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Talk about how you design, develop, ad-lib, or half-arse a setting for your tabletop roleplaying game. (EDIT: also card game, board game, war game, skirmish game, miniatures game, etc. I guess if you're doing a ultra rules-lite collaborative writing thing while framing it as a game that counts. If you're doing something bizarre like pretending to be a character in a scifi western while you play regular poker, that counts too. Fictional settings that you make up for games that you would talk about in the Traditional Games subforum.) Talk about weird and wonderful settings you've had a hand in creating. I remember one goon years ago doing some weird far future hyper-arthurian kingdoms set in a ruined dyson sphere with nanotech Sword Stones or something, and I'd love to hear about that poo poo again. Laugh about the dumb stuff that you and your friends made up when you were 12. Maybe your game started in the outpost at Far Kew? Talk about how you get players to collaborate on building a world rather than passively experiencing it, or talk about how you get players to interact with your 200 page setting document. Talk about doing it all completely randomly and the world that was implied. There's also been a bunch of people recently talking about how a fantasy world that's not built on colonialist ideas might look, how to construct fantasy races without importing IRL racism, how deeply weird things can be when D&D alignments are applied to everything without thinking about it and so on. Hopefully this thread also provides a place for those discussions where nobody who has an immediate violent "who cares?" reaction needs to look at it. --- I usually come down in the "ad-lib" through "half-rear end" camp when I'm making a setting. I like all players to have input (whether active or passively), and I don't like to plan ahead or make assumptions. To encourage that, I usually try to make sure there's only one of each character type, and encourage that player to be the authority on their character's species, job, background, etc. So in D&D terms, I want someone who's saying "I'm a wizard" to be the one saying what wizards are like here, do they have schools or do they do master/apprentice stuff, are they regarded as weird beards or are they normal parts of existence, etc. I want the player who says "I used to be a pirate" to tell me what pirates are like here, what do they get up to, exactly? Are they more like government sanctioned private warships, or more like water bandits? Yaaaar walk the plank splice the mainbrace skull and bones? Or a 400-person anarchist sea-adventuring commune? And gradually something comes together that might not be great, but has elements of what everyone wanted. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 03:03 on May 16, 2019 |
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May 13, 2019 07:37
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I developed a pretty quick method for developing a setting for Apocalypse World, which would work with most one-shots that can handle excess. 1. Pick the central thing that defines the setting. For AW it was mostly whatever caused the apocalypse, but it can easily be any sort of style or dynamic. 2. Ramp that motif up to 11. There wasn’t just floods, people live on the tops of skyscrapers as if they were islands. It’s not just class divides, people are fighting over bread in the shadows of a palace. 3. Get some details to focus in on. Players are your best source of this, so ask questions and work with the results.
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May 13, 2019 22:58
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This is a pretty cool idea for a thread, I'd love to collaborate more on building a setting. I tend to 'ad-lib to half-rear end' simple settings for my games, as we don't really get to play more than one-shots nowadays. For content, I'd posted these in the chat thread: Agent Rush posted:Doubt I could find the notes now, but I once had a setting where the world was a cube where every face had radically different technology levels and populations. One was your standard fantasy land where everyone thought the world was flat because no one had ever tried going over the edge. Another was full of modern people, who had realized that gravity would re-orient anything that went over but tried to avoid interfering with the development of the other faces. Maybe I'll talk more if I remember or find my old notebooks. Agent Rush posted:Neat! Feel like sharing any details?
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May 15, 2019 23:24
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Do general “game settings” count? Because I’m in the process of fleshing out background for a homebrewed skirmish game, and I would love to get ideas to make it suck less. The Setting Game is a Mordheim-inspired skirmish game, so obviously, the best place is a city after poo poo Has Gone Down. Because deciding on a single compelling event is hard, I decided that - due to the original purpose of major industrializing cities being a method to kill the original Elf-analog gods - the city itself exists as a fixed point in a number of divergent histories where apocalypses have happened, but it continues to primarily be in its “complete” state unless you take a wrong turn and end up wandering into one of the alternate possibilities. This has created a bit of an industry around looting these alternate versions of the city for material wealth, as well as dangerous overcrowding from refugees from these mixed-up realities and the occasional destabilized district flickering from a different reality. It’s early Renaissance inspired - some industrialization and mass production, and capital is beginning to come into conflict with labor now that power structures are solidifying. Species Trying to avoid using “Race” because I think it’s a bit more accurate. These are a bit rough at the moment, especially in terms of names.
Things I need to work on - avoiding cliches and dangerous cultural parallels, especially with the dwarf analogues: I know they get coded as Semitic frequently enough, so I really need to clearly differentiate them. Any thoughts on my kinda lovely setting so far?
