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 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.
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.
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”, and 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
The Architect DM: Give It Some Structure
Today I’m going to focus on what could be considered the biggest and most important architectural element that anyone could use. As things go, this element may also be one of the most overlooked when it comes to dungeon design for home games or even in published adventures. I’m talking about structure, and not the kind that makes sure your adventure has a beginning, middle, and end (though it can help with that with surprising ways) but the kind that if it were simplified to its most common element: you could just call it columns and walls.
The Architect DM: The Inverse Office Dungeon
I’d like to share an experiment with you, it’s something I’ve done to a minor extent and I believe it might be helpful to other people out there as well. Let’s say you find yourself in the situation where you need to design a dungeon and can’t think of how to do it, whether it’s a spur-of-the-moment situation or you’re just stumped while planning for next week’s game, you need a dungeon and can’t seem to figure out what to do.
The Architect DM: Fantasy Buildings 101
When it comes to designing locations and buildings, the DM/GM has a much more daunting task ahead of them than most players or even the DMs themselves realize. Thankfully in most of the RPGs we play and run it is far from crucial that the design of the world is 100% accurate and entirely believable. Most players are willing to suspend their disbelief to an incredible level and almost all DMs don’t really have the time to make sure every location they put into their game is believable. However, creating an environment that is believable can actually make your players lives easier because they will buy into the game on a more unconscious level. This added level of believability just might turn out to be the whole new layer of depth that your game needs.
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