World Building 330 - Repercussions

Maybe you don’t get the reference in the title.  This ain’t World Building 101!  If that’s what you’re looking for, there are countless guides out there on the internet.

But if you’re ready to move on to things that are more difficult to do than draw a map, name and place cities, and possibly figure out where the elves live, you are in the right place.  We don’t focus on the most beginner stuff, because both the folks at Board Enterprises and our customers have been at this for some time.  Most of us have been at this for decades.  World Building 101 isn’t for us.

Publisher’s Note:  If WB 101 is for you, then please go find several of them, experiment, learn, and then come back.  Everybody needs to start somewhere, but this article isn’t going to help you unless you have a world that has already established the beginning pieces.

So, what is it we wanted to talk about, now that we’ve scared all the youngsters off?  Repercussions!  Everything in life has repercussions.  This is also true of your game world.  Every decision you make, every city you place, every cultural note you jot down - they all have repercussions.  But here’s the trick:  That’s wonderful!

Here’s why:  Everything that you have figured out for your world is going to naturally lead to other things.  Let’s take what seems to be a reasonably common FRPG world building decision:  There are magical universities.  Seems fairly normal in a game world, right?  OK, but what are the ramifications?  Let’s list out some of them:

• There needs to be support industries for the school(s).  How do they get their books?  Do they need paper of some kind, and how is that done?  Where do the students live while attending school?
• What magic do they teach?  Are their individual schools for different types of magic, or is there just one big school?  If big, is it sub-divided into different colleges or departments?
• Are there magics they don’t teach?  If so, why not?  Are they banned?  Are they so rare that there aren’t enough teachers?  Are they simply not popular in this culture?
• What happens to the dropouts?  Some students won’t be smart enough to cut it.  What happens to them?  Some students cannot afford it.  What happens to them?  These should be two completely different types of people.  The flunkies probably cannot use magic but are not complete idiots (one would assume).  Meanwhile those without the money to continue probably can use magic, but only know the basics.  Are these your adventuring wizards?
• What do the graduates do?  Is there so much work for battle mages that they can all go into the army or navy?  Are they only learning battle magics?  This typically is a game rules issue.  If 95% of the spells in the rule book are there to harm others (OK, 90% cause damage and 5% heal it), then wizards are only good for killing other folks.  That has repercussions as well!

This is just the start, but this is how we think you should be thinking.  You put the dwarves there, why?  Probably because there were mountains.  And the elves went there because of the forests.  OK, that’s actually fine, but there are going to be these repercussions.  Who are the dwarves near?  Do they have good relations or are they typically at war?  Whichever it is will have consequences.

You may have placed a city on a major river because that makes good sense.  Who is upriver and who is downriver?  What consequences do these placements have?  Trade probably goes in both directions, but it is much easier when it flows downriver.  What are these places trading with each other?  If the cattle ranches are upriver, their tanneries are going to cause problems for those downriver.  Or did you think of that, and they drive the cattle downriver to where you placed the tanneries?  That has consequences too, because now the cattle are roaming across certain areas.  Has that caused issues with the local farmers?

Hopefully you see what we’re doing.  It is the seemingly simple “take a step back” method.  But this is incredibly difficult to do with something that you created basically from nothing.  It’s why even seasoned authors leave plot holes.  Looking at something you have created and thinking about it critically is tough!  But this isn’t bad criticism.

We really want you to go into this with the thought of, “This is really cool, and it is really shaping up.  What can I do next?”  If you just go at it working to create more, you will eventually burn out and get writer’s block.  If you look at it from the angle of thinking about certain aspects of what is already there and what is the next logical step, it can be so much easier to continually grow your world.

But we also want to warn you.  This style of looking at what you have created and then determining the logical repercussions of those creations brings the risk of the mundane.  When you think logically, you tend to come up with non-fantastic, non-epic things.  Too many normal things in your fantasy world and it risks not seeming like a fantasy world anymore.

When you are thinking through the logic of it all, remember to focus on the magical consequences too.  If you have a major city and they have therefore required the building of sewers, don’t just put in sewers.  Put in sewers filled with giant rats and mutant alligators.  Have the sewers hide the entrance to a dungeon (OK, we really hate that trope, but ...) or the temple of some death cult.  Maybe that’s the thing - They built the sewers (or more likely paved over something to put the sewers underground) and it caused flooding beneath the city, right into an old crypt where some vampires had lay dormant for centuries.