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May 16, 2019 00:24
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Wrestlepig posted:I developed a pretty quick method for developing a setting for Apocalypse World, which would work with most one-shots that can handle excess. That's so so important for short games. You gotta go all in. Big and bold, because when the whole game is measured in hours, you've really only got minutes to get the setting across, so subtle doesn't work. For my pbta stuff I write a short list of impressions and questions to ask. Here's one I haven't quite finished yet, "The Iron Halls" for Dungeon World. I won't use all of that stuff. The second question is pretty bad (I'm explicitly going for a several-hundred-years-post-apoc fantasy dungeon, as discussed with players). The Iron Halls lie half buried beneath the shifting sands of the Dune Sea. How did you find them? Do you think these long metal buildings were under the water that they say used to cover the Dune Sea? What do you hope to scavenge from the Iron Halls? How did you reach the top of this rusty wall of iron to find your way in? This sand gets in everything. Large spaces, metal constructions of unknown purpose looming from the darkness. A maze of tight passageways, all alike. The same rusty metal on everything. Floors, walls, ceilings. Brown and smelling like blood. A rust rotten floor, jagged edges, a seemingly endless drop. The only non-rusty metal is the chains on their wrists and ankles. Small blind creatures, who have never seen the light. Oh god it's full of snakes. A teetering, groaning walkway across the abyss. Shanties made of rusty sheets torn from the walls Huge pale beetles smelling of dead skin A shaft of light from a high hole illuminates the skull of something huge and ancient A bent metal door hangs halfway off its huge metal hinges. (When you are exposed to the Death of Iron...) Hedningen posted:Things I need to work on - avoiding cliches and dangerous cultural parallels, especially with the dwarf analogues: I know they get coded as Semitic frequently enough, so I really need to clearly differentiate them. First off, premise of looting alternate timelines is loving cool and I love it. Yeah, general game settings should definitely count but I've never thought much about the requirements for (eg) a fantasy war game as opposed to an RPG So I don't know how any of what I have to say will relate to the specifics of something like a minis game where it's always seemed to me that race/species/etc is a big bold signal about "this is the horde army", "this is the sneak army" etc that's inherent to the style of game. In general, you can avoid a lot of uncomfortable cultural parallels by not having all members of the race/species be the stereotype. If you (for example) make the ones you're focusing on a weird cult (like, weird even by the weird standards of the culture they're from), you at least avoid the "all <race> are <stereotype>" problems, and if on top of that you take a little bit of care not to do the more obvious RL stereotypes you'll be on the right track. The rule of thumb I try to use is that I try to imagine a hypothetical unabashedly racist player (like an actual nazi or KKK type person), and if I can imagine them looking at my fiction and going "oh yeah, I get what you're saying, but don't worry I won't tell anyone", then I try to re-think it. Ditto potentially sexist stuff - go "what would one of those incel dipshits think of this" and then don't do it if they'd cheer about how it's a return to the good old days or whatever. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 03:05 on May 16, 2019 |
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May 16, 2019 01:09
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Hedningen posted:[*]Ironbloods: Basically Chaos Dwarfs - industrious, originally made by their gods to build and live, but discovered that said gods made for excellent building material for thaumaturgical weapons. Were driven underground, found demons, ended up enslaving the demons, built a vast underground slave empire that necessarily needed to keep expanding, kinda became demon-y thanks to extended exploitation of demon resources, and are now trying to grab slaves from Adelav now that anti-demon wards are failing. It's especially important the you avoid semitic implications with your version of dwarves given the parallel of Nazi propaganda to, well, semitic peoples. It's interesting that you classify this as a sort of renaissance style setting, although the situation of it is very much in tune with the historical renaissance, with the church beginning to lose some of its power politically. Obviously the elves sort of stand in for the church, as they are, albeit in a much diminished capacity. I guess a large question is, who are the nobles? I am not a historian, but my pop culture knowledge of the renaissance leads me to the conclusion that there is some form of nobility that would be interested in humanist philosophy, the artistic thrust of the time with its politicking and patronage. Also guilds, which neatly sidestep the species element entirely, if you're looking into that. On a related note, Tolkien's portrayal of dwarves was obviously Semitic in nature, and carried through to a number of fantasy books, notably Terry Pratchett's, but where did the pop culture trope of dwarves being Scottish originate?
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May 16, 2019 12:01
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Here's my heartbreaker-type fantasy setting: High Elves - The old conquerors. Architects of a continental empire now on the decline. Their monuments, cities, arcane workshops, and spires are largely now in decay save for the select few that the self-proclaimed heirs hold onto. They are called the "High" elves, not just because their highest nobility live in towering arcane buildings called spires, but also because of their attitudes towards those with magical capabilities lower than their own. Those with higher magical aptitude are treated with at least a modicum of respect, but to the High Elves, Elvish magic is superior. At the highest echelons are those with the strongest magical abilities, and at the bottom are those with none. Those below serve those above and those above make sure those below know it. Wood Elves - Also called Low Elves by their higher bretheren, they too are technically the heirs to a long decayed empire. But where their cousins still try to cling to the old ways until their last dying breath, the Wood Elves have mostly given it up, either because they've been rejected by the High heirarchy or because they refuse to participate in it. The "Wood" part comes from the days of rebellion where guerilla tactics were employed to offset the power imbalance. They carry the heritage of rebellion and rejection. Their old encampments and settlements set the foundations for the cosmopolitan cities in modern times. Despite this, they come second only to humans in terms of population in these hubs. Humans - Compared to the elves and dwarves, Humans are fairly short lived people. They don't excel at much compared to the other races with their own specialties and generally are second best at most in all of them. The one exception that Humans have over everyone else, however, is their curiosity. Humans are curious creatures. Often, to a fatal fault. Where the other races either hunkered down or went into hiding, Humans moved to the edge. They went to the seas, the deserts, the cold wastes, and saw them as their paths of escape and dared the Elves to follow them through these dangerous territories. When the Elves followed, they were beset with strange devices or odd magics whose effects ranged from ineffective to suicidally potent. Nowadays, Humans are largely as the forefront of technology and innovation due to their innately curious and exploratory nature. They also lead the charge in delving into the old imperial ruins and site for treasure and artifacts. If some strange magical creature appears or some other bizarre arcane effect plagues a city, odds are, a Human did it because they're the only ones reckless enough