Bringing Life to Your Game World - Part II

That last post - seems to me that I left out on piece, because I assumed you already can do this: Create three “people”.

If you haven’t read the other one, start there. Link here Bringing Life to Your Game World.

In order to role-play, you need to know the characters. That guy that I have mentioned I don’t like - the one with the extremely successful book series that is now an extremely special cable series - yeah, he didn’t really do this. He didn’t make up his own characters. He went into history and took some his characters from there. That way he had fully fleshed out characters who had made decisions and he could assume that the decisions they made in history were similar to what they would do in his books.

So the question is: Can you make up fully fleshed out characters and then make decisions the way they would? This isn’t that easy a question, nor answer. But if you only know the stats on the characters, then you don’t know them. This is the big difference between the gold farmers and the role players. Gold farmers really don’t care about personalities or even motivations. They believe that everyone’s motivation is to either get more gold or experience or most likely, to deal more damage than any other character in the history of the game.

So you’re here and you’re reading this, so you’re not a gold farmer. How do you come up with fully fleshed out characters? Well, you could borrow characters from history. You could find people in your own life and use them. We have all sorts of warnings about how to make them your own as well as how to not get caught on these “plagiarisms” in our book The Character Foundry. But this isn’t just a commercial for our products. I think the best way to develop a character is this:

Start with an idea - What are you creating? A brilliant politician? A massive warrior? A tactical strategist? A cunning merchant? Figure that piece out - sort of “the present”.

Then figure out “the past”. Develop a character history that helps to explain how this character got to where he/she is today. By doing this, you are really starting to figure out who this character is. Whether the massive warrior came from the slave pits at the arena or the fighting schools of some fancy city or the military campaigns on the frontier or the monastery of the god of battle will help explain who they are, and how they see the world. No big surprise - Now you figure out “the future”. Don’t actually figure out the future; just think about what this character wants in the future. This is their motivation. By knowing what they want, you have the best possibility of figuring out what they will do now in order to achieve that goal.

Present, past, future - Not that tough? Well, do it systematically, and it can be a lot easier. Once you know the character, you can determine what they would do. Once you know what many of your characters will do in different situations, now you can build the action of the campaign world. Yes, you can be the next GRRM, at least in your world, probably not in the paycheck.

Bringing Life to Your Game World

You know that show where there are all those different families all trying get their ass in the big throne? Think of that show. In their plots, they kill (or have killed) other people. So, you have a core group of people who are motivated by their greed for power. Want your world to breathe like that? Try this:

In your world, make up three of these people. It doesn’t have to three people. It should probably be three groups of people. Could be races of people, nations of people, families, whatever. OK, now determine what these folks have done to gain their current level of power (or land or money or whatever). If you work through that, you will likely come up with things they have done to each other as well as things they have done that have affected “innocent” parties. Now, figure out the affected innocent parties - nothing big; sketches work here. Now figure out what these parties will do in order to get revenge on the ones who wronged them. You’ve just written a huge and interactive history, or if you want sketched out the future action for your campaign.

What are you doing here? You’re role-playing. “If I were King Fred, and Queen Thelma from next door married my uncle in an effort to say that she deserved my throne by some rite of succession, I’d have her daughter threatened and encourage the barbarians on her eastern border to attack her prized vineyards.” “If I were the barbarians and we took over the vineyards, we’d drink all the wine, rape all the women, and carry off all the livestock, including horses and oxen.” “If I were Queen Thelma and I lost my vineyards and whole bunch of cattle, I’d have to raid Prince Mark’s lands to capture his storehouses full of food or risk my subjects starving.” “If I were Prince Mark and my subjects are all magic users, we’d curse Queen Thelma with warts, but since we can’t beat her army, we’d have to form an alliance with King Fred who still has food.”

You designed the sketch of the “people”. As you make decisions for them, you are continuing to develop them and understand them better. King Fred may have started out as one of the King Louises of France in the early 1700s - pompous and detached from his people. But as you make decisions for him, you decide if he is a Machiavellian schemer or a royal bumbler (or somewhere in between). You originally wrote that Prince Mark’s people used a lot of magic, but now you have to figure out exactly what they do with it. Can they go to war against armored knights or are they mainly scholars who are trying to figure out how the world spins on its axis? And what will they do with that knowledge?

I really think it is all about thinking through that next step. Just think through: if this happens, then that would be the natural response. It works with your world’s politics as shown above, as well as the economics, and a whole bunch of other things. It also works in reverse. You may have written a history that said this tribe moved into this land at this time. Why? Ask the next question, again and again. Why did they move in? Did they want more land? Did they get chased out? And then what were the consequences of them moving in? Did they enslave the population? Did they chase them out and they moved somewhere else? If no one was in the fertile lands, why not? Was there a war a couple decades ago and no one has taken over yet? That might need a why not question too. Ask yourself why, and you’ll really start to build.

