How do you come up with your world?

[Kensan_Oni]

Right now, I am in middle of a conundrom.

I had been designing a space pirate game, and it was coming along great till I lost the hard drive it had been stored on. Having only a breif notes on what statistics I was using, I had to recreate my system from scratch. This time around, I decided it might be worthwhile to convert it over to a fantasy game so I could hack around with the special ability system, which to that point had been non-existant.

Well, I am about two weeks from finishing the 'first draft' of the system, and I have the magic system in place, and can even create new feilds of magic when I get to start playing it. Only one small problem.

While my Space Pirate game had a really good, if short, backstory, this new game was lacking even a name a few days ago. I now need to have to come up with a sample world so that at least my players have something to play with till I get a more official one up and running.

So, going backwards, how does one create a world for a system that is already in place?

[clehrich]

I don't think one can answer that in the abstract, or anyway not usefully.

Since you seem keen on it, why don't you tell us about your magic system?  That's probably a good place to start building a world, at least for the purpose of having something for your players.

Incidentally, sorry to hear about the hard drive crash.  That seriously sucks.

[Dangerboy]

Take a look at your skills and your magic system, or anything that isn't really based in the modern world. My friends and I were trying to make a generic skill set for a sci fi game and realized that in order to create a skill set, we need a setting of sorts. How can we have a skill in robotics if we're not even sure if there will be robots? My friend said he already had the skill set for a fantasy game laid out and when I asked him if there's a magic skill, he said no, indicating that in his setting magic is something completely different that mastering a sword, or riding a horse. Your mind may already have a setting of sorts in mind, you just have to find it. :)

[Kensan_Oni]

Since you seem keen on it, why don't you tell us about your magic system?  That's probably a good place to start building a world, at least for the purpose of having something for your players.

Well... basicly, it works the same as the skill system in a lot of ways. There is a primary magic statistic, called Source (Although unlike other attributes, it can have 0 points in it), and several magic skills. These skills all do one minor effect that can be called upon for free (Such as extra damage for swordsmen, levitation, free survival successes, and so forth)

So, in order to create a magic effect (Flying, throwing Fireballs, Throwing a Bastardsword, bearly missing the theif, so on and so forth), you roll your skill and aim towards a difficulty. If you succeed or surpass the difficulty, you do the effect, with perhaps a bonus for a good roll.

My sample magic skills have been borrowed from a couple of sources. There is Geomancy, which uses the power of the land to do damaging and stunning effects. There is Elementalism, which needs no real explination. There is Wing and Flight, for fliers. There is Weaponmastery, which allows you to do stunts with yout signiture weapon. There is Assasian's Gift, which allows you to do assasian like menuvers, like disappearing from plain sight, and sneaking around. There is Dancing, which memorizes opponents and creates minor illusions, and so on and so forth.

Each magic is devided into at the moment four catagories, depending on what it does. This provides guidelines for creating new skills.

So... that's the specifics... without being to specific. ;'D

[clehrich]

Hmm.  I was hoping it would be a lot more complicated than that.  Okay, I'll make it complicated.

My own inclination (which you should certainly take with a BIG grain of salt) is to assume that all these types of magic are essentially schools of some sort, developed over millennia by different people.  Assume that there are some basic facts about magic that are pretty much known and accepted, and then assume that beyond this there is very little agreement about anything.

Next, count up the total number of schools you've got and subtract two or three.  This is the number of major cultural blocks available.  If you want my advice, don't make them "races" (or better, species), but rather just folks -- if you want, they can be folks with funny ears or something, but basically folks is folks.

Now whip up some instant cultures.  Take a well-known fantasy culture, species, or the like: Tolkien's elves, dwarves, Rohirrim, etc. are good, but there are zillions of others.  Or take a much-cliched actual historical group: favorites for this are generally the English under the feudal system, pre-Tokugawa Warring States Japan (lotsa samurai etc.), Arabs (mysteriously all alike and very into religion), and Zulus (I think they're basically token black guys -- noble nude savages running around with spears preaching about lions and honor, that nonsense).  Pick one of these for each culture.  

Now take some really obvious and famous element and throw it away, and then replace it with something completely incongruous and irrelevant from another culture.  So for example, take the cliche Samurai and throw out ritual suicide -- then replace it with Aztec ritual human sacrifice.  Yum!

[Check out Tad Williams doing this.  He takes Hobbits, makes them Eskimos who ride sheep, and nobody seems to notice.  Easy!]

Now roll some dice and assign each magic school a primary cultural base.  Yes, there will of course be cultures with more than one; that's deliberate.  Do this totally randomly -- do not, under any circumstances, assign the Weaponsmith Magic to the Warrior Culture or anything of the sort or you will get instant cheez-whiz.  

