Articles by Danny Rupp
Danny works professionally as an architect and serves as managing editor here at CH, which means he shares many of the duties of being an editor but without the fame and recognition. He also writes about RPGs, videogames, movies, and TV. He is married to Sucilaria, and has a personal blog at Incorrect Blitz Input. (Email Danny or follow him on Twitter).
The Architect DM: Progress in Your Game World
Have you ever noticed that in most published tabletop RPG material the towns, cities, and overall civilization are kind of stagnant? Now have you ever driven down a street or been to a building campus and wondered when they would STOP doing construction on it? Our real life towns, cities, and overall civilization are very rarely in a state of stillness. When do these people build their cottages, repair their castles, and dig their mines? What I’m talking about today is introducing an element to your D&D games and RPGs that is very near and dear to the general topics I discuss in this column: Construction!
I’m sure that some time in the games I’ve run I have introduced a town beseiged by monstrous invasions that still happened to have a perfectly intact castle and city walls. Even in my current campaign I haven’t introduced the element of construction very much, with the towns in relative stillness except when it comes to events that the PCs themselves are involved with. The majority of residents in most D&D settings are most likely farmers, and if there’s one thing that farmers rarely have it’s free time. That’s because they are always working on something around their farms and more often than not it involves building something new or repairing something existing. My encouragement with this post is for you to throw a little bit of progress into your game world!
Pushing the Boundaries
Adding an element of progress into your game world isn’t just some gimmick that I’m proposing for one adventure or one location. In reality it can actually be a great element to really spice up your game and introduce new plot elements that you may not have thought of before. If you’re designing a town or even a whole kingdom for your RPG, why not look at the surrounding areas and decide that the people are expanding in one direction (or all directions, especially for those pesky & ambitious humans)? When borders are pushed conflict will invariably follow, and where there’s conflict there’s instant plot for your game to build from.
You can go with the classic and probably over-used deforestation route, or you can just have the humans expanding their farms and building structures further and further out from the town. As the people push farther into the wilderness, maybe the goblins or other natural residents of the region begin to lash out, and you have an already integrated reason for those goblin encounters you were planning on having to begin with! In this way you don’t necessarily have to create new plot points, but you might be surprised how you can tie expansion and progress into the plots you’ve already developed for your campaign. At its root expansion/colonization is change, and change is the magic stuff that can spawn plot points and build good adventures. [Read the rest of this article]
The Architect DM: Questions & Answers
While I’m gearing up and preparing to continue the Architect DM series into 2011, I decided to first put out a call for more questions on my twitter account (@Bartoneus) and see what kinds of questions you guys have when it comes to DMing and world building in your RPGs. This has worked incredibly well for me in the past, at least half of the posts in this series so far have come directly from reader questions or suggestions and I’m always looking for more topics to cover.
Today I’m going to keep it simple and simply share and respond to some of the questions I received this afternoon.
Samldanach asked, “How much damage can your average structure really take before collapsing? Assume barbarian w/axe, not explosives.”
This is one of those interesting questions that you never expect someone to ask, but when you start to think about it some interesting discussions can come up. Most structures can actually take a surprising amount of damage before collapsing, and more likely than not only certain parts of the structure will fail without the whole thing being compromised. This is especially true if we’re talking about a barbarian with an axe doing the damage – think about how much effort a person has to put forth just to hack apart a pile of fire wood. If you’re dealing with a sturdy wooden tavern or inn, the structural beams would probably be roughly 6 inches thick (round or square, either way) and even an impressively strong barbarian would have to take at least a dozen good swings at that with an axe to make any progress through it.