to try. Dwarves - Contrary to the high innate magical ability, Dwarves, are largely poor at using magic, save for one exception. Dwarves are experts at the creation and use of magical tools and devices. During the Imperial conquests, Dwarves retreated into their mines and forges, eventually combining the two. There, they adapted to life in the darkness, but compensated where they could with magical technology. Perpetually besieged by the Elves and resources mostly scarce, the Dwarves developed a culture of communal militarism. Under the surface, every dwarf were expected to do all they could for the war effort and be ready to fight at any time. They lived together, they fought together, and they were expected to die together if it came to it. As an almost reactionary contrast, the Dwarves organized themselves under the idea of equality and communalism among all dwarves. No one dwarf was greater than the other and each would be granted according to their need. Excess was frowned upon as every bit of food must be saved in case the next meal didn't come in. Finery was curbed as everything was needed to support those fighting or building. In modern times, the hard edge to Dwarves who've largely grown up underground hasn't softened much and the culture of communal survivalism is still alive and well. Much of the magical tools and weapons used during the war has been put away for a rainy day, but there's still a lingering paranoia that that rainy day could be any day now and to be ready to go at any time. With the war over, dwarves have started to slowly move back to the surface, but they often tend towards tightly packed settlements or residing in the larger cities as the sense of wide open spaces causes a culturally imposed agoraphobia in them. Halflings - Of the imperial warring by the old Elves against the other inhabitants of the continent, the only peoples left untouched were the Halflings. An early peace agreement was signed and in exchange for vassalage to the Elves as well as a supply of food, the Halflings would not come to harm by the Elves. The High Elves would only say this was a political and tactical maneuver and the "strange, wee folk" would eventually be put under heel as well. To others, it was because the Halflings knew ways to tap into magics older and wilder than the Elves knew and thus feared what would happen if full scale war were invoked against the Halflings. Because of their vassalage, the Halflings have largely known peace and the society in their hamlets reflect that. All visitors are welcomed with open arms, though it's uncommon for most Halflings to venture beyond their home hamlets. Weapons are picked up largely to defend against wild animals or the occasional bandit. As for the magics the Elves feared, it still exists as rumour, though it's noted that despite the lack of any ritual or magic, there's never been a fallow field within the older Halfling settlements and none of them have ever known illness. Orcs - While the Dwarves hid underground and the Humans fled to the most inhospitable periphery, the Orcs packed up and decided that holding no land was best. The Orcs became and remain a largely nomadic people. During the conquests, hit and run warbands would raid and pillage Elven units and proto-spires as both a means to supply themselves an to try and curb the Elven advances. Part of this was enabled by the proficient use of mounted animals to be able to hit fast and escape faster. Different tribes preferred different animals depending on the terrain and conditions, and horse, boar, and ram charges were the most common, though it's been said that even deer were used in combined raids with the Wood Elves. The other part of Orcish survival was the use of divine rituals to support and protect the warbands as well as keep their animals fed and healthy. Of the peoples of the continent, the Orcs are the most devout. Prayer to the gods was and continues to be a fundamental facet of their daily life. At the end of the conquests, permanent Orcish settlements were reestablished at their holiest sites while the remainder continued to live a more peaceful nomadic life. As they are the most well traveled on the continent, what were once roving warbands have now become caravans trading between cities and settlements. Prayers for resilience and strength have now become prayers for safety and prosperity.
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May 16, 2019 15:58
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So I'm working on a weird sort of science-fantasy hybrid setting for DnD (think Eberron with cyberpunk elements) where there's a sort of glamorous upperclass moon hosting a dystopian ecumenopolis orbiting a more traditional DnD fantasy world it exploits for energy and food production. The fantasy world was colonized by the moon-city in the past but a successful yet disastrous attempt to harvest energy from the planet's core (it's not a normal real-universe planet but a core of pure magic) has left the planet literally fractured as the ritual involved merged parts of the feywild and shadowfel into the prime material plane and left the planet fractured (like a quarter of it is a massive crater and there's giant fissures crisscrossing the surface) and colonization attempts were scaled back leaving the magitech stuff behind. Thoughts? I'm mostly trying to figure out how to make the moon-city as interesting as the main planet, as a sort of high-level area players could potentially access.
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May 18, 2019 23:24
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Resting Lich Face posted:So I'm working on a weird sort of science-fantasy hybrid setting for DnD (think Eberron with cyberpunk elements) where there's a sort of glamorous upperclass moon hosting a dystopian ecumenopolis orbiting a more traditional DnD fantasy world it exploits for energy and food production. The fantasy world was colonized by the moon-city in the past but a successful yet disastrous attempt to harvest energy from the planet's core (it's not a normal real-universe planet but a core of pure magic) has left the planet literally fractured as the ritual involved merged parts of the feywild and shadowfel into the prime material plane and left the planet fractured (like a quarter of it is a massive crater and there's giant fissures crisscrossing the surface) and colonization attempts were scaled back leaving the magitech stuff behind. The moon city is the Imperial Capital equivalent that spawns the Colonial Ventures on the planet. In the Capital players are faced with more political intrigues, backroom deals, etc etc. The moon city needs something from the planet--magical energy/crystals? slaves for blood magic rituals? more mundane raw resources?--and it's up to the players and others like them to go get it. Powerful Patrons sponsor Expeditions to the planet's surface. The players start as low level members of one such Expedition, but as they put in their time and help the Expedition accomplish its tasks, the players wind up getting more and more exposure to the upper levels. First the Expedition leader, then his contact on the Capital (a Mr. Johnson-like fellow), then the rarified circles of those who sponsor and invest in Expeditions. Soon, it becomes just as important to sabotage your rival Expeditions and play politics to get ahead as it is to actually accomplish your Expedition's own tasks. To complicate matters, there are different factions in the moon city representing the various attitudes towards colonialism in general. The default seeks to "uplift" the natives as "the moon-man's burden" while heavily exploiting them in the process. But others argue for stopping such exploitation altogether--even if it means a decline in living standards/loss of power in the Capital. Still others seek to not just establish colonies for resource exploitation but ultimately annex and incorporate them into the Empire as true Imperial provinces and Imperial citizens, not just second-class colonists. Others are more xenophobic and would like to eliminate all life on the planet entirely, paving the way for its "resettlement" with proper moon folk.