TheWorld of Fletnern has often escaped being called mundane because it is seen as being “gritty”.  In too many ways it might be a bit mundane because there has always been a focus on reasonableness and economics.  But when thinking of reasonable things, we include plagues and war caused starvation.  When thinking of economics, we make sure that we also figure out the price of unicorn horns and magic swords.

It is natural to look at our world and think of how items lead to each other based on those aspects.  What you need to do is both - if this, then what, both in the mundane society and in the magical.  The player characters live in both of those worlds contained within your game world.  They blend, and it’s up to you to make sure that it is both reasonable and supernatural.  That’s why this is WB 330 and not WB 101. 

 

Does this kind of content interest you?  If so, we hope you will consider joining us in our Small Bites project or the full title of How to Build Your Fantasy World in Small Bites!  We continue to build our community of game masters and world builders, and we would love to have you join us!

This post was written as part of The 50^th Edition aka All About More Miscellaneous FRPG Stuff, the latest in our Small Bites editions.  Each Small Bites book looks deeply at one subject, a character archetype, a race/monster, a style of questing, or some other role-playing/world building subject.  However, as an “anniversary” edition, this one is more of a mishmash of items that didn’t quite fit one of our previous themes closely enough and therefore didn’t get published in that book.  This isn’t a “best of” edition!  It’s a kitchen sink edition!

We hope we’re getting you interested.  If you want to see the World Walker edition for FREE!! click the link above.  This is a celebration issue, so this is effectively the full Game Masters’ edition of 76 pages of content.  If you want to be efficient, just click here and join us through Patreon to keep getting the full GMs’ editions every month!

How to Steal Ideas and Not Get Caught

 We have long advocated for a style we call Make It Your Own.  We know that as game masters and world builders, you get the sparks of ideas from all sorts of places and then incorporate them into your world.  The trick is not making it obvious about where the ideas come from.  More importantly, by the time you are finished making it your own, you will know it and remember it far better because it is your own.

You may or may not believe this, but the following mission idea is based on Smokey and the Bandit.  What’s the real plot of that movie?  These guys are bootlegging - a major crime.  In order to get away with it, they have a guy who’s job it to be the distraction.  He’s speeding, a tiny crime when compared to illegally transporting alcohol.  (Remember the good old days when they kept that crap in cans on the other side of the Mississippi?)  But he is committing his little crime so “loudly” that he is attracting all the attention and keeping the police away from the far bigger crime being committed by Snowman.

Cat and mouse is not all that original an idea for a mission, but we think we can turn this into something cool!  So, we’re in the middle of a war.  We’re going to use the Elf Dwarf War for an example.  The dwarves have been pushing their way through the Slyvanian Forest.  The dwarves were losing in the early stages of the war.  The elves were in their element and were easily picking off dwarven soldiers from behind trees.  The dwarves need to retreat before they get slaughtered.  But they can’t because the elves are pressing them too hard.

So, time to bring in the “Bandit” to distract the elves while the main army (what counts) gets out of the forest.  Admittedly, this is not a light-hearted, funny adventure, but instead something really dark.  That actually helps, because even though the movie was the spark of the idea, the players are not going to equate this mission with Burt Reynolds.

The party is brought in to be the distraction.  They are going to race around the woodlands finding small elven villages and lighting them on fire.  A risk that big is going to bring every elven soldier in the region to help put out the fire and save the villagers.  By the time they get that one out, the party should have started another in a different spot - leading the elves away from the retreating dwarves.  If they can trick the elves into thinking that the dwarves are retreating in the other direction (the direction of the fires) all the better!

Just like in the movie, Bandit never expected he would have one enemy willing to follow him far out of their jurisdiction, so how do we put Frog in here (the motivation)?  At the second village, the distraction party discovers that the elves have dwarven slaves.  Maybe they are slaves or prisoners of war or possibly dwarven criminals (at least in the eyes of the elves).  This is good, because it will slow the distraction party down because they now have non-adventurers tagging along.  But the former captives know things that are of benefit to the party.  And come on - You can’t leave them behind!