The great thing about games like D&D is that they let us exaggerate for effect, so if you have a person trying to destroy the inn and they start hacking away at a beam you can follow it up with the barbarian cleaving through the beam in just one or two swings and really highlight how incredibly strong the barbarian is (when he’s angry, at least). However, the problem then becomes that the entire building won’t collapse simply because a single beam has been heroically chopped in half – at its worst this would only cause a part of the floor to sag or collapse. If you start to look into stone structures then it just gets even worse, and you’d need a huge mob of people before any damage could really be done to a building using weapons like axes. All of this really just highlights how powerful fire, explosives, and magic are when it comes to doing meaningful damage to structures.
Our very own Vanir asked, “Where do babies come from (from a world-building perspective)?” [Read the rest of this article]
Personal Encounter Design Workshop
In mid-December I received a great e-mail from a reader named Brian that I talk to regularly on my twitter account, he was planning for an upcoming D&D adventure and wanted some specific help with designing an encounter. I’m not sure what exactly prompted him to send it my way, but I was more than happy to read through and share some of my ideas to help spice up his encounter.
Just today I received a follow up e-mail that he is planning to run the encounter tomorrow and that he wanted to run his updated encounter by me again. I was all to happy to oblige, and I also realized that the exchange of e-mails might be something some of you would be interested in seeing. So here it is, with his permission of course.
Here’s his original e-mail to me (with some minor edits for clarity):
I’m running the prelate module “Thunder Below”, with my party this Thursday. We are playing 3.5 d&d, and I wanted to create a challenging boss fight with this elder green dragon in the encounter. It seems like whenever we fight a boss one on party, it goes down pretty quickly
I wanted to set my fight in stages. Have the party beat the dragon down the drain, and when it reaches a certain point, have it transform or mutate into a different color of dragon, say green to black or something. And when the dragon was down to another certain point, it could also gain extra abilities right before it dies
I was also thinking of having the fight in this cleared glade in the middle of the forest, and have these random craters in the bog spew poisonous clouds at random from the earth to add some spice to the encounter.
Thoughts?
-Brian
After reading his e-mail and giving it some thought, I sent him back some of my suggestions:
Brian,
That sounds like a pretty sweet encounter! I haven’t run 3rd Edition in 8 years (and I’ve never run 3.x) but I have played in a 3.x game more recently, so I can’t really offer that much monster design advice other than to say when I did run 3E I almost always ended up just BSing the monster’s stats. It’s less satisfying as a DM, because you feel like you’re cheating, but for the most part the players should never notice (especially if you have a DM screen). What that means is – the monster won’t die too early or take too long to kill, because even though you may have a max HP for the monster, you adjust its HP (or how much damage it’s taking) round-to-round to keep the combat fun and interesting.
When you’re doing a multi-stage encounter, my advice would be to try and design the stages so that they will happen at key points in the combat – realistically a stage should change right before the party starts to get bored with the combat as it exists at the moment. If your party is really good and avoids getting bored in longer combats, then I’d say build the first stage or two on them pretty quickly so they feel the escalating of the combat and it feels like it just keeps getting cooler and cooler, then the encounter will have a much more effective climax.
Some more general suggestions – make the Dragon’s phase changes meaningful (and logical), not just changing colors for the sake of it. My suggestion would be to set the scene in the cleared glade with the bogs spewing poisonous clouds at random, a pretty interesting setting (and a dragon foe should always be interesting). Maybe at some point the players start to get the upper hand, and they push/strike the dragon back and a large poisonous bog opens – have the dragon fall in. The players might think they’ve won, or watch impatiently, but then after a nice and short dramatic pause (maybe if they start to leave the area have it happen just as they’re about to leave), and the dragon comes back out of the bog infected (and for all intents and purposes it is then a black dragon, but maybe its scales have been tarnished by the poisonous bog so it’s doesn’t appear fully black or fully green anymore).
Then I would say right before the dragon dies, maybe it gains the ability to have the bogs burst and spew forth tons of poisonous stuff, so the dragon literally turns the environment against the party just before it dies. Then right at the end maybe have it become completely covered in swamp poison goo and explode or something, but give them good warning so the party can stand back a bit if they’re quick/smart enough.