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May 19, 2019 08:36
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I really enjoy communal worldbuilding, not just in the lowkey, organic ways it happens in the middle of a game - where a player inadvertently creates world lore by gradually revealing the rites of his priesthood or telling you about the town she grew up in - but in deliberate, organized ones. Like before my college (3E D&D) game, which has been about 10 years now, all the players sat down together for a couple of hours in a library conference room with a whiteboard and sort of collectively designed our world, drew a basic map of the known world, assigning various countries and cultures to different players who were eager to fill in the blanks, etc. It had mixed results, but at the time I was very proud of what me and one other person in the group did with the Elves. We preserved the existence of three distinct Elven cultures - High, Wood, and Dark - to hew as close to the core rules as possible, but the actual details of the event that led to the splintering of Elf society were very different from the standard. Early on, we decided that one of our world's "twists" is that humans were the oldest player race, not the youngest; we had evolved from higher primates in a way very similar to human history on Earth, and after the first men built their first societies, all the "normie" demihuman races were created by the gods in attempts to emulate or improve upon humankind. In gameplay terms, we reflected this by making the Sorcerer class verboten to human PCs - they were never born with the "spark" - and available to all demihumans, while wizardry was a human science (that others could practice, but that was originated by us, not by Elves or whoever). Elven society became an arcanocracy, a highly-stratified culture where the amount of sorcery in your blood determined your prospects in life, and the people with the greatest natural acumen for magic considered that their divine right to power. All Elven leaders were sorcerer kings. The first Dark Elves were revolutionaries, members of the lower classes who studied the human science of wizardry (which was forbidden) in secret to weaponize it against their rulers. This led to a bitter war in which the sorcerer kings did all the horrific poo poo fascists do when their hierarchies are under threat, and the revolutionaries resorted to whatever forms of magic they could - including demonology and necromancy - for the greater good. In the end, the Dark Elves lost because Corellon was an rear end in a top hat who sided with his original creation and thought its magical order was good, and were exiled and cursed to fear the sun. After the war was over, the remaining Elves agreed this sort of thing could never happen again, and had irreconcilable differences about what had caused this rebellion and how to prevent it; those that would became High Elves believed the answer was basically liberalism - throwing open their borders, opening up trade with others including mankind, and slowly making their government a bit less classist - while the Wood Elves were essentially reactionaries or even primitivists who thought the problem was clearly the insidious influence of human ideas of things like liberty and justice, so they disappeared into the woods, preserved the sorcerous hierarchy, but focused on using that magic to provide for everyone's basic needs and create an isolationist Elven ethnostate. Meanwhile, the Dark Elves stayed angry, built a friendly relationship with one of the great human civilizations, and between the two groups of "mundane-bloods" created the most prestigious academies of wizardry in the world. The antipathy between the various Elven cultures was very deep, because it was still "new"; the events that sundered their people felt like ancient history to humans, but they were still living memory for the eldest Elves. Even though colorism wasn't a function and we had dark-skinned High Elves/did not have blue-black Drow, we preserved the name "Dark Elves" due both to their curse and to make players think about words like "light" and "dark" and how they relate to the way we perceive morality and value. They were set in contrast to Corellon, a god who was depicted as a sort of very pale, white-haired, alabaster-skinned god in silks who clutched a harp to his chest with his right arm and held a bloody sword in a bloody left hand, the only pop of color. To most Elves in the setting, this simply read as a symbol of how their peaceful, beautiful people were also capable of terrible vengeance and incredible violence if injured. To Dark Elves - and the players, who obviously saw a variety of real-world Marxist and racial parallels - it had much more sinister implications. We maintained the matriarchal values from FR Drow culture, figuring that to be a logical development in a society of revolutionaries against traditional power structures, but excised all the weird BDSM fantasy poo poo that got rolled into that right alongside the "racially evil" shtick, because we wanted to actually deal with matriarchy as a concept rather than reducing it to fetish fodder or "the bad guys are matriarchs because matriarchy is stupid". Not perfect, and there's things I'd change or develop differently if we did it over, but I think it served (at least, from 19 year-olds who weren't game designers) for an alternative take on the core Elf mythos that came closer to the complexities of a believable history.
