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Building Your World
36 Plays1 year ago
In the eleventh episode of Tabletop Tune Up, Mark and Ben kick off a new series dedicated to the art of worldbuilding. Whether you’re designing a fantastical realm, a superhero city, or a sci-fi galaxy, this episode lays the groundwork for creating a rich, immersive world for your RPG campaigns.
Explore why homebrewing your own setting can be such a rewarding endeavor, offering you creative freedom, control, and a deep sense of ownership. We’ll discuss the benefits of crafting a world tailored to your narrative and how involving players in shaping the world can lead to high engagement and dynamic storytelling.
Delve into the common challenges of worldbuilding, from overcoming the blank page to maintaining uniqueness and consistency. Learn practical tips on how to start small, build foundational elements, and use player feedback to enrich your setting. Whether you’re a seasoned GM or new to the art of crafting your own universe, this episode provides valuable advice and inspiration to help you build a world you can campaign in for years.
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Transcript
Building a Detailed Fantasy World
00:00:00
Speaker
It is important that it be fully detailed, so oftentimes, particularly in fantasy games, ah the milieu must consist of oh the the geology, climatology, that everything has to be there, complete social structure, cultures, religions, and so on, in order to satisfy the players as they experience more and more of the world, because they are, in effect, experiencing mentally a whole a whole created world of some sort.
00:00:56
Speaker
Oh my gosh, that is so funky-tastic. I love it. So smooth. Hey, Ben.
Humor in Gaming: A Light-hearted Interlude
00:01:04
Speaker
Yeah. When a friend is drowning in a sea of sadness, you don't just toss him a life vest. You swim one over to him.
00:01:12
Speaker
That's great. That's a yacht rock quote for our yacht rock intro. How you doing, buddy? I'm a good, man. I'm having a good summer.
Gaming Group Dynamics and Virtual Tabletop Benefits
00:01:22
Speaker
ah We are getting transitions in a lot of our different games. Some things are closing down, though some things are starting up. And yeah I think this week we wanted to do a special shout out. Mark, tell us about the drug.
00:01:39
Speaker
Yeah, let's give a shout out to Trogg. Trogg is a player we started up a game might be right before the start of COVID. And um we had a good run, a good enough run that we actually were able to make it through an entire one through 20 game. It was a first. It's not like I'd wish a pandemic on anybody, but gosh, if one happens, seize that opportunity.
00:02:01
Speaker
yeah ah yeah It's odd to be, yeah I'll always look back at the good old days of the pandemic. It's a horrible way to say, think of it, but we actually got to the good old days. We actually could play a game. We were housebound and we couldn't go out anywhere. And so we were stuck here playing RPGs. I will say having virtual tabletop tools, for those that don't know, I'm located in Colorado and Mark is located in Minnesota. And we do this in our games normally week to week.
00:02:32
Speaker
virtually and it's ah how you keep in touch. And Trogg was in the UK. That's right. yeah so um He was a big part of it all. so we We just want to give him our love, give him our thanks and um hopefully our paths will cross in adventures in the future. Looking forward to it. Thanks again Trogg for four great years of great games and great gameplay.
00:02:58
Speaker
All right, so we're going to be starting up a topic. It's actually going to be a series.
World Building Across Game Genres
00:03:02
Speaker
We're going to do a series of episodes on world building. And um it's a big, heady topic. There's a lot to go over. ah But we're going to tackle it. um Ben, what do you think of when you think of world building? Well, I'm really excited about this series. And I think we can think of all kinds of different forms of that, depending on the kind of game you're playing.
00:03:24
Speaker
so What does world building look like in a superhero game? Well, typically that's building the superhero city. What's your Gotham or Metropolis look like? That's the play area for your superhero normally. Sometimes if you're playing ah modern games or historical games, you might want to have alternate history. That's like world building in time, which is really cool. And I've got some fun examples and things like that that I've experienced over time. And they're a lot of fun to share in a science fiction setting.
00:03:52
Speaker
What kind of galaxy is out there? What kind of strange new life and new civilizations will there be out there for the players to interact with? And then, of course, in fantasy literature, we have our kind of traditional things where we've got maps and factions and dragons all around and magical things and who knows what else. So it can take a lot of different forms. Mark, help us zoom in though on fantasy literature, because I think that's one that most people will be familiar with and thinking about when we talk about this topic.
