WITH ESSAYS BY VERONICA ROTH, GAIL SIMONE, KEITH BAKER, KEN LIU, KATE ELLIOTT, AND MORE! TO WORLDBUILDING VOLUME 2 GUIDE EDITED BY JOHN JOSEPH ADAMS
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Kobold Guide to Worldbuilding Volume 2 Praise for Guides from Kobold Press KOBOLD GUIDE TO GAMEMASTERING “(This) is an easy purchase for anyone looking to take the next step from playing to running a game . . . Everyone can use a bit of good advice and this book is full of great tips for anyone.” —Rob Wieland, Geek & Sundry “Kobold Guide to Gamemastering is definitely worth picking up if you are leading a game and it would be a great gift to your gamemaster if you are a player.” —Jason Sansbury, Nerds on Earth KOBOLD GUIDE TO WORLDBUILDING “Class is in session . . . The Kobold Guide to Worldbuilding SHOULD be considered a textbook on intelligent setting creation.” —Dave Hinojosa, The Gaming Gang “While the book is aimed at the RPG crowd, a huge percentage of the material would be just as valuable to an author writing a novel set in an original world. . . . The Kobold Guide to Worldbuilding will spark some new ideas and help you add the proper doses of verisimilitude and outlandishness.” —Ed Grabianowski, io9 “A really great work . . . if you’re seriously pursuing worldbuilding as a hobby, I think it’s a worthy investment.” —Martin Kallies, RPG.net Winner, 2013 Gold ENnie Award for Best RPG-Related Accessory Winner, 2013 Gold ENnie Award for Best Writing COMPLETE KOBOLD GUIDE TO GAME DESIGN “A must-have book for both those looking to get into this industry, and those who merely want to play.” —NerdTrek.com “Highly recommended for gaming nerds everywhere.” —citybookreview.com Winner, 2012 Gold ENnie Award for Best RPG-Related Accessory Callum Sim - [email protected] - 349937
other books in the award-winning kobold guide series Kobold Guide to Gamemastering Complete Kobold Guide to Game Design Kobold Guide to Board Game Design Kobold Guide to Worldbuilding, Volume 1 Kobold Guide to Magic Kobold Guide to Combat Kobold Guide to Plots and Campaigns Find all Kobold Press titles at www.koboldpress.com Callum Sim - [email protected] - 349937
With essays by Keith Baker Tobias S. Buckell Banana Chan C.L. Clark The Dungeon Dudes Kate Elliott Shanna Germain Jeff Grubb Gabe Hicks Rajan Khanna Ken Liu Coral Alejandra Moore Veronica Roth Michael E. Shea Gail Simone Andrea Stewart James L. Sutter Ashley Warren Edited by John Joseph Adams Kobold Guide To Worldbuilding Volume 2 Callum Sim - [email protected] - 349937
KOBOLD Guide to Worldbuilding, Vol. 2 © 2022 Open Design LLC except as noted below: “Deep Time on Middle-Earth: Layering in Time and Change for More Effective Worldbuilding” by Tobias S. Buckell. © 2022 by Tobias S. Buckell. | “First Came the Word” by C.L. Clark. © 2022 by C.L. Clark. | “Building a Physical and Social Landscape” by Kate Elliot. © 2022 by Kate Elliott. | “Worldbreathing and the Importance of Space” by Rajan Khanna. © 2022 by Rajan Khanna. | “Technology as a Set of Story-Telling Tools: Or How We Can Learn to Build a World from Herodotus” by Ken Liu. © 2022 by Ken Liu. | “Weave Your Worlds Thread by Thread: A Guide to Diverse and Inclusive Worldbuilding” by Coral Alejandra Moore. © 2022 by Coral Alejandra Moore. | “Revel in Revelations: Worldbuild Efficiently with Fictional Religions” by Veronica Roth. © 2022 by Veronica Roth. | “Growing Your Worlds Organically: How to Build an Immersive World Your Audience Won’t Want to Leave” by Andrea Stewart. © 2022 by Andrea Stewart. AUTHORS Keith Baker, Tobias S. Buckell, Banana Chan, C.L. Clark, The Dungeon Dudes (Monty Martin and Kelly McLaughlin), Kate Elliott, Shanna Germain, Jeff Grubb, Gabe Hicks, Rajan Khanna, Ken Liu, Coral Alejandra Moore, Veronica Roth, Michael E. Shea, Gail Simone, Andrea Stewart, James L. Sutter, and Ashley Warren EDITING LEAD John Joseph Adams ADDITIONAL EDITING Wendy N. Wagner COVER ARTIST Mike Pape GRAPHIC DESIGN & LAYOUT Marc Radle ADDITIONAL LAYOUT Amber Seger DIRECTOR OF DIGITAL GROWTH Blaine McNutt ART DIRECTOR Marc Radle EDITORIAL DIRECTOR Thomas M. Reid DIRECTOR OF OPERATIONS T. Alexander Stangroom SALES MANAGER Kym Weiler COMMUNITY MANAGER Victoria Rogers TWITCH PRODUCER Chelsea “Dot” Steverson PUBLISHER Wolfgang Baur All Rights Reserved. Reproduction of this book in any manner without express permission from the publisher is prohibited. Kobold Press PO Box 2811 Kirkland, WA 98083 ISBN-13: 978-1-950789-28-3 WWW.KOBOLDPRESS.COM Most product names are trademarks owned by the companies that publish those products. Use of the name of any product without mention of trademark status should not be construed as a challenge to such status. Open Design, Kobold Quarterly, Kobold Press, the KQ logo, and Warlock are trademarks of Kobold Press. Callum Sim - [email protected] - 349937
For Wendy N. Wagner, a wizard who is always willing to take the Help action. Callum Sim - [email protected] - 349937
Table of Contents Introduction ........................................................................................... 11 John Joseph Adams Airships and Dragonbone Barons ......................................................... 13 Keith Baker Weave Your Worlds Thread by Thread................................................... 19 Coral Alejandra Moore Good Gods!............................................................................................. 23 James L. Sutter The Marketplace Microcosm.................................................................. 29 Ashley Warren It’s This Meets That................................................................................. 34 Banana Chan Spiral Campaign Development.............................................................. 38 Michael E. Shea Six Hot Takes on Worldbuilding for Roleplaying Games ..................... 43 Monty Martin & Kelly McLaughlin, The Dungeon Dudes The Worlds We Adore............................................................................. 48 Gabe Hicks Technology as a Set of Story-Telling Tools ............................................ 51 Ken Liu Callum Sim - [email protected] - 349937
First Came the Word .............................................................................. 56 C.L. Clark Hamster Trek.......................................................................................... 61 Jeff Grubb Building a Physical and Social Landscape ............................................ 66 Kate Elliott Growing Your Worlds Organically ........................................................ 73 Andrea Stewart Worldbreathing and the Importance of Space ...................................... 77 Rajan Khanna Deep Time on Middle-Earth.................................................................. 82 Tobias S. Buckell The Topography of Verisimilitude ......................................................... 86 Gail Simone Break the World to Make the World ...................................................... 90 Shanna Germain Revel in Revelations ............................................................................... 96 Veronica Roth About the Contributors........................................................................ 101 Callum Sim - [email protected] - 349937
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Kobold Guide to Worldbuilding Volume 2 Callum Sim - [email protected] - 349937
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Introduction h John Joseph Adams 11 Introduction f writers and game designers are the worldbuilders, editors are the worldbuilding inspectors. We examine their creations, looking for any areas that might need shoring up, any crevices that might need a bit more mortar. Or, sometimes, it’s like being an interior designer, pointing out how this area might need more light, or this one should be more of a focal point— or maybe this spot needs more color. Or, when we’re lucky, right from the start we’re anthropologists, minds alight with the wonders we’re exploring, with little to add except to implore the creator for more more more. I’ve been extremely fortunate to stand alongside the brilliant minds of hundreds (or maybe thousands) of creators in my role as an editor of science fiction and fantasy magazines, anthologies, and novels, there to lend a critical eye and a helping hand so that these constructed worlds are as fully-realized on the page as they were in the mind’s eye of their creators. What you may not know, if you do know my work but don’t know me, is: I absolutely and with all my heart love Dungeons & Dragons. “Obsessed” would not be too strong a word. Neither would “addicted.” I’ve been described as a D&D “fiend,” and—Insight check—I detect no lie. The thing is, D&D is my origin story (or the foundation, if we want to keep going with this construction metaphor)—the origin of my love for worldbuilding and for genre fiction as a whole. It’s what led me to study writing, and then editing, and ultimately led to a full-time career working in the genres I love. I’ve played (and loved!) many other TTRPGs of course, but D&D was the first time I picked up a metaphorical trowel, and I wouldn’t be a metaphorical building inspector without it. I John Joseph Adams Callum Sim - [email protected] - 349937
12 Kobold Guide to Worldbuilding, Volume 2 I’m excited to present these 18 essays by this array of world-class worldbuilders. What makes this book special to my eye is that we’ve brought together both game designers and fiction authors in the same volume. So you get an essay on how to inject verisimilitude into your worldbuilding by DC Comics writer Gail Simone alongside a piece by Keith Baker (creator of D&D’s Eberron setting) in which he lays out how to create a magical industry in your world. Or you get Pathfinder co-creator James L. Sutter sharing his methods for building a robust pantheon of gods alongside Divergent author Veronica Roth showing us how we can use fictional religions to worldbuild efficiently. This was a fascinating (and educational!) project to work on, and I’m thrilled to have had the opportunity. So, whether you’re a game designer or a fiction author—or a gamer or reader who just likes to see how the worldbricks are laid—I hope you’ll find as much value in these essays as I did. Let’s get building! Callum Sim - [email protected] - 349937
Airships and Dragonbone Barons h Keith Baker 13 Airships and Dragonbone Barons n secondary fantasy worlds, magic is often presented as an esoteric force that can only be wielded by a handful of practitioners. The wizard contemplates arcane mysteries in an ivory tower, while the iron-toothed witch dwells in the dark forest and eats those foolish enough to disturb her studies. Such worlds also often default to a medieval level of advancement, where champions ride horses and wield swords; the powers of the heroic sorcerer are remarkable and beyond the grasp of the common people. But there’s no reason this has to be the case. Science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke famously said “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” so why can’t sufficiently advanced magic be indistinguishable from (and replace) technology? In such a world, you can have streets lit by globes of cold fire or the guttering spirits of trapped ghosts. Airships may sail across the sky, while bound elementals fill the sails of vessels crossing the sea. Rather than being an isolated miracle, resurrection could be a service available to anyone who has the gold. So what principles should you keep in mind when designing such a world? What are the cornerstones of magical industry? What’s the Source of Magic? Industrialized magic needs to be a reliable force that can be harnessed across a wide area. It could be an ambient force that suffuses the entire world. Or perhaps it flows from the sun. Or it was the last gift of benevolent gods before they ascended to a higher reality. I Keith Baker Developing Magical Industries Callum Sim - [email protected] - 349937
