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  1. - Top - End - #1
    Barbarian in the Playground
     
    DrowGirl

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    Default Commonly missed elements to world-building

    Hey all, first time posting on this particular board.

    So a little while back I tried to build a world loosley based on hollow earth theory with a complex pantheon and a big deal about sentient/sapient zombies who retained their memories of life.

    Basically, it was just a few cool ideas strung together, and it provoked a lot of unintended consequences that I feel left my players feeling dissatisfied with the overall product. Due largely in part to poor planning and an amnesia story (the players are from the inner earth but weren't supposed to know it) I was heavily unprepared for a number of circumstances. Such as: How do these "good zombies" heal. I don't want to follow the God of this realm, but one of another, what do? Can we go here instead of there?

    In short: I don't think that setting can be salvaged. I'll be taking it either into low-effort mode while I start building an entirely new one, or cancel the current one completely.

    I've learned a lot from these mistakes, but I'm interested in getting advice on what other mistakes I could still make, even if I think I've thought it all through.

    The setting so far is a pseudo-earth a la FFXIV. (See picture below). The goal is to create a complete world that once created I can consistently use for every game. The game system is D&D 5E, and I'd like to avoid messing with classes too much.

    The magic system is based on a transitive particle that can be morphed into any other particle to produce physical effects and things, although mages don't understand it on such a granular level. They just understand that all things contain aether and that it's mutable and subject to will.

    I've got a lot more about different cultures, but I'm mostly concerned with certain trappings of world-building rather than seeking advice for my world specifically.

    Spoiler: Hydalean
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    Note: The main game takes place on the African shaped continent, but shares extremely few cultural or geographic similarities. The Sahara region is mostly snowy mountains, dragons, and elves, the Egyptian region is mostly forest with elves and humans,
    south is a grand desert full of gnome/dwarf children trying to summon demons, and the west is full of gnome/dwarf children hanging out with sea orcs.

    Oh and catgirls. (The landmasses to the east however are very Chinese/Japanese however)

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    Default Re: Commonly missed elements to world-building

    The one somewhat common mistake I could think of are countries in which all the inhabitants are raiders who steal their resources from others but nobody produces anything that the others could steal. Basically the same problem as having an environment inhabited only by predators who are eating each other.

    Perhaps another common pitfall is having very powerful magic being common, but the world looking almost like it didn't. If the world and its societies are relatively mundane, than magic needs to be either have very little potential for economy or warfare, or it needs to be really rare. If magic could make a huge difference and is also relatively common, than it makes no sense that the world still looks like the middle ages.
    We are not standing on the shoulders of giants, but on very tall tower of other dwarves.

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    Default Re: Commonly missed elements to world-building

    A lot of people, I've felt, just put "cultures" on a map, with very little interaction between them. Think about how neighboring nations interact. How are they related? Do they share religions? Dynasties? Decent from the same mythical leader? Language? Culture? Trade? History is complicated. Think about it as more of a source of fascinating ruins, it makes things more interesting.

    Speaking of religions, are there sects, heresies, orthodoxies, divisions? Is this a point of division between nations?
    Resident Vancian Apologist

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    Default Re: Commonly missed elements to world-building

    For me, the biggest pitfall is going too deep. Yes, you want to make a unique world that's immersive and interesting to your players, but you have to be aware of the system you are playing in. Players will come into any system with assumptions, and unless you make a new system to accommodate your world, you world needs to accommodate the system.

    Players are interested in why the supposedly good duke is paying big money for a cursed artifact. They are not so interested in why, "In my world, elves are blue."
    Name none of the fallen, for they stood in our place. And stand there still in each moment of our lives. Let my death hold no glory, and let me die forgotten and unknown. Let it not be said that I was one among the dead to accuse the living.

    -Deadhouse Gates (Book 2 in the Malazan Book of the Fallen) by Steven Erikson

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    Barbarian in the Playground
     
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    Default Re: Commonly missed elements to world-building

    Quote Originally Posted by Yora View Post
    The one somewhat common mistake I could think of are countries in which all the inhabitants are raiders who steal their resources from others but nobody produces anything that the others could steal. Basically the same problem as having an environment inhabited only by predators who are eating each other.

    Perhaps another common pitfall is having very powerful magic being common, but the world looking almost like it didn't. If the world and its societies are relatively mundane, than magic needs to be either have very little potential for economy or warfare, or it needs to be really rare. If magic could make a huge difference and is also relatively common, than it makes no sense that the world still looks like the middle ages.
    I think I understand what you're getting at? You refer to the idea that some lower level spells, such as Create Food and Water could theortically be used to end hunger everywhere. Or how True Polymorph and Wish can be easily used to destabilize a market and are pretty much MAD by their very existence. (MAD, as in Mutually Assured Destruction). D&D doesn't seem to really resolve that claim itself. A lot of artwork and modules seem to imply that Adventuring is a common hobby, and that clerics capable of casting those spells should exist in pretty decent numbers.

    Any suggestions?

    Quote Originally Posted by Eldan View Post
    A lot of people, I've felt, just put "cultures" on a map, with very little interaction between them. Think about how neighboring nations interact. How are they related? Do they share religions? Dynasties? Decent from the same mythical leader? Language? Culture? Trade? History is complicated. Think about it as more of a source of fascinating ruins, it makes things more interesting.

    Speaking of religions, are there sects, heresies, orthodoxies, divisions? Is this a point of division between nations?
    One of the players who recently joined is a Satanist, and he seems to be interested in playing heretical characters such as Necromancers, Death Clerics, Warlocks, etc. So probably yes to all of those things. My plan for building history is to start by dropping cultures on the map (ie: China is "Land of Dragons" now. There's a social order that goes Dragons>Dragonborn>Lizardfolk>Other Humanoids>Kobolds (Slaves). Their dynasties are divided by color and are ruled by the "Crystal Dragons". They worship a "Rainbow Dragon", who supposedly broke apart in ancient times to create the dragons we see today.

    I repeat the process and for every culture that's effectively locked together. Then, I pull back into their history. How much of each others specific cultures would have bled into each country. In real world Japan, they adopted Chinese Script. Perhaps the Gnomes here learned Dragonic and speak it as their primary language, and Gnommish is something only "european" gnomes do. Would any given ideologies have sparked war. If so, how did the cultures survive? Did they? Are the current cultures built upon the ashes of other nations before them?