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May 19, 2019 10:10
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I'd say you succeeded. Your alternate elf cultures are cool and interesting. I run a lot of Apocalypse World games, both one-shots at cons (or when I'm play-testing hacks or re-skins) and as campaigns. I don't remember where I heard the original suggestion, but I use the "adjectives" method whenever starting a game: I ask each player, "Give me an adjective or word that comes to mind when you think 'apocalypse.'" I'll also generally give the table some way to individually or collectively veto a word such that if someone says "Zombies!!!" and all the other players groan because zombies have been done to death we can do something else. It can also help avoid subjects that one or more of the players find uncomfortable, though to date I've never had anybody do anything that would invoke this. Anyway, once I have the adjectives, I quickly hammer out a conceptual world where they all fit together. I describe this to the players in broad strokes, just to set the tone. During character creation (especially during the Hx round, where the history of the relationships between the PCs are established), I ask a bunch of questions of the players - specifically with an eye towards incorporating those adjectives into the emerging narrative. This method is great because all of the players have buy-in from the very beginning. It has also produced some fantastic settings. The first one-shot I ran was "Arid, Lawless, Tribal, and Mutated." It was pretty Mad-Max, until the 3-armed gunslinger showed up and things got weird and awesome. My first campaign was "Cloudy, Damp, Moldy, Fiery, and Animal-Infested," so I set the game in post-apocalyptic Appalachia - the game started in a hold whose industry centered around an old coal-gasification plant. It drizzled constantly, everything rusted, rotted, or mildewed very quickly, and there was a super-aggressive slime-mold called "the Creep" (that could take root and grow in the human respiratory system) whose byproducts were hallucinogenic. "Cold, Dark, Vast, and Degenerate" took place on a dilapidated space station on the far side of a collapsed wormhole, long cut-off from Earth. In that campaign, we discovered that during cryo-sleep, your brain was laid bare to the psychic maelstrom - most people were bug-gently caress insane when you finally thawed them out, so there was a part of the station's inhabitants that simply cut to the chase and ate them. "Scorched, Hunted, Haunted, and Flashy" took place in "Abilene," a shining city on a blasted plain. Abilene had a functioning (if creaky) Tokamak reactor, so power was effectively free - it was all glitz and neon. The power also maintained "the Grid," which was the only thing keeping out the ghosts. This produced one of the best answers from a player I think I've ever had - since there was no PC Hardholder, I decided that Abilene was run by an executive council called "the Jury," and most of the PCs had some connection to its members as patrons or enemies. When I asked the player of the Brainer, "So what's Burroughs' connection to the Jury?" the player thought for half a second before stating unequivocally, "I'm on the Jury." Well, of course you are! And from that point forward the game had a political dimension that I had not envisioned when we first sat down. My current campaign is "Primitive, Religious, Shadowy, and Tormented" and sees a rigidly orthodox faith contending with the existence of literal demons in a feudal-tech world plunged into perpetual darkness. The orthodoxy believes that the darkness and the demons are god's punishment for mankind's sins, and are full-on flagellants-and-inquisitors crazy. But out in the countryside, the "Appeasers" have decided that safety demands sacrifice and have instituted lotteries for who among them will be given to the demons such that the rest may live. Then there are the Dammerung, who say, "gently caress this, let's fight the demons," and everybody views them as dangerously heretical lunatics. A absolutely love the challenge that this method gives me as a GM. I literally have no idea what the story will be about until we get rolling, and incorporating details as we go in a way that hangs together produces some really satisfying gaming experiences. Players go nuts when given a little encouragement, and come up with some really creative and cool ideas that just maker the whole soup better. I've done maybe 15 of these over the years and they've all been radically different. If you're even halfway decent at improv, I highly recommend giving it a try. Ilor fucked around with this message at 16:03 on May 19, 2019 |
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May 19, 2019 15:59
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The setting I run in is actually inherited from a friend who passed the GM torch to me. They told me I could just redo the whole thing but I have a personal thing where I don't like outright retconning something established. Also the original conceit of "these landmasses are long dead leviathan monsters" is very cool. Most of my setting building is done largely on the fly, except for the things that my players aren't really near. The closest thing to them that I've put more thought into are primarily orc tribes that come from the neighboring steppes into the forest towns to trade. These are roughly based on reading about the tribes that had control of the Silk Road in Central Asia from ancient-to-mid history (if you've ever played the GBA Fire Emblem, think the Sacae people). I wanted to dissuade from my players assuming an alignment from traditionally evil races, which is why their primary antagonists have been largely humans or corrupted humanoids and they've had mostly friendly interactions when encountering "monstrous" races. Almost everything else is just vague concepts that I thought would be cool like "this viking area that one character is from couldn't sustain an Underdark so it just Is The Underdark", or "this area that sees a lot of death is overlooked by a death-worshipping holy city with an evergrowing citadel to commemorate the fallen." I'm excited for my players to get to these places but yeah my priorities are all sorts of backwards in this regard.
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May 19, 2019 19:03
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Cantorsdust posted:To complicate matters, there are different factions in the moon city representing the various attitudes towards colonialism in general. The default seeks to "uplift" the natives as "the moon-man's burden" while heavily exploiting them in the process. But others argue for stopping such exploitation altogether--even if it means a decline in living standards/loss of power in the Capital. Still others seek to not just establish colonies for resource exploitation but ultimately annex and incorporate them into the Empire as true Imperial provinces and Imperial citizens, not just second-class colonists. Others are more xenophobic and would like to eliminate all life on the planet entirely, paving the way for its "resettlement" with proper moon folk. Dude yes! Ecoterrorist infiltration and stuff would be amazing. Why didn't I come up with that? Cantorsdust posted:The moon city needs something from the planet--magical energy/crystals? slaves for blood magic rituals? more mundane raw resources?--and it's up to the players and others like them to go get it. I like where you went with the magical energy. My original conceit had been that the energy was directly harvested from the core and just like directed along some leyline type conduit to the moon but it makes for more interesting resource dependency if I make it a mined crystal. So instead I think the conduit directly harvesting the core was the plan but it failed and caused the planet to be cracked but it did createdmagic crystals that can to be mined and are basically magic batteries. I originally only had food as the primary exploitation motive but more resources makes for more interesting things. Plus it'd be interesting loot for a party, especially as someone who isn't a fan of giving out fat piles of gold. More interesting to give out valuable things that aren't really useful directly and need to be liquidated or traded or something along those lines. This even goes further and lets me structure the basic progression of a whole long-term campaign: players start out planet-side, basic-rear end nobody PCs with a license to prospect for crystals in frontier areas (most of the planet at this point, since the lion's share of colonies had been abandoned for reasons I will need to re-assess given these changes), they progress along low-level-type content and dungeon crawls and maybe get noticed by someone important and end up getting involved with the moon-city to a greater degree. Eventually they could even get access to travel there (expensive and difficult because I don't like no-strings-attached teleportation - I could outline how it works in my world if anyone is interested) and that'd setup some higher-level stuff. You asked the right questions to get me moving forward in a good direction. Resting Lich Face fucked around with this message at 22:12 on May 19, 2019 |
