Hi! and help

[tngecho]

Hello everyone! I guess I should start with a little about myself. I've been gaming a long time. I was going to say I have been gaming for “this many” years but then I saw the number and felt old, very, very, old. Anyway as I've gained experience (no pun intended) I've found that I require more. Not just from the games, but also from the system. This search for more is what led me to HERO (that and I have inherited a lot of HERO books and PDFs.) I have only come to HERO recently but I've come to learn that it's a wonderful system. So, thank you, Hero Games!

Enough about me. My goal is to build a world, shocked, I know, but I want it to be a good one, so of course I came here. One of the things that I love about HERO is the “tool kit” philosophy. The system lends itself to world building, and you kind folks have experience with the system. That was the last platitude, I think. So with that in mind... I would like to ask the forum about world building. To start with, what tools do you use to keep track of everything? What are some questions that you ask as you're building your world? What are some common traps, and what are some ways to avoid them?

If I have put this in the wrong forum please move it. And sorry If I have preformed some thread necromancy. Now if you'll excuse me I have an ant hill I need to boil...

[Hyper-Man]

Welcome to HERO tngecho!

 

I'm probably not the best one here to offer advice on world building but it might help if we knew what genre of game you plan on running (supers, modern monster hunting, fantasy, space opera, etc...).  There are also sub forums for the most popular of these (Champions, Fantasy Hero, Star Hero, etc..) that might be the better avenue to the answers you seek.  THIS forum tends to be focused on character and/or combat rule how to discussions than anything else.

 

HM

[Scott Baker]

Regardless of genre, I use Hero Designer for character creation.

[Doc Democracy]

I would say that the most common mistake a HERO GM makes in building a world is underestimating the details that he or she needs to consider if the world is to be consistent. Work put in early avoids all kinds of issues later on.

 

 

Doc

[bluesguy]

Hi,

 

Thank you for joining us.  You are going to love Hero.

 

As for world building.  What genre are you looking at for your world?  Superhero, Fantasy, Pulp, etc?  That makes a big difference.

 

I have been building a fantasy world and I have started posting my process for doing build my world Nyonia - Celestial Jewels. 

 

You will get a lot of advice, I know I did, along the lines of "start small - one corner of your world, a village/town and work out from there" vs. "come up with a big picture and work on the details as you need to"; my advice is to just imagine and brainstorm ideas for a while.  Just let your mind wander over the ideas for a while.

[Lucius]

One pitfall I'd warn against is the Big Picture Trap. One can get to wrapped up in specifying the location and details of every empire, kingdom, and city state, or the various relationships among the Deities of several pantheons, or the historical conflicts and alliances among a dozen schools of magic, as to never get around to writing the first adventure.

 

If you are actually going to eventually run a game, you have to keep coming back to "What does this look, sound, and feel like to the individual adventurer?"

 

Lucius Alexander

 

This tagline looks sounds and feels like a palindromedary

[Ninja-Bear]

You know I thougbt of something alittle different this time around. Start watching th something familar then add on your tastes. I think one trap is "I have to come up were th a completely novel campaign! ". And related to that is beg, borrow and steal any game write ups you like and tweak to taste. That can be a big saver in time and effort.

[Scott Baker]

One pitfall I'd warn against is the Big Picture Trap. One can get to wrapped up in specifying the location and details of every empire, kingdom, and city state, or the various relationships among the Deities of several pantheons, or the historical conflicts and alliances among a dozen schools of magic, as to never get around to writing the first adventure.

 

If you are actually going to eventually run a game, you have to keep coming back to "What does this look, sound, and feel like to the individual adventurer?"

 

Lucius Alexander

 

This tagline looks sounds and feels like a palindromedary

Right. When you get into that level of detail, you really aren't looking at the Big Picture any longer. Too much detail early on can be extremely limiting for future adventure planning as well. 

[Nolgroth]

Tools:

For Hero specifically, I use Hero Designer for character creation.

For mapping, I use Gimp. I tend to be somewhat picky about my maps, especially world maps, so I roll my own using tutorials at the Cartographers Guild site.

For text, I use a little program called Jarte. It is basically a Hack of Wordpad, but for some reason the interface appeals to me.

For running the game I use MapTool (I don't have a face-to-face group.)

 

Questions I ask myself:

All of them.

 

Usually when I build a setting, I ask myself what it is I am trying to convey. What stories do I want to tell? What genre or setting type? I then follow up with how I want to present the world to the players so I need to know how they would fit into it. Are they Shadowrunners or Corporate Security, for example.

 

Then comes the questions about Organizations, Enemies, Allies, Contacts and how they fit into the setting I am building. That is followed closely by the grunt work of actually building them in game mechanics terms. If magic is your gig, that adds another level of complexity. The good news; Hero is mostly front-loaded work. Once you get your game and setting prepared, Hero is one of the quickest game systems I have ever played. Indeed, in terms of Combat, the only faster game system I've played with is D&D 4th Edition. The bad news; world building will take a lot of time and there are few resources for random character generation.