So, whether we replace Buford T. Justice with an angry elven lord who just lost his slave work force or with an elven commando who has been dying for the chance to stop training soldiers and go out hunting dwarves, there is someone willing to pursue the party across the entire forest if necessary.  They may have only counted on the locals being after them, then giving up the chase to go attend to the fires, but now they have a true enemy hunting them.  Hey, why not have both - the psycho assassin and the slave owner?  The assassin is a sniper, so he will be very difficult to spot and kill, making him last much longer.  The slave owner will have a lot of guys, allowing for a bigger battle when they eventually lock horns.

Few players are familiar with their characters being chased.  They are typically the aggressors and on offense.  This should be a whole new aspect of gaming for them, something new.  There is nothing “dungeon” about this one, nor does it feel anything like a more standard wilderness exploration adventure.
 

This post was written as part of the recently released Horror in the House of Mystique aka All About Non-Standard Adventures, the latest in our Small Bites editions.  Each Small Bites book looks deeply at one subject, a character archetype, a race/monster, a style of questing, or some other role-playing/world building subject.  This one details everything having to do with those monsters that are typically huge, super strong, but also not so bright, and how this will affect their actions and tactics, as well as other game mastering tricks, but within a fully defined mission showing both the stats for point-based characters (like in Legend Quest) and class-based characters like in most of the die-20 games.

We hope we’re getting you interested.  If you want to see the World Walker edition for FREE!! click the link here.  If we’ve hooked you and you want to get the full 61 pages of content in the Game Masters’ edition, click here.

Cosmic Horror Themes in FRPGs

There is a wonderful thing about cosmic horror:  no one knows what’s going on.  OK, some people know something is going on, but 99.99% of the people have no idea.  Usually, the concepts fall into three categories:

#1  The vast majority of the mortals have no idea what’s going on.  So what if a 3,000 years ago some ancient spirit/monster/god crashed into the world?  If a person was lucky enough to survive to pre-adolescence and therefore had the ability to begin to consider philosophy and other big thoughts, they only have another 50 or so years to worry about.  If nothing has changed (in their opinions) in 3,000, the next 50 look pretty safe.

This is the farmer who must worry about plowing, seeding and harvesting.  He is not going to waste his time wondering if the chaos magic on the other side of the world might be a beacon to similar cosmic entities.  He cannot see this affecting him.  Oh, things are different if his neighbor sacrifices his daughter to one of these cosmic crazies and then hides the demigod-like thing in the barn, but other than something like that, he just doesn’t care.

#2  The intelligentsia have a habit of dismissing things outside their books.  These folks have studied so they “know” the limits and boundaries of magic, and they refuse to think that something could work outside the rules that they have set in place.  Substitute science for magic here, they both act similarly.  Unless their professor told them it could be true, they are going to deny that it could be.  They would rather be condescending towards those attempting to learn than accept that their understanding of how things work might not be accurate.  (Please note the use of the term “intelligentsia” here.  You may define this word differently than we do.  We are not dismissing all scholars or scientists, just the ones with the attitude described here, and there are too many of those!)

#3  There is a tiny percentage of the people who, probably because of something absolutely horrifying happening to them, know that there is something out there and it is beyond dangerous.  But even among these people, there are those who want to hide away from this knowledge, some who have been driven insane by it and are therefore no longer reliable sources of information, and a few who want to learn more.

These few trying to understand face enormous obstacles.  Not only do the cosmic horrors often like to work in secret, but they may have secret cults who worship them, and these cults will act to keep the secrets.  Add to this the concept that most mortal minds cannot fully grasp the magnitude of what the cosmic horror represents.  As we see in so many stories, the more you learn, the less your grasp on sanity.  (We aren’t saying reality here, because the insane just might have a better grasp on that than we’d like to give them credit for.)

Why does this matter?  Because as a world builder, you can run dozens of campaigns in your game world without once drifting into the cosmic horror style, and then run a full-on cosmic horror campaign, and it makes sense.  The PCs and NPCs in those other campaigns - They weren’t in the know.  They had no idea and no glimpse of what was going on behind the cosmic veil.  You don’t even have to retcon anything to make this work.