I hope this helps some, I’ve been running 4E for the last 2.5 years so I’m not sure if my encounter/monster design has become skewed by the different design philosophies, but I tried to keep it rules generic enough that it would still help.
Thanks for sharing and definitely let me know how it goes! -Danny
Brian seemed to like the advice and thanked me for providing it, and I expected that to be it. However, I was very pleased today to see a second e-mail from him with some revisions and further sharing of thoughts: [Read the rest of this article]
The Architect DM: Open Spaces, Plazas, and Holidays
It’s the end of the year and what most of us would call the “Holiday Season”, while I was considering doing a recap post about the Architect DM series so far I have instead decided to bring up a relevant topic that is quite fitting for this time of year. I’m sure there are several published pieces and posts online about incorporating holidays into your RPG game, but I’d like to discuss them with a specific focus on the location designs you use in your game. I’d also like to focus on one specific holiday trope that you’ve probably considered for your own game – if there’s a holiday/special event, the party is most likely there to experience it.
The best example that comes to my mind is in the 4th Edition D&D material in the Underdark book, the Drow capital city of Erelhei-cinlu is detailed and one of the wards inside of it has a single day of the year where undead are let loos through the whole ward while locals board themselves inside or run for their lives. This is a ridiculous, hilarious, and overall fantastic event written out in the book but in the end I had one big problem with using it. My problem was that the odds of the party being in the city for that event are incredibly low. Sure, if I use the trope then the party just has the bad luck of being there on that one day, but in general I give my party more credit than that and try to avoid using tropes like that more than once per campaign.
I Use the Term ‘Holiday’ Loosely
The best way I can think of to use the above mentioned trope but avoid it feeling too coincidental is to design “holidays” that are more regular. Instead of going with our modern day concept of a once-per-year holiday, why not design your world and cultures with monthly holidays? If we broaden the extent of the term holiday, you can begin to incorporate weekly or even daily traditions that happen and add a unique feel to the cultures that celebrate it. If you begin to use monthly or weekly events, then it is not only more likely the party will get to experience them but also more believable when it does happen. For the primary town in my D&D campaign I set up that the market square in the middle of town is only really in operation for 1 or 2 hours each day, and for the rest of the day the caravans and wagons were boarded up or set out to travel to other towns.
Open Space is a Location Too
With my personal example above, the Market Square of a town is more than just a location but also a constant reminder that the merchants are open for a select few hours a day. If we apply this concept to the Drow “Running of the Undead” from Erelhei-Cinlu, perhaps you can use the design of the city to foreshadow the event without having to resort to the party having the worst luck in the world. When I ran my party through the Drow city, I hinted at the event but the party avoided that ward anyway so I never got to use the following ideas.
Consider how much impact the given event would have, if a swarm of vicious undead are loosed on a city the elements of that city are going to adjust in a fight for survival even if it only happens once a year. Including details such as extra fortification on buildings (especially doors and windows) similar to storm doors and windows seen in hurricane regions can allude to the event without being too overt. Maybe certain streets or alleys have heavy gates that are typically left open but will clearly point to some unspoken need for protection. Hell, you could go as far as having the ground floor of every building being noticeably clawed and chewed on to the point where they’re clearly temporarily occupied or even left vacant all year round. In this way, details of the open spaces in a city can tell a party just as much about a location as the architecture of the buildings themselves.
Feel Free to Steal From Reality
Another great way to use a holiday without actually using the holiday is to borrow from what happens in real life almost year round – decoration and preparation. Think about it, if a party of adventurers showed up in your neighborhood in mid-December, would they be able to tell something special was happening at the end of the month? All of the decoration we put up for the various holidays we celebrate are a great way to covertly imply the holidays or important events of your game world while still maintaining the feel that your party isn’t the center of the universe (even though they really are, shhh! We don’t have to let them know).