    (Side Note: While I refer to the regions by the earth-equivalent geographic location, their cultures aren't necessarily modeled after or similar to them at all. The dragons at least probably going to end up very different from China)

    Quote Originally Posted by Beastrolami View Post
    For me, the biggest pitfall is going too deep. Yes, you want to make a unique world that's immersive and interesting to your players, but you have to be aware of the system you are playing in. Players will come into any system with assumptions, and unless you make a new system to accommodate your world, you world needs to accommodate the system.

    Players are interested in why the supposedly good duke is paying big money for a cursed artifact. They are not so interested in why, "In my world, elves are blue."
    I disagree on this one. There's never too deep, but whether or not the players explore those depths would still be up to them. They actually loved my Sky Elves from the last campaign because they were blue, and could fly. (Which involved an entirely cultural thing against high elves, as the Sky Elves believed themselves to be the truly pure ones, and everyone on the ground was a dirty off-shoot)

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    Default Re: Commonly missed elements to world-building

    Quote Originally Posted by Sabeta View Post
    I disagree on this one. There's never too deep, but whether or not the players explore those depths would still be up to them. They actually loved my Sky Elves from the last campaign because they were blue, and could fly. (Which involved an entirely cultural thing against high elves, as the Sky Elves believed themselves to be the truly pure ones, and everyone on the ground was a dirty off-shoot)
    I think that means you already learned that lesson. Let me clarify a bit.

    I think that if you start building a realistic world, you will find it is not usually very well suited for adventure. i saw people posting about oxygen composition in the atmosphere, and graphing realistic climates on a procedural map. Once you drill down into realistic religions, cultures, etc. You will find that it doesn't necessarily make sense for every race and class to be present in an area.

    i wasn't saying, don't be creative and make flying blue elves, I was saying don't go into why their skin pigment is different because an enzyme, etc. The world has to be believeable, but that doesn't mean it has to make sense. You need to leave room for acts of god and Deus ex Machina, Mcguffins, and time paradoxes. Basically, you want a world that conforms to the adventure preferences of your players (and my players are too lazy to read lore about blue elves, lolz)
    Name none of the fallen, for they stood in our place. And stand there still in each moment of our lives. Let my death hold no glory, and let me die forgotten and unknown. Let it not be said that I was one among the dead to accuse the living.

    -Deadhouse Gates (Book 2 in the Malazan Book of the Fallen) by Steven Erikson

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    Default Re: Commonly missed elements to world-building

    Quote Originally Posted by Sabeta View Post
    I think I understand what you're getting at? You refer to the idea that some lower level spells, such as Create Food and Water could theortically be used to end hunger everywhere. Or how True Polymorph and Wish can be easily used to destabilize a market and are pretty much MAD by their very existence. (MAD, as in Mutually Assured Destruction). D&D doesn't seem to really resolve that claim itself. A lot of artwork and modules seem to imply that Adventuring is a common hobby, and that clerics capable of casting those spells should exist in pretty decent numbers.

    Any suggestions?
    What I did for my own setting is to scale down the upper limits of what magic can do in a D&D campaign. I made 5th level spells the maximum level that is available in the world. All the 6th to 9th level spells do not exist.
    Many people believe that the D&D magic system was originally designed to have only 6 levels of spells, with the 7th to 9th level spells being later added for extremely powerful NPC wizards who would be facing a whole party of what were at the time considered high level PCs. And it makes kind of sense when you look at the 5th and 6th level spells that have been around from the very start. They do things that would normally be considered "ultimate magical power": Turn an enemy instantly into dust, teleportation, getting advice from a god, bringing people back from the dead. How do you even surpass that? 7th to 9th level spells tried to do that and that's where many of the spells appear that could seriously change the way the world works. Even the 5th and 6th level spells could make huge changes if they were common. If they are the ultimate magical powers it'd be easy to see that they are super rare, but if they are just halfway up to the maximum that magic can do it does raise the expectation that they are still pretty common.

    In the same spirit I made the decision that any NPC who is not an outstanding hero automatically had the stats of a 0-level character/1st level NPC. Character classes and levels are only for heroes and villains. Background characters and even important "civilians" don't get any of that. If you want priests with magical powers in every village temple they can be 1st level clerics, but that's it. If the players need knowledge they can get it from a sage or alchemist, they don't need a wizard for that.
    The result is that magic becomes much more rare so that even if people who have such powers would want to selflessly use them for good, they wouldn't have the capacity to make a difference beyond their immediate neighborhood. If you have one cleric who can cast cure disase two times per day, what difference will he make when a plague is killing dozens of people every day? What use would it be to create food for a dozen people when thousands are starving? By keeping the number of people who can cast spells really low you can have them show their magic when interacting with the PCs but it would be obvious that they can't solve the big problems of the world with it.

    Another thing that I did, which probably isn't a good fit, is to make the creation of magic items impossible. All the magic items in my setting are remains of rare magical creatures that randomly retained some of the creatures' powers. Players can still find them in ruined castles or in the hands of NPCs, but it's not possible for people to mass produce them for widespread use. Every magic item is unique and if you want more of them you have to search for them and force the current owners to hand them over. Again, very little changes for players who are playing extraordinary people doing extraordinary things in extraordinary places, but it severely limits how magic can affect the wider world.
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    Default Re: Commonly missed elements to world-building

    In your predicament I see an obvious 'out': save the outside world by destroying the inside one.

    It appears that you have not delved too deep into how intelligent zombies work. Perhaps their creator, (possibly a deity of some kind,) is out to turn the players' world into a world of controllable undead, and in order to defeat this villain an object of immense power which was used to create the special zombies must be destroyed, thus ending the magic that animated the dead and trapped their souls on the prime material plane? Perhaps with the unlooked-for aid of some intelligent zombies? The result of this would be the immediate elimination of your zombie problem, and if this destruction also causes earthquakes and volcanos, it could mean a race to the surface, where the surface cultures are now under assault from the refugees of the world's interior.

    Such an approach would leave you free to create a series of adventures lacking in details, because the characters won't have time to explore in their flight/fight to get out before the roof falls or the lava rises. It would also explain why the surface world has changed when your new and improved adventures are ready. Plus, your players' characters will be the experts on these new enemies the surface dwellers face.

