World Creation

[IC Tanarukk]

Originally posted by GradonSilverton

It WAS a thread about giving information on building a world from scratch for someone about to undertake the task for the 1st time.....

Well, if I might be so bold as to get back to that topic for a moment, I'm currently running a message specifically for people writing thier own worlds to swap ideas and ask for advice: Commonplace Book

[Lucius]

World Building

 

Unless I missed it, no one has suggested what I think is a very basic idea when it comes to writing up a new world -

 

Find a world you like and base yours on that one.

 

Of course you won't want to slavishly imitate someone else's creation (unless you and your players are agreed that you all WANT to play in Tollkein's Middle Earth or in Xanth or wherever) but you can take an existing fictional world (or even a nonfictional one - say, a campaign based on feudal Japan or the Roman Empire) and base your own world on that. Then you start by looking at the aspects of the world you A) really want to emulate and/or have to have to even get started.

 

For instance, say I want to emulate Andre Norton's Witch World. I start by narrowing the focus - let's say I want to use the Dales. That automatically gives me some handle on topography/geography (a region of hills and dales between a sea and a mountain range/plateau) and on the cultural/political/social/economic realities (each Dale is, at least nominally, independent, heriditary aristocracy, etc.)

 

I decide on some changes to make - say, I call them the Vales instead of Dales, and say there is a greater degree of cultural and political difference from one to the next than in Norton's works (to give the players a greater diversity to learn about and deal with.) The place names are relatively simple English names like Greatvale, and named after geography (Rivervale,) first settlers or founding heroes (Olarsvale,) important events (Shattershieldvale, named after a hero slew a monster there that had shatterred his shield with its first blow) or other significant meanings (Griffonvale, named for the dangerous creatures that still nest in the cliffs above and sometimes are bold enough to snatch a sheep; Toadvale, after an incredibly ancient and perhaps prehuman statue that looks more like a toad than anything else; Horsevale, after their chief export; etc.) All of this is stuff I'm making up off the top of my head as I go along.

 

At some point, if you already know who will be playing, you will want to consult them. Find out what kind of characters they want to play, what kind of adventures they want. This will tell you where to start. If they want political intrigue and you are willing to give it to them, you need to create the personalities involved, the alliances and factions, decide what laws and customs have a bearing on the acquisition and usage of political power. If you have a bunch of Robin Hood fans and want to run that flavor of adventure, you need to decide how to define a status of outlaw or outcast (Are they hunted to kill, or to capture, for example) who opposes them (Is there an established office such as sherrif, with constables on call? Ronin or landless knight types, hoping by capturing an infamous outlaw to rise in status? Mercenary bounty hunters one step away from outlawry themselves?) and so forth. If nothing else, talking to players can help solidify your own ideas ("Nah, no way I want to run some political campaign, I guess I'll run with the outlaws in the woods. So I can put off for another day deciding on names and titles for the Great Lord's cheif retainers, and have to decide right now if there is a right of Sanctuary and what constitutes Holy Ground....")

 

At best, players can do some of the work for you.

 

But the important thing, if you really want to do it, is to start SOMEwhere. Start with geography, pull out an atlas maybe and copy some real place. Start with mythology. Start with some specific cultural institutions you want to have. Then fit the next pieces into what you already have.

 

Lucius Alexander

 

(- : :-)

[Tetsuyama]

Hmm.. This post isn't as well organized as I'd like, but hopefully all this stuff is useful to someone.

 

The "Dungeoncraft" series of articles from Dragon are a pretty good resource for getting started. They used to have them online, but it looks like the site's been rearranged and I can't find them right now. The author had a suggestion that really stuck in my mind: give everything - every person, place, or thing, a secret, and have a clue for every secret. You can of course go overboard with this, but it's not a bad guideline. If most things have some secret, you can get a lot of apparent depth out of your world for somewhat less work than you might otherwise put in.