The whole point is that you need a certain number of totally incongruous elements that just don't make any sense when you look at them at this point.  So if you rolled randomly that the samurai were going to be weaponsmiths, don't allow that -- decide instead that they're going to be the home of the school of Wind Masters or something.

Now look for anything that stands out as making really perfect sense, that really hangs together.  Fix that -- or rather, break it.  If you find that the guys who were sort of starting to sound like Elves are getting heavily into wood and trees and stuff, make them have annual festivals where they burn and pillage other people's forests or something.

Be sure to add at least a little pointless viciousness, preferably directed inward.  It's all very well to go to war with other people, but there's nothing to create depth and interest like a good old-fashioned civil hatred.

Now roll dice again.  1-2 the school of magic controls or serves the dominant political faction (king, emperor, etc.).  3-4 the school of magic is flatly opposed thereto.  5-6 it basically claims to be neutral but spends a lot of time mucking about in the political shadows.  If you have two schools of magic in one culture, don't let them have the same choice.

Set up two big cities in each major culture region, and align them slightly against each other along different axes in each case.  So if this culture is ruled by an absolute monarchy that trades in gold and influence, the secondary city pays its taxes but focuses primarily on trade in fish and tries mostly to stay under the radar.  And so on.  Make it different each pair of cities.

Now comes the slightly complicated part.  Every major city, all whatever number of them, contains a completely random percentage population of people from each culture.  You can populate each with let's say 75-85% of the home gang, depending on how xenophobic you've made them.  But the rest are a mishmash.  Roll some dice and get a nice distribution, so that it's not like every city has 3% each; you want this city to have 7% of these guys but like .09% of those guys.  Multiply this by about 10-25,000 for a big city, and 1/4 that for a small one.  Pick three cities (randomly) to make have 100,000 or so, and don't let them be more than 65% homogeneous.

Now back to the schools of magic.  Every city has a faction, a political faction I mean, aligned with a school of magic.  These factions are all in a sense at odds, but they know that "united we stand" and all that.  The other factions around are, of course, the dominant culture, the dominant political system (king, etc.), and then a little bit every other culture-group.  And the merchants, of course, although they're also divided.  Oh, and we forgot religion, but let's set that one aside for the moment.

So when you drop your players into the middle of one of the really big cities, they're immediately members de facto of about 15 different factions, and if they're tough or rich everyone's going to care which factions they side with.  There is now no way at all that they can turn around without being involved in something messy.  I recommend that you play off their tendency to unite as a party (aligned with whoever hires or whatever the crew) against the schools of magic demanding their factional support in a bunch of incredibly convoluted politics that you can make up on the spot.

See, that's the final trick.  With a setup that messy, you can make it all up on the fly and nobody's ever going to notice.

That's how I'd do it.  Take about 2 hours, tops.  You'll love it.  It's sort of like Dogs in the Vineyard but with large political factions rather than individuals, but when a faction is sleeping with another faction, it's baaad news.

[Kensan_Oni]

I was thinking about your suggestion, Rich, and I realized I couldn't use it as it stood.

One, it was too complicated for the way I like to run games. I'm a Star Wars kinda director. I like big pitcures, with clear cut good and evils.  A Merchant in Venice, while would be fun, is just not my kinda epic.

However, I do like the culture generation idea. That is useful and neat.

Part of me is very tempted to use the cultures of Disneyland as a basis. I mean, we have the Matterhorn, a swedish mountain culture with a yeti mythology. We have Alice in Wonderland... which if you use just straight up is  bizzare enough for anyone. You have the Snow White/Sleeping Bueaty cultural mix, which is a tad overdone, but we can mix that up. We have the Turn of the Century London group (Peter Pan/Mr. Toad/Main St.) We have the English Colonial group, the Pirate group, so on and so forth. As long as we rename them, and make all the really weird stuff be between all the sane stuff so that you have to go through the weird stuff to do anything, it should be fine!

Well, I'm back to brainstorming... talk to you later!

[Doehring]

Think of the basics the world is baised on, space pirates if I am right, your players will want to play that out.  

There will need to be some sort conflict in the system, in a perfect world there is no crime.

Having severial worlds with different governments would work sufficently.

Creating a reasource that is limited is something to fight over. Such as inhabital worlds or gold the money bases for earth a rare resource could even be something like iron in a space age.

Think of how big do you want your environment to be, is there faster than light travell, how many inhabited worlds are there, how long does it take to get from place to place, How does magic effect space travell. Is there more than one way to move faster than light.

Is space shipe combat an important thins or are weapons to weak to hurt most shipes and getting on board is the only way to attack.

How powerfull are the governments is there a super power other first wourld governments and many third world governments.