    I both agree and disagree with the depth of detail developed prior to play. I have in the past created elaborate and specific details, only to see the players immediately run to the blank section of the map, and I have seen the same players investigate the most trivial of red herrings in exclusion of the actual adventure I've prepared. In both cases, (I have learned after many years of gaming,) it was my fault. You as a DM must decide which details are necessary to advance your plot, then avoid ad-libbing even more enticing details on the fly as your game progresses. Your details, when written, must guide the player, and your roleplay as DM will determine for your players whether to follow up on a clue.

    As an example, in one of my campaigns I foreshadowed the players' involvement with an assassin by having a victim found nearby. This was supposed to be a clue for later use, and had nothing to do with the dungeon crawl I had written up for that session. However, one player became invested in solving the crime, hijacked the game session toward that end, and was furious with me at the end of the very unproductive game night for an evening wasted. He was right. I generated too much detail for an, at the time, unimportant situation. Instead, I could have had a tavern rumor about the murder, with all early attempts to investigate stimied by the lack of specific information. But I had the details, so I dribbled them out, and encouraged my players to investigate further each time they succeeded in wrangling another 'clue' from me.

    What I do now is create details only as I need them for the adventure at hand, and keep everything else intentionally vague. I can improv when I need to because nothing is written in stone. I have spent the week between sessions working out how to reign in mistakes I'd made, but I haven't had another dead-end game night since then.

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    Barbarian in the Playground
     
    DrowGirl

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    Default Re: Commonly missed elements to world-building

    I'll explain the setting a bit better. There are two gods, one of life and light. The other of death and darkness. I love duality, that's why I went with a hollow earth, and two gods, etc.

    This did not leave room for warlocks though, or nature clerics, or many other things. I lacked the imagination to ad-libs solutions to those, but quite frankly it was a homebrewed campaign with not nearly enough thought put into the world-building.

    As for the zombies.

    Souls are produced in the center of the Galaxy. All of them, ever. They spread across the cosmos and wherever these rivers of souls flow into a planet life happens. At the center of the Galaxy is a race that has a capacity for many multitudes of souls, so they declared themselves gods and go out to sentient planets and guide them to grow their souls, to increase the overall quality of souls, and that way you end up with ever better gods and citizens.

    The goddess of life has a responsibility of choosing which races deserve souls, which in this setting ends up being PHB races. The god of death is in charge of removing corrupt souls from the stream, and kicking back the goods into the river where they'll eventually reincarnate.

    What happens, is an evil God enters the stage. He defeats the god of death and takes over his position. Instead of performing the normal duties, he consumes the souls for power. This prevents all of the souls from properly separating from their bodies, thus the zombies were born.

    The bad guy doesn't care about zombies. He wants people to die, but not at an unsustainable rate that would destroy the planet. Thus, he has agents across the globe acting to incite wars and violence and other things of that nature.

    Problems: Zombies ended at their origin. I did not properly build what a zombie society would be like. If they don't feed food, sleep, or drink, what would they do? How much does their city accommodate living people? How available is food and water? If they lack for needs, to they only pursue wants? If that's the case, what strife could I create there outside of power plays and overcrowding?

    Basically, I just didn't plan. So I'm building a new setting. I'll have the setting fully realized before I begin playing, I'll build my plot properly around the ideas of a sandbox (Old setting had literal walls here and there to keep players from exploring too much. They needed gate passes to get through, and the players reacted strongly against the idea)

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    Default Re: Commonly missed elements to world-building

    I think there's another form of "going too deep." You can go into great detail regarding things that your players might love if you present it, or might ignore, but either way wouldn't miss if it were never there in the first place. And that's fine up to a point. Going too deep is spending so much time on that stuff that you never call it done and start playing. There's always more you could do, but you've got to know when to stop.
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    Default Re: Commonly missed elements to world-building

    One problem I have found is "what happens when the players leave the main area and/or go way off track?
    Either you have a very boring ocean, a tottaly unplanned landmass you have no-idea about, a fast way to get from one end of the world to another at low level, or players falling off the edge. None of those are good. Teleport/wish/ plane shift spells are another pitfall, for the same reason, just on different scales. Restrictions on those work well, but players can get around that with almost anything at a high level. The other main thing comes in the form of your economy. Tales of an industrious rogue is a good example of that. Any player that finds infinite or arbitrarily large anything can have infinite or arbitrarily large sums of gold. Be wary of things like that.

    TL;DR: Be careful of things off your main settled area. That includes your cosmology. Stay away from infinite anything as well. No economy can hold that.
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    Flumph

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    Default Re: Commonly missed elements to world-building

    It isn't a matter of what is or not too deep in a general sense. It is what is too deep for you, your style, and your players.

    What works for me

    I do deep background. A lot of it. I then create powerful actors in a general region I expect the PC's to be. I create a couple of things that may spur the PC's to action-and I get very in detail of who and what happened there.

    Then I do very little of what I expect for the future. Closest things are the goals and plans of certain villains, powerful NPC's, and potential mentors. Sometimes a general sense of something like - a gold mine opens-economy is going to boom-I'll generate stories from people dealing with that or "People are moving away which is going to cause a rift between X and Y and conflict between X and Z" - I should be able to foreshadow this kinda thing and generate stories as I get there. . .

    For me very deep background depth gives the platform to innovate and improvise very quickly. Fast enough that my players think I have it all planned. I don't. I need a ruined farmstead ASAP? I kinda mentioned it offhand to give a sense of enemy at the gates and didn't expect the PC's to go that way. So no prep. But I do know the personalities of captain and the two lieutenants likely to be in charge of a raid and the goals of the people directing the raid etc etc so a complete story writes a lot of itself. A half a dozen rough-in rolls for the various sides during the early description and the walk over fills in the story to me.

    That works for me. My games do lean more on the Hobo of the Murderhobo trends which isn't for everyone.

    Other people a more planned out story and plot. Good on ya. But if you focus too much on what the players will be doing three levels from now, while you can lay out great hints and sidenotes it is rather fragile. The great visual scene you created with the zombies is exposed as unlikely when a PC asks about healing for example. Honestly I don't know how to pick out what would make that work well. That's exactly why I developed the style I did.