Tolkien's Influence on Gaming Worlds
00:04:22
Speaker
Well, obviously, Tolkien, of course, comes to mind when you talk about world building. Tolkien was the master. He's kind of the one of the original OG world builders. Yeah. But it's not just limited fantasy. um I think of novel series like The Expanse, yeah which I think does a pretty remarkable job of slowly building a world that is believable and that they're living in. So it's not an exclusive thing to fantasy. However,
00:04:54
Speaker
Tolkien just does it so well. Yeah. I think one of the things I would encourage our listeners to do is go check out Tolkien's essay on fairy stories. And he talks about this a lot. And he has this whole essay essentially on why it's important to create internally consistent worlds. We'll talk about that a little more later. But for right now, ah the key thought is that you're standing in good company. There's a lot of really great literary examples and ah Tolkien was, kind of I think, the first person, at least in the fantasy genre that I'm familiar with, that set that expectation for us. Tolkien was being kind of discovered in the US around the time that D and&D was first created. right The Tolkien Lord of the Rings books hit in the late 60s, early 70s.
00:05:40
Speaker
the first generation of D and&D players is like in the mid 70s, about 74, 75. So a lot of the same people are having all of that stuff in their head at the same time. And I think a lot of early D and&D GMs were thinking, you know what? I'm going to take this on. I'm going to make my own world.
00:05:59
Speaker
you One of the interesting things when you look at Tolkien's work is it almost feels like he was in it for the long haul. He wasn't just there to write a book. He wanted to write multiple books in that realm. Obviously, he is one of those writers who's not as prolific as we would have liked. He got hung up in a lot of detail. But his I think when you look at the Sumerian, you look at all the different stuff he's working on, he's intending to write multiple stories in one space.
00:06:27
Speaker
Yeah, it's for him, it's almost like the ah books are kind of a window into a world that is already way larger than any book can contain, which I think is part of the appeal of those. So I think we're kind of circling around this idea of like what makes these things really exciting. Obviously, these literary influences that we've all fallen in love with give us um inspiration. Mark, um let's talk about that in the context of the games that we play.
00:06:53
Speaker
We always start with why here, right? What is the why for this? Why is it that you want to take on the effort of creating your own homebrew world?
Personal Motivations for World Building
00:07:01
Speaker
Obviously Tolkien spent his whole life doing this, as we said. But when we think about why we might want to take this on for our games, what's the real incentive for us as GMs?
00:07:11
Speaker
Yeah, it's a good question, Ben. and There's lots of reasons why somebody might um want to take on homebrewing and world building. Each person is going to have their own unique reason, but some of the ones I can think of, we got creative outlets. people need Some people just have that creative desire to kind of build something in a world. ah So that's going to be an outlet for a lot of people.
00:07:35
Speaker
We're already very familiar with players loving to create these characters that have these wonderful backstories. They've got these involved psychologies and so on. And if you're somebody who has that same level of interest in crafting worlds, maps, histories, civilizations, and so on, then you're probably you probably have some of that GM home brewing DNA in you. right And I think that the the GM's relationship to the world is very much like what the player's relationship to the character is. And so I think that kind of outlet, that creative expression might tell you whether or not you're going to be interested in doing homebrew worlds.
00:08:12
Speaker
Yeah, and home brewing in world building allows a bit of control and flexibility that you may not get otherwise from some written material. So, you know, we're about here creating opportunities for yourselves and your players. They just may not exist in, say, a boxed realm.
Homebrewing vs. Established IPs
00:08:33
Speaker
Yeah, I think one of the sort of foils that we need to be keeping in mind here, right? What is the opposite of homebrewing? It would be using a pre-established world that has a lot of its own history and rules figured out. And if you want to take a sort of a prime example of that, think about some of the really strongly branded intellectual properties are out there, things like Star Wars or Star Trek, or ironically now even like Middle Earth, right? Things that already have a lot of things already defined about them, where the major moves and players and things like that in that world are characters that are already established that are probably not going to be your player characters. And so what's interesting is, if you, to your point about sort of control and flexibility mark, if you wanted to run a game where, um you know, the empire just wasn't so bad,
00:09:21
Speaker
Maybe they were good guys. You might think, well, look, at some point, i mean maybe you can get away with a little bit of that in an isolated way, but at some point, that's just not Star Wars anymore. That's not the Empire. The Empire are the guys with the jack boots. The Empire are the guys that are going to you know imprison you and oppress you and stuff like that. That's literally what they're supposed to be about.
