Fantasy Worldbuilding

[DangerousThing]

After building a large number of settings, I've settled on one SF setting for now. The only thing that changes is the time period, which means I had to come up with history.

This is the DJverse, and I am working on describing the timeline in my blog.

It was first a rather Traveller-esque setting when the Phoenix Empire was mature. During that campaign I only had to worry about the planets that were on the route of giant cruise ship they were on, as well as the general history and facts of the Empire and neighbors. Some of the players decided some of the history.

When I decided to reuse the setting that I'd made, I set things in the early days of the Empire.

Then, for my new game, I'm setting it after the destruction of the Empire (The Shattering). I have the Phoenix Confederation somewhat mapped out along with some major NPCs and such. i haven't bothered to map planets yet, because I'm not going to bother with that level of detail yet on areas that the players won't be adventuring in yet.

I also have the major enemy of the Confederation placed, because it has to be just far enough that war is possible but difficult. Once the characters start exploring then I'll have to map more, but only as needed. I have several planets written up that can go into many places on the map.

Eventually I'll have a detailed map created.

[Humabout]

Something I have always found to add tremendously to a world is consistency. What I mean by this is that you, as the GM/creator, know what is actually going on and how the world works. This fundamentally has to remain constant, even if different in-world peoples have different beliefs, contradictory beliefs prevail within individual cultures, etc. That underlying consistency in how things are handled, regardless of how characters think they are handled will add a depth to the world that the players will notice - especially if it is lacking.

As whswhs mentioned, the reality underlying the beliefs and notions you will present to your players will be those sorts of things that you will smile to yourself about. You're players may never know what is really happening, but they'll notice if you don't, either.

Other than that, I can say that now that I've sorted out the big questions for my own setting, I am taking whswhs' approach, as well. I am currently working on a map, so I can start placing peoples and sorting out early migrations. The one thing I did before even starting this entire project, though, was to sit down and make a list of things I want to be able to do with the setting. This is serving as my guide when I think, "Oh, this would be cool!" I go back and make sure it fits with my ultimate goals. If not, it gets filed away in the "Cool stuff" folder for later reference.

That's my two cents. Hope it helps!

[namada]

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[whswhs]

Originally Posted by fartrader

If you're wondering why you should heed my advice at all, just know that I've done this a dozen times. I've fully created 12 very different and very unique fantasy settings, from scratch, and gamed extensively in them until I grew tired of the world and moved on to the next.
My current approach though, is that of the Lazy GM. Don't bother with world creation as you only truly need a very, very thin veneer to make the world seem real and plausible. At least for most settings. Plus, I like to change settings rather often, so all the work is rather pointless less than a year later when I'm ready for a change.

I'm going to suggest different points of view on several things in this post, and this is one. In the first place, I've been setting up two-year campaign cycles and playing them out for quite a while now, except the one time when I went to three years; the intensive worldbuilding campaign I'm working up now is aimed to last five years.

Even in my short six-month campaigns, though, I've often found it worthwhile to do quite a bit of historical research (for real settings) or invention (for created ones). Sure, most of it never becomes visible to the players. But the fact that I've thought out what lies behind the visible surface gives that surface a sense of solidity. It's kind of like the scenes in LotR where the camera pulls away from the characters and pans over a landscape that seems to just go on and on, and you sense the depth of Middle-Earth.

The problem with sandbox-style campaigns is that they say, "here's the way the world is, now go and interact with it" - when, as a player or GM, I don't want random, blind interaction - I want a damn great story. You'll not get that out of a sandbox style campaign - you may get a decent one if you've got a great GM and great players, but it'll never be a great story because story takes planning. But, then again, maybe my standards for what makes a great story are just too high.

Yes and no. I hardly ever run pure sandbox games. But I don't run "stories" either. I come up with situations and problems to confront the protagonists, and the "story" or the "plot" emerges from how they try to cope with it. I have no idea how they're going to act or where the conflict will go; I have to decide that in response to their narratives. I much prefer this approach to either of the extremes.

On Earth, the only significant technological regression that ever took place that didn't result in the total collapse of a civilization was the dark ages in Europe. So, humanity generally always pushes forward on that front, I can understand your dislike of 10,000-year long iron ages...

There really wasn't that much regression in the Dark Ages. Agriculture, food processing, power sources, materials science—all saw real improvements. There was political collapse and economic decentralization and a lot of waste, but people managed to make improvements.

This is also true. Compulsory education did more to advance science and technology than anything else ever. Look at some of the stuff the ancient Greeks designed and were messing around with in 500BC, for example - steam engines...

I'd put more weight on the printing press. And even more on the social invention of giving credit to the first person to publish a discovery, which encouraged sharing scientific results rather than hiding them.

Of course, Aquinas's winning the big debate over natural law in Paris didn't hurt. The Muslims decided that question the other way and it's still handicapping them.

With that said, people today often far over-exaggerate the rate of technological advancement. They talk about how fast things are moving - sorry, but just because your iphone OS updates every year doesn't mean technology is rapidly advancing. What was the last truly great invention? The transistor? That was a natural and inevitable improvement of the vacuum tube. Yes, it allowed for the miniaturization of lots of things because it could be built much smaller than an actual vacuum tube and it's been a great boon, but at the end of the day it's a fancy vacuum tube is all (that is, does the same job as one, I realize it's a completely different thing).

That's kind of like saying the automobile is just a fancy horse. It's not the function that's performed; it's the capability frontier it enables. I think we're seeing some quite remarkable innovations. They may not be one great invention that changes everything, but that's always been more heroic myth than historical fact anyone; invention has always been incremental.

