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One of the aspects of tabletop games that I find most interesting and fun is worldbuilding. Designing cultures, coming up with weird places and strange stuff, thinking of gods and their religions and the metaphysics of how the world works are all some of my favorite things to do. I have tons of ideas for settings and things to go in settings ready just in case I ever want to run them. I know some people are the same as me in that regard: designing settings is a huge draw especially for people looking to run the games. So let’s talk about it! I want to know everyone’s ideas for settings or setting elements. Gimme your weird cultures and your economies based around live insects as currency. Throw down ideas for dungeons and adventures if you’ve got ‘em. Artifacts with long legacies and magical curiosities with mundane applications. Tell us about folk traditions, local superstitions, world-spanning prophecies and your favorite real-life conspiracy theories too. Doesn’t matter if it is a setting all on its own, a piece of a larger whole or just a cool thing you think would be rad to have in a game, it belongs here. There are no system or genre assumptions, all settings and ideas are up for discussion. Inspirations Where do you get inspiration from? Nothing is created in a vacuum, but inspiration comes from all sorts of places. Novels are obviously a good source, and I reckon lots of people designed their first setting using inspiration from a favorite novel. Video games have always been a big part of where I get inspiration, both for setting design and mechanics as well. History is also a good place to seek inspiration from. Seeing how cultures throughout history thought, fought and changed is an endless well of inspiration that always has something new to give you. I also find that reading up on science can be useful, especially relating to the biology of plants and animals. I love thinking of ways that people would adapt to living with weird flora and fauna and how they would exploit them. This can be a minor detail that just adds a little flavor to the world or it can be the whole crux of a story. As an example, I spent a good couple of weeks obsessed with the silkworm economy, read lots of stuff about it, watched videos and documentaries, all that stuff. I worked on including silkworms in my game I was running at the time, giving players items made of silk and having them pass through small villages centered around the production of silkworms. This was mostly set dressing, but eventually I had them deal with two rival enterprises that were looking to take over a family-run silkworm operation. I took inspiration for the conflict from “For a Fistful of Dollars” but the silkworms and the setting I’d built up around them provided a lot of background for the conflict. It resulted in a fight in a sericulture room with big vats of boiling water and magic thread which all came from my silkworm research obsession. So is there a cool book/movie/video game that inspired you? Or an author you think has lots of neat ideas that you enjoy stealing? How about a historical event, legend or cultural practice that you think could make for an interesting part of a setting? Collaboration One of my favorite practices is collaborative worldbuilding. I like to do the heavy lifting of setting design, but I also like having people throw in their thoughts as well. GMs and players working together to build the setting is my ideal method, as I think it increases player investment in the world and the game itself. If they design something, even if it is totally unrelated to their character, they feel more attached to it, and helping to bring the world to life is a draw for some people. Collaborative worldbuilding is typically done either before the game starts or spontaneously as the game goes on. If you have a group beforehand but not an exact game or setting, some people like to involve the players in the setting design process. I’ve seen completely freestyle methods where the GM and the players throw around ideas and refine them into aspects of the world, and I’ve seen more formalized systems where you draw a map and people place things on the map, taking turns and moderating themselves and each other. Do you know a game that does this formal process well? Post about it and get some discussion going! I personally enjoy how “Beyond the Wall” structures this, with the players rolling and selecting from playbooks and using that information to build not just their characters but the village around those characters. Then you have the in-game worldbuilding stuff, which can range from a character giving a bit of backstory that adds to the map and the setting of the game to a player making an offhanded joke that becomes a part of the world. I’ll admit that I run games in a more lighthearted fashion and I really enjoy taking jokes and making them into a part of the setting. One practice that I’ve seen before and that I like to use is asking the players to come up with stuff. I love asking players who they meet during travel sessions, which has resulted in some of our most memorable NPCs. Getting the players to tell you what places they know in a city they’ve visited before, or who they’ve met in this region, or even to tell you what sort of loot they just found are all great ways of getting them more involved in the game and a sneaky way of having them do some of the work for you. What are some methods you use to get this spontaneous worldbuilding to happen? Do you really go all-in on incorporating character backstories into the world? Do you ask questions and have the players answer you? If so, what questions do you ask, and which questions provide the most interesting responses?