 

If you start with the characters as relative newbies in the world, it's pretty easy to cut them off geographically from the areas you haven't fleshed out yet. For example, reasonably large mountain chains to north and east, rapids to the west and a large lake with a ferry that they don't have the money for to the south. It may seem a little contrived, but it's not a bad way of giving yourself a little extra time to get everything worked out.

 

As far as maps go, I kind of like taking a map from part of Earth and just modifying it a bit. Adding a couple of interesting geographic features, changing the temperate zones and weather a bit, stuff like that. For example, in my last campaign I just used a map of Japan, but I replaced some of the area between the Honshu and Hokkaido land masses with a large crater lake. The backstory for the crater was that they had been connected by a land bridge, but Hokkaido had been overrun by evil, and a powerful group of heroes had called down a huge meteor to sever their bridge to Honshu, thus saving most of the land but leaving Hokkaido as the troubled "Cursed Lands" to the north.

 

Another handy tool is census data. You can get a list of names by frequency and such, and throw that into a spreadsheet. With a little bit of "programming", you can make it generate a list of 100 or so names. These are useful both during world generation and on the fly in GMing. I had two spreadsheets, one of typical American names and one of Japanese names, and I'd bring a couple of printed sheets to each game I ran. One sheet English, one Japanese, with half of each list masculine and the other half feminine. When I needed to come up with a name, there it was, and I could refer to it by number in my notes to fill it in later with the actual name when I was at my computer.

[Grymlynn]

When I started my world, the hardest part was the actual starting. What I ended up doing to get past the initial start-up hurdle was to get my map of the world, and trace northern Canada and Greenland into my map nearer the equator and rotated 90%. Since the world map was... whatever they call the Eurocentric and smashed flat so that Canada and Greenland look huge... version, I had some good coastlines that didn't really resemble anything currently known. Once I got past that hurdle, I was able to put in the rest of the geography, and then I also did as described previously: I put in some wandering tribes, and had them settle down, start farming, etc... up to the "current" day. Having the history to work with is a big help for campaign creation, as you know who was where, and when, for the ubiquitous deserted castle/town/city/dungeon adventure, and you know where the people are now. Also, you have a large timeline to use to insert players into any era in the timeline. Be careful with that, though, 'cause players can goof stuff up quick. I've had whole kingdoms disappear...

[Nelijal]

Originally posted by Old Man

I was all set to buy it until I read that last line. I avoid windows for a reason. Oh well, that's $5 they won't get from me.

Here ya go, Old Man, SVGames is looking for people to try a new Mac utility for joining files:

 

http://www.svgames.com/macpdfsupport.html

[Syberdwarf2]

Originally posted by Old Man

This is the hardest part for me, because I'm just not good at pulling good fantasy-sounding names off the top of my head.

 

I use this method when coming up with fantasy sounding names. The problem is not really making them fantasy-sounding, it's picking from the commonly used sounds to form something that works.

Try this;

When stuck for a name, check out the letters of any nearby car's license plate.

Example; KVY-####

 

possible name ideas;

Kovay

Komin Navay

Navius

Koliv Eire

et cetera.

 

And, of course, each combination and name idea can be used to generate new ideas. Hope this helps.

[keithcurtis]

Originally posted by Grymlynn

When I started my world, the hardest part was the actual starting. What I ended up doing to get past the initial start-up hurdle was to get my map of the world, and trace northern Canada and Greenland into my map nearer the equator and rotated 90%. ...

 

Heh, you've just described my Savage Earth map. I rotated the world 90°. The main action takes place in equatorial Nunavut (The territory west of Hudson Bay). I have climatology maps for the whole world. The north pole is approxiamtely halfway beween the closest points of S. Amerca and Africa. The history of the campaign has this happening to the world. It is not an alternate earth.

 

If you're interested, I have a spinning globe animation on my website.

 

Keith "Just can't beat an equatorial fjord" Curtis

[Super Squirrel]

I'm frankly lazy at world building. Here is my strategy that works well.