00:09:41
Speaker
um Are we the baddies? Are we the baddies? Having that ability to create that stuff from scratch and set up the relationships and the narrative elements you want is a huge deal. Mark, let's talk a little bit about what you like to call ownership.
00:09:57
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, that kind of touches a little bit on what you're where you're just discussing. you know When you have a a world, a boxed world, we'll just call it, um you may not be the foremost you know knowledgeable person at the table with that information. um There's been many times I sat down and had somebody who knew a lot more about the Forgotten Realms than I would ever, than I've ever known. So that can allow for a little bit of like, you're not the ownership of that world.
00:10:27
Speaker
you know You do not have all that knowledge in your head. That's one of the the problems you might come into is that your players might know more than you. Especially with these worlds that have strongly branded IPs around them, you're going to find that the people that want to play those games, a Star Trek, a Star Wars, and Middle Earth, they're going to be people who, because they're fans, really do know a lot about those worlds. They care about those details. They care about those details, that's right.
Player Contributions to World Building
00:10:52
Speaker
I actually had a player in a game of Star Wars that I was playing He was constantly like sort of fact checking me on stuff. And I was like, geez, man, give it a rest. We can retcon it later if you want, but, yeah you know, I can just see like, you know, you're playing a Harry Potter game. That's not how Quidditch is played. you know You got an extra player on the field. Look, that's the size of my party today. You know? Yeah. So.
00:11:15
Speaker
Anyways, um this is a great thing. A custom design world that you've created, a home-brewed world that you've built, it's one where you're the expert. And frankly, you're also the guy who's got that authorial capability over it that means that you're the George Lucas for that particular Star Wars world, or you are the person who can essentially redefine the world as you need to, as you go, according to the needs you have in your story. Mark, the next one I think is interesting, and I think it's close to our heart here. so talk about What kind of opportunities might present to people who have certain kinds of struggles? Well, one of the things I struggle with, and I've mentioned it before, i'm is retention from reading. So I don't really retain a lot of the stuff I read. I mean, I can get some information, but we're talking about service level. And when we're looking at world building and existing in a realm, you really want details. You're going to want those details. Now, I just struggle with that.
00:12:11
Speaker
So building from my imagination is a much more effective way for me to retain and know and be able to draw upon the realities of that realm. I think here, Mark, what's fascinating about this is that you do tend to remember better the stuff that you make.
00:12:28
Speaker
Yeah, and some people are and incredibly skilled at just like picking up a like a module and reading it and and kind of remembering those important details and I admire them for it. Yeah, that's just not how my brain works. Yeah, fair enough. And there are people like me out there and I get that and maybe world building is for you. Well, so this is great is you can create the world that um it's kind of funny to put it this way. You can create the world that's easy for you to absorb and remember. And that's a great, that's a great asset.
00:12:57
Speaker
Player ownership is something that not every world builder will do, but Mark, I think you found some really special benefits that come from giving players a chance to build that world with you a little bit. Can you talk about some of those?
00:13:11
Speaker
we're talking about just ah really it's this engagement you know you're you're allowing your players to take stock and ownership in the world that they're playing in and um this actually helps because it can divide up the work it could lessen your load and for the most part it's nothing but upside now maybe there could be some conflicts of creativity which could be addressed so be sure that you're having an open dialogue and let let them know that you know since you're running the game, you get to decide what you're going to allow into your world. But maybe start with small things. Something else that player ownership over the creative work helps with is it actually lets the players set up great things for their PCs to do. One of the things about box settings is that a lot of the big moves in the history of those ah worlds and those games
00:14:04
Speaker
They've been done by other NPCs. Luke Skywalker is the guy who defeats the Empire in Return of the Jedi. He's got help. He's got Princess Leia and Han Solo and everybody. It's a team effort, sure. But the point is, your player character is not in that throne room with the Emperor and Darth Vader. So there's a lot of great upsides to creating your own world. But conversely, there's a lot of challenges, too. so Mark, we're going to talk through some of these challenges, and we're not going to answer them just yet. We're going to really just start getting clear on what the size of the challenge is. So help us out, Mark. What are some of the challenges we've got in front of us if we're going to do our own homebrew world?
Challenges in Creating Believable Worlds
00:14:42
Speaker
Well, I think Ben, you as a writer know this one and and me as a illustrator. That blank page is, is an intimidating, daunting foe. So that's first and foremost, you got to kind of get over that, that blank page. What do you, what do you do to get over that, Ben? You're looking at it going, there's a world of possibilities. How do I start? You know, one of the things I find really challenging that's kind of related to that blank page is I find it really hard to make stuff that feels highly original.