If evil needs to be predefined then there could be severial warlords that pillage worlds and enslave people.

The superpower government could be like a big brother (1984 Book) government restricting freedom in everything with people like thought police.

The pirates could be the good bad guys.

Or the governments could be striving for peace and equality but many pirates keep stealing from them for  what ever reasons and the players could be the bad guys.

If there are many planets with people on it then you could have some with few people others with many.

Economics of the people could determine they type of system that they have. Small population very pour nation or a small nation of snobs that thought they were to good to live with other people.

Alieans with such different cultures that in the middle of the day they have a break to stand on there heads like the british used to drink tea.

Humans could be the only race with bod people of humans could be the only ones with good.


I know I went a little over on this but I hope it helps

[jc_madden]

Chris,

That was some good stuff.  It reminds me a lot of the old "World Buldiers Guidbook" for 2ed AD&D.  I wore that poor book out!  This touches on something that I was  pondering since I asked about publishing rules and setting seperately.  Since it's a bit OT I'll post the rest of this thought there.

http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=13668

[Eero Tuovinen]

Didn't anybody realize that Chris was joking about the irrelevancy of creating high fantasy worlds? It seemed so clear to me! Random mixes of cultural attributes indeed...

The point of the exercise is to realize that nobody is one whit interested in this fantasy world of the week. They're thirty to a dozen. Observe:
- You, the author are not interested. You're interested in your rules system. It's one and the same what kind of world you get, as long as it's something.
- We, the audience, don't care. We have our own favourite fantasy worlds, more than we could ever need. I personally know by memory A DOZEN fantasy world well enough to set games in. Middle-Earth, Riftworld, Rokugan, Earthsea, Young Kingdoms, Hyborian age, Hyberboria, Forgotten Realms, Ravenloft, Third Age of Exalted, mythic Europe of Ars Magica <draws breath> The point is, I wouldn't even use any of the above for most games, despite remembering enough geography, sociology and names to do so. I have more suitable ones in my draver, worlds you haven't even heard of. And you don't need to, because they don't impact anyone but my play group.
- Do you really think that your customers will care in the future? I mean, if the rules and the setting have no relationship at all, if it's just something you put in just because, why would they care?

The conclusion? If you don't have specific message or other reason or something to include a game world, let the players make or pick one. That way they get one interesting to them. They can even use Chris' method to spark the game, that'd be interesting.

Conclusion: Chris was telling us that truly, high fantasy worlds lost the point already in the seventies for the most part. The only function of the world in modern high fantasy and roleplaying is to justify the plot elements (Whee! Giant eagles save the protagonist!) and kewl powerz (This is the coolest setting ever! My character can fart fireballs!). The world is irrelevant enough that you can, truly, make one by rote, just like Chris adviced us. But why would you want to? It's easier to first pick the powerz and plot you want and then craft the world around them.

... what, he was serious? What do you know...

[jc_madden]

Well I feel moronic for getting all teary eyed over past offerings of this sort of creation process.  There is too much sarcasm here for me it seems.  I'd like to be able to read a post without wondering if I'm being somehow very subtly insulted.  When I get insulted I want it to be blunt and overt, that way my dull american mind can really get the full effect of it, and thus be more apt to take offense.

[clehrich]

Well, hang on a sec.

On the one hand, yes, Eero is sort of right.  I do think most of these fantasy worlds are silly, because crafted -- or knocked together -- mainly because of some rules system, rather than thought through from the start.  If I had my druthers, I'd create the world first and then weave out the magic and whatnot appropriate to it.

But on the other hand, I did mean what I said.  Kensan_Oni asked a legitimate question: how, given that you have a relatively generic system and a few bits you really like (in this case the types of magic), do you whip up a world-setting to fit?  And I did intend the answer to be perfectly workable.

Sure, it's a bit silly and cookie-cutter.  But Kensan didn't ask how to craft a deep and complex world in which to develop rich and intricate stories of high enchantment.  He asked how to whip up, in two weeks or less if I recall, a fantasy world that would fit his system.  He gave us one set criterion, which was that it had to have these several different kinds of magic.  So I started from there and turned the crank.

There's no insult here.  No sarcasm.  As it happens, I'm not a huge fan of this sort of thing, but it's perfectly workable.  And in fact, I have developed a world in very much this way -- there was a long thread back and forth in RPG Theory about a year ago where I talked about there being these 5 Champions (capital intended) who Save The World, and each represents the highest pinnacle of fighting ability of a Fantasy Culture, and all that.  Then, of course, they wake up 1,000 years later and discover that everything is suddenly difficult and complicated and there's really no place for them any more, but that's my deliberate spin on this sort of heartbreaker.

JC and Eero -- you're both right.  Now kiss and make up.  :-)