A town in the midst of their yearly festival preparations can be a much more interesting setting for your game, and if you’re looking for elements for your players to contribute the specifics of the culture’s rituals and preparations are a great way for them to get involved by suggesting random or even humorous ideas. Though I do have to caution the DMs out there, if you go with this you may find yourself with a group of bird worshiping invaders that use the phrase “Raven Poop” as their common greeting (I swear, it translates into ‘Hello’ in their language). Yes, I say that from experience. Yes, they still use “Raven Poop” as their greeting. No, I will not concede to changing it, my players came up with it and are stuck with it.
Using this idea for annual holidays is easy because we are so accustomed to it, but it can just as easily work for more frequent events. The best part of this strategy is that it naturally works to build tension in your game. Going back to the Market Square concept, imagine that your party of adventurers needs to buy something and they show up at the square only to find all of the merchants are packing up and closing down for the day. They might be able to bribe one of them to re-open, or they might be told to wait until the next day. Either way you’re setting up the party for some classic interaction, and it could even be the kicking off point for an entire plot line in your game if you want it to. The party gets involved in an adventure later that day and the Rogue quickly realizes things would have been easier if they’d gotten to the merchant – “I wish I had some freaking rope!”
Happy Holidays to Everyone!
Was this a shameless way of taking a normal post and giving it a Holiday theme just because it’s December 29th? No, actually, it’s a concept I’ve been thinking about since back in the summer/fall when I ran the above mentioned Drow undercity adventure. Thank you for reading Critical Hits and my Architect DM Series. I hope you have been enjoying both and I’m confident that this series will continue well into the new year!
Click here for the rest of the Architect DM Series.
The Architect DM: Fantasy Technology & Development
In my last post I talked about how the abandonment of locations and their resettlement can be used to influence the way we design our RPG worlds. The discussion led into the idea of technologies that could be developed and subsequently lost along with a civilization, only to be rediscovered at a later date by different cultures.
I know for a fact that many people have a mental disconnect when it comes to thinking of “technology” and their typical Dungeons & Dragons game world. I often think of technology in an RPG along the same lines as psionics, there seem to be a lot of people who love to use them and a lot of people who avoid using them altogether.
When it comes to technology there is quite a bit of framework that needs to be put forward in order to discuss it adequately.For the purposes of this article I’m going to use the term ‘technology’ in a very general sense. When I say your game includes technology it doesn’t necessarily mean there are dwarves flying around in gyrocopters shooting guns at each other, but that is certainly a distinct level of technology that some games might like to have. We most often hear technology and development described in terms of the Age system, starting with the Three-age System for classifying prehistory (particularly european/mediterranean prehistory) into the Stone Age, Bronze Age, and Iron Age. One of the resources that I like using for this kind of development is the List of archaeological periods over at Wikipedia, which shows you the progression of certain ages across the various continents.
Which Period Does Your Game Take Place In?
The answer to that question is a tough thing to figure out, and a lot of people probably see it as one of the most important questions regarding their game. The answer, in my opinion, is really not that important. Even if you’re attempting to run a game in a historic setting, unless you’ve studied history extensively, you’re not going to be able to get everything right. My observations are that the implied setting of most D&D games is very strongly early-medieval in theme and sticks pretty closely to the kinds of things that were seen throughout the Iron Age. Most people don’t run D&D games using only stone or bronze tools, but you also don’t often see a castle wall lined with cannons. However, when the characters inevitably end up on a (pirate) ship in the pirate ship-themed adventure, you bet your ass there are going to be cannons there!