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Sep 9, 2016 11:50
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I’ll start things off with something that I’ve got rattling around in my head. Paradise and Perdition The afterlife is a really interesting part of both our real-world cultures and tons of fantasy settings. “Riverworld” is pretty famously all about the afterlife and Iain Banks’ “Surface Detail” is a really interesting sci-fi novel about alien cultures and the moral rightness of creating your own afterlife. I stole a lot from Banks when I was coming up with this idea, which is centered around the idea of conflicting afterlives. The world is one where reincarnation is not just a belief but a known fact, where cosmic machinery keeps the souls of the dead flowing into new bodies. People have built their lives around the idea of a dispassionate god who simply shuffles spirits on to their next form with no regard for their deeds. Then along comes a new god, a refugee from a dying world where things worked very differently. Souls did not return to the world, they were funneled away from it, into two opposite planes. One was called Paradise, and the good and righteous people of the world were rewarded for their hard work and effort. The other was Perdition, a gray and sullen land of pain and want, a punishment for the wicked and the craven. This new god does not approve of the ways of this world, and all they want is to make things right. So they do. They rip up great chunks of the world and fashion them into a pair of moons. Hollow worlds, shaped to resemble the planes that died with its old world, Paradise and Perdition are a constant reminder to the people below that an alien invader now lives with them. Avoiding, overpowering and co-opting the world’s natural systems for soul collection, this new god steals the spirits of the recently deceased and funnels them into their own system, one that judges them and then consigns them to one of the two moons. There they are shoved into new bodies and forced to live new lives under the watchful eyes of the god’s wardens. Cults pop up, as they do, learning the god's secrets to soul-snatching. They work in secret, setting up networks of machines and spells that catch the souls of the recently dead and channel them to the new god for judgment. So how does this go from being just background to something usable in the game? Death is interesting in games, and player death is always a contentious idea. Some people like high-lethality systems and games and others prefer lighter or more narrative systems when they get to decide when or if their character shuffles off the mortal coil. I see Paradise and Perdition as a way to have player death, like in the instance of a TPK, not be the end of a campaign. The players die, then before their souls can pass on to the next life, they get snatched up and smuggled to the court of the new god, who judges them for their deeds. Doesn’t much matter which world they go to, as I’ve never known a player who would let a second chance at attaining their goals pass them by. So now it becomes a prison break story, with the characters working on ways to evade the wardens and escape from the moon back down to the world. Their new bodies might have some new skills their old ones didn’t, and do they even want to keep these new forms? Getting back home and getting your old body back could be the basis of a really fun arc. Of course you could also base an entire game just around the idea of your players getting their souls snatched. Adjusting to life in a new body, figuring out the rules of the particular afterlife you live in, then working on either breaking out or orchestrating a change in management. It could be a character study in Perdition where the characters have to face punishment for past wrongs or a dystopian thriller in Paradise where the characters are tempted by having their every need met but face a life without conflict or true satisfaction. All it requires are characters who would want to either get out or master the world around them. And you don’t even have to go to the moons for a game. You could easily run a game of cops and cultists, busting up soul-collecting operations and sending the dead on to the next life. Or a campaign or arc based around the idea of going to Paradise or Perdition, forcing your way in and stealing back a few unlucky souls to bring back to the world.
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Sep 9, 2016 11:52
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The Smallville RPG (Aka Cortex+ drama) had creating a relationship map as part of chargen; you'd establish connections between characters, and that connection could be both NPCs (Like Bob works for Alice's dad) and also locations, "Donna regularly hangs out at the diner where Chad works part time" It was the first time I'd seen that sort of formal shared setting building, though I'd done impromptu stuff before- when running a "Small town urban fantasy" game, I asked all the PCs to tell me a ghost story or other piece of local folklore about the area. ( Which is how one of the players wound up living in the murder house that everyone still called by the name of the last owner despite it having been abandoned for 30 years before they moved in.)