Bill Stoddard

[Henchman99942]

I have been building my campaign world over a period of years. I continue to flush out different aspects of it both periods where I have active game play and periods where I have no active campaign.

Recently, I read about Biomes. Wikipedia has a lot of good information links on Biomes, but I like the categorization done by Berkeley the best.

That is interesting reading whether or not you plan to use it to build an RPG world.

Right now, I have an inland sea that USED to be a salt lake complex with no water outlet ten thousand years ago, that is currently a fresh water lake system that does have river that drains out to the oceans. Buried deep underground is evidence of this ancient salt sea in the form of salt and chalk deposits. The elves have a living memory of the old times and guard a great secret relating to how and why the sea has changed. This stuff is fun on a bun.

[namada]

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[Grouchy Chris]

Originally Posted by Jinumon

The problem is that I've never attempted serious worldbuilding before, and the process seems incredibly daunting.

The first thing I would suggest is that you decide what kind of game you're going to be running, and then build out from there. Whatever kind of world you build, the PCs are going to start somewhere and be confronted with some sort of situation. Maybe they'll be wizards at a magical college, and the headmaster has just been murdered. Maybe they'll be town guards and a gang war has just broken out. Maybe they'll be caravan merchants and a new source of spices has just entered the market. So start with that, sketching out a few locations and NPCs, and you're ready to start your first session.

I'm loathe to start the game before I have the majority of the world at least mostly thought out.

Think like a movie director, not an RPG publisher. If you were a publisher, writing up a fantasy world for publication you'd have to give everything equal amount of detail, because your customers might want to start anywhere and run any sort of campaign. But you're building your world for only one campaign. So you only build the sets you're going to use. Things that aren't in focus don't need much detail. You can just leave them as a matte painting, and everyone will think they're really three-dimensional. All those faraway cities and nations? For all your players know, they're mythical, anyway.

And that goes for society as well as geography. The wizard's college campaign does not need a detailed design of the local criminal underworld. The town guards campaign does not need a detailed design of the enchanter's guild.

Authenticity is a big point for me, and so I do want to borrow plenty from historical examples for what is and isn't feasible. [...] These are the kinds of logical slip-ups I'd like to avoid.

Your players, if typical, will spend approximately zero time thinking about the history of the world and how everything is put together. Furthermore, if you borrow ideas from the real world (and you should), if you wipe off the names and write in new ones, no one is going to have any idea what you did.

When I started my fantasy campaign, I had just been reading a history of Korea, and I was impressed at how it had maintained its independence throughout all its history, when its neighbor China is one of the greatest imperial powers the world has ever seen. So I based the setting on Korea, but I have Italian-sounding names to the people and places, and Scandinavian-sounding names to its large and imperialistic neighbor. My players think the imperial power is based on Rome. Korea has never even been brought up.

I've come up with something of a starting area for the characters to begin in, a western-style nation called Erramys. But creating a nation, and then attempting to determine it's scale in significance seems difficult.

Use your players as much as possible. Don't draw up a map, give them detailed descriptions of all the places on it, and ask them where they're from. Let them tell you what their PC's home town is like. Let them tell you what the races are like, and the social institutions, and so on. "Okay, so you're an elf. And what are elves like? Where are they from? Down on the southern coast, hm? Ah, they're seafarers, I see. And you're a wizard? How did you learn magic? Mm-hm. And who was your master? What kind of magic did he specialize in? And you lived where while you were training? How big a town is that?"

This way, the entire load is not on you, the players will feel more like it's their world, and the ideas you get from your players will spark ideas of your own.

[Rasputin]

If you're looking for a sandbox approach, go for Rob Conley's, the Welsh Piper's, and Jeff Rients's. Also, look to Roger Sorolla for handling encounters; notice that he just rolled on the tables in the Fiend Folio, showing just how much depth you really need. That's if you want to do some work, which you don't seem to want to do.

Looking at all this, you just need a basic map, and some seeds, which include NPCs with agendas. You don't want most of the world plotted out. Instead, you want one area with some detail and some wiggle room.

[Dustin]

Another rule of thumb is that, at first, you only need enough material and history to provide a 1-2 page summary to your players. Most aren't going to want more background initially, and PCs' knowledge of the world may be very local.

Just getting that summary worked out will probably produce enough extra detail (in your head) to get ahead of most player questions, and you can continue to build out the more distant specifics of the world after play starts.

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by Jinumon

I've always been a big fan of the sandbox-style campaign, and so I'm loathe to start the game before I have the majority of the world at least mostly thought out.

Actually for the purpose of sandbox game the important thing is is to thoroughly develop the actual field of play. The grand scope of time and space only matters if the player characters are equipped and willing to operate on that scale. It is more important to populate and furnish what is within the boundaries of your sand box than it is to generate the whole school yard...so to speak.

Authenticity is a big point for me, and so I do want to borrow plenty from historical examples for what is and isn't feasible. Often, in fantasy literature, you here about civilizations that have been around for thousands of years, and yet their technology is still in the middle ages.

Something which of course accurately describes 15th century China. As far as they were concerned they had been around for 3000 years and yet their technology was "still" basically in the middle ages. Now of course 3000 years ago their technology wasn't in the middle ages and they went through many dynasties and several conquests and fragmentations in that time frame but still, as far they were concerned "China" had been around for some 3000 years.

They'll occasionally offer an explanation like, "the existence of magic makes the importance of technology less of an issue, hence a slower progression," but I feel like the ambition of non-mages would drive them to create technology to even the playing field.

Or you know, just learn their own magic and become mages.