How to Include Technology in Your Game
The way I see it there are two methods of inclusion for any particular type of technology into your game. The first method is that the technology exists in what I’ll call an Uncommon-to-Common way, meaning that if the PCs wanted to find this technology they could and it would be fairly reasonable for them to be able to reproduce it or purchase it if they so desire. One key distinction that I have to make is that this doesn’t mean your entire game world has access to this technology. One of the aspects of world building that I think is often overlooked by DMs and players is that civilization doesn’t develop at the same rate in every location. The example I used in my last post illustrates this perfectly, the Romans had means of creating and using Concrete (even advanced methods which allowed it to cure while underwater) which were lost when the empire collapsed and were not seen again until hundreds of years later. [Read the rest of this article]
Review – Tron: Legacy
I am a particular brand of Tron fanboy because the original movie came out the year before I was born and I wouldn’t really understand much about computers or programming until many years after I had the movie decently memorized. I’ve loved the original movie for pretty much my entire life, even writing about my love affair with the movie and how I can use it to know if I’ll really like someone right away. It should be no surprise that I went to see Tron: Legacy on the day of its release, but I am a bit surprised that we decided to see it in 3d and that it turned out to be a good decision.
Tron: Legacy is a fitting sequel to the original for a handful of reasons, not the least of which is the fact that it makes the idea of fighting each other with frisbees seem really freaking cool again. The movie is an amazing visual and auditory experience that has some of the most entertaining action sequences I’ve seen in the last few years. The only thing that I really missed in the movie was the layer of real world computer references and ‘nerd-insider’ feeling that was pervasive in the original Tron, but in a 2010 world where computers are much more common place I’m not sure this layer is as necessary as it was back in 1982. Tron: Legacy is a mainstream and updated version of the original vision of Tron, but it is also very much a sequel and avoids retelling the exact same story as its predecessor though the structure will feel quite familiar.
Though the visuals and audio are the highlight of the film, the characters are not far behind. Jeff Bridges does a good job of mixing his age with the wit and slacker attitude that he created for Kevin Flynn back in the 80′s as well as playing the younger part of Flynn’s program CLU as a single minded but efficient entity. Garrett Hedlund performs extremely well as Flynn’s son, Sam, and even noticeably attempts to take on an aspect of Jeff Bridge’s personality in several parts of the film. Olivia Wilde is my hands down favorite of the film as the program Quorra, adding a bit of innocent humanity into the still entertaining habits of programs that we saw some of in the original film, while Michael Sheen is a close second for his small but scene-stealing role as the quirky and hilarious program Castor. [Read the rest of this article]
Movies I Want to See in 2011
Something you may not know about me if you come to Critical Hits mainly for the RPG content is that I’m a huge movie nerd. In April of this year I posted a look ahead at the big summer movies of 2010 that I was hoping to see, just as I have done for the last four years running. Iron Man 2 came out in the lead this year and it is actually (unfortunately) the only one from the list that I have seen at the moment.
I wrote in that post that I couldn’t include Tron:Legacy because it isn’t a summer movie and I am very thankful that I can finally see it tonight at midnight! On the other hand Inception didn’t even make my list back in April but between then and its release the trailers convinced me it was a must-see, so I saw a midnight showing and promptly wrote a review of it the next morning.
This year is a bit different from the last few because I am already excited to see a ton of movies in 2011 and we’re not even through December yet! Here’s a look at the movies of early 2011 that I’m most excited to see, and a quick description of why I’m excited about it:
The Green Hornet – January 14th
Staring Seth Rogen, directed by Michael Gondry, and has a direct relation to Bruce Lee. Plus it looks pretty funny. Win! (trailer)
Unknown – February 18th
Liam Neeson in what looks like a role similar to the one he played in Taken. (trailer)
The Adjustment Bureau – March 4th
Matt Damon in a movie based on a Philip K. Dick short story (think Minority Report, Total Recall, and Blade Runner) by the director of the Bourne Ultimatum. (trailer)
Battle: Los Angeles - March 11th
I’m a sucker for alien invasion movies, and this one looks like a better version of Skyline. Also looks along the same lines as Cloverfield or District 9, but possibly with robotic aliens. (trailer) [Read the rest of this article]
The Architect DM: Abandonment & Re-population
As a DM that runs a tabletop RPG, it is your right and privilege to strike towns, lands, and whole continents with whatever form of catastrophe or disaster that strikes your fancy. Whether it is a terrible plague, massive tidal wave, or vicious invading army that sweeps through the area and all but wipes out the native inhabitants it is up to you to determine what happens with that location once the initial catastrophe has passed. These events could have happened hundreds of years before the characters were born or they could be the climatic event that finishes off a chapter of your game and opens up a new one. No matter when it happens, it is up to you as the DM to figure out how these events will effect your game world and how the players will experience the event and the aftermath.
