GM said.  So within an hour of the game starting, player vs player conflict had erupted, and things went bad quickly.  People were dropping Spheres of Annihilation to the bottom of the ocean.  Somebody found a way to control a Specter, and then sent it through town after town turning everyone, creating a level-draining undead horde.  One person used a Wish to try and send me to the center of the sun.  Fortunately I had an item that gave me constant Spell Turning and it reflected back on the caster.

 

Anyway, as the years went by, I thought back fondly about that wacky, crazy game.  We got to do every asinine thing you always wanted to do in D&D.  But that Wish -- "I wish you to the center of the sun!!!" really doesn't make sense when you think about it.  Not from a medieval perspective, anyway.  Wishing someone to the heart of a volcano, or under the sea, or in the pits of hell, that makes sense.  But in a standard fantasy world, nobody should know the sun is a giant ball of intensely hot plasma.  And in fact, it doesn't have to be.

 

That was when I decided that if such a situation were to somehow come up again (not likely, as that group fell apart over 15 years ago), I'd have the target appear in the halls of the sun god.  He'd find himself standing inside a big floating Parthenon-looking building that radiated light.  And if he walked to the edge and looked down, he'd see mountains and farmland and ocean far below.

 

My rambling point here is, you're generally going to be dealing with adventuring-type fantasy characters.  Priests, warriors, wizards, etc.  They don't have the scientific background that people do today.  While the player may assume that the planet revolves around the sun, there's really no reason for the character to know that.  Therefore, there is no reason that information has to be accurate.  Perhaps that volcano is caused by an ancient dragon that has been placed in a magical slumber underneath a mountain, and his snores heat the rock until it is molten lava.  Discovering things like that during the course of the game can reinforce the fantasy aspect of it.

[massey]

I also think more fairy-tale aspects should be included in fantasy worlds.  Talking animals, magic beanstalks, that sort of thing.  They don't have to be common, but throwing something like that in every once in a while can really change the mood of a game and the feel of the world.  A lot of fantasy worlds seem very uptight -- people have their crystal spheres and their incredibly detailed systems of magic, and they've got the social structure of deep gnome society and the economics of elven communities all graphed out.  Adding in the occasional fairy godmother and/or talking porcupine who wears a pair of pants can lighten things up.