 

Pitfalls:

An Atari 2600 game from Activision.

 

On a serious note, Lucius really defined it best. One of my biggest mistakes is always trying to build on the large scale instead of the detailed one. Of late, I have been building micro settings like a 100 mile x 100 mile square swatch of land or an island or a small solar system or two. That has helped focus my creative energy on the NPCs, locations and all the stuff listed above, just for that location. While I lack breadth doing that, I find that I gain depth. 

 

By definition, world building implies that you want to custom roll your NPCs. There are resources for you to draw from but they may not fit your "standards" in regards to how you want them to come out. As a novice, I suggest you seek them out anyway and give them a try. Find what works for you and what doesn't. Hero is very modular and there are many ways to build things. Vast arguments have sprung up over the best way to model Superman's invulnerability, for example. When I say argument, keep in mind that most arguments here are ultimately good-natured differences of opinion.  Once you have a handle on things and how they work together, roll your own Rogues Gallery, Bestiary, Treasure Hoard, and Adventure Seeds to fit your game. That way, if the characters wander too far from the Main Plot, you have ready made resources to quickly build from. As your mastery of the system increases, you will be able to do more off the cuff stuff.

 

Hero has some built in training wheels in the form of CV, DC, PD/ED, etc. maximums per genre and power level. I find them extraordinarily useful while others find them a crutch. They are both. I suggest sticking with those at first until you get more accustomed to using the system. Then you can take off those training wheels as you desire. 

 

That's all for now. I'm sure when I hit Post there will be a wall of text enough as is. Welcome to the Hero Boards and good luck.

[DasBroot]

Lucius and Scott nailed it - in my own games, regardless of genre, I tend to build world-down.  In some ways that's neccessary, especially in Champions (where unless you've restricted it somehow it's not hard for characters of any power level to decide to fly to anywhere in the world if they want) but in other ways it diverts creative attention away from making the places where you *want* the players to spend their time appeal to them enough to want to spend time there.  I've had to really dial in and focus on the places they are instead the places they may go recently as a result.

 

System/mechanically speaking ease of travel, in my opinion, can be one of the greatest challenges of running the Hero system regardless of genre.  In a standard fantasy RPG like D&D you tend to have *time* to sort the world details out as the low level characters save the township/village/etc while working their way up to saving the world - your 'world' is a pretty small place if all you have are horses. Deciding what movement types you'll allow and to what levels can be an important decision.

[bluesguy]

My focus for world building is Fantasy specific.  That is because my superhero game is very episodic and is basically a 'mirror' of our world + Marvel + Champions Universes mashed up.
 
One thing that is important to think about is that a world is different than a campaign.  A well designed world can support many different campaigns each of which could take place in different locations, points in history, etc without having to make major overhauls to the world.
 
For my world, Nyonia I started with a high level framework for the world.  If you read this article I posted, especially the section Total Control, which describes the framework I wanted to define.  I put together a spreadsheet to help pull all the information together, which you can find here.  Or you can just look at the Nyonia website.  Currently it is about 80% where I would like it to be.
 
I am currently moving my campaign from Obsidian Portal to my own site.  The campaign is called Pauci Fortis and it is focused on a specific place, time and set of characters.  In this case I stayed very focused on the Land of the Five Spices, specifically within the Soke City State, and a corner in the city state (which I haven't pulled over from Obsidian Portal yet).  The only details for the Land of Five Spices and thte Soke City State are the ones I have shown on those pages.  There is a lot more detail in this corner - specific locations, villages, towns, cities, and NPCs are detailed out in this area.

[tngecho]

Thank you. There is a lot of helpful information here.

[TheDarkness]

I tend to have periods of world development that are big picture, and periods that are small details/local phenomenon. Too much focus on one or the other, and the feel of the world seems to suffer.

[bigdamnhero]

When I was younger I used to do more world-building for world-building sake, but honestly who has time for that anymore? Now I'm usually building for a specific campaign with a specific group of players. I usually have some sort of meta-plot or theme in mind when I start. I sketch out the broad-brush view so the players have an idea of what the world looks like from 20,000 feet and what options they might have to choose from. Then I pounce on whatever options they pick up on, and flesh those out. The surrounding details can stay vague and fuzzy until/unless become relevant. And my players understand that sometimes I may have to tap out and say "Good idea, guys, but I don't have anything written for that yet. How about you guys go play a round of Flux while I make shit up?"

 

Start watching th something familar then add on your tastes. I think one trap is "I have to come up were th a completely novel campaign! ". And related to that is beg, borrow and steal any game write ups you like and tweak to taste. That can be a big saver in time and effort.

Good point, and I've seen this used to good effect. For example, I played one sci-fi game where the GM wanted to have a huge variety of different alien races, but knew we'd never be able to keep track of all of them. So he basically threw in every alien race from every book/movie/show you can think of: Klingons, Wookies, Narns, you name it. Made it easy for us to remember who was who. And then when he did throw in an original race, it seemed much that much more original and important by comparison.