Ask and You Shall Receive
This post comes as a response to a comment by Michelle on my last post, World Building by Process, in which she asked what an area that has been depopulated and then resettled might look like. At first you might think this topic doesn’t have all that much to do with your specific game world, but the more I’ve thought about it the more I’ve realized it really does apply to a large percentage of fantasy settings because of one simple trope. The fantasy trope in question is Ruins, or to be even more specific Ruins and Dungeons that are just as likely to be abandoned and populated by monsters than by their original inhabitants. Almost every fantasy setting that I can think of includes some kind of far reaching kingdom that has since fallen into ruin and its lands have been repopulated in various ways.
Start With The Basics
Before you can start seriously putting your abandoned and repopulated world together, you first have to determine the basic characteristics of the world for what I’ll call the “Before” and the “After.” Before refers to the world/location/kingdom that was abandoned. Did the kingdom succumb to a horrible plague that wiped out all living creatures across the lands except for those that could escape uninfected? Was the entire continent wracked by wars and all of the nations crumbled in the conflicts? How much of the population survived, and did certain animals or people survive unharmed somehow? What state are the buildings and landscape in? If a plague is the cause then perhaps the buildings are only suffering from neglect and are still mostly standing, whereas a war might result in buildings being knocked down and burned in the conflict or aftermath as a part of the pillaging. Answering these basic questions can help you immensely in planning the world that I’m calling the After. For example, if a war occurred and many people died on the lands, perhaps they are infected and poisoned for a few years by the decay but after a time they become the most fertile lands around.
At the same time you should be thinking about the basic attributes of the world you want the party to experience. Are they entering these lands shortly after everything has been abandoned or has it been centuries and the land has changed in many ways? If you know the basic details of the After world you want to portray, you can then also develop the previous questions about the Before area to mesh with what you want the world to be like. If you want it to feel like a ghost town, then you should develop the catastrophe from the Before time so that it leaves buildings intact but wipes out all of the residents like the aforementioned plague. It’s not against the rules to design backwards in this respect, because the players will experience it backwards to begin with and you want it to make as much sense as possible. If you want something to be deliberately nonsensical, you can easily turn it into a mystery that needs to be solved about the area they are adventuring. A great start to a spooky adventure can have the players wondering, “Where did all the people go?”
A Second Chance to Survive
When you are repopulating an area, the are becomes interesting because there is a history build into it and the natural expectation is that history will repeat itself. Perhaps the land is inherently dangerous and the people who are settling here again are at risk just like the first inhabitants. If a region has extremely harsh winters, a settlement could easily be wiped out and a year or two later more people will arrive to resettle that area – will they survive the winter any better than the first group? This approach works very well with plague infested lands or natural enemies such as barbarians / natives / bordering nations. No matter what the danger, the location itself is being given a second chance and that makes it seem like and inherently important area.
The pattern that the new settlements take should be a direct result of the basics you’ve determined beforehand. If all of the structures are still mostly intact, then the new inhabitants are much more likely to build on the existing framework and perhaps make a few important improvements so that they might have a better chance of survival. The length of time between the Before and After is a key factor also, because if it has been a short amount of time you may still see some remnants of the prior civilization or foreign entities like looters and scavengers that feed on the destruction. If more time has passed than most likely looters and scavengers will be gone, and perhaps wildlife has moved back into the region or it has remained completely devoid of life for a specific reason (again, the plague comes to mind). If you set your game shortly after the society has been abandoned, perhaps you want to emphasize the struggle and downward slope of the Before time and have a steady stream of settlers attempting (and most likely failing) at repopulating the area year after year. This strikes me as a more distinctly “Wild West” style of game, but if that’s what you want to play then this style of world building might help you further emphasize the daily struggle for survival so that the players really feel it when the are in the game world.