    But the biggest things I figured out about what to delve into :

    First: The world and NPC's should work without the PC's involvement.
    Spoiler: Longer version did read
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    And by work I mean things like. Children being born, grow up, get skills, go to work, and retire and die. People and animals should be able to eat, drink, and excrete without it being a sudden question of how. Stuff shouldn't appear from nothing-so a copper tool implies a mine, miners, smelters, smelting fuel, copperworkers, people to transport the tool, ore, smelting fuel etc way for all those people to fed, watered, given the tools to do their jobs, and prolly kept secure, entertained and be demographically replaced if needed...And that's just for the damn copper plate the PC's got lunched served on. . . because otherwise how it got there is kinda interesting story dealing with bad physics. And that stuff doesn't necessarily need to be all perfectly laid out. But the big stuff should be penciled in perhaps a sentence for :food, water, a couple of trade partners and how, major industry need (say smelting fuel if a mine town, salt for a fishing village), and how they make money (which could be via taxes stuff). and the more your PC's will be spending time in place the more it is important. And actually this can be a very helpful for developing ideas for plot hooks, interesting characters etc. Just because something works without the PC's doesn't mean it is stable, especially in a longer term view. Except Elves - but that's kinda their shtick.
    Same with an important NPC. If you have a rich merchant opposing the PC's, they may well look to undercut his business - knowing what business he is in, and if he has any rivals (even if they just have a one line description) etc before they start looking allows you a huge leg up. It also provides ideas on how that merchant may react to try and block the PC's (if he assassinated his rivals then you know he has contacts with the local assassin types and may try it again-if he has political contacts you can create guards hassling the PC's). This can help you be create and be create quickly later in a way that is not just random but holds together no matter what the PC's do.


    Second thing: Never get really attached to anything no matter how much planning and love has gone into something.
    Spoiler: Longer version
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    Your players will usually ignore the great bright shiny thing you've spent hours perfecting to chase a red herring implied by an offhand comment. . . . and be totally certain that their course of action is what you planned for and expected to boot. Or they kill the BBEG the first time he shows up before he has any chance to start recurring. And it may not be the players. If part of your setting keeps blocking the fun parts of the game you may well need to change it. If a part of town is kept with a very low crime rate due to a great watch captains and this causes a ton of possible fun ideas to fizzle then you next plot thread is that the captain got assassinated and hopefuly the game can be more fun for everyone. If the players feel like their super cool mentor guy who helps them get missions is kinda controlling their lives (and that this is a problem) you should move him to the background or kill him off no matter how much you love playing him and funny voice that goes with him.


    So yeah those are the parts that work for me. Your mileage may vary and that may not work with your style.

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    Default Re: Commonly missed elements to world-building

    Clay.

    Literally, just clay. A place by the river where people quarry clay to make ceramics. Maps, town writeups, etc often just ignore this essential detail even as they fill the shops with clay bottles full of potions.

    You protect farmers from field monsters, fishermen from sea monsters, and miners from cave monsters, but I can't recall ever having to save potters from river monsters.
    Last edited by Blake Hannon; 2017-04-30 at 01:47 PM.

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    Default Re: Commonly missed elements to world-building

    Quote Originally Posted by Beastrolami View Post
    ....Players are interested in why the supposedly good duke is paying big money for a cursed artifact. They are not so interested in why, "In my world, elves are blue."

    Gamemastering 101.

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    Quote Originally Posted by sktarq View Post
    ...If part of your setting keeps blocking the fun parts of the game you may well need to change it....

    Very good advice.

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    Default Re: Commonly missed elements to world-building

    I think if you play up the dichotomy between the light and dark some more. Have the world currently exist in a balance, and with the forces in a kind of stalemate. You can borrow from any other locations with similar tropes - Summer vs Winter, Night vs Day, et cetera. Each of the Gods have both a Dark and light side, so both forces are looking to the same pantheon, but different aspects.

    I like the concept of the "good zombies"... although you may be getting hung up on the word "zombies". Take your deity plot a bit further down the way, and make the transition to undead as part of life - literally, an after life.

    Quote Originally Posted by Sabeta View Post
    Problems: Zombies ended at their origin. I did not properly build what a zombie society would be like. If they don't feed food, sleep, or drink, what would they do? How much does their city accommodate living people? How available is food and water? If they lack for needs, to they only pursue wants? If that's the case, what strife could I create there outside of power plays and overcrowding?
    There's a couple of ways to do this. A common mechanic in D&D is the positive/negative energy acting in a manner where necromancers aren't considered bad or evil - But rather just a dark version of normal clerics. Channeling negative energy to heal them (in the first example below) or using their necromantic abilities to act as management (as in the second example)

    • If the zombies are basically themselves, but without needs, then they're in an post-scarcity society, and you can draw from those post-scarcity tropes - treating undeath as a sort of super-retirement, or even some form of the singularity. They can continue to learn, they can travel, they can focus on self actualization or specialization. So & So, the Zombie Blacksmith makes amazing swords because he's been able to do so for hundreds of years. The dark clerics are there for their spiritual guidance and healing, just like a normal cleric would in normal life. What strife could be added? Obliteration. Have zealots or armies from the light side find some way to break the stalemate, and actually exterminate them, for various reasons.

    • Alternatively, if the zombies are fragments of people, without needs, that have a vague sense of what they're supposed to do, but without the ability for complex or critical thought, then they're basically machines. The zombies of farmers continue farming, the servants continue serving, the soldiers continue soldiering, et cetera, but they need necromancers to help direct their actions. This is similar to the most recent MTG plane Amonkhet, where those that perish in the city are turned into The Anointed, which are basically mummies that handle all labor in the city, so the living can live the life of luxury. What strife is there? These individuals are effectively slaves, and are forced to remain slaves, unable to self-actualize and in a constant state of strife.

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    Default Re: Commonly missed elements to world-building

    My currently favored solution for keeping the setting from turning into tippyverse, is to simply tell the players that their character is the only 'wizard' in the world. There are other people that went to the magic college, who know similar stuff, but they all hit level 3 and decide if they wanna pick up shatter or hold person or misty step. There were probably students there that cast magic in ways even more different from how a sorcerer or warlock do, but nonetheless achieved this through rigorous study, practice, and formulation of magic theory. The 'cleric' is the only cleric in the world, even though other people in the church have that title, and a fair number of them can perform the same small miracles a couple of times a day. Some people can cast spells that none of the PC classes can, and a lot of the magic users in the world don't refresh their spell slots so easily as tucking in for the night and waiting for the old sundial or rooster to show that they have entered a new day. Magic is and is not rarer in this way, but the important thing is that the NPCs of the world have a whole lot less agency in what magic they choose to know, and how freely they can use it. Like this, they might even have a lot more magic, but it's specifically the magic that I choose to give them in abundance.

