Worldbuilding With Players in Mind

Summary: Since I’m playing with people I don’t really know, and the desire to play Dungeons & Dragons—and not some other game or some homebrew bastardization of D&D—is what brought us together, and because I don’t want to say “no” to anyone’s character idea because it doesn’t fit with my selfish vision of what the campaign should be, I’m taking a more improvisational and collaborative approach to worldbuilding in my current campaign.

I’ve created a number of “conceptual” campaign settings over the years, most of which required mechanical alterations to the game. Usually, these changes are restrictive: no gnomes, no single-class spellcasters except for rangers or eldritch knights and the like, no plate armor. Others are cosmetic (“imaginary” rather than “symbolic” to use the psychoanalytic jargon): these elves are aliens, these orcs and dwarves are created by currents of chaos energy and law energy pulsing through the depths of the planet, all spells must be cast as rituals.

When such restrictive alterations amount to small ideas revealed through gameplay, the players might just go, “oh, that’s cool,” because that’s all it is: a twist on something we all already know about D&D, a sigh of new life breathed into a well-worn concept. But when they are big ideas that require major mechanical changes, or when they restrict the choices a player can make about their character, the results are a little more mixed. You start to realize why certain mechanics exist in the first place. It is rare that a player who is not a good friend will say, “sure, I’ll read your 50 page word document before the first session!” And when it’s already hard enough to find players, I don’t want to tell that player who loves gnomes for some reason that there are no gnomes in the world.

So with this most recent campaign I’ve taken a much more improvisational and collaborative approach to worldbuilding. I’ve ditched the preliminary worldbuilding along with the question, “what is this game about?” in favor of allowing a constellation of small ideas to cohere through gameplay. I’m playing with the races, classes, and rules presented in the core rulebooks (D&D as gaming lingua franca). My preference is for human-centric (anthropocentric?) parties and worlds, but my players came to the table with their own ideas: an elf ranger, two halfling bards, and a gnome druid. They all have great backstories, too: an elf supremacist death cult, a halfling sibling rivalry, a community of gnome druids chased from their forest. Since I’m trying to be a good DM, my first thought was not, “ugh, this is messing with my idea for this campaign.” It was, “in what sort of world could these characters and backstories coexist?”

I can’t come to the table with such rigid ideas about what my world is like that I reject player input. I can’t expect the players to play the game the way I want to play it while ignoring the way they want to play. I can’t force them to respect the integrity of my precious creation while stifling their own creativity and asking them to compromise their own creations. So those backstories and all of the assumptions that go along with an elf, two halflings, and a druid becoming friends gets woven into the fabric of the world.

This doesn’t require too much radical change if I don’t bring my preconceived notions of what this campaign setting should be like to the table in the first place. Worldbuilding is fun, creating campaign settings is fun, but it’s fun mostly for the person doing the creating, especially if that world does more than just tweak players’ understanding of what a D&D world is supposed to look like. So for this new campaign I’m running, I’m implementing only those “cosmetic” changes, bringing out what’s weird or interesting in the default assumptions of the game as presented in the three core rulebooks, and integrating the implications of character backstories into the fabric of the game world. 

Easy Map Making

Crap, I need a map, and I need it by tonight.

My players are about to sneak into a pirate den and attempt to steal a ship. They have no idea how to sail a ship, but luckily for them, there is a good chance that the ship will be out to sea anyway. As a consolation, the pirates' treasure horde, if they find it, will contain books on sailing and a map of the local coastal area.

I have a hex map, made with Hexographer, that I use for overland travel, but I wanted to give them something more in-universe for their characters to find. So how do I go about making a map that looks somewhat realistic?

Because I want realistic maps with believable geography, the first thing I do when making any campaign map is consult Google Earth for an interesting location. For this map, I turned South America upside down:

Then I messed with the contrast to make it more traceable and printed out a grayscale version. I made a makeshift lightbox by putting a lamp under a glass table so I could easily trace the outline of the coast. There is a sheet of white printer paper over the printout of the map.

I traced the map:

As you can see, I moved the Falkland Islands up and to the right and fudged the coastline a little bit. I also added an archipelago extending from the tip of Tierra del Fuego almost to the South Sandwich Islands. Hopefully at this point it is already unrecognizable as upside-down Patagonia.

The next step involved roughing up the map a little:

The thing that makes this post great is the beautiful photography. Next I scanned it and opened it in GIMP (Photoshop? Aren't you fancy). I'm going for something similar to a medieval portolan chart:

I fiddled with the brightness and contrast, used the scissor tool to select the land areas, and colorized them. Next I added some rhumb lines and filled in a few cities. Because I'm lazy and didn't want to come up with 50 city names on the fly, I decided that at some point they will learn that the map is magical and perhaps events, spells, or interactions will reveal hidden names and rhumb lines in the future. Here's the map:

I used miles and an approximate km equivalent because this is a roll20 game and my players are in multiple countries. I debated using an in-world measurement (leagues? li? let's just keep it simple). Not brilliant, but good enough, right? With a little effort, you could do something great with this method.