If you can honestly (or even semi-honestly) make decisions from a role-playing perspective of “what would this character do in this circumstance”, you will continue to define the characters and flesh out your world. This really is accretive - That means the more you do, the easy it gets because it keeps adding things. After a while, you will know exactly what Prince Mark and his court wizards would do, because you’ve made a bunch of decisions for them and you know what trials they are facing on their other borders.

I hope this helps you start developing your worlds, your campaigns, and your games in general. Use the feedback you get from your players, too. They’re reactions to certain characters and ideas in your game world can help spur you in new directions, even if they are directions you did not think of moving in the first draft. Hey - It’s not retcon if they didn’t figure it out the first time around!

Criticals

There are a couple of places in our latest book 100 Character Histories where I used the term “pocket critical”. I’m not sure if this is a term I just made up or not, but a “pocket critical” is a character that has been designed so that they can get a critical when one is needed. They keep a critical in their pocket - get it? Most games that allow for criticals have some mechanic by which you can increase your chances, and these characters use/abuse those mechanics. So a character who is or holds a “pocket critical” is the one you go to when you absolutely have to have that critical hit.

Hope that explains it. and if you need to see how you can make that happen, check out 100 Character Histories (available at either RPG Now or Warehouse 23). Not only does it have 100 character backgrounds you can use, but each of them is named, so you can just use the names if you need. But we weren’t sure that people would understand our histories and our short hand, so we also included 123 character archetypes. That way you can far more quickly understand where we were going and what we intended.

Character Histories

Hey everyone - We’ve put a new book out on our distributors’ sites: 100 Character Histories. Here’s the write-up:

So you’re starting a new campaign tonight, and you haven’t made your character yet. You’ve been a little busy and haven’t thought through what you want to do, so where are you going to get your ideas? Look here! Not only have we given you 100 character histories, but in order to explain these characters, we have given you 123 character archetypes. Even if you are playing a game where the dice determine your character, these histories and archetypes can guide you in giving them that touch of originality that will make them that much more fun to play and grow.
This supplement is for both players and game masters, because the ideas here are just as useful for non-player characters as they are for player characters. Use them to give you a jump start, that spark of an idea that will get the creative juices flowing. Without a brief character history like this, your character will lie flat on the page - taking mercenary jobs because there simply isn’t anything else to do tonight. Come on - breathe some life into them! Just pick a history and get going!
This is not a simple a one page chart. You will get a short paragraph for detail, but enough that you will understand and get some direction. Then you can take it from there.

This supplement contains:
45 pages of content
100 character histories - starting points to describe where they came from and why they are adventuring. Including suggestions on archetypes
123 character archetypes briefly describing character types and which skills they would most need.

All that for $2.99. Not only do I think it’s a bargain (45 pages for $2.99), but I honestly think it is a solid 223 ideas that nearly everyone can make use of. Here are the links:
100 Character Histories at RPG Now
100 Character Histories at Warehouse 23

NPCs - Cannon Fodder or Useful?

The more I think about it, the more I think that there should be a lot more NPCs going along with the PCs when they adventure. You can feel free to disagree, but first, read my Tricks and Traps blog post.

But what else are these NPCs doing? I think that depends on your party. Most of the Wild West movies that I love involve them hiring a tracker. Unless someone in the party is really a skilled tracker (and you probably want them to be really skilled killers), then you probably need to hire a tracker in order to go after guys when you don’t know where they are. I often complain about sages and scribes telling the adventurers about mystic treasures and then trusting said adventurers to go off and retrieve this one of a kind historical item while the scribe sits at home and waits. Not to imply that scribes like exploring dangerous ruins, but to determine the location of a historic treasure and then trust the safe retrieval of this historic treasure to a team of thugs and murders - really? The scribe guy doesn’t want to go along? What if there’s a fake historic treasure and the “dumb” adventurers grab that because they don’t know any better? What if there are additional historic treasures that they may not recognize? What if they break it? What if they steal it?

I’ll go down this rabbit hole further: While you might expect your roguish guy to be able to pick the lock on a standard treasure chest (or bash it open), is your lock smith really good enough to beat a lock that has kept treasure hunters out of a tomb for centuries? Is your priest(ess) good enough to scare off the undead that have protected their final resting place? Your warriors may be tough enough to take on a dragon, but if some trap maker built something that can take them alive, are your warriors technical enough to use the trap properly?
I think adding NPCs in this fashion works best when you know a little bit about what you’re going to face. My parties know relatively quickly when they need to get on a boat to get where they’re going. So are the sailors all NPCs who are going to fight during this mission? Probably not, unless they get attacked at sea while they’re getting there. Otherwise it’s drop the party, then pick them up and head home. The NPCs I’m talking about now are just a little more than that. How about examples?

The party knows that there is a vault door, so they bring a safe cracker. They know there is a chasm because the bridge collapsed decades ago, so they bring a conjurer who can conjure a bridge, or a sorcerer who can fly them across. They know they have to scale up or down a cliff, so they bring a professional climber. The bandits were not at their “regular” camp site, so they bring a tracker. The hellhound with the flaming breath is in the jungle, so they bring a guy who flies to act as a forward scout. All the signs in the ruined castle are written in an ancient language, so they bring a language expert to translate. The dwarves between here and there are friendly, but only if approached in the right manner, so they bring a dwarven ambassador.