    -

    There's kind of a similar ideal for world building. You can play in settings where you need to read a half dozen books before you have some sense of what kind of character fits into that lore, but you can also build this stuff on the fly, and not entirely by putting the weight on your own shoulders. When somebody asks you where warlock powers come from you say, "There are only 3 gods, and one of them is dead. What other kinds of places do you think that druid powers could come from? What sort of source does your character rely on?" If you take the right kind of tone you maintain all the power of being GM, but even if the person stammers and flounders as they try to come up with something, you've bought yourself a lot of time to improvise some things, and you can throw that drowning player a life saver if this is too difficult for them, or when you have some idea you can start to ask them questions and adjust the concept. If instead they take right to answering those kinds of questions, you just have to listen and decide if they have come up with something that is compatible with this world, and have a little conversation if you feel it needs to be modified.

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    Default Re: Commonly missed elements to world-building

    If I can put my two cents in here, another thing that might've ended up to your disadvantage is that not every person likes the same things that a certain person would like. For example, I would like to hear about lore (assuming it wasn't wholly washed off of other media without any care into hiding that fact), but others might be more interested in doing things that will give their characters experience and powerful items.

    And there's always the possibility that things might just go all Henderson on you, so learning how to improv is always a good backup plan.

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    Default Re: Commonly missed elements to world-building

    Quote Originally Posted by Zeus Killer View Post
    If I can put my two cents in here, another thing that might've ended up to your disadvantage is that not every person likes the same things that a certain person would like. For example, I would like to hear about lore (assuming it wasn't wholly washed off of other media without any care into hiding that fact), but others might be more interested in doing things that will give their characters experience and powerful items.
    Which is why, of course, these things should be balanced. While it's true that some players just want lots of combat and loot with only enough story to stitch the fights together, I think those are a minority; I know they are among my gaming groups. There are those who just want story - lots of role playing and lore with just enough action to stitch that together, and those are equally rare.

    And there's always the possibility that things might just go all Henderson on you, so learning how to improv is always a good backup plan.
    OK, I Googled "go all Henderson" and mostly got hits about a restaurant called "Hash House a Go Go" in Henderson, NV. And yes, improvisation is a critical skill for GMs.
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    Default Re: Commonly missed elements to world-building

    I think that's Old Man Hendersons. Which I believe was some kind of munchkin character.
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    Default Re: Commonly missed elements to world-building

    Not really a Munchkin as such...

    Apparently, Old Man Henderson's player's DM ran a Call of Cthulhu campaign that was pretty bad and no one liked the DM much anymore after the last one. So Henderson was a revenge character. Namely, he was a bat**** insane vietnam veteran with a backpack full of improvised explosives, in a campaign that otherwise featured a university professor, a highschool athlete and a private detective. While the others adventured to find out why people were vanishing, Old Man Henderson was looking for his stolen garden gnomes that he believed the cult had.

    Basically, a character who's first and only resort to all situations was violence. In a horror/investigation campaign. The campaign ended when he drove a tanker truck of kerosene into a ceremony to summon Hastur.
    Last edited by Eldan; 2017-06-06 at 04:52 PM.
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    Default Re: Commonly missed elements to world-building

    Oh please tell me he used "First Blood" as inspiration. The darker book version of proto-rambo

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    Default Re: Commonly missed elements to world-building

    Nah, apparently, he mostly went for cartoon violent crazy old hobo, from the anecdotes. Read for yourself.

    https://1d4chan.org/wiki/Old_Man_Henderson
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    Default Re: Commonly missed elements to world-building

    The lunatic in my gaming group is a big fan of Old Man Henderson, so I'll nitpick. He says he's a 'nam vet, but would have been a kid during the war.

    In that story the Zeus Killer advice would have made things less ridiculous is the bad gm had understood that a military base is bustling with lots of people all over the place and that one does not simply walk into a millions dollar helicopter hanger and knock out one guard to steal the thing. Improv to go with the flow is good, but you want to try and have some understanding of things like why terrorists don't blow the world up overnight, why thieves sell at bad rates to fences, and so on.
    Last edited by Zorku; 2017-06-08 at 08:58 AM.

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    Default Re: Commonly missed elements to world-building

    Quote Originally Posted by Sabeta View Post
    ...what other mistakes I could still make, even if I think I've thought it all through.
    This:
    The goal is to create a complete world that once created I can consistently use for every game
    You're building far too much.
    I don't blame you, or any other new DM for this mistake. My good friend makes this mistake on truly gargantuan scales, with maps that take up entire tables, and he'll consult our meteorologist friend to work out realistic weather patterns - he himself is a Poli-Sci and Economics dual major. The result is a world that is so dense and crunchy that it is truly alive, but also one that only he understands. And then we get whirl-winded through it so he can show it all off.
    I blame the official setting books, like Forgotten Realm, Eberron and so forth. You can play a 1-20 level campaign and never leave the Sword Coast. In that campaign, cities like Cormyr are practically a separate setting entirely. The players don't see them, you don't need them.

    That is also, by the way, how these setting books came to be. They did not start as fully fledged game worlds - they started as a game, which then expanded as needed. The next campaign after that one might say,
    "you guys remember your characters from the Sword Coast? Well, this campaign is 100 years later, and you live in a neighboring kingdom, and the Sword Coast is invading you."
    You're creating a deep, rich history and building a larger, organic world. But you're doing it collaboratively with a group of people. You know it will work because it already has.

    When I design a campaign world, my first question is always,
    "Why?"
    Why am I not using an existing campaign setting? Why am I running this campaign; who is it for, what do they want? Why is my setting different?
    For instance, I don't run Eberron, even though it's my favorite setting. Instead, I run a far more Low-Magic Eberron, with steam power and dirty coal and oil. More like Dishonored or the Iron Kingdoms. Why? Because I don't like the over-abundance of magic, and the 'Star-Trek optimism' of Eberron.

    Once I have figured out the goal of the setting, I start working on the races. How does each race fit into my world? Where did they come from? How do they interact with others?
    In my current Arthurian campaign, I decided that Orcs and Halflings were the first settlers of the setting. Then Elves and Dwarves came and teamed up to defeat the Orcs, before turning on each other in a vicious war. What started the war? I don't know, it's "list to history." Maybe the players will work that out during the campaign. Maybe not.