14 Kobold Guide to Worldbuilding, Volume 2 On the other hand, magic could be drawn from a concrete resource, much as we use oil or steam. Perhaps magic is torn from the bones of longdead dragons. Maybe your industry is based on necromancy, fueled by the harvested spirits of the dead. Or perhaps it involves bargains made with otherworldly entities. This question is crucial for defining the flavor of your magical industry. For instance, magic that flows from the sun is freely available and virtually limitless. But if it comes from the bones of dragons or a similar material resource, then the question is who has this resource; the nations with the most significant deposits of dragon bone will wield outsized economic power, and you could have bone barons who have stumbled into power because of the deposits found on their land. In a world where magic is drawn from the spirits of the dead, there would be a very different cost. If spirits can be harvested from unwilling creatures, the stage is set for a brutal society that looks for any excuse to kill people and claim their ghosts. On the other hand, if a necromancer must be granted the right to harness a spirit, you could have a complex system of contracts, where the poor sell their afterlives for a handful of coins. There’s no need to limit yourself to a single path, however; each civilization on your world could have developed its own systems of magic. Imagine two neighboring nations. One draws on the mystical potential of the natural world—a renewable resource, but one that is only available in small quantities each day (preventing their industry from spreading too far or too fast). The other nation powers its industry with ghosts; it can expand quickly, and it has as much power as it needs—as long as it has lives to feed its necromantic engines. A Wizardly Workforce The existence of industrialized magic implies that there’s a significant number of skilled laborers and artisans capable of providing supernatural services. But who are these workers, and how does a person become one? One possibility is that anyone can learn to use magic, just as anyone can learn computer programming or electrical engineering in our world. Success is largely based on talent and drive and opportunity (though perhaps the ruling class is the only source of mystical training). If, on the other hand, you limit the number of people who have access to magic, you go a long way toward defining the shape of industry in your world. If magic is solely tied to a handful of sorcerous bloodlines, for instance, the families that carry that heritage can easily become the captains of industry. Callum Sim - [email protected] - 349937
Airships and Dragonbone Barons h Keith Baker 15 What about magic that comes from bargains with otherworldly entities? In such cases, you could easily see these fiends or elemental forces becoming the equivalent of real-life megacorporations; no one likes Baal, but the services his warlocks provide are just so much more convenient than what the mom-and-pop hedge mage can offer. Another way to limit magic is to tie it to specific locations. Perhaps the rituals of resurrection can only be performed in a Bloodwood Grove or at a nexus of ley lines. This is can make certain locations significant and give power to those people who reign over these vital regions. Be sure to question your initial assumptions when creating your magical industry. The practitioners of magic certainly could become a privileged or ruling class in a world of industrialized magic, but it doesn’t have to be the case; one could easily imagine a world in which the mystically gifted have been bound in service to the mundane majority, where the wheels of magical industry are turned by the oppression of mages. Arcane Economy Now that we know where magic comes from and who can wield it, it’s important to consider the cost of magic—both the cost to perform it and the cost to purchase magical goods and services (two things that should be directly related). Let’s say that a pyromancer can create lanterns infused with eternal flame and can dominate a battlefield with blasts of fire. Can one pyromancer create an infinite number of lanterns or devastate an entire army? If not, why not? This could be obvious based on your source of magic; if you rely on dragon bones or the spirits of the dead, you’re already working with an inherently limited resource. If this isn’t the case, is there some other factor that restricts the use of magic and raises the price? Time is a simple option; perhaps the pyromancer can make an infinite number of ever-burning lanterns, but the complex ritual takes three days to perform. Magic could take a physical toll on the spellcaster, too; the pyromancer could push themselves beyond their limits, but they risk literally burning themselves out. Likewise, powerful, world-changing acts of magic could carry a greater cost. Consider the idea of resurrection as an industry. If resurrection has no real cost beyond time, then society is going to have a more carefree relationship with death; high-risk activities would be commonplace and duels to the death could be casual, everyday affairs. If resurrection requires an expensive, limited resource—such as ground dragonbones—then you’re likely to see a severe distinction between social classes: The wealthy can Callum Sim - [email protected] - 349937
16 Kobold Guide to Worldbuilding, Volume 2 afford to purchase immortality, and the poor are limited to a single life. On the other hand, resurrection could have no material costs—but you can only resurrect someone if a person related to the victim willingly surrenders their own life. In such a world, resurrection can be a service available to all, but one that is rarely used. Another option is that the cost of industrial magic isn’t personal, but environmental. Aside from all the costs that come from harvesting limited resources, it could be that breaking the laws of nature has an impact on the natural world and that the more magic is used, the more the land or the people wither away. Magic! What is It Good For? What is the scope of your magical industry? Is it something that people use everyday or is it tied strictly to higher-end services? Consider some of the basic needs of society: transportation, communication, healthcare, and warfare/defense. Transportation Are your streets filled with zephyr-drawn coaches and your skies filled with airships? Are brooms of flying or bat-winged cloaks commonplace? Or do people largely rely on mundane travel to get around town, but when you need to go between towns, you can use the teleportation circles of the Guild of Endless Doors? (This again goes back to the question of whether your magical solutions merely mirror the tools we’ve created with science, are inferior to modern technology, or exceed it.) Communication Do the people in your world carry personal scrying crystals that effectively function as cell phones, allowing them to instantly contact one another with ease? Or is such communication much more limited, perhaps with sympathetic books that act more like a telegraph system? Or does your society perhaps rely instead on a magical messenger system, where, for a small fee, you can whisper a message to an arcane mote which then delivers your message to the intended recipient? Healthcare What maladies can be cured with magic, and what can’t it fix? Is healing magic instantaneous or does it take time? A world in which any disease or malady could be instantly cured will be quite different from ours—and if resurrection exists, it can undermine any plot that hinges on murder or assassination! A reliance on limited and expensive components is one way to limit the power of magical healing. Another possibility is to make Callum Sim - [email protected] - 349937
Airships and Dragonbone Barons h Keith Baker 17 it a zero-sum game; a healer can transfer an injury, but someone else must suffer it. This allows a hero or villain to quickly return to the fray, but only if they find someone willing to carry their burden. Warfare/Defense Warfare is inevitable, and, as such, any society with magic would soon enough develop ways to use it to kill and defend. How do people fight one another with magic? Do duelists face one another with rapiers infused with mystical energy? Or have advances in magic largely made such weapons obsolete, with sword and shield giving way to wand and curse? Industrialized Heroes Does the veteran warrior wield a sword or a wand? Do the characters fear death, or is resurrection always an option? This in turn raises another question: In a world with such widespread magic, what can you do to make your heroes feel remarkable? Perhaps, as in the example above, magical talent is limited to specific bloodlines . . . except for your sorcerer, who’s the first commoner to wield this power in recorded history. Maybe the foul spirit Baal is the underlying force that powers magical industry, but your warlock has forged a pact with a being of light—or with a lesser imp that hopes to topple the infernal hierarchy just as you change the mortal world. Or what if magic has a well-established cost, but your wizard has devised a new and more effective system . . . one that the established industrial powers may soon see as a threat? One of the most interesting things about industrial magic is that it gives you the opportunity to explore parallels to the real world, while also considering the impact of services we don’t have. You can imagine the beneficial potential of a network of teleportation gates linking every major city or the ability to buy a second life with resurrection. But you can also explore the negative aspects of industry—the destruction of limited resources, the environmental impact, the power wielded by guilds that have a monopoly on vital services. Is your industrial magic a boon to the common people? Or is it a force that dominates their lives—or, in the case of industrial necromancy, actively consumes them? No matter the rules you build into your world, you are free to establish that your heroes are innovators and improvisers, more versatile and creative than the cogs that keep the wheels of magical industry turning. The locksmith in the market knows a spell of warding and the rituals for breaking such wards, but that’s all he knows and it took him years to master such rituals; the fact that your wizard can spend a few hours Callum Sim - [email protected] - 349937