Your Effort Should be Thin but Visible
This is a developing philosophy I have about World Building in general, but it applies especially to the development of the past of your game world – Spread your effort out but keep it where the players will experience it. To illustrate I’ll use the basic D&D game world I talked about earlier, the odds are your players will come across a set of ruins or a dungeon sooner or later that is a remnant of a past civilization. If you put all of your effort into the past, then the dungeon won’t feel old and abandoned and it may not make sense why monsters are there or there may be no reason for the original inhabitants to have left. If you put all of your effort on the present, which I would bet is how the majority of D&D dungeons and ruins are designed, then some players might be left wondering what this building or dungeon was created for and who created it, or why it even exists in the first place. However, if you spread your effort out and focus on a few key points about the ruins/dungeon, you can hopefully create a more rich and believable world that will increase immersion for everyone involved.
Some of the key questions I would answer are: Who built this? Why did they build it? Who lives there now? What did the location provide to the original owner that it also gives the new inhabitants? What is one important event that happened within or to the location? Much like many of the campaign/adventure planning techniques, once you’ve answered these questions you should be able to start tying several of the aspects together to create a brief but believable history of the location that also informs how it looks at present and what the players will find or experience while they’re there.
A Few Small Decisions Can Shape Your Entire World
When it comes to World Building as a whole process, the topics of abandonment and re-population discussed in this post can be some of the most crucial things to consider. Even the absence of them can influence how parts of your world feel, if a population is the first group to have ever settled on a land that can tell you a lot about their civilization. Perhaps they’re making mistakes that are hurting how they develop, but the mistakes have to be made before they can learn how to survive in that specific location. The area and its inhabitants might have a pioneering nature and consist of a lot more experimentation with types of settlements and buildings.
In much the same way you can use these concepts to drive the technological developments of the cultures in your game world. To use a real world example, the Romans invented/discovered Concrete (even the ability to mix it so that it could cure underwater) but this technology was lost for hundreds and hundreds of years before it was rediscovered. Imagine if one specific culture had stumbled upon some Roman ruins and rediscovered it earlier and what kinds of changes that would have caused in the history of our world. Perhaps the fantasy setting of your world is shaken to the core when one culture discovers the lost secrets of steam technology, or hell even electricity, in the ruins of a long lost civilization. Next week I’ll be talking more about technological developments and how they can be used in World Building.
This post and next week’s post are both inspired by reader’s comments, so if you have something specific you’d like to see discussed with regards to World Building or any aspect of location design for RPGs please let me know!
Click here for the rest of the Architect DM Series.
The Architect DM: World Building By Process
If you think about the world around us and how it came to be the way it is, most things you’ll look at are the result of a process. Villages were created out of a need for shelter and then grew into towns and some eventually grew into cities, while natural formations like mountain ranges rise and fall due to the workings of plate tectonics. When we set out to create a world for an RPG, or even for videogames and fiction, we are attempting to create a world that is the result of a process that has never actually happened. Some worlds can certainly have mountains that don’t line up along a range and aren’t even created by plates of earth shifting and colliding, but my personal belief is that if you are creating a world the best foundation you can use is that of the real world that we see all around us.
