Fantasy worlds you had to "rework" years later once you've grown up and knew better

[Jhaierr]

When I was in high school 20 years ago, a friend and I created a fantasy world together over the course of many roleplaying games, complete with creatures, races, characters, and ridiculous amounts of magic and magic items. There were about 4-5 sources of "power" (e.g., magic, "mutant"-like, power from the gods), and we had mutliple teams of various characters on different adventures. (It was definitely Fantasy Champions.) We had a blast with it.

 

As time progressed, however, I began to look back on the world we created and realized that it was wildly incoherent. Too many special abilities that made it feel "non-fantasy," too many creatures and races taken directly from other materials, and an overall sense that things were just not "jelling" together well. So we began a long process of reworking things. The problem is, this world has a lot of sentimental value and is hard to change without feeling like one is throwing away something very valuable. All to often I would look at something we had created and think, "but how does this fit into the overall world? Why is this important to the big story?" We even had character names that I realized that we needed to change because they just sounded really uncool. Sometimes I think we should just not worry about rewriting or recreating it.

 

Anyone else ever had a world like this that you realized was totally whack once you got older?

 

[Also, sorry: the thread title should have "you'd" instead of "you've"]

[Lord Liaden]

Re: Fantasy worlds you had to "rework" years later once you've grown up and knew bett

 

I think you just described most of the official worlds for the Dungeons and Dragons game. You can't really be blamed for creating a chaotic catch-all world in your youth, when the main published examples from the era followed the same route.

 

Like most old-time gamers I started with D&D, and stayed with their game worlds for a long time. But by the time I had matured enough to prefer something with more internal consistency and coherence, there were other such settings in the marketplace. To this day I prefer to take a published game world with a solid foundation, and then customize it to suit myself, rather than create something out of whole cloth. I'm still not sure whether this reflects lack of imagination, lack of confidence, or plain laziness.

[Enforcer84]

Re: Fantasy worlds you had to "rework" years later once you've grown up and knew bett

 

I started with making a video game world...Breath of Fire based.

Then I decided all my tweaks were making it less and less like the source material. So I pared out the obvious bits and tried to make it my own.

Coherent isn't in my dictionary though

[Zen Archer]

Re: Fantasy worlds you had to "rework" years later once you've grown up and knew bett

 

When I first started gaming, most of the players and GMs I knew didn't care about whether or not the fantasy world made sense. We just wanted to play, and we just wanted to have fun. *Everything* was whack, and we didn't care.

[tkdguy]

Re: Fantasy worlds you had to "rework" years later once you've grown up and knew bett

 

I constantly rework my worlds. Granted, I spend more time doing that than I do running them, so there's less sentimental value that way.

[Markdoc]

Re: Fantasy worlds you had to "rework" years later once you've grown up and knew bett

 

When I started GM'ing, I didn't have any published game worlds: all I had was a copy of the AD&D player's manual. So I had no idea of how things were "meant to be". So, I built my game world on the fantasy and myth I loved: Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, Conan, Lord of the Rings and old norse tales. As a result, my fantasy world was middle to low magic and relatively low-monster. It's held up surprisingly well: I'm still using it after 27 years. What I tend to do is choose one area of the map, develop that and run a campaign there. After a few years of play, that part of the world is heavily detailed, and I bring the game to a close and start up somewhere else. So far I have only detailed about half the world, so there's a good quarter century left in it, I reckon.

 

cheers, Mark

[Captain Obvious]

Re: Fantasy worlds you had to "rework" years later once you've grown up and knew bett

 

When I started GM'ing, I didn't have any published game worlds: all I had was a copy of the AD&D player's manual. So I had no idea of how things were "meant to be". So, I built my game world on the fantasy and myth I loved: Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, Conan, Lord of the Rings and old norse tales. As a result, my fantasy world was middle to low magic and relatively low-monster. It's held up surprisingly well: I'm still using it after 27 years. What I tend to do is choose one area of the map, develop that and run a campaign there. After a few years of play, that part of the world is heavily detailed, and I bring the game to a close and start up somewhere else. So far I have only detailed about half the world, so there's a good quarter century left in it, I reckon.