18 Kobold Guide to Worldbuilding, Volume 2 studying a spellbook and pick this up, only to cast it aside and prepare a new spell tomorrow, is a reflection of your unbridled talent. Not every musician is Mozart, and not every electrician is Tesla. To make your protagonists stand out in a magical world, you can either highlight their exceptional talent and unlimited potential, or you can focus on the idea that they are actually challenging the system and coming up with entirely new paths to power. Industrial magic allows you to bring arcane power out of the dark woods and hidden towers and to make it a part of everyday life. It’s a way to blur the lines between genres and to explore stories that don’t fit in a medieval world. So start pulling on this thread and see where it leads you! Callum Sim - [email protected] - 349937
Weave Your Worlds Thread by Thread h Coral Alejandra Moore 19 Weave Your Worlds Thread by Thread he world we live in is filled to bursting with unique people and cultures, and so naturally if we want to build rich and complex worlds of our own—that seem just as vibrant as the real one—we must strive to emulate that same diversity. Too often, fictional worlds are populated with monocultural societies. In addition to breaking verisimilitude—which it does, since nowhere in the real world does a monocultural society exist—when we build worlds this way, we unintentionally make some of our audience feel unwelcome because they don’t see anyone like them depicted in our fictional world. It can make a person feel excluded. Erased. Monocultures, by their very nature, seek to stamp out those that believe differently in pursuit of harmony (at the expense of diversity). But in fiction and in games, one of the most important things we can do is build vibrant worlds where every one of our readers or players feels included. Let’s explore how we can do that when we build our next world. Cultural Tapestries In our world, all cultures are tapestries made up of individuals. Some individuals in the tapestry agree with the majority of the laws, customs, and mores of that culture, and others don’t. Some individuals within that culture are actively trying to bring it down, and others are trying to make sure nothing ever changes. So why would we ever want to create monocultural worlds in our fiction? It’s a lazy shortcut—and frankly not helpful in crafting compelling stories—to create fictional cultures that are homogenous. T Coral Alejandra Moore A Guide to Diverse and Inclusive Worldbuilding Callum Sim - [email protected] - 349937
20 Kobold Guide to Worldbuilding, Volume 2 So, if we accept that premise, what are some of the strategies we can use to help create such vibrant worlds? To answer that question, let’s look at the following three exercises. 1. Be Widely Read The first exercise isn’t really an exercise per se, but more of an ongoing project: Read widely about people who aren’t like you. This axis of difference can be anything you choose—stories with characters of different gender identities, from different places, of different socioeconomic status, of different religious beliefs, of different ethnicities, or any combination thereof. Whenever possible you should try to find primary sources. Nothing is more beneficial to this exercise than reading what that person who is different than you actually has to say about the world around them. Where primary sources aren’t possible to find, make sure you’re aware of how a secondary source relates to the subject matter. A secondary source may have an agenda of their own that may have little to do with communicating a culture accurately or truthfully; keep this in mind. Try to read about people in your own culture who are different than you, and also about people who are different than you and from a totally different culture. You might consider keeping a list of these differences and the things you learned about the individuals you read about that you didn’t expect. The goal here isn’t to become an “expert” on any culture or identity so that you can replicate it—because you shouldn’t even try to do that—but to be curious and respectful, and to understand how inhabiting different identities changes one’s perceptions of the world. 2. From the Outside Looking In This second exercise requires a bit more introspection. Think about your culture, the one you live in right now. How do people from the outside perceive that culture? Get a notebook or open a document and spend some time—fifteen or twenty minutes—noting these perceptions. Try to provide an honest and thorough assessment here, not just the surface buzzwords that come easily to mind. When you’re done, go back and mark the ones you think are true and the ones you think are false. What on this list would you change, if you could? What do you hope never changes? As you’re looking over your list, think about some of the different people you know and how they might populate this list. 3. Examine the Threads of Your Own Tapestry This third exercise is the big one. Spend some time thinking about what subcultures you belong to. Which communities that you are a part of have different beliefs or customs than the prevailing culture around you? Try to be thorough here; don’t just take the easy monolithic answer. Callum Sim - [email protected] - 349937
Weave Your Worlds Thread by Thread h Coral Alejandra Moore 21 Remember that you are not the epitome of your prevailing culture. If you need help getting started, go back to the second exercise and think about your answers. How exactly do you differ from what people on the outside think your culture is like, and what is the genesis of that difference? Is it because you were born in a certain place, or because your parents believed something in particular, or because you decided to join that one club at school? Does being a part of these different subcultures effect you positively or negatively with regards to the larger culture around you? It’s possible that some of them have no effect at all, but that should not be the case for all of them. Really think about these effects and the impacts they’ve had on your life. How does being a part of these subcultures change how you view the larger culture around you? This is your personal corner of the tapestry of your culture. Everyone you know has a corner that’s slightly different. Some of the people you know have unbelievably complicated corners, and for others their corners are relatively simple. Neither has inherently more value than the other; it’s just a difference of texture. Some of the people you know have corners of the tapestry more similar to some of the folks you read about in the first exercise than you. Others look very much like yours. If you want to see firsthand what the differences in these corners might be, you could ask your partner, significant other, family member, or close friend to do this exercise with you. This is too big an ask of someone who is merely an acquaintance, so be mindful of the power dynamics involved when you make this request. Make sure you explain the reason you’re asking, and be respectful of the boundaries people set if you are refused. This is a deeply personal thing you are asking and shouldn’t be requested lightly. Worshippers of Unfashionable Gods Armed with what you learned in our three exercises, let’s build some worlds! Let’s operate under the assumption that you already have some kind of world in mind with a culture that’s interesting, but you fear is somewhat monolithic. To make this world more inclusive, we should look at what we’ve learned in our exercises above and try to incorporate some of those textures into our worlds. Take care that you do not take a culture from the real world and drop it whole cloth into your story- or gameworld; that is not the goal of what we’re doing here. (And if you need an explanation as to why, do some reading about cultural appropriation.) What we’re looking for are aspects of difference and the impacts those differences have on perceptions of the world. Callum Sim - [email protected] - 349937
22 Kobold Guide to Worldbuilding, Volume 2 What we want is to come up with interesting subcultures that might exist within the larger culture. You can also use the lists we generated in our exercises as inspiration to imagine some subcultures that might fit more neatly into your fictional world than they might in ours. Let’s say there is a village that has grown up around a temple to a god whose worship has gone out of fashion in this world. Perhaps there’s a neighborhood in your city heavily populated by immigrants from another nation where they mostly speak a pidgin of the primary language and the language of the place they come from. Maybe the users of a certain kind of magic come together at the shores of a river to mark their celebrations a few times a year. Or there’s an island where they have significantly different ideas about marriage or death than the rest of the culture-at-large. All of the people that come from these places have a significantly different outlook on the world around them, and you can use those outlooks to make wonderfully diverse and compelling stories in addition to making your audience from different backgrounds feel like they have a place in your world. There is no one subculture, just as there is no one overarching culture. While cultural differences can certainly create conflict in your world, do your best not to depict any subculture as inherently evil or wrong. They are just different from the prevailing culture around them in subtle or not-so-subtle ways. You can certainly have a villain that is a member of one of these subcultures, but it should not be the subculture that makes them a villain. This is an important distinction that I cannot emphasize enough—in your worldbuilding, strive to show that individual choices or experiences make someone a villain, not their culture. Tying It All Together Now that we’ve developed some new tools to use when building your fictional worlds, think about ways you can use them to increase the number of unique textures—and/or create plots and conflicts that revolve around individuals from these subcultures. With these tools in hand, we can now build much more interesting and inclusive worlds where people from different backgrounds than our own will feel more welcome . . . and, as a result, create worlds that will feel as vibrant and rich as the real one. Callum Sim - [email protected] - 349937
Good Gods! h James L. Sutter 23 aith is one of the most powerful forces in any given setting—and that’s even before you add in actual miracles. Religion permeates people’s lives, determining everything from national borders to cultural taboos, and memorable gods make for memorable worlds. While it might be tempting to cherry-pick your favorite gods from real-world religions, that route can be complicated. Why run the risk of accidentally insulting or appropriating from an existing culture, or getting publicly critiqued by scholars more knowledgeable about the subject matter? Even if you succeed in avoiding controversy, you’re still sharing those characters with anyone else who wants to borrow them. If you create a completely new cast of gods, however, you’ve got a unique hook that players and readers can only find in your setting, bringing them back again and again. How Many Gods Do You Need? The first decision to make about your religious system is how many deities you want to include. Many Gods A multi-deity pantheon, like those of Norse, Hindu, or Aztec mythology, provides your world and culture with a wealth of divine influences. A small pantheon might have just a handful of deities—say, one for each element, or nine gods representing the nine alignments on the classic D&D alignment grid. Larger systems might have hundreds or even thousands of deities, as with the gods of Ancient Egypt. F James L. Sutter Good Gods! Designing Unique Deities Callum Sim - [email protected] - 349937