Everyone that is going to experience the world your creating has a fundamental understanding of how our world works, the result of which is that any differences that appear in the world you create are going to stand out. This means, to me, that the things that are different about your game world should be important and serve a very definitive purpose in your game or the stories that you’re hoping to tell. What is one of the first things you notice about the planet Tatooine from Star Wars that is different from our own? It’s all desert, sure, but our planet has some very large deserts so that’s not totally out there…OH GOD IT HAS TWO SUNS! Not only does this hammer home the point that Luke Skywalker is very far away from our planet Earth, it also looks cool and when you think about it even more it provides a solid explanation for why the planet is much more hot and dry than what we are used to. George Lucas may not have come up with the idea because he wanted Tatooine to be a desert planet, he may have just thought it would be cool and alien to show two suns on a horizon (which it totally is), but the ideas work together and serve to enhance the world and the stories that are told on that world (okay maybe just the first three stories).
Start With What You Know
When designing a fantasy world (or sci-fi, or any fictional world, but I say fantasy for ease of use) my biggest suggestion is to start with what you know about the world we live in. If you’re designing a map then look at a local, regional, continental, or world map and steal things liberally. Take the map and turn it upside down or sideways, trace parts of it and then overlap those with other parts of it, but most of all if you find yourself wondering whether or not something is right try to find a similar case on a real map and if you do you’ll know what you’ve done is feasible and makes sense. Again I will state, this is a fantasy world so not everything has to be feasible or make sense, but as I stated above if it doesn’t make sense there should be an interesting and good explanation as to why it doesn’t. You may not know the explanation at the beginning, but you should be prepared to come up with one or else I guarantee your players will be disappointed in the end. [Read the rest of this article]
The Architect DM: World Building Basics
So far the Architect DM series has focused primarily on locations and building design, but today and over the next few weeks I’m going to take a look at the larger scale idea of world building and some factors that play into designing a realistic and believable world to play your games in. As with many of the design aspects I’ve talked about previously, designing a realistic world can feel like one of the most intimidating and daunting tasks to undertake but in reality if you apply principles correctly it can make your efforts easier and better at the same time.
For the most part this post will focus on the pseudo-medieval world building that goes along with most Dungeons & Dragons campaigns, but I will try to address modern, sci-fi, and other worlds as much as possible. As always I strongly encourage you to comment and ask questions if you have them, and if I see enough interest in other types of world design I will definitely do more posts in the future addressing non-D&D specific world building.
A Matter of Scale and Approach
The way I see it there are two distinct ways to design a world for your campaign, with a possible third approach that dances somewhere in the middle. The first approach is what most people think of doing when they run a D&D game which is drawing a complete world map and filling in as much information as possible, then running the game and letting the players explore that world – we’ll call this the Large Scale approach. The other is designing a specific town/city and starting the party out within it, then as they explore designing and introducing more and more of the game world to them as they explore. You can even start the party out in a more confined location such as a specific district of that town/city, a tavern within the town, or even a single room within a building inside of that town and branch outwards from there – we’ll call this the Small Scale approach.
The obvious disadvantage to Large Scale world building is that it takes an insane amount of effort from the DM beforehand, and you’re probably never going to satisfy yourself or the players with the amount of information you can put into any specific area of the world. Thus, the appeal of running something in Forgotten Realms or other campaign settings because all of the beginning work has been done for the DM. The obvious disadvantage to Small Scale world building is that if you haven’t designed or prepared a location then the players either can’t go there or will have an improvised and most likely less interesting adventure if they choose to go where the DM hasn’t planned things out yet.
The Middle Ground
The shady middle ground between these two approaches is most likely what I would suggest for any DM attempting to create a world for any RPG. The first step is to decide what the basic scale of your game will be, and I very much recommend talking to the players first. Some examples of basic scale are a game that focuses on local happenings and is based mostly around a single town and the areas close by, or a game that focuses on a kingdom and a series of villages within it, or even a game that encompasses a smaller continent and its interaction with other nearby islands and continents. All of these are acceptable scales for a game to begin with and can dictate the entire feel of the game – if you and the players decide you want to focus on kingdoms or continents then the specific details of the towns and cities are not as important and you don’t have to plan for them. [Read the rest of this article]
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