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Sep 9, 2016 12:16
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I feel like Fellowship has spoiled me for setting generation forever. I usually roll up to the table with little more than a choice of army in mind and listen to the players tell me about what they came up with for their personal cultures. Sometimes I have to ask a few leading questions to get them to open up, ("what do your people consider normal that human culture would consider strange", "how does your character feel about [x]", and "is this the truth, or only what people have heard about your people" are particularly helpful,) but once they start to spill out details, it feels like it doesn't stop sometimes. There's no way I could come up with the level of minutia that a player focusing on one culture does, and its always something the player cares about at least a little. Then I get to tell them in detail why the Overlord directly endangers the society that they just got done building, using some of the specific minutia that they just got done telling me about, and the reaction is like nothing I'd ever seen playing with a topdown pre-generated setting. Often there is a genuine hatred for a pretend villain, just because that villain threatens something that the players built themselves. I've since started porting a little bit of that into other games, asking the players what their cultures are like in d20. The crunch sometimes limits things a little bit, but sometimes the fluff ends up explaining why the crunch is the way it is, so it ends up working out in the end. My players like it a lot, and they must never know I am openly outsourcing my duties as a GM to them and making it look like a feature. EscortMission fucked around with this message at 18:46 on Sep 10, 2016 |
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Sep 10, 2016 18:35
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Recycling Your Old Setting Ideas One thing that I think may not be evident to a lot of people is that you don't have to start from scratch every time that you make a new setting for a game. Like with music, iteration, sampling, and refinement of themes is a way to add developed concepts to your new setting. Oftentimes, revisiting or re-using scrapped material will help you save time and If you're worried that the groups you've presented similar settings to will care, I doubt they'll take offense, as long as the setting is still fun to play in. Like with many recurring elements in long-running video game series and within game companies, this can give comfortable or fun/annoying touchstones, like Trusty Patches, the Zenny Currency in Capcom games, or Chocobos. Stealing from yourself acts as a way to revisit and refine material, speed up your writing process, and will give you personal easter eggs in your work. My Setting's Development Process: An Exercise in Recycling I guess I'll go ahead and rant about the development of a setting for one of the (very, very) long-term projects of mine, which I've sometimes obliquely mentioned in other posts on TG. Like a lot of people, I grew tired of standard Eurofantasy and I wanted to also make a system of my own. A lot of articles on the internet back then (and now) talked about setting design as being more about drawing proper plate tectonics than actually, you know, making compelling fantasy settings to play in. The "guides" written out there really weren't helpful for approaching anything outside of an established "meta-setting" that had dungeons, dragons, sword-and-sorcery cities and castles, and loot tables. Setting #1 What were my starting inspirations way back then? The most primal version was just a reactionary inversion of what I saw as regular Eurofantasy tropes, with the addition of Dark Sun elements and, as I'm a 90s kid, JRPG elements. The world is pretty messed up, with the destruction of magic overthrowing the Elf Empire and sending them into decline. The earth is stalked by titanic Land Kings, monsters unleashed by the apocalypse. A giant structure that used to basically be a magical arcology is now a cracked-open blister of a ruin fought over by human kingdoms, which descends deep into the earth's mantle. Humans are magically inert but developed alchemy, Dwarfs are all dead and their souls condensed into solid phantoms, Goblins live in a chaotic under-empire, Trolls are basically humanoid elephants with solitary male trolls causing trouble, and the "gilled ones" are fish people that continually mutate as they age. (I'm going off of very sparse old Word documents here, so I apologize for the brevity.) So, the setting aspects of the first attempt were:
I promptly got distracted and worked on other ideas for games and also running D&D, but soon came back and completely revised the setting, as one would. Setting #2 The second draft removed a lot of the vestigial euro-fantasy elements like elfs and dwarfs, and it was reborn as more of a sword-and-sorcery setting. The focus was on humans interacting in a post-post-apocalyptic world they inherited. Hundreds of years ago the gods were destroyed by the Great Beasts, who ruled the world and covered it in their Land King spawn while the last humans huddled inside the Sanctuaries, which were very much not like bronze-age versions of the 2300 AD Domes in Crono Trigger. Seven heroes managed to reunite humanity, go to the afterlife to meet the last two gods (The Judge and The Pursuer), use their secrets to kill all but one Great Beast (who is now being chased through space by The Pursuer), and then established a new divine law, associated with the cosmic spheres that appeared when the heroes made their promises to The Judge. In the actual present of the setting, the game looks at one of the new countries made by one of these heroes and centered around one of these Sanctuaries 800 years later. The country’s ruled by a bunch of holy orders that are each devoted to a particular planet / metal / set of laws/ hero: The Iron Order (Mars) handles war laws, blood money, and violent crimes, the Tin Order (Jupiter) handles class and inheritence laws, etc. These translate into forms of magical edicts that a given Judge has. The Land Kings still stalk the earth, and a faraway plague is turning its dead victims into undead. Along with Edict magic, there’s also Hermetics (summoning, astronomy, and alchemy) and the Occult (curses and warlock stuff). A colony was established in the north, but it’s been taken over by a dictator and broken off from the theocracy. The Mercury Sphere has also just disappeared from the sky, which is bad news for 1/7 of the Sailor Squad Talmud Jedi. Setting aspects of the second attempt:
Setting #3: My Final Draft I soon got absolutely maddened by the demands that my detailed-skill-list based system put on writing the game, and started scrapping just about everything system related at this point, over and over. When I came back to working on the setting, I realized how much I actually didn't like it. The metaphysics weren't easily turned into the kind of rules I wanted to write, the concepts seemed to be all over the place without a central focus, the magic forms weren’t very well thought out, the history of the setting was high-concept and didn't have the kind of hooks or the implied kinds of stories that I wanted, and frankly I didn't like it. Writing the whole thing felt more like a chore than a creative exercise. Enter the Ancients, a concept that was part of some extremely abortive works at a fantasy novel– just a few things jotted down more than anything else. The Ancients were the last of a group of pre-humans that all died out in a mysterious supernatural cataclysm called the Change of The World that happened sometime before humanity was on the radar. They’re all squat, frail creatures with a head like a warthog, warty skin and a single large eye. Each of the surviving Ancients was meant to embody a form of immortality: for one, it’s through law and history as she became a sort of Nüwa - Yellow Emperor composite Culture Hero before her death. Another is kept alive by infernal machines he now barely understands in his senility, and the descendants of his old students revere him from outside of his massive Sanctuary. One is a quasi-Buddhist religious figure that’s dead, but his lacquered corpse still inspires visions and he can communicate through dreams. The last of the original four was a master of what was basically Dark Sun’s Lifeshaping, but he’s very reclusive after his human students tried to take over the world. Sticking the Ancients right into the center of my setting allowed for me to write a major driving backstory for the setting and start creating themes. Most of the Ancients interacted with humans as “culture heroes,” and an Ancient’s views of their dead society were superimposed on willing human students, like when parents use their own upbringing as instructions or warnings for their kids. At the same time, in the setting present all of the Ancients are out of commission or antagonistic (missing, senile, dead, hermit, evil wizard in tower), leaving humans as the major actors. Things started clicking into place after that, and the post-divine theocracy from the second draft morphed into a dysfunctional society created by an absentee Ancient. With the major “legend” in place for the setting, I decided on placing the focus of the setting on the large civilization made by that first Ancient I mentioned. The other Ancients seemed to have just inspired mystic orders rather than societies large enough to support a variety of character types. In addition to this, we at TG had been through another cycle of talking about John Wick’s eternal fascination with Doomed Highborn Manchildren and I figured that I could make the concept more enjoyable by including them while also widening the aperture of what were acceptable PCs. I also wanted to get back to what I really wanted to do with the game, and that was to make a system that supported low-fantasy adventure in a bronze / classical age setting. So, the Civilized Lands began to be modeled after ancient hierarchical warrior societies like the Mycenaean Greeks, Shang Dynasty China, and the Akkadians. An oppressed underclass made of conquered helot-ized tribal clans popped up, and so did the many, many barbarians in the wider world. Since I was already cribbing a lot from Ancient China, I decided to divide the world both culturally and geographically into a civilized center and four barbarian directions. I started to write out possible character archetypes people may want to play, contextualizing them in the setting. The radically different character types of Final Fantasy Legend II were an inspiration at first, but I eventually settled on only doing setting and mechanics for human PCs (for now). Setting started to interact back and forth with system, refining how I approached PC structure and reintroducing classes to my game mechanics. Elements of 4E D&D began to assert themselves more strongly then too. The rest of the writing started to come out of me more easily than the old versions, and I finally found a setting I could enjoy developing. I’m also taking care to leave enough of the setting details blank for players and GMs to add their own touches. Setting aspects of the final version:
Funnily enough, the only aspects that survived through the revisions were “fishmen” and “giant building as major landmark.” I’m not sure what that says about my setting preferences. So, that last segment all happened 4 years ago (oh god). What’s the current status? 100% of this stuff remains true in the setting today. I’m a major victim of procrastination when it comes to writing in my free time, so fleshing out areas and concepts in the world, not to mention the rules themselves, is a slow and random process. In addition to this, a modified version of my game’s system is being tested out in a dwarf-centric dungeon crawler, which also takes up writing time. But, the work still feels fresh to me, and I hope that when I finally try to small-print publish this game, others will find it fun too. Spiderfist Island fucked around with this message at 05:47 on Sep 13, 2016 |
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Sep 13, 2016 05:42
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I appreciate collaborative worldbuilding, but I've always dreamed of putting together a big ol' setting, with civilizations influenced by the landscape and other civilizations.
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Sep 14, 2016 18:52
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paradoxGentleman posted:I appreciate collaborative worldbuilding, but I've always dreamed of putting together a big ol' setting, with civilizations influenced by the landscape and other civilizations. It's This concept I am a bit struggling with. Namely player investment and immersion. I made a big ol setting, great, now how to get my bindle of gleeful murderhobos to care about it. As for catering to a player's character, I know it has and can work, but when I think about it I just feel like Im taking away player agency.
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Sep 14, 2016 21:20
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Rigged Death Trap posted:It's This concept I am a bit struggling with. Namely player investment and immersion. What I do is just, improvise like crazy and incorporate cool things my players think of on the fly. Like in 13th Age, I went around the table and said "tell me a unique thing about this town you've entered in."
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Sep 15, 2016 02:43
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Spiderfist Island posted:Recycling Your Old Setting Ideas There was a time when I was still just running oneshots, but I always set them in the same world, just with different groups playing in it every time, with me building upon the assumptions and consequences left behind by the previous group as a seed for the next (oblivious) group's adventure. I found it easier and less straining on creativity to not have to come up with a different premise for stuff every time, but of course there's an element of care required so that you're not just playing out what you the GM hope to want to happen and foisting off your expectations on some other group that has no idea you're bringing baggage into the game.
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Sep 15, 2016 02:48
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Serf posted:Paradise and Perdition I like this a lot, and the play considerations seem like a good idea. The idea of being taken from one God to another gives me an idea for a setting where players play in a series of nested planes. When people die on Earth or whatever, they're all taken to another plane. At the end of that chapter or whatever, they're going to die, and go to the heaven/hell/styx/hades/afterlife of /that/ world. Somewhere deep enough, it probably ends up like Kill Six Billion Demons. Planescape mixed with Quantum Leap I guess? In a couple of weeks, I'm going to be running a new DnD 5E game. I've gotten the greenlight from the guys that I can run something not Forgotten Realms, and so I'm thinking of resurrecting and old project I've been looking at: a sci-fi fantasy hybrid, where players are on a planet that lost spacefaring technology, but (eventually) they'll find it and continue whatever adventure into the stars. I'm looking at Phantasy Star IV and Endless Legends as probably my biggest influences for this. Does anybody know of any works that might provide some similar influence? (don't say Star Wars) I'll probably run it as collaborative, and when the players sit down let them know that they're going to each represent something in the setting. They get to choose what it is, and can make their own kingdom, race, culture or whatever, and maybe they're the culture or the anti-culture, but an aspect of the universe will be defined by the character actions. I'll also ask them open ended questions, and their answers will develop the world; I've done this before on a smaller scale to some success (people players have met in bars, developing backstories, etc), but haven't ever utilized it for large scale setting building. Hopefully it works well.