24 Kobold Guide to Worldbuilding, Volume 2 In general, smaller pantheons are easier for both designer and audience to manage, and many large systems with hordes of named divinities still tend to focus in on a few “major” gods, such as the twelve Olympians of the Greek pantheon. You can also make a large system more accessible by grouping gods together, creating specific pantheons for the major cultures of your world so that a reader or player interested in one culture doesn’t necessarily have to assimilate the entire list. Yet there’s also nothing wrong with a sprawling system in which every place, creature, family, or concept has its own patron deity. In addition to full gods, pantheons can also include less powerful entities or intermediary spirits, such as saints and angels in Catholicism or the loa of Vodou. Exploring the relationships between all these different divine beings—from hierarchies and family ties to feuds or romance—can help generate story hooks and cultural details. Two Gods Dualistic systems are often as much about the relationship as about the deities themselves, be that antagonistic—like a classic good-vs.-evil face-off—or harmonious, such as sun and moon deities united in divine marriage. One God A single, unopposed deity raises all sorts of intriguing questions about your world, especially if worship isn’t universal. No Gods A religion doesn’t necessarily need a deity. Consider something like the Force in Star Wars, which is a robust spiritual practice without an anthropomorphized god. This category may also include varieties of animism, totemism, ancestor worship, and so forth. Designing Portfolios When designing a god, especially a god in a pantheon, it’s good to know what that god’s all about—what in RPGs is sometimes called a deity’s “portfolio.” While gods may have many different powers and interests, think of their portfolio as a way of communicating your god’s brand: Thor as the god of storms and thunder, Ares as the god of war and courage, or Anubis as the god of death and the Underworld. Start by listing out the various niches you want to fill with your world’s religions, taking care to balance the needs of both your imaginary cultures and the specific stories you want to tell. You might decide you need a death god for your heroic necromancer character, a sun god for your Callum Sim - [email protected] - 349937
Good Gods! h James L. Sutter 25 solar-powered robot empire, a nature god for your fey-bonded druids and nomadic centaur clans, and so forth. If you’re having trouble coming up with a list, think about the roles real-world gods play, what your cultures value most, and what stresses might lead someone to pray—farmers for rain, soldiers for victory, and so on. Conversely, if you find that your list of divine roles starts growing out of control, consider placing similar motifs under a single god’s purview to condense things down. For example, perhaps magic, secrets, and scholarship are all closely related enough that they can be combined into a single deity. Now you have your initial list of gods and their concerns, but that on its own probably doesn’t do much to capture the imagination. After all, we still don’t know what makes your death god different from all the other death gods we’ve encountered in other fictional worlds. A simple way to help your deities stand out is to introduce a “curveball”: an element of a deity’s portfolio that seems totally unrelated to their role in your setting. By adding the curveball and then forcing yourself to justify and explain how these elements actually are related, you’ll find yourself coming up with new and interesting aspects of the faith (and perhaps your larger setting) that you might not have considered otherwise. At its best, this style of design can be a stream-of-consciousness improv game you play with yourself. Talk out every idea you can think of, no matter how bizarre, and springboard off of them until you end up somewhere unique and exciting. To show how this works, let’s say you need a god of war and battle, and you decide to throw in the wildest curveball you can think of: love. Immediately, you start to see some ties and justifications—because what better reason to go to war than to defend something you love? Maybe combat in this faith is also tied up with romantic love, with adherents constantly fighting duels over their beloveds. But what if we take things one step weirder and make it so the person you’re dueling is your beloved? Perhaps it’s a sign of admiration in this religion to challenge someone to ritual combat, and no one respectable would marry anyone who couldn’t kick their ass fifty percent of the time (bringing a whole new meaning to the phrase “met your match”). Perhaps priests of this religion even combine love and warfare into a vocation, fighting side by side with their romantic partners in elite military units, a la the Sacred Band of Thebes. Or maybe you’ve got a god of magic, secrets, and . . . eggs. Well, you say to yourself, that makes a sort of sense, doesn’t it? An egg is a kind of secret, hiding its unknowable contents until it hatches. Perhaps your religion venerates birds or snakes—or is practiced by nagas and harpies. Maybe Callum Sim - [email protected] - 349937
26 Kobold Guide to Worldbuilding, Volume 2 its magical adherents are wardens of fantastic beasts, raising dragons and other exotic familiars from the mysterious eggs they search out or conjure from other realms. They might believe that reality is itself an egg, and their god a vast wyrm that coils around it like the World Serpent of Norse myth. In the above examples, note how easily a small choice or detail can lead your religion in a wildly different direction. For instance, we’ve said nothing about the morality of the above religions or whether they play positive or negative roles in their societies. The god of love and battle could easily skew good—by making these warrior-priests divine defenders of the innocent—or evil, by making them brutal raiders who prey upon “weaker” faiths. Similarly, our friends with the magic eggs could be kindhearted guardians of endangered magical beasts . . . or an apocalyptic cult dedicated to cracking open the egg of reality and birthing us all into the howling darkness beyond. The Call to Faith Faiths need followers, and worshipers need a reason to worship. For each god or religion you develop, think about what drives people to the church. What are the worshipers getting here that they can’t get elsewhere, especially if there are other faiths they could choose? What social factors or environmental stresses led to the church’s foundation and popularity (especially if the god’s existence isn’t empirically obvious)? This all goes double for evil faiths—what drives your demon-worshipers to perform their dark rites, when it’s easier to just stay home? As with all storytelling, it’s vital for your villains to have identifiable reasons behind their actions. At the same time, it’s also helpful to know what—if anything—a particular church is wrong about. Why would a reasonable person reject it? Are there contradictions in the faith or schisms over interpretation? Even if your god is perfect, their mortal followers probably aren’t, and a little bit of hypocrisy or moral ambiguity can add verisimilitude to a religion. A word of caution here: If you’re building “good” deities for a game with an alignment system or other form of absolute morality, or if you even just plan to present a god in a positive light, be careful which flaws you include in your faith. While some players may love the complexity of a generally good religion with a few backward tenets, others will assume that your inclusion of those hurtful values means you as the author support them. You can get around this somewhat by having other “good” characters rail against the problems in a particular faith, but it’s best to know what you’re getting yourself into if you slap the “lawful good” label on a faith you don’t one hundred percent agree with. Callum Sim - [email protected] - 349937
Good Gods! h James L. Sutter 27 Filling in the Details Now that you’ve got the broad strokes of your deities and their religions, it’s time to bring them to life by asking yourself some additional questions. Again, while this can be a great place to draw inspiration from real-world faiths, try to choose elements from a variety of different cultures and mash them up into something new and unrecognizable, rather than swiping large swaths from a single source. Church Structure Is there a hierarchy within the faith? Is worship collective or individual? How does the church structure reflect, reinforce, or respond to the conflicts and tensions of the larger society in which it exists? Relations with Other Faiths How do the gods and their followers relate to each other? If you have two different “good” gods, how do they reconcile their differences while still remaining “good”? How do their followers treat each other? As noted earlier, consider going for relationships more complex than a simple war between good and evil, such as having your gods be competitors, colleagues, lovers, family—or all of the above. Terminology Craft terminology that reflects your specific religion, rather than defaulting to the nomenclature of faiths you’re already familiar with. Why settle for addressing a priest as “father” when you could have “sea speaker” or “brilliance” or “guardian”? Rituals What sort of rituals does your church observe? Again, try to avoid using practices from real-world religions—create something new that speaks to your god’s central themes. For example, perhaps your sea god is worshiped in a boat that’s intentionally capsized at the end of each service, representing the sea’s dominion over the faithful. Sayings A few choice aphorisms or proverbs can go a long way toward characterizing your religion, often without even addressing it directly. Having “god guide your blade” as the standard greeting among the faithful paints a very different picture than “water for your family.” And don’t forget profanity—how your characters curse can reveal a lot about a religion’s values. Callum Sim - [email protected] - 349937