Thoughts on Research (and Some Other Nonsense)

I’m currently working on a Victorian-inspired campaign setting. I know, there are like at least—and this is just a rough guesstimate (not even a precise guesstimate)—forty eight thousand of these out there already. Why make another one? I’ll get into that later. But right now I want to talk about research.

I studied a lot of 19^th century British literature (not just Victorian) in grad school, even published a paper, so I’m having no problem finding source material. I’m going as far back as the Romantic era, Coleridge in particular, since Gothic literature continued to influence poets and artists up to the turn of the 20^th century. Poe’s in there, too, and all of the French poets he inspired, and Marx’s Capital (lots of vampires and werewolves and ghosts in control of the arcane constructs that are colonizing humanity); I’ve been reading everything from Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna to China Miéville.

I’ve got about 30 books, articles, poems, and films in my “Appendix N” right now. It’s like writing my thesis all over again, and it’s easy to get bogged down, or just to get so into reading and learning and absorbing information, that I never get around to actually writing. So here’s what I’m doing about it: I read a source, I take some notes, and then I don’t look back at it again.

I’m trying to keep the research at arm’s length for a few reasons. Most practically, constantly referring back to what I’ve read means I’m not writing. But I also don’t want to just put a fantasy paintjob on the Victorian era, faithfully reproducing historical details in D&D terms. What I want is to get a feel for the time and to capture the major themes without just doing “Fantasy London” or whatever. I have zero interest in steampunk; my interest lies more along the lines of the use of Gothic aesthetic figures as a way to describe and come to terms with the new social and economic order taking shape in this era. Hopefully this approach will result in a game more interesting than gears on a corset and goggles on a top hat, but steers clear of a super serious, not-your-grandma’s, grim’n’gritty reflection on class struggle, slavery, imperialism, and patriarchy.  It’ll be pretentious¹, how could it not be, I’m making it, but shit, I like games that let you go into a cave and kill everything and not have to think about the orc babies.

So anyway, the research I’m doing will help me get into the thematic space I need to be in to write this thing, but I don’t want to be shackled to notions of historical accuracy, so once I’ve read something, I’m not going back to it.  I have to remind myself that this isn’t scholarship; it’s a game.

_____

1. Pretentious, like having footnotes in a blog post. Reminds me of this classic from Jeff Rients. God, I can’t believe that post is almost a decade old. 

Central Asia-influenced Campaign Setting

• Imagine if the Plague of Justinian (541-542) wiped out 75% of the population of the Roman Empire, sending the Mediterranean and Europe back to the Neolithic Era. (think Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Years of Rice and Salt)
• The starting town could be in a Kashmir/Hindu Kush/Torugart Pass-type crossroads where there is something interesting in all directions
• East: The western frontier of China
• Northeast: Smaller warring kingdoms
• North: the endless steppes, nomadic tribes
• Northwest: more steppes
• West: desert, scattered city-states
• Southwest: the Sasanian Empire
• South: Hindu Kush Mountains (Dwarves?)
• Further South: Greco-Indian Kingdoms of Punjab: remnants of Alexander the Great’s empire—this is where you have statues of the Buddha done in Greek style. Descendants of an ancient elven empire?
• Southeast: Tibet
• Silk Road: Desert oases, caravanserai, cave monasteries.  Nomads settled into cities built by older civilizations. 

 

Wizard, hireling, fighter, cleric

Classes

·         Cleric:  I can see the cleric’s role in society being the disposal of corpses in towers of silence (give them a spell to summon scavenger birds?) in addition to their traditional function as fighters of the undead. Fire and Water are agents of purification. Corpses are a host for druj, which reanimates impure corpses.

·         Fighter: Cataphracts, nomadic mounted archers, guardians of caravans, bandits.

·         Magic-User: The Greeks and Romans claimed Zoroaster invented magic and astrology.  Ostanes introduced it to the West by accompanying Xerxes in his war against Greece. 

·         Thief: Explorers, merchants, highwaymen, among other things.

·         Elf: The Xian, celestial beings said to live in the Tian Shan mountain range

·         Dwarf: The Yaksha of Hindu mythology (caretakers of treasure buried below the earth)

Alignment

·         Law: Asha, created in the world through good deeds, etc.

·         Chaos: Druj, the opposing force that seeks to destroy the world (Although I personally don’t like the use of “law” and “chaos” as synonyms for “good” and “evil”: Maybe instead of the Law/Neutrality/Chaos system, a simple Good/Evil system to reflect the dualism of the religion?)