 

cheers, Mark

 

It should be pretty dang awesome by the time we get up that old-gamer's-home campaign we keep talking about on the boards...

[teh bunneh]

Re: Fantasy worlds you had to "rework" years later once you've grown up and knew bett

 

I have a world I've been running in for the past 30+ years. It started as AD&D and has migrated to Fantasy Hero. It's undergone a lot of changes. I was reading "Wizard of Earthsea" when I first started playing, so the world was a series of tiny islands in a vast sea. Then I got really into prog rock, so the world started to resemble the cover of a Yes album. I read the Conan stories, which inspired me to re-work the world so that the archipelego was only one tiny part of a larger continent. I read Lord of the Rings, which made me re-think how magic and specifically magic items worked. My first year in college I was a Geology major, so I reworked the geography of the continents so that they made sense -- I worked up a pretty detailed weather map, rock strata, and so forth. As the years have gone by, I've worked and re-worked it, refining every piece. It's a pretty solid piece of work now, IMHO. Looking back at those early days... I'm not really embarrassed by any of it. It all led me to where I am now.

[Cancer]

Re: Fantasy worlds you had to "rework" years later once you've grown up and knew bett

 

The fire in my dwelling in 1983 destroyed the old dungeon I'd spent half-a-dozen years accumulating, and since then I haven't done anything quite that ambitious, gaming-wise.

[NuSoardGraphite]

Re: Fantasy worlds you had to "rework" years later once you've grown up and knew bett

 

I built my own game-world for D&D the entire time I was in high school (started roleplaying as a Freshman) but after graduating high school and going into the Navy, I was transported to a magical place where actual game stores existed and was able to eventually find a published campaign setting that I really enjoyed (ICE's Shadow World) so I haven't done any work on that campaign setting since.

 

I have however created my own Sci-fi game universe, which is even more daunting considering that I have to detail dozens of worlds now instead of just one. Been working on that campaign setting since the early 90's and it is a work-in-progress that will likely never end. I don't get to use it nearly as often as I would like to as few gamers I know enjoy sci-fi gaming. They are all stuck on fantasy (traditional and urban).

[Manic Typist]

Re: Fantasy worlds you had to "rework" years later once you've grown up and knew bett

 

I have a fantasy setting that I NEED to rework, someday.

 

I was trying to justify lots of diversity within one reasonably small collection of space, so I had a party of adventurers (who represented different cultural and martial archetypes) be responsible for founding the nation. So it was the equivalent of the early Roman empire with a Eastern-themed city, a Middle Eastern city, and Italian style city, roving (and sanctioned) "barbarian tribesmen" who policed the interior for the occasional orc infestation, etc.

 

The Italian city, Semona, was the setting of the campaign. A city with nobles who bought their titles long ago due to their incredible wealth- and had divided the city up based upon the loose affiliation of businesses and families that became a very rigid city, identified by color (and primary exports). House Carmine, House Azure, House Ebony, House Ivory (an exception of sorts), etc. The city was a bit too neatly divided- I needed to rework that.

[IndianaJoe3]

Re: Fantasy worlds you had to "rework" years later once you've grown up and knew bett

 

I started with making a video game world...Breath of Fire based.

Then I decided all my tweaks were making it less and less like the source material. So I pared out the obvious bits and tried to make it my own.

 

Sounds like my current project. It started out as Spelljammer crossed with One Piece (with a bit of Firefly), but it's developing into something unique.

[bluesguy]

Re: Fantasy worlds you had to "rework" years later once you've grown up and knew bett

 

When I first started gaming it was D&D, ~1979 , and no one had a "campaign". We did dungeon crawling. Basically wander around, find monsters, kill monsters, take their stuff and then go to town to drop of the excessive stuff. After about a year of that I started to move the group away from dungeon crawling to more role playing. I had been reading the Thieves World series and there was some source material you could buy at that time. So I dropped Sanctuary where Albuquerque NM is at. I used the USA as the campaign world - which saved having to work up geography, weather and some other issues in creating your own world. I also found out I could get maps from the US Geology Service which were pretty cheap and made things more fun for everyone. The campaign world basically spread east from Sanctuary ("Albuquerque") thru west Texas, down to Houston and then back towards where the Texas/Mexico border is today. I found I was spending a lot of time trying to be consistent and fixing problems I had created during earlier gaming sessions.