28 Kobold Guide to Worldbuilding, Volume 2 Taboos Like sayings, taboos are a window into your faith’s worldview. Try going beyond common taboos around sex and excretion. Is riding animals forbidden? Playing music? Showing emotion—or not showing it? Try choosing one of your religion’s core values and exploring how a taboo might grow naturally out of it, or pick a random taboo and work backward to justify why it makes sense for the religion to enforce it. Clothes and Symbols How do adherents display their values in their garments? Are they scandalous or modest? Expensive or humble? Proudly standing out or trying to blend in? Think also about how priestly garb differs from that of lay worshipers. Holy Texts Consider how your religion passes on its tenets. Remember, holy texts aren’t just books and should reflect both the faith and the people who practice it. Instead of written works, a holy text could be an elaborate knot language, oral tradition, scrimshaw, music, vines pruned to grow in specific patterns, a living coral reef that acts as a psychic reliquary for the congregation’s ancestral memories—don’t be afraid to get supernatural! Infinite Inspiration By using the methods presented above, you should be able to create fun new gods in a matter of minutes—so if a given religion isn’t exciting you, throw it out and start over. The multiverse is vast, and there are always new gods waiting to be discovered. Callum Sim - [email protected] - 349937
The Marketplace Microcosm h Ashley Warren 29 he scent of baked goods and sizzling meats wafts through the vendor stalls. Smoke from the many aromatic votives in lanterns rises into the cold air and dissipates, leaving behind a perfumed mist. The din of the crowd ebbs as a heated haggle escalates between Old Martha, the milliner, and Mr. Opal, the luthier—but the tension is broken as two children dash into the fray, one dodging under Old Martha’s skirts. Mr. Opal relents with a smile and hands over the satchel of silver coins that clink in the bag. Nearby, the sound of a hammer meeting metal on an anvil echoes through the narrow cobblestone alleys. Where is this marketplace scene occurring? It could be almost anywhere, and it almost doesn’t matter. But from a handful of details, we can glean a lot about this fictional locale: • It’s cold, and people take steps to mitigate that through warm and comforting foods; • It’s busy and populated, given the noise and chaos; • Its economy includes artisanry—the milliner, the luthier, and a nearby blacksmith—and coin currency as a means of exchange. A marketplace scenario like this manages to convey a lot of worldbuilding in a relatively small number of words. We call this the “Marketplace Microcosm,” because a marketplace essentially acts as a zoomed-in view of a fictional place. It can do the heavy lifting of conveying the culture, the history, the traditions, the economy, the residents, and so much more, by placing readers in an organic and very familiar starting point. T Ashley Warren The Marketplace Microcosm Callum Sim - [email protected] - 349937
30 Kobold Guide to Worldbuilding, Volume 2 Let’s break this concept down into parts and dissect why establishing a marketplace can fast-track meaningful worldbuilding without having to overload a reader with lore or exposition. The Economy Almost every fictional setting has some sort of economy at play. On the other hand, the lack of an established economy can be just as compelling for storytelling. An economy does not necessarily have to include currency, although the form and purpose of currency also tells us much about a place. Ultimately, a fictional economy comes down to the presence (or lack) of goods and services and a system for exchanging those. Trade, barter, sharing, and currency are all tried-and-true options for a reason, but you can develop a more abstract system—such as the use of personal favors, prayer, memories, or a sense of duty. Whatever system your fictional society uses must have a purpose, so what is it and how does that tie into the larger narrative you’re trying to establish? That question alone is fodder for a unique story. If you don’t want the economy of your world to be too much of a focal point, you can still put a creative spin on currency to say something about your setting. Often, forms of currency are determined by genre. In the Fallout video game’s post-apocalyptic setting, bottlecaps are used as currency because they are already-manufactured items that were once in abundance, but are now much scarcer. Like real-world currency and economy, yours will likely have its own set of rules. Using this thought process, how is currency produced in your world, and what does that process suggest about your world’s resources and values? Who determines how the economy functions? Is there a bank or arbiter of the economy and currency? Is the whole system rigged, or does it operate fairly? Once you have some of these bigger questions answered, you can drill down to share this information through a meaningful scene that takes place in your market. For example, does the lack of coinage, but abundance of goods, lead to theft? Thievery in a market is a classic trope that presents an opportunity for readers and players to think about moral choices. Think of the Disney movie Aladdin and what its bread-stealing market chase sequence conveys in the context of the story. We learn that Aladdin has few material resources, but he himself is resourceful. He charms some and angers others through his escape, which gives us a chance to witness other aspects of the society in which he lives. He stops to feed hungry children, which also implies that there is a class system in Agrabah. The vendors are packed closely together, and there is a bustling crowd visible throughout, implying that this is a busy hub of culture and commerce. Callum Sim - [email protected] - 349937
The Marketplace Microcosm h Ashley Warren 31 All of this worldbuilding is communicated in media res using a market as its foundation. Imagine instead if Aladdin had simply sat in one place and explained all of that same information to Abu without the viewer learning it in brief vignettes. Which would you rather experience? The Wares What defines a market is its wares, and this is where worldbuilders can get really creative and convey a lot with relatively few details. What is on display in your fictional market? What is available for trade or purchase? Are the offerings strange or unique? Do the wares come locally to the market, or are they imported from far away? When it comes to wares and goods, there’s almost no limit to what you can create. If it feels daunting to come up with this fictional inventory from scratch, start by answering some simple questions: • What five wares does your market have? • How much do they cost? (Whether via currency or trade, depending on your economy.) • Where do the goods come from? • Who or what makes them? • What are they made out of? (For example, if your market offers mostly foodstuffs, the presence of unique and unconventional meat from rare or alien creatures is automatically an enticing hook for readers and players.) A market with memorable wares is the Troll Market from Hellboy II: The Golden Army. Only certain people can access the Troll Market, and what they find there is a treasure trove of fantastical and supernatural offerings from around the world. The variety of creatures who patronize the market is equally as interesting, as they are as fantastical as the goods on display. We’d be remiss if we did not also mention one of fiction’s most famous markets, Diagon Alley, from the Harry Potter books and movies. This introduction, for both the reader and Harry, is our first real glimpse of the wizarding world. The shops and types of items offered immediately teach us so much about the values of this world, such as the importance of pet ownership, school supplies, and what people do for pastimes. The Vendors A market’s offerings are rarely provided without the presence of vendors. These characters are some of the most fun to develop, as you can give them personality and characteristics that align with—or are at odds with— their wares. A proud old artisan sharing their beautiful, painstakingly crafted embroidered garments may have a completely different personality Callum Sim - [email protected] - 349937
32 Kobold Guide to Worldbuilding, Volume 2 than someone who hawks cheap (or even stolen) items for a steep profit. Your vendors suggest features about your setting. Are artisans and makers prized or derided? Is being a vendor or merchant something to be proud of? Ashamed? How do the vendors treat their customers? Those who spend much of their lives in a market are also excellent sources of lore and information. The way a vendor acts also suggests the value of the wares, which ties back into the greater economic system of your original world. In The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, the Riften marketplace in the center of the city is small, but the vendors there each have distinct (and comical) personalities. Grumpy Grelka reluctantly sells weapons and armor while insulting every customer who looks her way, and the lack of pride in her offerings make the player assume she provides low-quality supplies. Her stall is beside the smooth-tongued, reptilian Madesi, who makes and sells his own jewelry, and we associate that with a higher value. The differences in their attitudes speak to both their individual backgrounds—Grelka is a Nord from Skyrim, whereas Madesi comes from the far-away Black Marsh—but also how Riften functions, which suggests a combination of danger and humor that the players can expect to find there. The Location Now comes another fun aspect of creating a marketplace: determining how it looks and functions. Typically, most markets mirror whatever locale they are a part of, so you can leverage that to establish consistency in your setting. Perhaps the market stalls are onion-domed like the nearby looming castle. You can likewise leverage it to do the reverse. Perhaps ratty scraps of fabric barely shield vendors from snow, a stark contrast from the surrounding glossy corporate buildings. You can also break out of traditional market tropes entirely. One of the most memorable scenes in the film Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets is the “Big Market,” which can only be experienced through virtual reality with special gear. Without the gear, the “market” is simply an empty desert, but the VR set brings to life a massive mall with hundreds of thousands of shops. It’s a unique take on an old trope and gives us a glimpse at the technology possible in the film’s fantastical sci-fi setting—as well as who is able to access such remarkable technology. The architecture, layout, and location of your market can also tie into the vendors and the wares. If your market is a traveling caravan, the vendors may be accustomed to living as wanderers without a home base. The wares available may change depending on where the caravan travels. There are essentially no limits to what the location of your market can communicate about your larger world. Callum Sim - [email protected] - 349937