    I try to make a few races somewhat unique to the setting. The Arthurian setting features Goliaths quite heavily, but they're not the mountaineering folk they are in most settings. They're more like Saxons or Vikings, with a nautical culture and Nordic/Germanic influences.

    When my aforementioned friend found my campaign notes for the Arthurian setting, he was shocked to see that my "map" wasn't a map at all. It was just a bunch of nebulous circles, with a few terrain features sketched in. The realm is an island, but I hardly drew any coastlines. Each circle is the location of a faction on the island, and I sort of erased and blobbed them together as needed.
    Oh, Orcs live in the north, okay.
    Goliaths fight the Orcs constantly, so they should probably share a border close by.
    Some big calamity happened in the west, alright, let's make the west coast a wasteland and maybe stick our BBEG out there.
    The king settled here from a larger mainland to the east, okay then, let's put his capital on the east coast and far away from the Orcs - so the southeast corner.
    Etc, etc...

    When filling in factions, I made sure they would be playable for everyone. If someone wants a Goliath character, the Goliath culture is not "unwelcome" in the wider setting. Even Half Orcs are viewed favorably, albeit treated with discrimination.
    You can also tailor factions to different players. My girlfriend is very feminist - this is a problem in medieval settings where traditionally women were not allowed to be adventurous. So I decided that there is an order of Paladins who venerate Guenevere and womanhood. I based Guenevere herself on Boudicca, Queen of the Celts and enemy to Rome. Only one culture on the island is truly misogynistic and racist, and the players quickly realized that this culture was an antagonist. But even players who's characters hail from that culture can choose to be good, because some members of that culture remember an earlier golden age when things were not that way.

    I don't need many details for each culture. I'm not playing on a large map. I expect my players to meet all of these people in turn, but I'll map them and expand on them when we get there.

    Don't get caught up on the Why and How mechanicals of your world. Worry about how you're going to engage your players and make them interested. There are cool sounding worlds, but if it's just,
    "There's a big poisonous ocean and look at all these detailed continents I've made!"
    It's just a shrug and a nod and "I guess that sounds cool."
    But when you can tell a player,
    "Dude, you wanna be a Viking? The vikings in my campaign are 8ft tall and superhumanly strong Goliaths, but they are oppressed by a human king."
    That player chomps it up. Oh, you want to be a Bard Viking? Well, uh, I guess they have this small guild of story tellers and historians who wrote epic poems and ballads about their heroes - like Skalds. That make sense?
    Work with the players and be flexible.
    Last edited by CaptainSarathai; 2017-06-08 at 06:52 PM.

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    Default Re: Commonly missed elements to world-building

    Quote Originally Posted by CaptainSarathai View Post
    This:


    You're building far too much.
    I don't blame you, or any other new DM for this mistake. My good friend makes this mistake on truly gargantuan scales, with maps that take up entire tables, and he'll consult our meteorologist friend to work out realistic weather patterns - he himself is a Poli-Sci and Economics dual major. The result is a world that is so dense and crunchy that it is truly alive, but also one that only he understands. And then we get whirl-winded through it so he can show it all off.
    I blame the official setting books, like Forgotten Realm, Eberron and so forth. You can play a 1-20 level campaign and never leave the Sword Coast. In that campaign, cities like Cormyr are practically a separate setting entirely. The players don't see them, you don't need them.

    That is also, by the way, how these setting books came to be. They did not start as fully fledged game worlds - they started as a game, which then expanded as needed. The next campaign after that one might say,
    "you guys remember your characters from the Sword Coast? Well, this campaign is 100 years later, and you live in a neighboring kingdom, and the Sword Coast is invading you."
    You're creating a deep, rich history and building a larger, organic world. But you're doing it collaboratively with a group of people. You know it will work because it already has.

    When I design a campaign world, my first question is always,
    "Why?"
    Why am I not using an existing campaign setting? Why am I running this campaign; who is it for, what do they want? Why is my setting different?
    For instance, I don't run Eberron, even though it's my favorite setting. Instead, I run a far more Low-Magic Eberron, with steam power and dirty coal and oil. More like Dishonored or the Iron Kingdoms. Why? Because I don't like the over-abundance of magic, and the 'Star-Trek optimism' of Eberron.

    Once I have figured out the goal of the setting, I start working on the races. How does each race fit into my world? Where did they come from? How do they interact with others?
    In my current Arthurian campaign, I decided that Orcs and Halflings were the first settlers of the setting. Then Elves and Dwarves came and teamed up to defeat the Orcs, before turning on each other in a vicious war. What started the war? I don't know, it's "list to history." Maybe the players will work that out during the campaign. Maybe not.

    I try to make a few races somewhat unique to the setting. The Arthurian setting features Goliaths quite heavily, but they're not the mountaineering folk they are in most settings. They're more like Saxons or Vikings, with a nautical culture and Nordic/Germanic influences.

    When my aforementioned friend found my campaign notes for the Arthurian setting, he was shocked to see that my "map" wasn't a map at all. It was just a bunch of nebulous circles, with a few terrain features sketched in. The realm is an island, but I hardly drew any coastlines. Each circle is the location of a faction on the island, and I sort of erased and blobbed them together as needed.
    Oh, Orcs live in the north, okay.
    Goliaths fight the Orcs constantly, so they should probably share a border close by.
    Some big calamity happened in the west, alright, let's make the west coast a wasteland and maybe stick our BBEG out there.
    The king settled here from a larger mainland to the east, okay then, let's put his capital on the east coast and far away from the Orcs - so the southeast corner.
    Etc, etc...

    When filling in factions, I made sure they would be playable for everyone. If someone wants a Goliath character, the Goliath culture is not "unwelcome" in the wider setting. Even Half Orcs are viewed favorably, albeit treated with discrimination.
    You can also tailor factions to different players. My girlfriend is very feminist - this is a problem in medieval settings where traditionally women were not allowed to be adventurous. So I decided that there is an order of Paladins who venerate Guenevere and womanhood. I based Guenevere herself on Boudicca, Queen of the Celts and enemy to Rome. Only one culture on the island is truly misogynistic and racist, and the players quickly realized that this culture was an antagonist. But even players who's characters hail from that culture can choose to be good, because some members of that culture remember an earlier golden age when things were not that way.

    I don't need many details for each culture. I'm not playing on a large map. I expect my players to meet all of these people in turn, but I'll map them and expand on them when we get there.