00:15:13
Speaker
And yeah sometimes I feel like I'm also setting the bar too high for myself that it's got to be so original. um you know Look, there's probably some artful medium in there, but I struggle a bit with that sometimes. Yeah, you you that uniqueness. you want You want to kind of put your stamp on it. You want them to know this is this is something of yours. I don't think you'd want to start an entire task at world building if you didn't feel like you could add something unique to it.
00:15:43
Speaker
Another thing that seems really challenging is just the volume of material. We talked about Tolkien a little earlier. That guy spent his life coming up with everything from plants to divinities to geography and maps to languages to lots of other things. And you might look at that and go, oh my gosh, that is a volume of material that is just downright intimidating.
00:16:06
Speaker
ah If I try to homebrew a world, I'm not going to get a play in it until 2050 or something. so That can be daunting for some people too. Agreed. ah Closely related to that is that when you think about what kinds of skills you're going to need to describe that world, it's going to be a lot of writing. You might think to yourself, I need to have a bunch of art skills now. If I'm going to do heraldry for these different factions or concept art for aliens or do I have to know how to make maps of everything or what's all involved in this? I'm not good at everything. A news flash, just a spoiler. You don't need to be good at everything. We've got one more kind of challenge here and then we're going to talk about how to maybe get started. Groundedness. Mark, what do you mean by groundedness? This was a note you brought up for us.
00:16:53
Speaker
Yeah, I mean we're talking about like this kind of internal consistency of the realm.
Maintaining Consistency in World Building
00:16:59
Speaker
You you got to make it believable to an extent that the players can buy in. You just need that buy in from them. If you think about some realms that maybe didn't have that kind of Tether to reality that allowed people to buy and it can cause problems. It can cause a disconnect from your imagination. And you had brought up when we had talked about a show that we both agreed on that and this is going to be controversial. I'm sure there's a lot of fans of this series. As we've said before, we don't show away from controversy here on tabletop. Yeah, but you and I have both had a problem with the show. The Walking Dead. What did you tell us your buy in reason? And I'll tell you mine.
00:17:40
Speaker
Okay. My problem with The Walking Dead was that harder to believe than that zombies might be walking around was that human beings were going to be consistently as awful as they are in that show. Um, it's a show where we put people under stress. We're in conditions of scarcity. People are running for their lives and all that kind of stuff. But the consistency with which people are awful to each other and do horrible, wretched things.
00:18:09
Speaker
I was just like, you know what, I'm out, I'm done. um I have to confess, it may have been around the time that they, spoilers, went after Glenn. But it's funny because I started watching the TV show having already seen and tuned out of the comic book that had all of that same, all of those same low points. And I was just like, I can't deal with this anymore. It's just too unrealistic that people are not that people are consistently bad in that way.
00:18:36
Speaker
How about you? What was your, what was your kind of disconnect? Yeah, I had like kind of a different disconnect and that's definitely, I could, I could see your case there. Mine was that I just don't think zombies would be that hard to take out. and Like all I need is a chain link fence and a spear. That's it. Yeah. They just come up to the fence and you stab them through the fence. Done. And it's not like they're going to get back up.
00:19:00
Speaker
Eventually, you're just going to have less and less zombies until there's none left. The idea that there were these giant packs of zombies roaming around just seemed preposterous to me. I just couldn't buy the fact that these slow-moving, shambling monsters could take over as much of the the world. I mean, that's a whole genre problem for me. Yeah, it did make me wonder about populations, you know what I mean? like Obviously in a big city, you know, I don't know what the population of Atlanta is. I'll just pick a number. Let's say it's 6 million or something. I could see there'd be real problems with zombie toys there and suburbs. They should. But okay, fine. But like, I'm thinking like there's probably a whole bunch of like outlying towns and like Iowa and New Mexico and other places like that where you're like, yeah, there's zombie problem lasted all of about 10 minutes while the locals, you know, um got their
00:19:50
Speaker
rifles off their gun racks and a clean house for a minute. And then they were back to normal. you know The running and sprinting zombies. Yeah, I could, I could maybe, I could make a case for that. But like these short, these slow, you know, don't walk any faster than my grandpa. ah Zombies. I just, I couldn't buy it. Anyway, we're getting sidetracked. no you think That's true. But we're talking about buying. Everybody thinks they're prepared until they show up at your door mark.