The Marketplace Microcosm h Ashley Warren 33 The Atmosphere Because it’s self-contained, a market is an excellent way to establish atmosphere. Pull in the five senses to bring your market—and subsequently, your original setting—to life. What are the textures people can feel or interact with? Are the scents pleasant, foul, a mix of both? Is there something to taste through food or drink? Or is that sense explored via weather, like a cold chill in the air that leaves a metallic taste on the tongue? Is the market loud and bustling and lively or ghostly quiet with a few hardy customers that blow in from the desert? Hone in on those details to provide a rich, immersive experience. Ultimately, a market is a sumptuous storytelling device. Because it’s “small” in the context of a bigger world, it serves as a good starting point for your worldbuilding. Sometimes when writers give ourselves some limits and parameters, we can unlock greater creativity. You may find that the narratives you want to explore transcend far beyond market stalls and grumpy vendors, but you’ll still have a solid foundation for developing the many nuances and unique elements of the places borne from your imagination. Callum Sim - [email protected] - 349937
34 Kobold Guide to Worldbuilding, Volume 2 It’s This Meets That he first tabletop roleplaying game that I wrote for was the Kids on Bikes franchise by Doug Levandowski and Jon Gilmour. At the time, I had just finished playing (way too many) hours of Dream Daddy, a dad dating simulator video game. Inspired by that game and the Stranger Things universe, I wrote the “Dads on Mowers” adventure prompt and sent it off to Doug, thinking I’d get a rejection along the lines of “Banana, maybe you need to take a break from the computer.” Instead, he published it. Looking back, I realized that my work is heavily inspired by the media I consume, but it’s almost always two or more pieces of media crossed with one another, whether it’s movies or music or something else. My game They’re Onto Me is inspired by the TV series BrainDead and Channel Zero. Jiangshi: Blood in the Banquet Hall is the result of me mashing up the Mr. Vampire series of movies with Bob’s Burgers, Kim’s Convenience, a little bit of Shaun of the Dead, and of course, my own Chinese American experience. In the film world, “comparables” are used to help a producer figure out the budget, demographic, genre, and cast, by comparing the movie being pitched with other previously released films. Similarly, in games, we often use media touchstones to set expectations with the target audience. Everything we create is impacted by the work we have consumed before, one way or another. But crafting comparables needn’t be something you do only after the fact; you can use comparables as you worldbuild to help you create a more fully-realized setting. So, how do we use comparables to help us build our worlds? T Banana Chan Using Comparables to Inspire Your Worlds Callum Sim - [email protected] - 349937
It’s This Meets That h Banana Chan 35 Consume Some Stuff One place to start worldbuilding is to closely study other media that already exists in a similar genre space. It doesn’t have to be other examples of the same kind of media you’re creating; it can be tabletop roleplaying games, music, theater, TV, books . . . anything. Let’s use film as an example. If you are specifically interested in creating something in the horror genre, watch (or rewatch) some horror movies. Maybe you’re interested in a slasher set in the suburbs, or maybe you would prefer a folk horror cult set in a bright and sunny rural area. Watch popular films, but also do some research and find the challenging works that hardcore aficionados know and love but are not widely known. Whatever it is, look for some pieces of media that excite you from the genre you want to work in. But don’t restrict yourself to consuming only one genre. Perhaps you also enjoy watching reality television. Maybe you’ve been watching reruns of Big Brother or The Circle and you are starting to see interesting patterns in the way the narratives of those shows unfold. Could those same narrative beats be reworked to function in a horror setting? After giving yourself time to view and process what you watched, write down which pieces of media you’re interested in and ask yourself the following questions: • Which scenes in media A excited me the most? The least? • Which scenes in media B excited me the most? The least? • Optional: Identify scenes in media C and D as well. • Which scenes from media A would mesh well with media B? If so, how? Once you’ve had time to think about these questions, continue to think about the genre meshing and which would be ideal for your story or world. Identify the Core Experience You Want to Create Unfortunately, sometimes you might be interested in too much. That’s when honing down on the core experience that you want to create for your audience can help you get rid of creative clutter. This is important, because it is when there are so many touchstones or ideas swirling around in your head that all those ideas risk throwing your narrative off the rails. This means trying to figure out the right genre for the world that you want to create. After answering the questions from the first step, think about the tone of what you want the experience you’re creating to look like. Is it closer to comedy or to horror? Science fiction or fantasy? Character- or plot-driven? Callum Sim - [email protected] - 349937
36 Kobold Guide to Worldbuilding, Volume 2 Here are a few more questions that could help you define your vision more clearly for yourself. Examine the various pieces of media that you enjoy and ask yourself: • Is there one of these that does not match up with the others in terms of tone or genre? • What tone interests you that you see recurring in some of the media that you enjoy? • If you are planning on juxtaposing two genres or tones with a setting that usually wouldn’t go together, what is the primary tone or genre? (For example, in a horror-comedy setting, a comedic tone is more prominent than a scary tone.) • How do you want your audience to feel when exploring your world? Outline the Details of the World Now you’ve collected all the pieces of things you like and started narrowing your vision of the world. At this point, it’s helpful to return to your primary influence—the film or media that you were most excited by—and make a simple list about its basic details. For this exercise, we are focusing specifically on the setting. • Where and when does the piece of media take place? Be as specific as you can: For example, modern day Staten Island, Toronto in the early 2000s, Shanghai in the 1920s. • What are the individual locations within this setting? Maybe there’s a bodega the protagonists frequent or a speakeasy nestled away between a candy shop and a butcher or something else. • What are the residents of the setting like? Are they busy, impatient city folks rushing from place to place or quiet yet nosy suburbanites? You don’t need to go through the piece of media with a fine-tooth comb, but hopefully identifying these setting details will help you gain clarity for your own world. After you’ve made this list, you should see if there are details that could be juxtaposed with themes or concepts from other media. Try using the questions below to spark these connections. • Time and Place: What is an element that might contradict this space that can be found in another movie or media? • Locations: Which, if any, location seems out of place? Is there someplace from another piece of media you can insert here? • Residents: Are there any residents that can act like fish out of water? Or are there possibly characters from another media that might fit well here? Callum Sim - [email protected] - 349937
It’s This Meets That h Banana Chan 37 Let There Be Light! This process can really help you figure out what kind of game you want to make. It can also really help inspire you when you’re facing writer’s block or just feeling overwhelmed. But, just as importantly, working with comparables helps you summarize what your game is about, so when you pitch it to a publisher (or even just talk about it with a friend!), you will be able to provide them with a clearer picture of what you are trying to create. Callum Sim - [email protected] - 349937
38 Kobold Guide to Worldbuilding, Volume 2 Spiral Campaign Development n the original Kobold Guide to Worldbuilding, Monte Cook describes how novelists need not waste time building out an entire world when they know where their characters are going throughout the course of the novel. Monte describes this being generally impossible in a roleplaying game where characters follow many different potential paths throughout the game. Monte’s essay is largely targeted at those building campaign worlds that other GMs use, but it’s still worth considering when building worlds for our own home games. In roleplaying games, we can’t build worlds the same way a novelist does. Instead, we must build worlds that offer both freedom and meaningful choices for our characters. One way to do this is with a style of worldbuilding I call “spiral campaign development,” though I doubt I’m the first to coin the phrase. In this style of campaign development, we put the characters in the center of our world and build the world out from them. Where are the characters right now? What do they see around them? What is the nearest settlement like? What ancient history lies beneath it? What fantastic feature defines this settlement from all others? What adventure locations lurk over the horizon? We build our worlds from these questions outward—the questions the players have about the world around them. They’re not concerned about the whole world; they care about the adventure they’re going on tonight. If we have a limited time to build out our world, we can do so by narrowing down the world as a whole to the world that appears in front of the characters. What if we only had 30 minutes to build such a world? Let’s find out! I Michael E. Shea Building a Campaign World in 30 Minutes Callum Sim - [email protected] - 349937
Spiral Campaign Development h Michael E. Shea 39 What Makes This World Different? While we don’t need to write an entire campaign bible before we start running games in our world (or ever!), we still want to have enough information to sell the world to the players. What makes this world different from all other fantasy worlds they’ve played in? What are the big truths of the world the characters know that the players need to learn? I like to refer to these as the “six truths,” but any number of truths can work to get us started. Start your 30-minute worldbuilding by writing down three big, bold, important bullets describing what makes this world unique among campaign worlds. Perhaps the gods have stopped speaking to their clergy. Perhaps mysterious obelisks have pierced up out of the ground all over the land. Perhaps a new demonic ruler presides over the long-abandoned throne of Kvaal nestled in the heart of the Wyrmspine Mountains. Three is a good start but if you get to six, consider it extra credit. In your first session of the campaign (often referred to as a session zero), discuss these truths with the players. Talk to them about what makes this world unique and help them build characters that fit well into the world’s unique state. Build from the Characters Outward Next, we zero in on the settlement surrounding the characters and can do so with two questions: • What makes this settlement unique? • What character-focused locations exist? First, we want our starting settlement to be unique in some way. Perhaps one of those huge black monoliths emerged in the center of town. Perhaps The city sits upon a geyser that goes off every four hours. Perhaps the town sits under the shadow of a black citadel long-since abandoned. Think about what central feature makes this settlement unique in the world and what makes it interesting to the characters. Next, build out the settlement by looking at the characters and their backgrounds. What locations make sense for them? Is there a cleric or paladin of the Lord of the Sun in the group? It turns out the local temple is dedicated to the very same lord! Perhaps our rogue must pay regular dues to the local thieves’ guild that’s run out of the abandoned tavern just outside of town. Our scarred veteran fighter might have an old, grizzled sergeant who works at the local general store after taking that proverbial arrow to the knee. Building from the characters outward isn’t just about physical location. Callum Sim - [email protected] - 349937