 

First you need a concept. Like Keith Curtis said you need to know what it is... Genre first than the specifics.

 

I do most of my work based on inspiration. Things I like inspire me. So many of my ideas start there and expand.

 

In the case of Chronicles of the Wishes it came to me from listening to Poe music on repeat after rewatching Fushigi Yuugi by Watase Yu. I started to ask myself what would a world be like if there was someone who had the ability to make a wish whenever the felt like.

 

This gave my setting, Earth, and political structure, Dictatorship, and it only required recent history plus the history of one man.

 

After that I started expanding on issues such as races, magic, and so on until I have what I have now.

 

Previous to this game, one thing I found that works well is creating the "who". I create major organizations, businesses, and so on.

 

Once you have the macro down, let the micro come with time. I usually create most of my details on the fly.

 

For example:

Recently on CotW, the party reached a particular city for the first time. The city is really just a communications tower that collected a ton of residents over the course of 35 years. One of my players is a member of a gang and because he was enslaved the last year or so, he has been out of touch. Deciding to bring up that disadvantage, I had him encounter some old buddies that he didn't recognize.

 

A battle broke out when one of his teammates thought that the buddies playful challange was serious and went for a killing strike. It resulted in a very messy and complicated situation. In the end I had created a total of four places of interest in the city as well as two major NPCs who are now pivotal to the plot.

 

As the game advances and the players explore or stay within one region, the details will fill to the point that I will not have to do much. But it is important to keep a good record of these places and things.

 

As far as coming up with names... good luck. I steal mine. I took Cori from Keith's campaign (accidently in this case but it was where it came from) and Neko is Japanese for cat and so on.

 

I try and create my own but they often are too similar. Such as Tarkth (Tark - eth) and Coeth (Co - eth). I haven't even given a name to the major antagonist. He is known only as the Wish Master and I doubt he will ever be named.

[Super Squirrel]

Originally posted by keithcurtis

Heh, you've just described my Savage Earth map. I rotated the world 90°. The main action takes place in equatorial Nunavut (The territory west of Hudson Bay). I have climatology maps for the whole world. The north pole is approxiamtely halfway beween the closest points of S. Amerca and Africa. The history of the campaign has this happening to the world. It is not an alternate earth.

 

If you're interested, I have a spinning globe animation on my website.

 

Keith "Just can't beat an equatorial fjord" Curtis

My map was a combination of sheer laziness and dedication. I had the Wish Master make the world become more lethal. I then took photoshop and about five hours of my life and deleted between 100 to 250 landmarks in the State of Maine and cast the game there.

 

For most of the city names I dropped one letter and mixed the rest around (this was to make the cities seem more foreign to players). I also focused mostly on cities and towns I was familiar with.

 

Of course my favorite landmark is the fact that the worlds most corrupt and powerful slaver lives at my former address.

[lemming]

Originally posted by Super Squirrel

[bOf course my favorite landmark is the fact that the worlds most corrupt and powerful slaver lives at my former address. [/b]

 

I have a fantasy world that hasn't seen the light of day for (gack! that long) about a decade. It's set in North America with the human settlements along the Missisipi and Ohio.

 

The NE is over run by Orcs so New York became New Orc...

 

Halflings ran Las Vegas while the evil drow elves were near Seattle.

 

What can I say, it was a bit on the silly side...

[Grymlynn]

Hey Keith! No kiddin'...!

 

Yeah, I just used Canada / Greenland, though. Well, I actually continent-ized my world with landmasses that started on Earth, but got squished and rotated enough to be unrecognizable. Plus, the mountains et al... are in diffenent places. I just needed the outline to get started, once I had the coastline, I was good to go.

[Old Man]

Wow, in comparison, my world is so...simplistic.

 

I basically have the land masses form a fat ring around the planet grouped pretty much near the equator - completely unrealistic but hey, it's fantasy right?

 

This set up makes the yearly weather cycle very moderate with no snowy winters. Might seem odd to some folks, but I live in Hawaii and have next to no experience with snow and winter in general. I couldn't do it justice so I left it out of my world.