 

Of course the flip side is playing in a world that's just a pastiche of stuff from other worlds can get boring and derivative fairly quickly.

 

What stories do I want to tell?...

...I need to know how [the PCs] would fit into it. Are they Shadowrunners or Corporate Security, for example.

These are the two key questions IMO. I've seen & played too many RPGs where the GM's focus seemed to be on impressing us with the depth and originality of the world they'd created, whether or not it had anything to do with us as PCs. There is a fine line between conveying a rich backstory of a wider world, vs. burying the players in details that aren't immediately relevant to the characters and plot. Remember, the story is about the PCs and their actions; the world is "just" a means to that end. (Tho an important one!)

[dougmacd]

My goal is to build a world, shocked, I know, but I want it to be a good one, so of course I came here. One of the things that I love about HERO is the “tool kit” philosophy. The system lends itself to world building, and you kind folks have experience with the system. That was the last platitude, I think. So with that in mind... I would like to ask the forum about world building. To start with, what tools do you use to keep track of everything?

 

I start with two documents: one for the players, and one for myself. The initial "player guide" contains:

1. A page-long introduction to the campaign setting.  This is a teaser, so I keep it brief.
2. Character creation guidelines.
3. House rules.

My "GM guide" is a typically a stream of consciousness mess that parallels the "players guide", but focuses on information I need to know. Most of the initial information I give to players is incomplete or wrong, so this is where I detail the missing bits, misconceptions, plots, etc.

 

I also create a Proper Nouns spreadsheet with people/places/things and a one-line blurb describing each.  This serves as a Cliff's Notes to the players, and I helps me avoid creating NPCs with confusingly similar names. 

 

I update these documents as the campaign proceeds.  The "player guide" usually hyperlinks off to additional documents with greater details.

 

What are some questions that you ask as you're building your world?

• WHO: Who are the major players? (Individuals, Organizations, Nations)
• WHAT: What's special about my world? (Novel premises, weird rules, etc.)  
• WHERE: Make a basic atlas! Players love maps, even crappy ones.
• WHY: Why is my world different? (Explain the WHAT)
• WHEN: What are some defining events? (How the World Came to Be, wars, etc.)

What are some common traps, and what are some ways to avoid them?

 

Be wary of writing universes from scratch. The more you diverge from the "standard" campaign rules, the fewer pregenerated materials you can use/adapt. Where you do choose to diverge (e.g., custom magic rules) make it clear and compelling.

 

Fortunately, Hero System makes this easier. Try changing the spell system in D&D....

 

Steal liberally from other sources: books, TV, movies, other games, your players.

Only be as specific as you need to be. Locations far away or events far in the future (e.g., hidden plots) only need to be sketched out. This saves you from unnecessary effort detailing stuff the players may never encounter. It also makes it easier to change your mind as the distant locales/events come into focus.

 

Stuff of immediate concern to the PCs should be fleshed out, at least to yourself. Be comfortable enough with your setting to answer questions from PCs on the fly.

 

Doug

"Wait, when you said [our contact] Anne killed them, did you mean Anise [the villain]?"

[Kesedrith]

tngecho, it seems you and I are in good company with "old timers" here, so I wouldn't worry about that.

 

In answer to your question, I blush to admit that I'm so old fashioned that I still use notebooks and paper to build my worlds.

 

As an example, my most detailed world started as a map on a 36"x36" hex sheet.  I drew the map, thought about where geological features should be, what nations should be there, what wilderness/unclaimed areas should be there, the races I wanted, what were the relationship between all these groups.  In the end I wound up with a world where there were two types of dwarves: mountain and hill.  The mountain dwarves considered themselves the only "real" dwarves.  They are a warrior people who dwell in citadels dug into the mountains of a central mountain range, split by a chain of volcanoes.  They are a tough, disciplined, hard people who enjoy strong drink and battle between two honorable foes.  For one to draw a weapon on you and proclaim he (or she) has decided to grant you the Gift of Battle(!) is a high honor.  Both males and females are bearded and the braiding of the beard - with its knot work and decorations - tells you the clan, family, rank within both, occupation, and rank within that occupation of any dwarf.

 

I'll stop there, but you can tell that I've drawn on several archetypal sources for dwarves, but have added some twists and flairs.  Some has even been added by players being told basically the above, and then working with me to fill in any blanks that might come up.  In the end, I have a 2" ring binder filled with notes on the Dwarves of Kardin, the nations of Kershalt, Eufaula, The Thousand Realms, and more.  There's the legends of the First Emperor and his Companions who defeated Orcus and broke his scepter in the Demon Wars.

 

Sadly, I think in various moves I may have lost that notebook, but the outline is still in my head.

 

Anyway, I really set out to write that you should never underestimate the power of just buying a map sheet or a notebook, and just start sketching out notes of things you think would be neat to have in your world.  Then start connecting it all together and expanding further.  Maybe run a game or two and see what your players do with this sketch-start you've made, though I do recommend more experienced players for doing that.  

 

Hope this rambling bit was at least a little helpful.