00:20:14
Speaker
So we're talking about buying into the the general consensus of that realm. and That's an example of something we just couldn't get our minds past. And it made the show less enjoyable for us. Again, I'll just refer you to Tolkien's Unfairy Stories essay if you want to kind of do a deep dive on internal consistency and why it matters and what kinds of things go with that. So um All right. These are some of the challenges. The blank page, uniqueness, the volume of work, the skills to do the work, the consistency of the work. And these are things that I think can be daunting if you think about them all as big, huge worlds. But Mark, I think we're going to give people some advice that we've given them before when it comes to world building laying
Starting Small in World Building
00:20:57
Speaker
on us. Start small. That's right.
00:20:59
Speaker
You don't have to describe the entire world. You don't have to to build all the languages. You don't have to know what all the different unique creatures are. You can just start somewhere small. What's that look like in a fantasy setting, for example? I mean, we're for since we're talking about token,
00:21:17
Speaker
It doesn't get smaller than the Shire. Yeah. Kind of a tucked away little place, um you know, off the beaten track, a place where maybe the news doesn't quite get. It's a place where you can kind of start an adventure.
00:21:30
Speaker
That's right. A lot of other authors have started their stories in these kinds of out of the way places because it gives you a method to start small with things that are pretty easy to manage and then as that character goes out in the world and learns more things, you the reader are going with them and they're your point of view to learn those things as well.
00:21:50
Speaker
similarly in your game, you can start somewhere relatively small. And by small, that could also mean something like an out of the way planet, if you're thinking about a science fiction game, or even it could mean somewhere where maybe just not a lot of stuff is happening, right? And it's not, imagine like you're playing ah an espionage game, you don't have to start in Langley or Washington DC, you could be starting in a field office in no Malaska or something, I don't even know. yeah But the point is,
00:22:19
Speaker
There's a lot of different ways to sort of start with something where the players don't have to have a lot of world detail, which means you don't have to produce a lot of world detail. And that's an important way to get started. so again A great example, if you remember watching The Expanse the first season of that, it started with just basically like a murder mystery. It wasn't this big, giant, global thing. It started with a murder mystery. Over the course of that first season, your character was unlocking a larger conspiracy, which allowed the story to gradually move into a larger ah larger realm of possibilities. So it doesn't necessarily need to be a small location, but maybe the idea could be small, allowing it to expand. Okay, so let's say we're starting small. um That said, we do need to do some things, right? So what is it that we need to minimally kind of get done when we're starting small?
Incorporating Real-world Elements
00:23:14
Speaker
Ben, we want to describe the you know the foundations. What are the things that we need to know about for the story you're about to tell? You don't have to go into giant big details, but foundationally, what are the things you need to be thinking about for your long-term campaign and also thinking about how much of this foundation do they need to actually see? How much of that foundation do I need to actually develop? Can you think of an example of that where either in a movie or a book or TV or something. Give us an example of something where we started small, we didn't necessarily know a lot about the world, but we started and then as we got further into it, we learned a lot more and they built the world out a bit more.
00:23:55
Speaker
Well, I think my example just I gave about the expanse is kind of a good one in that, you know, we're, we're zoomed in so closely on this investigation that we're not really seeing big picture things at that point. We're just following the, the leads of this detective as he goes around it and anything that,
00:24:12
Speaker
gets expanded on is through the course of that investigation. But like another good example from ah ah a movie, I don't know if people ever saw Pitch Black with Vin Diesel, that first film was just, talk about Zoomed In, it was just a ah prisoner fighting for survival and like in a kind of a classic monster movie. But as it turns out in a sequel later, that it was a much bigger universe than we kind of expected.
00:24:39
Speaker
One of the things you can use as your lens, as your limiting factor on how much you need to write is think about what the characters are going to be exposed to or what they might know. Let's imagine that you have a paladin in this town. Well, then you're going to need to know a little something about what the deities in this world are like and what the sort of paladin's order is like. What kind of vows did they take?
00:25:02
Speaker
um If you have a gnome, you probably should know a few things about gnomes and what their culture is like, at least in this part of the world. And that proviso in this part of the world is a way of giving yourself room to change the rules for gnomes or paladins or anybody else when you're somewhere else and you're further out.