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May 19, 2019 21:54
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I give worldbuilding a lot of flack for being a masturbatory exercise combining all the pedantry of a fanwiki with the insularity of a game you'll never play. That said, we all do it, and I have a setting I'm never going to get to do anything with so I may as well share and let anybody have at it. This is a pulp sci-fi weird fiction setting built for a variety of session focuses. The idea is to enable space-fantasy characters that stop just short of having regular magic. The theme of the setting is a lost human colony that has developed without contact from any other interstellar involvement -- whether or not that exists at all. Narya (named for Gandalf's ring of fire, but I'm very open to better names) is a tidally locked planet in orbit of a red star. It has no natural satellites of its own. The planet's day side is a lethally hot desert while the night side is a frozen ice cap. There is a band of, technically, habitable territory around the terminator where liquid water can exist. Stout cities have been built here as the air currents moving from the hot side of the planet to displace the cold result in frequent, cataclysmic storms. Being tidally locked means that the planet has no natural night or day and the habitable bands are locked in perpetual dusk and dawn. The two sides of the world are each dominated by one hegemonic nation, the pair of which are in a perpetual cold war. Travel from one side to the other is difficult and usually done by crossing over the ice sheet on the night side near the poles. So, while no one would choose to live here, the world was colonized because humanity needed new worlds and this one had earthlike gravity and earthlike atmosphere. The liquid oceans near the terminator have complex ecosystems, but there's essentially no native life on the land except what humans clones when they colonized. Time has not been kind to the world's inhabitants, and they have lost much. The first thing they lost was their interstellar colonization fleet, how and why are unresolved mysteries. Space launch platforms exist on the world, but sit relegated to historical study. Wrapping the world is a dense, hazardous debris field and further out are derelict space craft and stations. Sometimes these come crashing down to the world (where they form valuable dungeons full of salvage.) This is the source of Dragoons, mech suits that are highly sought by pseudo-knights that fight as mercenaries. Others are content to become Augs, Mad Max style body modification enthusiasts that are happy to weld a nuclear reactor into themselves and then see how much robot stuff it can power. More cataclysms befell the world. An AI once guided mass swarms of nanomachines, until for lost reasons, it went mad, then shut down. The nanomachine swarm retreated into the world, literally. Veins of grey goo are mined in dangerous prospects, if not handled with care, they will assimilate animal life, turning it into a source of biomechanical monsters. But the swarms can be re-purposed to produce magic-adjacent effects as well by nanogineers. A few people, no doubt half mad, even build themselves suits of armor from the nanomachines and connect with the dormant AI, becoming antennaes, something like a paladin and a Sentai Ranger. One influence was Metal Hurlant / Heavy Metal -- creating a setting where as many cataclysms as possible could have happened in the past. An attempt to reclaim the ocean found a man-o-war like colony organism, but turned it into a gestalt sapience somewhere between a god and the internet. Some of the original colonists operate secret bases frozen into the night side of the world. And the cities are polluted by crime and industry, densely packed pockets where people can eke out a livelihood. VVV: As a statement of contrition, I do know what boustrophedon means and have used it in prose before. I hope that I'm no longer such an immature rear end in a top hat as to be branded as that guy though. ZorajitZorajit fucked around with this message at 00:38 on May 21, 2019 |
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May 20, 2019 21:13
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ZorajitZorajit posted:I give worldbuilding a lot of flack for being a masturbatory exercise combining all the pedantry of a fanwiki with the insularity of a game you'll never play. Also, aren't you the boustrophedon guy?
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May 20, 2019 22:34
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Torchlighter posted:It's especially important the you avoid semitic implications with your version of dwarves given the parallel of Nazi propaganda to, well, semitic peoples. Absolutely agreed on these points, and worth developing. As far as the points brought up that I’m navigating through, I have a few thoughts. To start, the dwarfs started out because I’m a huge fan of Chaos Dwarfs and love those huge-hat wearing beardos, but as I’m writing, I keep moving further from the idea. As much as allegory is possible in designing a game about miniatures, the central idea was to set them as a menace of capital and labor exploitation, with individuals looking to claim any resources and move them into “productive” ends. Changing them from a species to a philosophical background might make it easier: they went to exploit resources beneath the world, became further and further radicalized in ideals due to the conditions and occasional integration of other similar folks seeking resources, and eventually came to the conclusion of “all things are resources, thus all things can be owned and used in acquisition of resources and advancement, and thus all things must be so.” Reading the above, and comparing to fash ideas and the hypothetical neckbeard who is “just asking questions”, it would be really dumb to use dwarfs because of the history of semitic coding in the genre. Pointing to an established connection to the above city and making it clear that this is not an inherent aspect, but rather something people signed up for and which is really, viscerally wrong can work. At the moment, they’re shelved beyond mechanic testing. Nobility, at least in the context of this weird city, is handled both by hereditary wealth and the new exploitative capitalist class. A noble title is nothing more than a certain amount of wealth and recognition by peers - to give them a role, I think the philosophical argument aspect of powerful individuals in place of religion is my current direction. In a city where alternate times and historical city-ending events both have to have occurred (Because ”the Ruined City” implies both that it must be an existing city and that it must have experienced ruination), the nobility and governance exist primarily to push their version of history (and thus, reality) onto the populace. Organization-wise, there’s a few major players that I’ve detailed out.
As far as the unique challenges of minis games and worldbuilding: I’m restricted in terms of what exists and what I can sculpt, especially if I ever release it. Bearing in mind what exists commercially - as well as what I can get rights for in any pictures I take - is a major hurdle. The fungal undead have all either been hand-sculpted or done via major conversion work, for example, and I have queries out to numerous companies for permission to use models.
