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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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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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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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