00:25:21
Speaker
And one thing to think about is that they're going to be playing in this world and you're not going to be done building it. So don't think of this as like, I'm done. I've, I've developed this one thing. Um, we're going to be expanding on all these things, but we're going to be expanding as we need. As the requirement for that detail arises, you'll continue expanding on it as you go. Now, conversely, there's a lot of things you can actually borrow or use from ordinary reality.
00:25:51
Speaker
So Mark, if I said to you, hey, um I'm going to start your character in a kind of a vaguely northern European setting, you're going to come from a small town set on a river and to the south of this town is an old oak forest, right? You, at that point, know lots of things about this world that aren't things I made up from whole cloth. You know what oak trees are like. You know what it might mean to have a small medieval town on a river. You know what rivers are like. And you might guess that there are fishers there, fishermen there. You might guess that there's a blacksmith in town and and lots of other detail. Your imagination is automatically going to fill in. So, you know, when you're thinking about world building, you're thinking about what kinds of things you need to make, you can take this kind of hybrid approach. You don't have to reinvent every aspect of society. And frankly, the more you borrow, the more the players will already be familiar with when you have that first game.
00:26:49
Speaker
and then you can use that familiarity to highlight the interesting or exceptional components of your world. And also get some help from
Collaborative World Building
00:27:00
Speaker
your players. and another you know Another point here is to delegate. Your players are a resource for you. and They're not like obstacles in your way. Let's not be so precious with our with our world, what we've built, but we can't um that we can't ask for help. Ben, you said something earlier to me. What did what was your quote? um I said, it's important not to be too precious, and that mythology is the work of many hands.
00:27:29
Speaker
I love that. Many people are working on mythology. It doesn't become mythology unless it's been told by multiple voices in many different ways. I want to take a moment, Mark, and just highlight that you actually have been working with other friends of ours on a game world called Kerris for many years, like since we were in high school, college age, somewhere around there. Some of the lessons we're talking about here in terms of this collaborative spirit is something that we learned back then. What are some key ideas to, if you're the GM and you want to do this, what are some lessons you've learned from
00:28:06
Speaker
some of that world building as you collaborated with others about how to do this smartly, how to delegate to the your players. Jam sessions was one of the things I remember ah you know sitting down, having a jam session and coming up with names of places. You know, we had this map that our our our game master had drawn out and it was inspiring, and but nothing was labeled. You know, he had drawn out this incredible map. I think he had like, I want to say,
00:28:35
Speaker
It must have been about, yeah, the game master Randy had drawn out like nine pieces of paper that are all linked together in this giant map. And I just remember we all looking at this thing like going, wow, this is so cool. And then we just opened up and just sort of writing down names of towns and places. We had it on a scratch piece of paper.
00:28:55
Speaker
Those are fun. Collaborate with your with your friends. um Let them have some ownership in that. And if everybody shoots out 20 names for places, you don't have to take all of them. As a GM, you might take you know half of those.
00:29:11
Speaker
but it's fun ah to get that feedback from people. it It makes your job a lot easier, it makes the realm better, and it makes people feel like there's part of they're part of something. Ben, you're currently starting up a game right now where you're trying to get some of that feedback. Tell me how that's going. It's going pretty well. I think we have a character who's going to be a gnome and he's going to be some kind of an arcane caster, or maybe he's a cleric. That's right, he's a cleric.
00:29:40
Speaker
And so, of course, we had to define what some of the gods were like. And so we spent some time coming up with ideas about how this was going to go. And as a GM, I'm like, well, I don't want to like overprescribe this. I want to give this player the freedom to try things to, you know,
00:29:57
Speaker
Contribute their own unique stamp. So what I did was I just said well look ah Exactly what the gods are like could be kind of fluid here's like three or four kind of key Principles that I want this thing to look like at the end of the day and then see if you can work with those constraints Great creative players like these ones that are playing with they're gonna be fine with that kind of stuff But also they'll put their unique stamp on it just to recap kind of for the listener what Ben has done here is he's delegated some of the task of maybe some of the dwarven culture, ah some of the maybe the religion. He's allowed that player to create some of that and bring it into the table. So he's delegated some of that work and and he's only doing that section for that character because it's relevant to that game. He's not creating a whole nother pantheon
00:30:48
Speaker
i' I'm going to let him describe what gnomes are like here. And we're gonna just he's going to describe kind of what the gods are like. And there we go. There's his race and class combination for this team D&D game. So we're not creating an entire Pantheon right now because, he you know Ben, you may not have time to do that right now in week one. But that's something you can do that can impact the game so you can start playing right away.