    Don't get caught up on the Why and How mechanicals of your world. Worry about how you're going to engage your players and make them interested. There are cool sounding worlds, but if it's just,
    "There's a big poisonous ocean and look at all these detailed continents I've made!"
    It's just a shrug and a nod and "I guess that sounds cool."
    But when you can tell a player,
    "Dude, you wanna be a Viking? The vikings in my campaign are 8ft tall and superhumanly strong Goliaths, but they are oppressed by a human king."
    That player chomps it up. Oh, you want to be a Bard Viking? Well, uh, I guess they have this small guild of story tellers and historians who wrote epic poems and ballads about their heroes - like Skalds. That make sense?
    Work with the players and be flexible.
    If that's the case, then what would you reccomend a new GM to start with in terms of world building?

  27. - Top - End - #27
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    Default Re: Commonly missed elements to world-building

    Quote Originally Posted by Zeus Killer View Post
    If that's the case, then what would you reccomend a new GM to start with in terms of world building?
    The thing you genuinely need? The tutorial level. The first mission.

    It can set up the main plot for the campaign or be totally unrelated to the main plot, but it needs to be something that the party gets involved with and that's about it.

    Terrifyingly open, right?

    Whether you simulate plate tectonics and weather systems and zoom in from there, or you ask yourself what cultures the setting is going to have and try to zoom out a bit to fill in the gaps, you've got put together adventures in this, and until you've made yourself actually piece together a couple of those, no other prep work is actually going to help with this. Once you've got the basic hang of it then sure, knowing that this campaign takes place around a particular sea, or a mountain range, or on the fringe of a war between turtle dragons and pixies; will steer you around pretty quickly, but until you're at that point all of this other stuff is just a way to delay doing the scary part.

    So, some actual advice for doing that:
    The method I like is simply, rationalize a random mess of crap. List off a bunch of cultures, races, monster types, and whatever stuff you feel comfortable enough having in your story; then make random tables out of them and roll the dice a few times.

    Undead, Romans, temple, kuo toa.

    Well that's meaningless, but we're gonna rationalize it. Romans were pretty up tight about keeping the dead buried (unless you were a criminal, in which case you rotted in plain sight in the familiar Roman style,) so zombies getting out of crypts or much more decayed zombies plucking themselves off of their display racks would cause a fuss, or this could be after the fall of Rome and just people from that era are reanimating and shambling around in togas.

    Undead and kuo toa can easily come into conflict. Undead don't need to breathe so this could be an underwater sort of adventure, though those are really mean to throw at players in general, much less at level 1. Romans had temples, a foul temple could be the cause of the undead, and an underwater temple would suit the kuo toa.

    This all feels like a little too much, so I'm gonna have to trim it down to only some of these elements.

    The adventurers run into a desperate murlock kuo toa shaman begging them for help. Her people are being driven from their native waters by hordes of undead, set upon them by a bunch of warmongers who disgrace their defeated enemies and criminals by reanimating them. The trouble is that there is a very important ritual that the kuo toa need to perform in their underwater temple in order to prevent the fire god (volcano) from getting angry. The party needs to either delay the attacks or complete the ritual to prevent this place from going all plane-of-fire.

    Well, that became a much more cogent idea than what we started with. Maybe not one I want to try and open a campaign with, but this took like ten minutes if I round up. I didn't actually make random tables so we'll say I spent a few minutes doing that and actually rolling some dice in the comfort of my home. I can save the text if I like it and roll the dice again until I rationalize up something that sounds a little bit easier to run as an adventure, and maybe I'll make the Roman necromancers thing into some larger plot thread for the campaign by tacking on a few other reasons the party needs to fight or negotiate with them.


    And if you want to set your sights a little bit higher? Try to come up with 3+ things like that that are going on in the local region, and then when your players roll up their characters, rationalize a little bit more to come up with reasons that each character should be particularly invested in one of these things. Family legacies, religious ideals, business, you name it; at least one of the characters has some personal stake in this roman necromancers mess.

    After you've got those ideas taken care of, work on your map just enough that you feel comfortable improvising any other details as you feel like the story needs them. If you've got time go ahead and work on the map a lot more than that, if you enjoy that kind of thing (I know I do,) but you only really need "just enough that it works."


    If all of this still seems to intimidating, there's no shame in running published modules and campaigns. You only need to make your own world and write your own adventures if you want to.
    Last edited by Zorku; 2017-06-09 at 11:25 AM.

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    Default Re: Commonly missed elements to world-building

    Quote Originally Posted by Zorku View Post
    The thing you genuinely need? The tutorial level. The first mission.

    It can set up the main plot for the campaign or be totally unrelated to the main plot, but it needs to be something that the party gets involved with and that's about it.

    Terrifyingly open, right?

    Whether you simulate plate tectonics and weather systems and zoom in from there, or you ask yourself what cultures the setting is going to have and try to zoom out a bit to fill in the gaps, you've got put together adventures in this, and until you've made yourself actually piece together a couple of those, no other prep work is actually going to help with this. Once you've got the basic hang of it then sure, knowing that this campaign takes place around a particular sea, or a mountain range, or on the fringe of a war between turtle dragons and pixies; will steer you around pretty quickly, but until you're at that point all of this other stuff is just a way to delay doing the scary part.

    So, some actual advice for doing that:
    The method I like is simply, rationalize a random mess of crap. List off a bunch of cultures, races, monster types, and whatever stuff you feel comfortable enough having in your story; then make random tables out of them and roll the dice a few times.

    Undead, Romans, temple, kuo toa.

    Well that's meaningless, but we're gonna rationalize it. Romans were pretty up tight about keeping the dead buried (unless you were a criminal, in which case you rotted in plain sight in the familiar Roman style,) so zombies getting out of crypts or much more decayed zombies plucking themselves off of their display racks would cause a fuss, or this could be after the fall of Rome and just people from that era are reanimating and shambling around in togas.

    Undead and kuo toa can easily come into conflict. Undead don't need to breathe so this could be an underwater sort of adventure, though those are really mean to throw at players in general, much less at level 1. Romans had temples, a foul temple could be the cause of the undead, and an underwater temple would suit the kuo toa.

    This all feels like a little too much, so I'm gonna have to trim it down to only some of these elements.