This isn’t Ars Magica where you bring a bunch of NPCs along to kill off along the way. This is an intelligent approach to “professional” adventuring. You might even want to think about it as Mission Impossible. Sure, you have Tom Cruise along on every mission, but he needs certain types of support along the way. Please help me by coming up with a better analogy than that!

Tricks and Traps

I love tricks and traps, though probably not as much as my players over the years. Let me correct that - They love “tricks” - puzzles that can be solved as opposed to “traps” that might be dismantled, but are not challenges in the same fashion. So puzzles, tricks, brain teasers - that’s what they were always looking for. But those are tough to come up with as a GM. Challenging half a dozen players who knew me for a decade or more was incredibly difficult, especially when I was expected to do it pretty much every week.

I’ve written on things like this before, but today what I’m thinking is from a more practical point of view, maybe even a boring point of view. I avoid making massive dungeons; I just don’t think they make sense. Why would someone make a huge dungeon (or any other kind of underground complex) and then stock it with monsters (who don’t eat each other), tricks, traps and treasures? Plus, Legend Quest is less of a slogging game. The challenge of LQ is typically winning a fight, after which you can more typically heal up a bit, catch your breath, and prep for the next one. It’s not intended to be an extended running battle like some other games are. I guess it is more of a series of encounters, and when you are stuck in an extended battle situation (like a major battle or war) you very quickly see how lethal a game this can be what with its fatigue, bleeding damage and armor deterioration.

But these tricks - Why? Why build a “dungeon” and plant these challenges to get through it? To protect something or keep the uninitiated out, right? Well, I hate to say it, but wouldn’t that mean that the “tricks” are going to be more on the order of a history test than some challenging riddle? My point is this: If the Masons hid a massive treasure under Washington DC like they did in that movie (or was it Boston?), then the “riddles” should be things like: “James Thaddeus Jones was which High Exalted Leader?” and then there would be some way to choose a number from 1 to 20 or whatever. Or three symbols belonging to the Masons and one that they do not use in their secret ceremonies. Take the fake one out of the wall and the other three can unlock the door. Stuff like that - stuff that their members would know, but no one else would.

Let’s give some more examples: A rune or old language that reads “fireball” and the only way to bring down the magical barrier is to cast a fireball at the target. (Could be fun in all sorts of ways if the target is in a tiny room.) An alchemical formula is written on the altar; by placing the missing ingredient on the altar the magic item will rise out of the marble. The relief on the wall shows an army attacking in a certain formation; only by shifting the proper defensive formation to combat that one can you unlock the door. Or it can be the boring stuff, like putting the six dead kings’ tokens in order chronologically.

My point is this: If you want to be more true to common sense, then flowery poems and riddles don’t make sense. The builders would want to test the treasure hunters to make certain that only their kind of people made it through. Now that I think about it, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade did it right. They were testing the treasure seekers knowledge and forcing them to follow clues that they felt only a devout person would understand.

So am I saying that your dungeons need to be boring and make everyone wish they were in school taking a final exam? Maybe not. Maybe the traps are too tough for the player characters. Maybe they need to bring a non-combatant who knows all this stuff into the dungeon with them, someone who can decipher the clues and answer the test questions. Then the challenge becomes keeping the scholarly guy (or gal) alive when the arrows and spells are zinging all over the room. That will be a different kind of challenge, and maybe a fun one.

Easter Eggs in Fletnern (with violence)

Stay with me on this one; it’s not what you think.

Some time ago, sun worshiping humans established a spring festival where they would have the children search through cow pastures for wooden balls painted or stained a golden color. They were “searching for the sun”. They would bring the golden balls back to their parents (or town elders) and receive small treats or finding them. While taking balls from other children was never fully encouraged, it happened. Most adults thought the fun was watching the children search through the tall grass and avoid the cow pies left behind.

The orcs picked up the game from the humans they enslaved, but they took the violence part much further. To ramp up the action, they had only one golden ball, so once someone found it, the others had to try and get the ball away from him. To the orcs (at least the original ones who played), the golden balls were not the sun but instead the fiery mouth of a dragon. So the orcs called the game Blan Zar or “golden eggs”.

The game has caught on in the Wembic Empire to such a degree that it is now played in specially built arenas by teams sponsored by military units. The more “official” teams still don’t wear equipment, but there are “leagues” were they can wear armor but no weapons. Of course these guys are wearing spiked gloves and other “weapons” built into their armor. Killing is frowned upon, but beating to unconsciousness is expected. Teams can be of any agreed upon size, but eight on eight is considered normal.

So yes, Fletnern’s version of an Easter egg hunt is a violent sporting event most typically celebrated by orcs. Probably not what you were expecting when you saw Easter eggs, huh? Did I tell you that during the winter religious festival at the end of the year they give each other gifts, but coal is considered a good thing? Yeah, I can be ironic.