Importance of Maps and Expanding Worlds
00:31:07
Speaker
Right. Well, and to that earlier point about starting small and starting somewhere provincial, I'll be doing that. And maybe not all the gods are kind of well known now.
00:31:14
Speaker
out in the hinterlands so that's a that's an advantage in our case and we were just talking about your band we're talking about the map i was i was mentioned with randy. um He started with a large map which is cool but you don't have to you can start with a small map and that can be cool too so i think a map is kinda important aspect would you agree on that.
00:31:37
Speaker
I think it's indispensable. You've got to have something that the players can use to identify where home is. And what's interesting is you might be thinking about fantasy maps. We're talking about that in the context of this curious game. But it also matters in science fiction settings. Any science fiction game I've ever played, I would want to know where's Earth, if if that's even possible. but Is this some futuristic setting from now, or is this something completely off the rails? And if it was something from our world,
00:32:07
Speaker
That was how it oriented. Where's Earth? What happened to Earth between now and when the future setting was? All right, so, you know, lastly, and we're not going to go on too long about this, but come up with a great name for your realm. You don't want to be calling it Bob's World. Jimbo's World. Unless you're Bob. Unless you're Bob. And your players are also Bob. Yeah. You want to come up with a great name that's something you can remember. It'll be memorable. Don't just give it an afterthought. Be thoughtful about it. Yeah. Because it's going to be there for a long time.
00:32:44
Speaker
And you don't have to come up with your entire like set of languages and all those things. But I do think, Mark, we should probably talk in a later episode about names in the context of building civilizations and factions. yeah And I think that's when names become more interesting and more important and when you'll want to generate a little bit more consistency around your naming conventions. So here's what happens. You do all these things to get started. you You start small. You just describe the basic foundations. You borrow from reality where you can.
00:33:14
Speaker
You delegate to your players to let them sort of get bought into the world and to give yourself a little bit less work to do. And then build at least a small map that you can expand on and that tells the players where home is. Do a little bit of naming, maybe come up with ah a little list of names that you can pull out at ah at a moment's notice. And then you're off and running. You start your first adventures. We've already had a whole episode on how to start your campaign well.
00:33:41
Speaker
What happens then, Mark? What do you do if you now have this starter space that you can work in, this starter bit of the world? How do we get from there to whatever's next?
00:33:53
Speaker
Well, we're really just expanding the areas that you need for the next adventure. um And you just you really just rinse and repeat that throughout the game. So let's say that the players decide they're going to go to the next town. Well, your map is just getting bigger, right? And now you've got to think about what's the culture in that next town. What time to introduce a new deity or a new type of faction that might be introduced in that next town. Where do you want to go with your next LEGO adventure?
00:34:22
Speaker
Start working in that spot. That's ah kind of an interesting idea is that it's almost like a fog of war concept, but for the world. Friends, that is as much as we want to say about the general stuff to do with world building today. These are just some general points about how to get started and how to think about it and how to take on the task. In upcoming weeks, we're going to continue on this series and we'll talk about things like how to describe the great powers that shape your world, like fantasy deities or elder beings of some kind in a science fiction setting or other things that may be significant. We'll talk about how to create civilizations and histories and factions. We'll talk about villains and NPCs and the types of characters that might be available to you. Are there going to be elves in your campaign? Is it a fantasy campaign? If you don't have elves, who knows? There's a lot of things we can talk about. And Mark, I love this thing that you brought to us. I think you're going to want to talk about the second campaign.
00:35:16
Speaker
Yeah, ah that's one thing I want you guys to be aware of as your world building. You oftentimes might not see the dividends of all this world building on your first campaign. You're really going to start seeing it in your second campaign in this world. Maybe your third, your fourth, you're really going to start seeing this. We had talked earlier about how token was creating something for the long haul. That's what we're doing. Yeah. When your characters in that second campaign,
00:35:46
Speaker
come to the ruins of the castle that used to be owned by one of your characters in the first campaign, the whole world's going to feel way deeper and more interesting than it did before. Yeah. So all of that coming up and now Mark, it's time for this week's tabletop tune up. Oh yeah. so Why don't you tee this up for us and let us know what we've got to talk about this week. Okay, I got i got this um message from a friend of mine um who I played in the game. I actually started this group up um as a starter, one of my starter groups, learned to play D and&D kind of thing.