40 Kobold Guide to Worldbuilding, Volume 2 We’re likely to need elements of history and theology based on the backgrounds of the characters as well. Do we have a cleric of light in our campaign? (Who’s the god of light?) Is our rogue escaping an assassin’s guild from the bustling city of Fargate? (What’s the name of that guild?) Did the fighter and paladin fight on opposite sides of the War of the Six Spires? (What’s the one-line description of that war?) We can work with our players to fill in some of these details if they’re willing. Otherwise, we’ll want to at least have a few ideas so we can stay one step ahead of the questions the players ask about it. The details and resolution need only increase when the characters involve themselves in these subplots. A Land of Adventure This micro-campaign we’ve built wouldn’t be much fun if adventure wasn’t around every corner. Adventurers don’t gather because everything in town has been quiet and peaceful. What makes our settlement ripe for adventure? Every small town can sit upon a limitless dungeon burrowing thousands of feet underground and hidden away for thousands of years. Every hollow in a tree can lead to a lost crypt of a dragon emperor whose name has been wiped from the history books. Every inn has a strange sub-cellar that has remained unopened since the days the innkeeper’s great great uncle went missing after going down there looking for a prized bottle of wine. Instead of building a wide world, we build a deep one. We build a world right outside the crumbling stone walls of the local town. And this world expands as the light of the characters’ torches reach its dark corners. In our 30-minute worldbuilding exercise, ask yourself, what three adventure locations lie nearby? What’s Two Horizons Out? There’s a balance between building an entire world and focusing on what the characters see. GMs need to be one step ahead of the players. We need to keep the illusion going that the world is living and breathing just beyond the limit of their vision. If the characters can see one horizon out, the GM must see two horizons out. Within the first horizon lies everything the characters see. It might be the town they’re in, the current quest they’re on, or the current dungeon in which they’re delving. If we’ve done the right homework, we know what lies within that horizon. Then there’s the second horizon. What happens after that? Where might the characters go after they’ve finished the dungeon or explored the town? We know what’s going on this session, but what about the next session? We Callum Sim - [email protected] - 349937
Spiral Campaign Development h Michael E. Shea 41 don’t need to think three, four, five, or more horizons out. Doing so leads us to prepare more than we’ll likely require and might make it harder for us to pivot when the characters and the story take a strange turn. But we need to know what happens next so we know what hooks to put in place. If we know the characters are starting in a town, maybe we need to know what adventuring sites exist in, under, or just outside of it. If the characters seek the crown of Narovintaurus in the tomb of the dread king, maybe we need to know what trouble awaits them when they remove the crown from the king’s tomb. Thinking two horizons out can be tricky because that second horizon is a lot bigger than the first. We can have a solid idea of where the characters are now, but where they go next is a lot hazier. Luckily, there are tricks for this too. What Three Choices Lie Ahead? Instead of filling out every square foot of that second horizon, focus on three choices. Once they recover the crown of the dread king, what three options lie ahead? The magic number of three works well for both us and our players. It’s enough to offer useful options without so many that we get overwhelmed. Of course, our players may have options of their own they want to pursue, and that works too. We can build out these three options as a menu of different styles of play. We might offer three quests: one that requires careful diplomacy or political subterfuge, one that requires unlocking the mysteries of an ancient text in a deep dungeon, and one that requires hunting a powerful monster and its minions in an old elven ruin. Likewise, we can build these three options from the backgrounds, goals, and motivations of the characters. That’s the next step in our 30-minute worldbuilding. What three choices lie ahead of the characters? Ideally, we get these options in front of our players near the end of a session. That way we need only prepare the one option they choose for the next game we run. Of course, as part of that prep, it’s time to look two horizons out again. What three options open up after that? Layering History Ancient histories lie in the dusty halls forgotten under the ground. With each journey the characters take into the lost lairs one horizon out, they learn the deep and rich histories of our world. Whether we’re running our game in a published campaign world or a world of our own, we can take these histories and break them down into one or two sentences, write them down, and reveal them as the characters explore the world. The Callum Sim - [email protected] - 349937
42 Kobold Guide to Worldbuilding, Volume 2 cob-webbed halls through which they explore need not be barren. Every mosaic on the wall, every cracked statue in an alcove, every script written on the rims of burial urns reveals the history of the world surrounding the characters. We needn’t worry about where they discover these pieces of history, or even that every piece of history is discovered at all. With our list in hand, we’re prepared to reveal as much as we desire as the characters explore the world in whichever direction they take. With the time remaining for our 30-minute worldbuilding exercise, write down these single-sentence “secrets and clues” to expose the world and its history to the characters as they explore the land. A 30-Minute Worldbuilding Checklist Here’s a final look at our 30-minute worldbuilding checklist: • Write down the truths of your world. • Build a starting settlement with a unique feature. • Fill out the settlement with locations based on the characters and their backgrounds. • Drop three quests, hooks, locations, or choices in front of the characters. • Write down several one-sentence “secrets and clues” that reveal the secrets of the world to the characters as they explore it. No doubt our worldbuilding can expand past these simplified steps, but this gives us a solid campaign world from which to let our adventures grow. Channeling Your Creative Drive People who find themselves thrust into the GM seat often discover RPGs as a creative outlet they never dreamed of. Suddenly, we can build entire worlds, entire multiverses, and all the details within. We have a blank slate we can fill with details for the rest of our lives. Many GMs act on that drive and start hammering out the details of the world before a dark reality sets in—no one may care but them. While some players may fall deep into the lore of the world, most players primarily care about their characters. They want to experience the world, not learn about it all at once. The beauty of this spiral campaign development method is that we get to build the world through their eyes. We build what they see, feel, touch, discover, talk to, and fight. We need not throw away that creative drive. Instead, we can channel it into places that players will care about. Instead of building a ten-thousand-year history, we build the history of the lost tomb just outside of town. Drawing in the aperture of our creative drive lets us focus on the things the characters, and thus the players, care about. Callum Sim - [email protected] - 349937
Six Hot Takes on Worldbuilding for Roleplaying Games h The Dungeon Dudes 43 Six Hot Takes on Worldbuilding for Roleplaying Games he worldbuilding we do for tabletop roleplaying games isn’t quite the same as it is for a novel, film, or television series—or even video games. Fundamentally, a roleplaying game world exists to provide a setting for the fantastic adventures of the player characters. We like to think about our worlds as a collection of building blocks that we can use to inspire and create adventures. It exists to facilitate a narrative. We want everything we add to our setting to serve a purpose: not just in the world, but as a potential adventure element we can use in our games. To serve that purpose, we keep these six ideas in mind when we’re designing worlds for our games: 1. Read More Novels Over the years, we’ve found that our best worldbuilding happens when we surround ourselves with great inspiration. While film, television, and video games are wonderful sources of ideas, we think the best inspiration for worldbuilding comes from books. We enjoy reading history and nonfiction, but a steady diet of science fiction and fantasy novels has proven time and time again to be the single greatest source of worldbuilding fuel for us. If your fantasy literature begins and ends with Tolkien and Rowling (or the film adaptations of their works)—get reading! No doubt the works of these two authors have instilled a love for fantasy adventure in multiple generations, but there is a staggeringly diverse array of authors beyond these media giants. There are far too many to possibly list them all here, but the wonderful Appendix E in the 5e Core Rulebook (formerly Appendix N) is an excellent place to start, and you also can’t go wrong with the previous winners of the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy awards. Monty Martin & Kelly McLaughlin, The Dungeon Dudes T Callum Sim - [email protected] - 349937