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May 21, 2019 04:02
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Torchlighter posted:On a related note, Tolkien's portrayal of dwarves was obviously Semitic in nature, and carried through to a number of fantasy books, notably Terry Pratchett's, but where did the pop culture trope of dwarves being Scottish originate? Some people say R.A. Salvatore, some people say Warcraft 2.
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May 22, 2019 07:17
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I base everything on songs. I literally just spent an hour writing the first draft of a PBTA hack based on Springsteen albums like Born to Run: melodramatic, over the top, slightly urban fantasy/horror about petty criminals & losers trying to escape New Jersey. How can you go wrong with locations like Jungleland, The Darkness on the Edge of Town, and the Badlands (not the ones in Glorantha) and characters like The Magic Rat? And the Chicken Man? I’m using the Gaslight Anthem’s 59 Sound for a silly Christmas episode of Monster of the Week where they fight Jacob Marley’s ghost. I’ve spent 16 years planning an Unknown Armies game based on The Hold Steady album Seperation Sunday, making Holly an Epideromancer who ascends as the Naked Goddess. Then i’m gonna turn it into a full setting based on all their songs. Lots of murders and double crosses and surrealism. Gonna add in Thomas Disch’s Minneapolis Gothic and Emma Bull’s War for the Oaks. I just started running Monster of the Week and their song A Slight Discomfort has like 5 monsters in 5 lines: Don't it suck about the succubi, the bloodsuckers and the parasites? They're never funny and they're all so scared to die All the small talk seems like suicide, the spiderwebs with the legs and eggs and eyes They creep up from behind If I were you I wouldn't get too close I've seen how they eat and it gets pretty gross They slip their tongue and they hitch onto their host My MOTW characters are also gonna meet the Best Ever Death Metal Band Out of Denton but that’s based on a published adventure about a cursed metal album. It can only be defeated by the sacred chord from Hallelujah. I could get years out of Tom Waits (using Just the Right Bullets already) and Nick Cave. Ezra Furman’s Transangelic Exodus is about queer angels on the run from the government, but the upcoming Relics RPG already does that. Wanna do a music game like Powerchords where Dance Music works like Banality in Changeling. Count Chocula fucked around with this message at 17:03 on May 22, 2019 |
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May 22, 2019 17:00
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Can confirm, songs are good. I once got a bunch of plot elements for my long-running Shadowrun/Call of Cthulhu/In Nomine crossover from The Tea Party's "Edges of Twilight" album. Good stuff.
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May 22, 2019 18:21
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Yeah you're never gonna run out of music to rip stuff off from. Most PCs are basically 70s rock stars in personality anyway. I'm currently trying to write a fantasy/punk pbta game (working title "Who's gonna throw the toilet?") where the core theme is gently caress Off We'll Do It Ourselves, the main mechanical gimmick is passion vs obsession, and the implied setting's an ongoing slow apocalypse caused by the neglect of the comfortable people who need to have neither.
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May 22, 2019 23:40
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Elector_Nerdlingen posted:Yeah you're never gonna run out of music to rip stuff off from. Most PCs are basically 70s rock stars in personality anyway. Every Hunter and similar game I've ever run has been loosely - or very openly and closely - based on Clutch songs. For instance, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZRnyJltTTY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W74TewnAxx0
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May 23, 2019 02:13
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How do y'all handle gods/divinity/religion? My current world is sort of standard low-ish fantasy medieval Europe but with more fey than usual. I like the 'American Gods' approach of gods have power based on number of worshipers, but for this campaign I never quite got around to fleshing out a pantheon (largely because nobody wanted to play a cleric) and so religion has been very much an afterthought and not very present in the campaign. I had this idea that most people worship small, old 'gods' that might just be the spirit of a place-this village worships this ancient tree and the spirit of the river over there and some really old people still leave a bit of bread on that rock outside of town after every harvest kind of thing, but that there are also more modern, organized gods. In the country people still cling to their old pagan ways, but in the cities new and powerful gods are being worshiped and maybe even created. For some reason I have always found gods that were active in the world of humans in the Greco-Roman/norse way a bit odd, but at the same time I really like idea that your neighbor might be a god with only 2 worshipers left. I did write up a bit of a creation myth (which might just be a myth?) that I've sort of locked myself into, which definitely implies the fey and dragons at least are much older than the gods in this here bad little story: The Beginning: In the beginning, Wotan, the All Father, the wise, the mover of mountains, and Gestra, Mother of All, the wild, the sower of forests, came into Dara. They coupled and their son Forstig was to have been the kind, the just, the bringer of balance, but on the day of his birth he was born disfigured, twisted and oozing and sickly, a living abomination. Wotan and Gestra cried in their grief, and their tears became the pool of magic on which Dara floats. In their anger and their shame, they buried Forstig under the ground where he writhes, shaking the world and the sea of magic in his pain and his loneliness. It is said the most ancient of elves were born after the last time Forstig shook the world, drowning it in his parent’s tears. In his grief, Wotan created the humans, the dwarves, and the orcs in his image-hard as stone, tough as iron. Gestra in turn made the elves, the gnomes, and the halflings to console her in her sorrow. These are not the only creatures of Dara, for it was not an empty land when Wotan and Gestra came into it. They found there dragons and fairies and spirits which were ancient even then-creatures which know of gods much older than these two-and much more besides. E: There's tons of great situations and stories and fairies and poo poo in traditional folk music and stuff too. Sometimes an image or a line just sticks in my brain and turns into a whole plot arc: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTEcH3lt7zs "How your sweet lips would sing, saying I was a king Whose crown had been stolen away We'd get what was mine, just a little more time A little more out of my pay" Kaiser Schnitzel fucked around with this message at 02:36 on May 23, 2019 |
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May 23, 2019 02:32
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If we're posting songs, this one describes a beginning shadowrunner falling into the business: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZxLMNz3lsY You play a little rough but I never knew you were after me Now even when I'm alone I feel like somebody's watching me I couldn't smell the smoke and now I'll watch the flames I couldn't push myself to quit, oh this dangerous game There's a reason people die out here I can't keep living this way I've been running so long These shadows start to feel like home I know it's backwards Been scared so long Can't recall what I started running from What am I becoming? You tell me "that's enough," but I got a hunch I'll be back again Even if I could escape, I'm paying with something I shouldn't spend I couldn't smell the smoke and now I'll watch the flames I locked myself out here again, oh this fruitless game All these people are gonna die out here I can't keep living this way I've been running so long These shadows start to feel like home I know it's backwards Been scared so long Can't recall what I started running from What am I becoming?