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Sep 20, 2016 17:49
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piL posted:I like this a lot, and the play considerations seem like a good idea. The idea of being taken from one God to another gives me an idea for a setting where players play in a series of nested planes. When people die on Earth or whatever, they're all taken to another plane. At the end of that chapter or whatever, they're going to die, and go to the heaven/hell/styx/hades/afterlife of /that/ world. Somewhere deep enough, it probably ends up like Kill Six Billion Demons. Planescape mixed with Quantum Leap I guess? I can think of quite a few books that have varying degrees of similarity to what you want(none of them have magic, and only a couple feature Psionics of any sort though); Mother of Demons by Eric Flint(this one is a personal favorite of mine) The High Crusade by Poul Anderson(kinda the inverse of what you're wanting but still worth mentioning) The Dragonriders of Pern by Anne McCaffrey Wyrms by Orson Scott Card Homecoming series by Orson Scott Card Speaker For The Dead & Xenocide by Orson Scott Card(only slightly related, but the Piggies are one of my favorite fictional races so I felt the need to bring them up) All Tomorrows by Nemo Ramjet Man After Man by Dougal Dixon
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Sep 20, 2016 23:43
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paradoxGentleman posted:I appreciate collaborative worldbuilding, but I've always dreamed of putting together a big ol' setting, with civilizations influenced by the landscape and other civilizations. I totally get this sentiment, just so you know. I often go overboard designing stuff and lots of it never gets used. But I think the important thing to do is create hooks that the players can get into. Make open-ended organizations, mysteries, big names etc. and let the players find what interests them. In games of smaller scope, just narrow things down but always have those hooks they can build off of. If a player wants to contribute and create a connection to one of those hooks, go with it. That will get them invested and give them an anchor in the world. piL posted:In a couple of weeks, I'm going to be running a new DnD 5E game. I've gotten the greenlight from the guys that I can run something not Forgotten Realms, and so I'm thinking of resurrecting and old project I've been looking at: a sci-fi fantasy hybrid, where players are on a planet that lost spacefaring technology, but (eventually) they'll find it and continue whatever adventure into the stars. I'm looking at Phantasy Star IV and Endless Legends as probably my biggest influences for this. Does anybody know of any works that might provide some similar influence? (don't say Star Wars) I would recommend the game Hyperlight Drifter for the music, art direction and general aesthetic. The game practically bleeds style and just lives in this sci-fantasy space that I think you might be going for. Actually, I was working on a sci-fantasy setting of my own for 13th Age, using a new set of comparable Icons to do the heavy lifting on the worldbuilding. I'll dig some of that up and toss it into the thread.
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Sep 21, 2016 02:10
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Here's a setting-related question: the players have solved the mystery of the missing cows, and have tracked the goblin thieves to a nest of goblin warrens. They're about to enter a dungeon of, say, 12 rooms/scenes, with maybe two-thirds of those having goblins inside. How do you create variety within the various goblins so that they're not just varying amounts of "goblin with a sword", "goblin with a crossbow" and maybe "shaman-esque goblin who can throw firebolts"? Or could this be "enough" and the variation comes from the terrain of the different scenes, in the same way that raiding a human-occupied barracks would similarly only yield variants of pikemen, archers and hedge wizards and still be interesting?