 

I then found the Harn product line which was the best RPG world I have ever used as a GM. It was easy for me to create an epic campaign and lay that on top of the incredibly detailed Harn world products. I ended up selling that material.

 

When I came back to gaming, I looked at purchasing the Harn product line and decided that was too costly. So I bought the Valdorian Age which has served my purposes very well. Elweir is a very detailed city and the rest of the world has an adequate amount of information that it makes for a good background. There is plenty of room for detailing out places outside of Elweir. This allowed me to create a lot of city adventures and eventually detail areas around Elweir with more detail.

[Old Man]

Re: Fantasy worlds you had to "rework" years later once you've grown up and knew bett

 

I tended to focus more on fleshing out or customizing small corners of published game worlds. Originally this was an offshoot of 'retired' characters establishing their own holdings, but the interactions of those holdings with the surrounding areas drove me to start redefining those surrounding areas. My version of the Duchy of Tenh didn't really match the description in the book by the time I was done with it.

 

Like Bunneh I also made an archipelago world inspired by Earthsea, but I included versions of every possible seafaring culture so that I could have quasi-Greek triremes against Chinese junks and Viking longships. It didn't hold together very well. If I were to rework it today I'd probably increase the weirdness of the different cultures so as to make it clash a little less.

[Orion]

Re: Fantasy worlds you had to "rework" years later once you've grown up and knew bett

 

I constantly rework my worlds. Granted' date=' I spend more time doing that than I do running them, so there's less sentimental value that way.[/quote']

 

This is me. I've only created two settings, one for fantasy, and one for supers. Both are works in progress that will never end. For what they are, they are pretty good. It helps that I was in college when I started the supers setting, but have developed most of it in the last 5 years. There was no supers settings when I started, so I was forced to create it. Given my play style, there's no way a published setting, or a comic book series, could ever done the job without extensive rewrites. It resembles a lot of others because I've "borrowed" so much material, but that also let me pick and choose just what I liked.

 

The fantasy setting was only started a year ago, and most of the work has actually been done over the last 3-4 months. As many did, I started out not knowing that D&D dungeon crawls could be connected, or that you could reuse a character from one session to the next. I got World of Greyhawk, but never used it, because I found Harn very early on, and immediately knew I was home. Harn was so good all I did was develop a small corner of it, although that has been significantly developed. Recently though I wanted something different as an exercise in creativity, so I've started my own stuff. Late bronze or early iron age is the feel I'm going for, though with reasonable amounts of magic. It started out as something for D&D-playing friends that mostly ignore the setting, but I'm enjoying it too much to stop, and eventually it'll be quite detailed.

 

For Battletech, Traveller, and Shadowrun, I pretty much just choice a point in the official timeline and run with the standard setting.

[Lord Liaden]

Re: Fantasy worlds you had to "rework" years later once you've grown up and knew bett

 

Most of my fantasy creativity over the last couple of years has gone to customizing The Turakian Age. It has a lot of the elements that I look for in a published setting: a solid, consistent base but with plenty of room to add details; familiar tropes plus a number of more innovative elements; large enough for plenty of diversity, but not on an overwhelmingly global scale.

 

At this point the basic framework is still intact and very recognizable, but a lot has mutated, much of it slightly, some of it greatly. Many details the book leaves deliberately sketchy have been fleshed out. I've got the setting about 99% where I want it to be before I'm ready to turn PCs loose in it.

[azato]

Re: Fantasy worlds you had to "rework" years later once you've grown up and knew bett

 

I have a logic problem with most settings. My head gets in way much too often. I have am thinking about doing one from "scratch" using google maps, pasting some greyhawk, and throwing in some odds and ends.

[Nolgroth]

Re: Fantasy worlds you had to "rework" years later once you've grown up and knew bett

 

I never had complete campaign worlds in the sense that they were, you know, a whole world. I tried to build one but a massive case of grandiose expectations coupled with OCD* killed it in the crib. I have little bits of a world. An island here, a city there, that sort of thing. I've even taken chunks of published worlds and adapted them for my own use. I've not run or been in a campaign that lasted long enough to worry about making sure it is right though.