    The adventurers run into a desperate murlock kuo toa shaman begging them for help. Her people are being driven from their native waters by hordes of undead, set upon them by a bunch of warmongers who disgrace their defeated enemies and criminals by reanimating them. The trouble is that there is a very important ritual that the kuo toa need to perform in their underwater temple in order to prevent the fire god (volcano) from getting angry. The party needs to either delay the attacks or complete the ritual to prevent this place from going all plane-of-fire.

    Well, that became a much more cogent idea than what we started with. Maybe not one I want to try and open a campaign with, but this took like ten minutes if I round up. I didn't actually make random tables so we'll say I spent a few minutes doing that and actually rolling some dice in the comfort of my home. I can save the text if I like it and roll the dice again until I rationalize up something that sounds a little bit easier to run as an adventure, and maybe I'll make the Roman necromancers thing into some larger plot thread for the campaign by tacking on a few other reasons the party needs to fight or negotiate with them.


    And if you want to set your sights a little bit higher? Try to come up with 3+ things like that that are going on in the local region, and then when your players roll up their characters, rationalize a little bit more to come up with reasons that each character should be particularly invested in one of these things. Family legacies, religious ideals, business, you name it; at least one of the characters has some personal stake in this roman necromancers mess.

    After you've got those ideas taken care of, work on your map just enough that you feel comfortable improvising any other details as you feel like the story needs them. If you've got time go ahead and work on the map a lot more than that, if you enjoy that kind of thing (I know I do,) but you only really need "just enough that it works."


    If all of this still seems to intimidating, there's no shame in running published modules and campaigns. You only need to make your own world and write your own adventures if you want to.
    So keep it simple and self contained, preferibly as a tutorial for the adventure. Good to know.

  29. - Top - End - #29
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    Default Re: Commonly missed elements to world-building

    There's a lot of good advice here, yet I feel compelled to pick at some of it.
    Quote Originally Posted by CaptainSarathai View Post
    You're building far too much.
    Maybe. Remember that the goal is to play, which means you have to have adventures/quests/campaigns ready to roll and you have to run sessions. With that understood, if you still have the time, energy, and inclination to create a whole, amazingly detailed world then knock yourself out. Just remember this: you're doing it mostly for you. I've never had that kind of time and energy, but I've often wished that I did since I most definitely have the inclination.
    The result is a world that is so dense and crunchy that it is truly alive, but also one that only he understands. And then we get whirl-winded through it so he can show it all off.
    (My boldface.) And that's the problem. What you've created if you go this route is a great wealth of behind the scenes information, but it needs to stay behind the scenes until there is a good reason to bring it forward, which may never happen. When the characters wander far from home, you've got all the information you need to run things in the new location all ready to go, and then the players get to see it. When major events occur you can quickly determine what if any implications they have, and if those will circle back to something affecting the characters; if so then the players get to see it. But if you lead the characters around on a tour of the world for the sake of your own pride then you are detracting from the game.

    When I design a campaign world, my first question is always,
    "Why?"
    Why am I not using an existing campaign setting? Why am I running this campaign; who is it for, what do they want? Why is my setting different?... Once I have figured out the goal of the setting, I start working on the races. How does each race fit into my world? Where did they come from? How do they interact with others?
    This, on the other hand, is unequivocally good advice.

    [M]y "map" [isn't] a map at all. It [is] just a bunch of nebulous circles, with a few terrain features sketched in. The realm is an island, but I hardly drew any coastlines. Each circle is the location of a faction on the island, and I sort of erased and blobbed them together as needed.
    Oh, Orcs live in the north, okay.
    Goliaths fight the Orcs constantly, so they should probably share a border close by.
    Some big calamity happened in the west, alright, let's make the west coast a wasteland and maybe stick our BBEG out there.
    The king settled here from a larger mainland to the east, okay then, let's put his capital on the east coast and far away from the Orcs - so the southeast corner.
    Etc, etc...
    And this works fine, if it works for you, and if you're comfortable improvising when the party decides to hire a boat and go to the eastern continent. But the other way isn't such a bad idea, if you can invest the time and still keep your pride in check.
    -- Joe
    “Shared pain is diminished. Shared joy is increased.”
    -- Spider Roninson
    And shared laughter is magical

    Always remember that anything posted on the internet is, in a practical if not a legal sense, in the public domain.
    You are completely welcome to use anything I post here, or I wouldn't post it.

  30. - Top - End - #30
    Barbarian in the Playground
    Join Date
    Mar 2016

    Default Re: Commonly missed elements to world-building

    Quote Originally Posted by Zeus Killer View Post
    So keep it simple and self contained, preferibly as a tutorial for the adventure. Good to know.
    It doesn't need to be self contained, it's just not a problem if it is. The very first adventure just doesn't need to be related to very much else of what the characters do, and a lot of people don't know who their characters are until they've played them for a few hours (or months,) so any lofty ideas you have about an epic campaign that you want in a first adventure, can just as easily be stuff you set up in a second adventure. Right at the start basically nobody knows anything so it doesn't matter if the first adventure is heavily plugged into other stuff, and the party can do a couple of sessions of totally random adventures because they don't know what's connected to something bigger than this, so it all feels like it's connected to something bigger than this.

    After you've started with adventures and plots and such you can make them much more complicated and interwoven, you just don't need to when with the first one.

    Do something, then worry about doing it better as you go along.

    Quote Originally Posted by jqavins View Post
    And then we get whirl-winded through it so he can show it all off.
    And that's the problem. What you've created if you go this route is a great wealth of behind the scenes information, but it needs to stay behind the scenes until there is a good reason to bring it forward, which may never happen.
    I couldn't quite put my finger on it when I first read the post, but I've been thinking along similar lines. I think the actual fix there, is to plan multiple campaigns in a world that's got this much detail. With that mindset, just because we didn't have any reason to do this thing right now, maybe we'll hit it on the second, or fifth campaign.

    And this works fine, if it works for you, and if you're comfortable improvising when the party decides to hire a boat and go to the eastern continent. But the other way isn't such a bad idea, if you can invest the time and still keep your pride in check.
    I've been (slowly) scouring other rpg manuals for nifty ways to abstractly hold on to a bunch of "living world" type stuff. "Bunch of circles on a map with minimal landmarks drawn in" sounds pretty similar to my pre-understanding of the factions system in dungeon world. Still need to actually buckle down and actually finish reading that one though.
    Last edited by Zorku; 2017-06-09 at 04:48 PM.

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