And if you choose to, once the cosmic horror campaign is over, you don’t have to make any future campaigns venture in there if you don’t want to.  It’s tough to close that barn door once opened, and the players may be clamoring for more, but if the PCs aren’t aware of what’s going on around them, they don’t get to know.  Besides, cosmic entities work in terms of centuries.  What are the chances that multiple cosmic horror events would happen near each other in time?  OK, they’re pretty high, because they are happening all the time, but the PCs shouldn’t know that.

But who are these entities?  That is a much bigger question.  Well, who can we compare them to?  The best comparison is the gods.  Both cosmic entities and the gods have incredible amounts of power - enough power to make miracles happen.  Both dwell outside of the mortal realms.  Both have worshippers on the mortal worlds.  In fact, the cosmic entities are often called “old gods”.  So, are they gods then?

Honestly, we’ll leave that for you to decide.  The question we think needs to be asked is, “Why are you treating the gods that the religions of your world worship differently than the cosmic entities?”  What makes the old gods mean and creepy, but the pantheon gods happy and helpful?  Think that the “good” gods can’t be mean and spiteful?  Read more about Hercules and Hera.  She’s often considered helpful to humanity.

We think the point here is that the old gods are considered mysterious and unknowable, but the religions find their gods to be understandable and even predictable.  Who’s right?  Well, we think both styles of gods need to be mysterious and unknowable.  That doesn’t change the assumption of the religious.  They believe that they understand their god(s).  They have communicated with these gods, and they believe they are on the right track and following the gods’ will.  And maybe they are on the right track, but that has nothing to do with understanding the gods.

The gods are immortal beings of enormous power.  A mortal cannot think like a god and therefore cannot understand one.  A god’s plans could easily take a century or more to come to fruition.  Over the course of that century, the god will have been revising and improving the plan.  There should not be a means by which a mortal can foil it, unless another god has been interfering and arranged it so the mortal is in place to foil the plan.  That’s perfectly understandable.

Would a god intentionally let a plan fail in order to position themselves for an even bigger plan a generation down the road?  Absolutely!  After all, they need to fake out their rival gods, and how better than to appear defeated?

But what do the gods want?  We have made it pretty clear in a lot of our writings that the way we run divine beings is this:  Divine creatures survive by consuming the adoration or fear of mortals.  The concept of eating or consuming is probably just a mortal’s mental paraphrasing of what is actually happening, because we cannot fully understand, but in any case, they need this fear or adoration.  Adoration comes from mortals sending prayers, love, awe, etc.  One of the best ways they can receive this is to establish a religion and get tons of followers to send prayers.  Of course, the gods usually need to help these religions or they don’t thrive, so it is a give and take.

But the bad guy divines live on fear.  They too might have religions, but instead of happily praying to their god(s), they are making sacrifices in hopes of avoiding their wrath.  This could be organized religions (think about the Aztecs), or demons pulling stunts, or cosmic entities causing fear simply by being powerful, scary and unknown.  Let’s face it, the unknown is scary!  If you were trying to install fear into a group of mortals, staying “unknowable” would be a good way to accomplish it.  Of course, you can’t be so unknown that no one fears you, but there is a delicate balancing act in there.  Plus - they don’t need to know what they’re afraid of for the being to gain.

Maybe you want your cosmic entities to be more powerful or more mysterious than your gods.  That’s fine.  But we really think that you need to make your gods a bit more mysterious than what has been used in some past RPGs.  Once your gods have hit points, they have ceased to be the powerful beings they should be.  You need them to seem a bit more cosmic horror than that!

 

This post was written as part of The World of Sylansse aka All About Highest Fantasy, the latest in our Small Bites editions.  Each Small Bites book looks deeply at one subject, a character archetype, a race/monster, a style of questing, or some other role-playing/world building subject.  This one is showcasing a world where nearly everyone has access to magic.  No, not every sharecropper can cast spells, but they can hire rain makers or consult herbalists.  And most of the adventurers have something more fantastical up their sleeves, whether it be magic or racial.

We hope we’re getting you interested.  If you want to see the World Walker edition for FREE!! click the link here.  If we’ve hooked you and you want to get the full 55 pages of content in the Game Masters’ edition, click here.