 

* I really wanted to be able to map from satellite views of the overall world, all the way down to the street level. Google Earth had not yet made an appearance, and honestly that would be a monumental undertaking in and of itself. At the time though, it was very frustrating wanting to do that with Campaign Cartographer 2 and not being able to.

[tkdguy]

Re: Fantasy worlds you had to "rework" years later once you've grown up and knew bett

 

I just do it for fun. And it's a way to keep gaming when I'm not actually running or playing.

 

I don't always start from scratch. I have mixed and matched stuff from different worlds and systems.

[Markdoc]

Re: Fantasy worlds you had to "rework" years later once you've grown up and knew bett

 

* I really wanted to be able to map from satellite views of the overall world' date=' all the way down to the street level. Google Earth had not yet made an appearance, and honestly that would be a monumental undertaking in and of itself. At the time though, it was very frustrating wanting to do that with Campaign Cartographer 2 and not being able to.[/quote']

 

This kind of thing is why so many fantasy game worlds go nowhere

 

I've drawn a lot of city maps in my time, many right down to street/alley detail, but you honestly don't need to know the details of small and obscure towns, hamlets and forest paths. I always started off with a big map so that I knew what was outside the planned play area and had a pretty good idea of what/where everything was in the entire world, but even after 25 years, there are large regions that are no more detailed than 5-6 sentences, while some individual cities have detailed street maps, sketches and floorplans of important buildings. religious notes, lists of major families, political systems and alliances, sketches of costumes, trading details, etc.

 

We all only have so much time, so you want to use it where you'll use it, if you know what I mean!

 

cheers, Mark

[tkdguy]

Re: Fantasy worlds you had to "rework" years later once you've grown up and knew bett

 

It's a good idea to adjust the level of detail according to the scale of the campaign. If the entire campaign is set in a single city and its immediate area, then you need a detailed map of the place. If the characters will be wandering from town to town, then you can give a lot of general info and detail a few areas.

 

If you run for different groups (I've never done this), you can set the groups in different parts of the world.

[The Main Man]

Re: Fantasy worlds you had to "rework" years later once you've grown up and knew bett

 

This reminds me of an idea i had for a thread series i would call "Let's Hack," in which posters discuss a particular setting and how they would modify it. For example, "Let's Hack: Turakian Age."

 

I guess I'll ask now: anyone interested in the concept?

[tkdguy]

Re: Fantasy worlds you had to "rework" years later once you've grown up and knew bett

 

I don't have the Turakian Age, but I have taken parts of Warhammer's Old World and 7th Sea's Theah for my campaign.

[Lord Liaden]

Re: Fantasy worlds you had to "rework" years later once you've grown up and knew bett

 

This reminds me of an idea i had for a thread series i would call "Let's Hack," in which posters discuss a particular setting and how they would modify it. For example, "Let's Hack: Turakian Age."

 

I guess I'll ask now: anyone interested in the concept?

 

As I mentioned upthread, I've been hacking TA for two years, so heck ya!

[Markdoc]

Re: Fantasy worlds you had to "rework" years later once you've grown up and knew bett

 

It's a good idea to adjust the level of detail according to the scale of the campaign. If the entire campaign is set in a single city and its immediate area, then you need a detailed map of the place. If the characters will be wandering from town to town, then you can give a lot of general info and detail a few areas.

 

If you run for different groups (I've never done this), you can set the groups in different parts of the world.

 

I've actually run for two different groups (the Saturday Group and the Wednesday group) in the same area and (more or less) same time: occasionally timelines diverged due to periods of travel, downtime, etc, but the overlapping games ran weekly for about 2 years. Different storylines, so they didn't interact directly, but over time, the two groups became aware of each others existence and activities. They didn't come into contact or conflict, but they did, from time to time, have to deal with the fallout of the other group's activities. It was particularly nice for me because one group was basically wandering monster-killers: your typical adventurers. The other group got involved in a much more political plotline, involving the young king attempting to consolidate his rule and stabilise his kingdom, while the evil witch queen attempted to tip things over into chaos and civil war.

 

cheers, Mark