[GradonSilverton]

Originally posted by Shadowpup

Wow, in comparison, my world is so...simplistic.

 

I basically have the land masses form a fat ring around the planet grouped pretty much near the equator - completely unrealistic but hey, it's fantasy right?

 

This set up makes the yearly weather cycle very moderate with no snowy winters. Might seem odd to some folks, but I live in Hawaii and have next to no experience with snow and winter in general. I couldn't do it justice so I left it out of my world.

 

As for your land mass..... always remember that there might be other things across the sea that no one has sailed to....

 

And for the winter thing... imagine the shock if it does snow..... something must be going on, something big....

[Lucius]

CIV II

 

An idea I've never used yet but think would work -

 

Use the Civilization II computer game.

 

It will create random worlds for you with up to 7 races or peoples. It can be customized at any level from a completely random world, to editing the map square by square. You can give it a size to go for, maybe specify some things like landmass type (continents or lots of islands?) climate, age of the world, etc.

 

The game requires one civilization to be the "Player" civ, but you have the better editions, like the Gold edition or Fantastic Worlds, you can place your starting unit in an out of the way place, protect it, and stay out of the way as the six computer controlled civilizations interact "naturally."

 

With Fantastic Worlds, you also get a lot of choices of exotic civilization names and lists of cities.

 

Lucius Alexander

 

The palindromedary reveals that Lucius once named a civilization "Hoosiers" and its leader "Dan Quayle" just so when he won he could fall over laughing at the announcement "The whole world hails DAN QUAYLE THE CONQUEROR!"

[AnotherSkip]

Frankly for my last worldbuilding event I took several Sci Fi ideas (David Brin, VTM, Nanotech, Star Fromtiers etc) and made it work with a millenia ago a space ship crashed etc... and from there on no one knows the history.

very general but then again there are a few thing I need to do with it.

[LordGhee]

how I create a campain

 

How do I start a campaign? Well I developed a strategy that has worked well for me quite by accident. One day back in 91 I was sitting in my den waiting with my long time buddy C. Siros waiting for the rest of our group to show up for a movie. I had just arrived back into town and was renewing some friendships and trying to decide on a game to run. Now I had run space opera in collage and D&D then champions came out. Well our group took to this system. I ran a super game for 3 years, Justice Inc game and a Fan sty Hero Game for 4 years. I had not been able to run a game for a couple of years and I was looking for something. Now I had a thought.

 

Lord Ghee: Siros

Siros: Yea.

Lord Ghee: Has anyone ever run a game for you.

Siros. What?

Lord Ghee: Has anyone ever set up a campaign with what you wanted to do or your character as the center.

This actually got my lanky friend attention

Siros: No

Lord Ghee: well what do you want to be?

There was a long pause, some contemplation and beer sipping.

Siros: I want to be a god. (Big smile)

Now this surprised me. I did not know that my friend held such pretensions

So I bowed my head to consider. Head bowed I quickly thought – that would be bad.

Then I reflected on the book on my lap. In search of the Trojan Wars (I was rereading it).

Trojan war (like this would help) Achilles and Herkculies. Gods and demigods.

Hey that is the answer.

Lord Ghee: now I cannot do a god but how about a demigod?

Siros: Sure.

He is moving! He is getting paper and pencil right now he is starting a character!

Lord Ghee: How about Ciros of Mycenae son of Hercules.

Siros: Sure.

 

And that was how my Mycenae campaign was born. Since then I have started every campaign since then with that question to some one.

 

I want to be Jedidia Matthews of Mars (read John Carter of Mars)

I want to be a Blood Guard. (The Empire game)

I want to be a football hero (the burst Bronson game –read flash Gordon)

 

My answer: I want to be a star ship Captain. (Ah what a crew – spice addicts and smugglers, gun runner and spies, psychos and criminals on the run –but it was my ship and a star to guide her byJ)

[Jhamin]

One of the best bits of worldbuilding advice I ever got was from Monte Cook at a Gencon forum. He reccomended that everyone buy "The Tough Guide to Fantasyland" by Diana Wynne Jones.

