Fantasy Worldbuilding

[Jinumon]

Hello, All!

I got this idea in my head a little while ago to run a fantasy game. I'm a big fan of fantasy gaming and literature in general, but I always have bones to pick with particular settings or stories. So I decided that I'd try my own hand at creating a fantasy world, full of mystery and wonder, and avoiding what I view as pitfalls of the genre. The problem is that I've never attempted serious worldbuilding before, and the process seems incredibly daunting.

Being a GURPS fan, I've read what I can on the topic of world-building, but I find more and more that when it comes to the more esoteric elements of the game, GURPS encourages you to "do whatever you want" without offering much useful information as to which directions to head, or significant cause-and-effect relationships. As such, I'm looking for any and all advice, tips, and tricks with which to assist me in building my world. Below are a few of the problems I've faced thus far.

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. At the same time, I don't want cut-and-paste cultures from our world just sprinkled throughout. It has to feel believable and real, but also organic and fresh.

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. 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. These are the kinds of logical slip-ups I'd like to avoid.

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. I often feel like worlds should be created chronologically rather than geographically, but, yet again, that seems to make the task even more daunting.

I think, ultimately, that my biggest problem is a font of ideas that may or may not mesh together, and an inability to decide where to start. Please help! And thank you all for your eventual contributions.
Jinumon

[Turhan's Bey Company]

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. At the same time, I don't want cut-and-paste cultures from our world just sprinkled throughout. It has to feel believable and real, but also organic and fresh.

Be careful here. This tends to be a recreation for GMs which has questionable payoff for players. You can build all you want, but do gauge your players' interest in knowing about your world. They may be far more interested in actively playing than in passively absorbing the material you produce.

Originally Posted by Jinumon

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.

The first, best thing you can do is read. A lot. Hit the history and anthropology sections of your local used book store for cheap ethnographies and histories of places you know nothing about. That'll give you ideas. Specifically for GURPS, I'd recommend GURPS Fantasy, GURPS Infinite Worlds (the chapter on building alternate histories may be useful) and Pyramid #3/41,, which has a table-driven article about building dynamic, plausible-sounding histories.

[ericthered]

First: world-building is great fun, but is indeed often more fun for the GM. So be careful.

When you say you want the entire world thought out, be careful what you mean by 'world'. a medieval game set in Europe only really knows about europe, with vauge details about deserts to the south, ice to the north, Russian Steepe and the Moslems to the east, and Oceans to the west. And perhaps Jerusalem.

As for the thousand-year old civilization: This actually happens: china, Rome, Egypt: Locations often have similar technological backgrounds and cultural continuity for hundreds of years. They tend to think of their history in terms of dynasties, Place great importance on specific locations, and have a grand sense of superiority over their neighbors. They also seem to work best at TL 1-2, not TL 3.

There is a history generator in one of the pyramids . 41?. I just wrote an automated program that emulates it and now I use that. I wouldn't do thousands of years with in, but remember that after a certain point history stops being relevant. Our world's history is less relevant before WWII. and before 1500 it really doesn't matter, other than counting cultural groups (which have pretty much not changed since then).

As for where to start, just pick something exciting! anything exciting! And start making stuff up. pick a couple of features to stand out. Or you can pick an existing work and mess with it. One the favorite worlds I build is based on medieval Europe, and I just added a dimension where fairy-tale stuff happens (the idea that the knight goes questing and walks into the new dimension to encounter the dragons and wizards in towers), and it has grown beautifully.

As a final piece of advice, don't think this is the end all: if you are too attached to getting it right the first time, you'll never finish it. Build it, look at it, and either change it (though that can be heart-breaking) or build a new one.

Oh, and don't kitchen sink it. It wrecks havoc on worlds. Banestorm gets away with it because its pulling from lots of different places. Pick a couple of ideas to dominate and keep them in the front.

[jason taylor]

The "technology hardly changes" thing is less of a problem then it sounds. Until about 500 years ago, technological change was incremental.

[D10]

Its funny that regardless of how amazing a genius you are, technological discoveries simply cant get fully enjoyed until you have a culture in place that allows for some degree of education and implementation of said tech.

At the end of the day the most important technological development is education, its when you start to evolve rapidly

[whswhs]

I don't know if I have specific advice to give, but I have in fact been working on creating a fantasy world, and I've started several threads over the past few months that talk about aspects of it, and gotten very helpful advice back from other people here. Some of them are even fairly current.

I'm afraid I'm doing precisely what people here are cautioning you about. I started out by drawing continents, and figuring out what tectonic plates they were on, and setting up the plate motions to create mountain ranges in the right places, and figuring how the different races were distributed over them, and which races had linguistic spread zones and which ones had refuge languages, and a bunch of stuff like that. At present, for example, I have 44 broad culture areas mapped out, each assigned to one or more races—though there are going to be several more culture areas interspersed with others in units too small to show up on my world map.

Just bear in mind that half the payoff of worldbuilding will be things you gloat over to yourself, that your players will never know about. Just as, when I ran a Tolkienian alternate universe campaign, I never discussed Eowyn and Meriadoc as a romantic couple with my players; I just wondered about it privately.

Bill Stoddard

[Winged]

The way I see it, there are two main ways to get started at world building; top down, and bottom up.

Top down design would be coming up with concepts and then figuring out where those ideas would come from in the setting.

For example you might start knowing that you want a group of monks who are master swordsmen and seek to resolve conflicts before they can become wars. To support this idea you would work backwards.You decide that after a very long war some number of generations ago a number of swordsmen shaken by the senselessness of war retired from military life to study philosophy, the followers of these men are your modern sword monks.If you like you can keep working your way back, deciding what the aforementioned war was about, and so on.

Bottom up is the opposite, you look at what you already have and try to guess what it may become.

For example if you draw up a map with nothing but raw geography and you decide that the grasslands are populated by a nomadic people living on horseback. You decide that for a few years in a row the herds of the nomads main food source has been dwindling causing the people to spend a lot more time fishing. The culture eventually subsist mainly on fish and move from a culture that lives on horses to one that lives on ships. In time they become a feared naval power. Now you have a culture of warriors with ships painted with horses all over them using long bows that have replaced they short bows they would have hunted with from horseback.

Naturally you can combine the two methodologies and bounce ideas back and forth, perhaps the war i mentioned the the first example lead to a food shortage which caused a bunch of people to over hunt the deer populations that the plains people needed and set the second example into action.

As for starting the game without the world entirely though out consider the following. The entire map in Skyrim take up like 2 square miles of the real world. Unless you intend for your players to be traveling far and wide you can actually get a ton of game out of a very small area even in a sand box, and even if players want to travel and explore, travel on foot or horse is still very slow in a world without well maintained roads. I you are worried about your players asking questions about parts of the world you don't have built yet give them the basics of the ideas you have during character creation, and f no one wants to be from one of your distant lands it can be on the back burner for a while.

[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.