00:36:19
Speaker
And I played in the game after I stepped down as GM. And I played in it for a short while before I i stepped away from the game. Anyway, I have an existing character in that game and the and the GM was nice enough to send me a message saying, and I'm going to have a festival in town where the players are.
00:36:40
Speaker
They're going to have cameos from prominent NPCs and they're going to have a competition style combat like fencing or non-lethal gladiatorial match. How do we tune up the contest in this festival? One of the things he had mentioned that my character that I played, he wanted to be in that contest. And he he sent me that message as a courtesy because I know this is your player. How do you feel about this? And I said, yeah, thumbs up. I'm all for it. That's great.
00:37:08
Speaker
So um I gave him a little bit of feedback. Ben, i'd like to I'd like to hear yours. Yeah. So the question is, how do we tune up this contest where there's going to be a kind of a competition style combat? It's not going to be killing anybody immediately. You think, well, okay, so the stakes are going to get lower, right? Like nobody's going to die. There's nothing at stake. I think is there. Here's what I would do is I'd start finding things that were not death to raise the stakes. And so in a situation where you're not worried about dying,
00:37:37
Speaker
or getting significantly you know injured or killed or maimed, um you could do things like, who am I fighting? Am I fighting like the a kid from the local nobility that if I beat him, all of a sudden I'm gonna be in trouble? Am I fighting that girl that I have a crush on? That's awkward. Am I fighting am i fighting her boyfriend? Yeah, that's gonna be great.
00:38:00
Speaker
In this case also, he's got cameos is from prominent NPCs. So let's assume that, you know, there's some towns, people that know these characters as heroes and they might, you know, have invested interest in them winning or losing and that will feed their ego. Yeah. I think there's a lot to draw in here. So look to the social relationships that your characters have with the different people in this town and the connections they may have to the people in the tournament. Um, there's reputation and,
00:38:30
Speaker
glory and pride to be won and lost, even if you're not going to bleed real blood in this thing. How about you, Mark? What was your ah advice to your friend as he was considering this?
00:38:42
Speaker
I had two bits of advice. ah One is which, but the character I played was a druid. And my advice was like, hey, have them start the combat with this, you know, my character in druid form and they're fighting a bear or something like that. And then also it shifts. And at at at some point, maybe they discover it's my old character Dagmar. And so there's a little bit of a twist there that could be fun.
00:39:10
Speaker
I love that variation on the disguised combatant. My second thought is what if the player doesn't really want to get in a gladiatorial fight? Are there other competitions? Are there other things for non-combatants to do? Maybe they're games of intellect. Maybe the bard wants to engage in a rap battle. I don't know. There should be things for them to do other than just fight.
00:39:33
Speaker
Mark, your friend also has a plot twist that he has in mind. So this is our our first ah opportunity to maybe do an extended tune up here. He wants to introduce a certain kind of complication, doesn't he?
00:39:45
Speaker
Yes, well he had mentioned that he has a he plays in person. He has this printed He has a printed token a figurine of a qualla bear and I don't know how he ended up with this qualla bear figurine anyway He wants to use it and I was thinking like You know among the menagerie of people to fight in there What if ah there was an assassin or something in this qualla bear costume?
00:40:11
Speaker
That would have to be a very small assassin, I would think. Yeah. Yeah. So he, he liked the idea and he's easy. I think he's going to go with like some sort of little halfling assassin in a quality costume so he can get close enough to the party. And that could be a complication. It could also be a plot twist. It could be something that introduces another faction into the game. Uh, and to what is otherwise kind of a bit of a random encounter, right? Like is this festival advancing a plot in any way? I don't know, but maybe this might.
00:40:40
Speaker
That's a really important point is that for encounters like this, especially when you're going to spend a whole session or maybe two on them, make sure that there's elements in here that advance either the campaign story or interestingly, and I think this is more frequent and more likely, all the different character stories in some way. So great tune up this week. I think that's about it for us this week on Tabletop Tune Up. Mark, any other notes?
00:41:06
Speaker
No, I think we rambled on long enough. We're going to pick up this world building and continue it in a later episode. So I'm hoping you stick around and we'll be here for you. That's right. And of course, as always, please send us your ideas for things you'd like to tune up to tabletop, tune up at gmail dot.com. and And until next time friends, keep those dice rolling.
00:42:07
Speaker
Toon up, toon up, toon up, toon up, toon