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Oct 3, 2016 16:22
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gradenko_2000 posted:Here's a setting-related question: the players have solved the mystery of the missing cows, and have tracked the goblin thieves to a nest of goblin warrens. A combination of unique & interactive terrain, goblins with different abilities, and different pets would probably be enough. Supposing eight rooms: 1 - Goblins with swords 2 - Kennels (Goblin kennelmaster with crossbow and doggos) 3 - Goblin shaman in study - many toxic potions scattered about that result in gas clouds when broken 4 - Goblin archery range - players enter beside the targets, because goblin OHSA standards are very poor - terrain pieces that move up and down the range when triggered by goblins at the firing line 5 - Goblin kitchen - sword goblin and a lot of angry critters that are soon to be lunch 6 - Goblin gymnasium - kettleballs, climbing ropes, and a very physical orc fitness instructor 7 - Walled off room containing a tough beastie that the goblins are afraid of 8 - Goblin Thiever in Chief - tough goblin with lots of flammable papers and fire hazards strewen about
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Oct 3, 2016 16:56
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gradenko_2000 posted:Here's a setting-related question: the players have solved the mystery of the missing cows, and have tracked the goblin thieves to a nest of goblin warrens. 1) Goblin library. A twisting room of narrow hallways festooned with rickety bookshelves that hold the many tomes the goblins have taken during their raiding trips. There are magical books here that the goblins don't know how to properly handle, and the friction between them is summoning extradimensional creatures which move among the stacks and prey on unwary goblins. 2) Laboratory. Goblin alchemists working with unstable chemicals are creating strange potions and dangerous bombs. The elixirs can be quaffed for random effects, and bombs can be tossed by both sides. The chemical vats will rupture at some point, covering the floor in acid and forcing the combatants to higher ground. 3) Dwarven mineshaft. This ancient arm of some forgotten dwarven empire has been bridged by sturdy but reckless goblin walkways. Occasionally large spiders and old dwarven defense constructs emerge and have to be dealt with. 4) Stable. Here the goblins are training the spiders from the mineshaft to be pets and mounts. They have dozens of spider egg sacs and their most successful specimens are here, ready to help the goblins by being ridden into battle with the intruders. 5) Scrap forge. A natural pool of lava seeping out of an underground vent is used to melt down weapons and armor recovered by raiding parties and be turned into goblin arms and armor. Lots of sharp objects to fall on, and maybe even a captured lava spirit that has to be dealt with or freed. 6) Hospital. The goblins have strange biologies and weird medical arts that are poisonous to most other species, and this room is covered in choking mold samples, biting blood-sucking parasites, stinging salves that give hallucinations, and highly combustible powders snorted by the goblins before surgery. 7) Fungus farm. Molds and fungi grow all over the corpses of cows and goats the goblins have scavenged, and moldfarmers collect the matured specimens for use as stew fodder, garnishes, drugs, and brewing into a beer that causes non-goblins to temporarily go blind just from the fumes. 8) Troll embassy. A single troll diplomat from a nearby troll colony lives here to foster good relations with the goblins. As a negotiator, they are surprisingly open to parley, and could be convinced to turn on the goblins in exchange for safe passage out of the warrens.
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Oct 5, 2016 19:21
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gradenko_2000 posted:Here's a setting-related question: the players have solved the mystery of the missing cows, and have tracked the goblin thieves to a nest of goblin warrens. The Angry DM wrote about this exact thing a while back where he talked about this in relation to video games, especially older games with memory limitations, having asset libraries. The thing is, if your first encounter is goblins with swords, second one is goblins with crossbows, and so on so forth, your players miss out on one of the cooler aspects of gameplay: that awesome feeling of having learned an enemy's tricks and then getting to use that knowledge against them. Also, even with a limited "palette" of enemy types you can build a lot of different situations and force your players to think on their toes while not being completely in the dark as to what they're up against. That's not to say that each dungeon should be completely one-note: you can divide a large dungeon (not a megadungeon, but a single dungeon with a few separate areas) into different sections, each with a separate theme. The goblins may have set up camp in an abandoned dwarven fortress, in which case the dwarven quarters taken over by the goblins would be one section, the crypts with dwarven undead would be another, and the cavern taken over by a big god-damned spider is another. Another incidental benefit of this approach is that it saves you a lot of prep time and page-turning, as you only need to keep so many statblocks in front of you at a given time.
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Oct 7, 2016 10:08
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