44 Kobold Guide to Worldbuilding, Volume 2 Being well-read in fantasy literature offers you a body of work to draw on for inspiration and ideas to use in your personal games. You might borrow a small element or an off-hand remark from one author, adapt an entire character or plotline from another, or even use an author’s entire setting as a starting point, adding your own unique spin or interpretation along the way. Even if your players are well-read themselves, taking inspirational material from a novel and turning it into something usable in a roleplaying game naturally reshapes the source material into something truly unique. Many times, the players will be none the wiser to your creative pilfering, especially if you combine elements from multiple sources. On the flipside, our players often respond with delight when they recognize references to their favorite author or novel in our game sessions. After all, part of the fun of roleplaying games is being able to live out the fantasy adventures we’ve spent so much time reading about. Books carry one additional benefit over other forms of media when it comes to worldbuilding inspiration: Reading prose fiction is one of the most effective ways to learn what makes a great written or verbal description. When you read, keep a critical eye open for how authors describe history, locations, people, and actions. Over time, you’ll develop a working vocabulary that you can use effectively at the table when you’re presenting your non-player characters, adventure sites, and plot hooks. 2. Worldbuilding Isn’t the Same as Adventure Design Worldbuilding and adventure design are related but distinct creative activities. Worldbuilding is about the high-level creations that provide meaning and context for your adventures; it describes history, cosmology, society, religion, magic, technology, and often the focus is on the “big picture” that forms the backdrop for adventures. Adventure design focuses on the nuts-and-bolts elements of every game session, such as mapping out adventure sites, creating descriptions for locations and non-player characters, choosing monsters and treasure, and plotting out the general scenario the player characters will encounter. As before, these elements inform one another. Great worldbuilding helps facilitate campaign planning and adventure design by creating plot points, locations, and lore—which give meaning, context, and explanations to the narrative. Conversely, adventure design often prompts large worldbuilding questions such as “Who built this place?” and “Why are the Guild of Sorcerers and the Knightly Order enemies?” The answers to these questions need not be immediately relevant, but they enrich the immersive experience and prompt players to explore more deeply into the world. Good campaign planning combines these activities and considers overarching game mechanics, homebrew rules, how to plot out narrative Callum Sim - [email protected] - 349937
Six Hot Takes on Worldbuilding for Roleplaying Games h The Dungeon Dudes 45 arcs, and populating your game sandbox with interesting things for the players to do. It’s the fulcrum between worldbuilding and adventure design. Of course, designing a fantasy world is a rewarding and intellectually stimulating pastime on its own. We’ve spent countless hours worldbuilding in preparation for our campaigns because we love presenting our players with detailed worlds as much as we enjoy the act of creation itself. We tend to run games that include a fair amount of player-directed action and improvision, so having a strong foundation built allows us to run our worlds in-game with consistency. As such, we’ve learned to focus our efforts on the exact places that will be featured in our upcoming game sessions while still indulging our worldbuilding passions to generate inspirational material which we can draw on for future adventures. 3. The World Can Always Change One of the most important things to keep in mind when worldbuilding is that the players will never be interacting with the entire world all at once. Consider the lens through which your players experience your world. Especially when you are just starting out, focus only on what is important for the next adventure. Until your players experience the various elements of your world in play, it’s not set in stone—and even once details are established in-game, players are usually understanding about the GM making minor revisions or clarifications (or startling new revelations!). Everything else may be allowed to be in a constant state of flux, and there is no need to flesh out the entire history and the entire adventure of every location in your world prior to starting your campaign. For instance: If you come up with great ideas for adventures, monsters, and stories—or other ways to integrate your characters into the world—jot all those ideas down. You don’t need to fully develop the town of Dragonspire until you know your players might be traveling to Dragonspire. It’s easy to spend days, weeks, or even months plotting out every detail of a campaign setting before the first session even begins. Do as much planning as seems fun for you—as much work as you have the time and energy to put in. In our experience, letting the worldbuilding come alive as the players themselves discover it is often the most fun. Likewise, your cosmology, religions, and history can be built brick by brick as the players encounter them. As they uncover secrets and plots within your world, you can add a new brick to the foundation of what your world is all about. Callum Sim - [email protected] - 349937
46 Kobold Guide to Worldbuilding, Volume 2 4. Consider Your World’s Learning Curve One problem with worldbuilding for roleplaying games is how commonly the rich details we’ve created don’t come up in play at all. But there’s a second layer to this problem too: the player’s ability to experience the world, learn about how it works, and then act upon that information to make unexpected choices during play. When we think about the lens through which the players experience the gameworld, we also ask: How much do the players need to know about the world to create interesting characters and make meaningful decisions within it? What expectations might players carry over from their experiences of other worlds (or the real world) which don’t hold true in your world? What things about your world will players immediately find familiar, understandable, and relatable based on their prior experiences? If your players need to know a lot about your world to make decisions within it, your world has a steep learning curve. On the other hand, one of the advantages of using recognizable fantasy tropes is that our players immediately recognize them and understand implicitly how they work. This gives the world a gentler learning curve. 5. Archetypes As a worldbuilder, you can take a few familiar archetypes and use them as a launching point to explore the more unique and nuanced elements of your world. This is especially true if your setting includes major historical events that shape unique cultural customs, legal systems, and original cosmologies—or you want to explore a world that diverges heavily from the default assumptions of your roleplaying game system. Even when you are constructing a world that relies heavily on familiar tropes and archetypes, however, it’s tough for players to keep track of important locations, famous NPCs, which factions can be trusted, and understanding their character’s place in the world. It can be helpful to hand out lore primers to the players, and sagacious NPCs can, from time to time, spout expositional lore. But one of the most effective ways for players to better understand your world is just to spend time within it. As GMs, when we introduce our players to a game setting, we like to spend several game sessions letting them explore and experience the world before we shake things up by introducing the major plot points or overarching conflicts. The rules of your game system can help you in this regard. The game rules lay out a consistent set of expectations so players can make meaningful predictions and decisions about what their characters will do next. We’ve all seen how our players can feel frustrated and confused when they don’t have enough information, or when they haven’t had enough experience with the conventions and rules of the setting to fully grasp how a character in that world thinks and acts. Callum Sim - [email protected] - 349937
Six Hot Takes on Worldbuilding for Roleplaying Games h The Dungeon Dudes 47 6. Create a World of Problems A roleplaying game world is the backdrop for fantasy adventures, and so a critical component of a good adventure is a tantalizing problem or conflict that must be solved. Many of the most interesting fantasy and science fiction characters live in worlds that are deeply flawed. Rather than carefully crafting a world that is cohesive, logical, and consistent, a world filled instead with problems can be messy, illogical, and inconsistent. In our experience, the messier and more conflict-ridden worlds often feel the most complex, rich, and real. When we design elements of our worlds, we ask: How does this create interesting problems in the world that the players might be able to solve? Vary the scope and scale of the problems and conflicts in your settings, and if you aren’t sure how these problems might be solved, so much the better. Vanquish the dark lord, destroy the evil artifact, or banish the demon queen. Your world doesn’t really need to be totally original if your campaign is filled with compelling non-player characters, interesting scenarios, and exciting adventure locations. More and more, we look to reality for inspiration for complex problems for our game worlds. Don’t fall so much in love with your world that you aren’t willing to see the players mess it up—or do so yourself to spark drama and conflict. Your world will look better on fire. It’s up to your players to figure out how to put them out. This is how roleplaying games let us live out that most tantalizing fantasy of all—that it is possible to face great problems head on, solve them, and change the world for the better. Callum Sim - [email protected] - 349937
48 Kobold Guide to Worldbuilding, Volume 2 here’s so much to worldbuilding. Worldbuilding is creating something alive and then seeing what it connects to. Worldbuilding is telling a story that can be directly experienced by spending time in the world. Worldbuilding is asking yourself questions and then answering them. How are you going to build your world, and what questions are you going to ask? When you’re building a world, start by working on the stuff that excites you. If one of the things that you are really interested in is food, then dive into food. Consider the different tastes that come from the region you want to develop, or, if you have an idea for one particular dish, focus on what the flavor of that food is like. Ask yourself: What does it smell like, what does it feel like? Where do people get the resources to make this food? Keep working to flesh out your ideas. For example, if you’ve imagined a dish that has rice in it, you might try to come up with a scientific, logical background for rice production in your world, even creating your own rice-growing region—or you can lean into fantasy and give your rice a backstory that is entirely unique. Or, if you’ve imagined a dish with meat in it, what animal is it coming from? Where does that animal live, and is it domesticated or wild? If it’s wild, how dangerous is that animal’s behavior in its natural habitat? When you’re worldbuilding, just find a starting point that you really care about and then elaborate around it. One of my favorite parts of the worldbuilding process is figuring out who lives in the world. Even before I have countries or continents I start thinking about the people, and then I can place them as I develop the T The Worlds We Adore Gabe Hicks Callum Sim - [email protected] - 349937