 

It is a guidebook to a really generic fantasy world. As humor it is moderate, but as a guide for what not to do in a world it is Marvelous.

 

As I understand it, if you ever want your world published you had better make sure it doesn't resemble Fantasyland in any way. The publishers already have 1000 worlds that do.

 

In gaming on the other hand, you often do want the generic fantasy tropes. If you do, this book will help you remember them all. When you create your evil race, look up evil races in the book. Do the two resemble each other? If so you have created a really generic evil race. Decide if that is really what you want. Rinse, repeat.

[Old Man]

Originally posted by Jhamin

One of the best bits of worldbuilding advice I ever got was from Monte Cook at a Gencon forum. He reccomended that everyone buy "The Tough Guide to Fantasyland" by Diana Wynne Jones.

 

I've been looking for that book for aeons, but it's been out of print for a while and the only times I've found it online it was vastly overpriced (approx. US$60). Bah.

[GradonSilverton]

Originally posted by Old Man

I've been looking for that book for aeons, but it's been out of print for a while and the only times I've found it online it was vastly overpriced (approx. US$60). Bah.

 

Try here....it was a quick look so I'd call someone to guarantee it... But its via Books-A-Million

 

http://www.booksamillion.com/ncom/books?id=2487111860932&pid=A8135244071

[austenandrews]

Lord Ghee: I ran a game like that once. I asked each of the players to tell me what they wanted to do in a game. One of them said, "I want to have a cool super-gun." One said, "I want to be invulnerable." One said, "I want to be a gangster." I said, "I want to run a pulp game." So we wound up with 1920's gangsters loot gadgets from the wreckage of a Martian shapecraft and taking the coppers to task.

 

-AA

[Old Man]

Originally posted by GradonSilverton

Try here....it was a quick look so I'd call someone to guarantee it... But its via Books-A-Million

 

http://www.booksamillion.com/ncom/books?id=2487111860932&pid=A8135244071

 

Thanks... but right after I posted I found a hardcover copy on amazon for like six bucks. It's being shipped from the UK, though, so I will have to wait another aeon.

[AnotherSkip]

Originally posted by Old Man

Thanks... but right after I posted I found a hardcover copy on amazon for like six bucks. It's being shipped from the UK, though, so I will have to wait another aeon.

 

 

Yeah but you are the Old Man of hero.

What are Aeons to you?

[Zoth]

Originally posted by Jhamin

One of the best bits of worldbuilding advice I ever got was from Monte Cook at a Gencon forum. He reccomended that everyone buy "The Tough Guide to Fantasyland" by Diana Wynne Jones.

 

As I understand it, if you ever want your world published you had better make sure it doesn't resemble Fantasyland in any way. The publishers already have 1000 worlds that do.

Problem is that so many fantasy world archetypes are coved by this book that if your fantasy world does not resemble at lest one thing in this book then it’s a science-fiction

 

Z.O.T.H “OUTPUT DISPLAYEDâ€

[Jhamin]

Originally posted by Zoth

Problem is that so many fantasy world archetypes are coved by this book that if your fantasy world does not resemble at lest one thing in this book then it’s a science-fiction

 

Z.O.T.H “OUTPUT DISPLAYEDâ€

 

You are of course correct. What good is a fantasy world without the DARKLORD or the FALLEN EMPIRE?

 

On the other hand, it does tend to keep people honest about what is their brilliant idea for a world and what has been done in every game world ever since the dawn of RPGs.

[Jhamin]

Originally posted by Old Man

I've been looking for that book for aeons, but it's been out of print for a while and the only times I've found it online it was vastly overpriced (approx. US$60). Bah.

 

Hadn't realized it had gone out of print. I bought mine off the shelf of a Barnes & Noble about a year ago.