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May 23, 2019 03:02
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Wrestlepig posted:I developed a pretty quick method for developing a setting for Apocalypse World, which would work with most one-shots that can handle excess. this works really well because the only things that matter are the things that are interesting to a player.
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May 23, 2019 03:03
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Elector_Nerdlingen posted:Yeah you're never gonna run out of music to rip stuff off from. Most PCs are basically 70s rock stars in personality anyway. Can we collaborate? Is it going to be strictly punk or will there be Velvet Goldmine style glam crossover like Bowie working with Iggy and Lou? Micheal Moorcock’s The Great Rock & Roll Swindle combines the literal Sex Pistols with Jerry Cornelius (who’s sidekick in the books is based on Lemmy): http://gnomeship.blogspot.com/2012/08/the-great-rock-n-roll-swindle.html
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May 23, 2019 03:07
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Loomer posted:Every Hunter and similar game I've ever run has been loosely - or very openly and closely - based on Clutch songs. For instance, The second link was already visited for me and I knew what song it would be, you're a good egg. I'm seeing Clutch in 12 days, can't wait.
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May 23, 2019 03:30
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Curse of Milhaven by Nick Cave, based on a Peter Straub short story, is a perfect MOTW/Hunter adventure. It’s got: an escalating series of murders, red herrings, NPCS, a villain with a cool motivation... Red Right Hand is cliche but good for a big bad Nebraska by Springsteen is about a literal Murder Hobo: he just wanders around killing for no reason Bunch of Nick Cave songs are similar
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May 23, 2019 08:06
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Count Chocula posted:Red Right Hand is cliche but good for a big bad I did a 5 or 6 game d&d series in the 90s that was blatantly this and nobody noticed. I haven't listened to nick cave for ages but now I wanna do curse of millhaven in coc or motw or something. What was her motive though, from memory it's just "they all gotta die" because she's crazy (or maybe possessed?) I only listened to the song but isn't it just she admits its her doing it and then the ambiguous like my eyes aint green and my hair aint yellow, its more like the other way around Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 09:48 on May 23, 2019 |
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May 23, 2019 09:39
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If I was running it i’d probably track down the original short story, which I assume explains this, but I feel like the song does have enough for a one shot. I took that last one as her disguising herself. But yes, I would say she’s just ‘crazy’. Or, like myself, she’s an existentialist who views death as inevitable & is just hurrying it along. But i’d go with crazy or possessed. Maybe a minion of the Res Right Hand. If one is seeking a genocidial villain, I can suggest eliminating life to eliminate pain & suffering. How’d you do Red Right Hand? Literally a ‘man, a god, a ghost, a ghoul’ who manipulates people? Like I know those are all things you can be in D&D with stats. He reminds me of King’s Randall Flagg or Mr Needful/Leland Gaunt. Even Stephen King isn’t above this technique, his ultimate big bad is just named after King Crimson. I’m told Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure uses a similar technique. The new MOTW book has a blues adventure with a very long Spotify playlist . I think The Goon RPG is probably close to a Tom Waits RPG, since the comic is partly based on our songs. Count Chocula fucked around with this message at 14:09 on May 23, 2019 |
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May 23, 2019 14:06
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Count Chocula posted:How’d you do Red Right Hand? Literally a ‘man, a god, a ghost, a ghoul’ who manipulates people? Like I know those are all things you can be in D&D with stats. He reminds me of King’s Randall Flagg or Mr Needful/Leland Gaunt. 20 years ago and it was pretty cliche, but... I just did the Walkin' Dude with a dusty black coat as the villain in a cusp-of-industrial kinda world. The devil himself (red skin hooves and pitchfork guy), walking up and down upon the earth, recruiting. Only part he can't hide with magic is his right hand. There's always a huge dramatic storm when he arrives in an area. His schtick was to secretly gently caress stuff around until heroes showed up, then demonstrate that you couldn't trust knights in shining armor pretending to help for the glory, but you could trust him to fix the problem (PCs as cogs in his plan). I did the "disappearing land" thing literally. Once he'd got people on-side, the area... went away. e: And using the best ever death metal band out of denton as antagonists is... holy poo poo, I love it. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 02:42 on May 24, 2019 |
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May 24, 2019 00:21
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It’s not my idea, Matt Fraction made them fight Thor in the Marvel Comics, and Tome of Mysteries already has an adventure about a cursed metal band. I’m just using the name. The more I work on my Springsteen game, the more shocked I am that nobody has used Jungleland for a setting. It’s epic as hell! I won’t quote it, but it’s basically Shadowrun or Blades in the Dark. Midnight gangs assembling to fight! Secret debts! Double crosses! The street being alive in a death waltz! The Magic Rat getting gunned down by his own dreams! The hungry and the hunted! The Maximum Lawmen - I dunno what they are but they sound like some scary Judge Dredd poo poo to throw at your players. Just total over the top criminal romance. It’s a whole setting that I don’t think I can begin to do justice to.
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May 24, 2019 04:17
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