Designing Worlds of Adventure
From D20advanced
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Building a World or a Place for Adventure?
Just how big of a world do you need for players to have an adventure? Do you need to detail every city and town around the world, and know just what every NPC there is out there is going to be doing at any given time? If it's an alternate world and not simply set on Earth, do you also need to establish things like seasons, calendars, populate the world with flora and fauna and-
Short answer: no with a "but".
When you settle in to actually put meat on the bones this chapter has been helping you construct, think like director arranging a set for a movie or play, or even a magician. The world only needs the illusion of depth for the players to believe that it is indeed deep and real. That means that the only perspective that the world needs to be deep from is the one your players will have.
To that end, your job in creating your world becomes significantly easier. You're not going to need to worry what the inside of a grocery store looks like in your world if you don't think the PCs will be going grocery shopping any time soon. You're also not going to need to worry about land taxes if your medieval PCs are a band of wandering adventurers. And you're certainly not going to need to worry about what the engineering and chemical principles are behind the refinement process that makes mid-grade starship fuel in your space opera.
What matters is that the players believe that the fictional space you've put their characters in feels real to them. And depending on the scope of your game, that fictional space might not need to be very big to create the illusion of a vast, deep, and exciting world.
Designing an Adventure Site
At the end of the day, your job is to give your players places for their characters to go on adventures. To that end, all your world needs to contain are numerous possible sites for those adventures. Everything in between is just window-dressing (which many of us happen to greatly like, to be sure, but not strictly necessary for all games out there).
An adventure site needs to be exciting, either on its own merits (such as a rickety bridge over a pit of lava, or an ancient catacomb which descends into a bizarre subterranean world) or by virtue of what happens there (such as a climactic battle against some ancient evil, or the beginning of a race around the world to recover a long-forgotten treasure). It needs to frame the encounter and support it, to give it foundation and to help the encounter be more significant.
Designing a World
At its most basic level a world need only be similar to the old pulp adventure stories where the only thing connecting two exciting sites was a red line on a map. So long as it provides a way for the PCs to get from one adventure site to another, you have a world sufficient for an adventure game.
To create more robust and engaging worlds, you need to provide more than sites of adventure: you must provide places where the characters can interact peacefully and calmly with NPCs, where they can stretch their legs and soak in the flavor of the world. You need to give them the ability to stroll through marketplaces and saunter into bars and taverns. You need to give your players a reason to fall in love with your world, to make them invest in it so that they care when it's in peril. Give the PCs time to spend with their loved ones, or have parties, or just laugh and enjoy themselves. If the players invest emotionally in your world and in the NPCs you introduce them to, and they'll find the experience all the richer for it.
If you choose to take this next step, you need to find not just a way to give your players adventures, but for your world to be a place for the NPCs too. They need places to live and work, places that define them and give the players an understanding for who they are. Religious NPCs need temples and churches, farmers need crops to grow, sailors need oceans to sail, and reporters need media to broadcast their stories.
When you design your world, if you start small, you need to ask yourself with every NPC you introduce, "Who is this person? Where do they belong in this world?" In a way, these characters become a reason for you to expand your world, to create places for them that fit into your setting. The first time the PCs might venture to a new town or city could be to meet a new NPC.
As you grow more comfortable with world-building, you might start asking the bigger questions about your setting, like what the presence of supernatural abilities might change the way the world works. How will "ordinary" NPCs react if there are many people in the world with the strength and capabilities of the PCs? Just how well do the PCs really fit into the world? As your world grows, these are questions which the players will ask, and which you will have to answer. When these questions come, you'll have the opportunity to expand your world in wonderful ways, to draw your players' interest in and to make them excited enough to come back next time hungry to learn and explore more.
How Much Like the World We Know?
The basic assumption when creating a world, whether for a game or for fiction, is that it is in some way like the world that we ourselves live in. That is the common ground which allows all the participants of the game to share the imaginary space in which their character exist. But these assumptions are only the foundation, and from there you must decide just how different your world is from this one.
The World Outside Our Windows
The first (and easiest) option is to simply set your game in our own Earth, starting with everything being exactly the same as it is today (or seemingly so, if characters in your game have supernatural abilities). Politics, languages, cities, and everything else are just like you and your players know them. The only differences are the characters who you introduce.
This is the presumption of many works of fiction, though some GMs find that working with a world their players know too intimately constrains them, as they lose the ability to change it as easily. Certainly the GM is still able to replace figures with characters of his own creation, or present his own take on public figures, but in doing so, he runs the risk of disrupting his players' suspension of disbelief.
Like Earth, Except for Metropolis
A common concession in fiction is to add or change cities from real ones to fictional ones, so there's more room for you to stretch without interfering with real-world facts. For example, there might not be a slum that was once a grand experiment in a self-sustaining metahuman living called Highgarden in New York, but it could exist in a city of your creation called Arcadia City.
Under this method of world design, an existing city or place on our Earth is nudged aside for a fictional one in which the GM has greater freedom from pre-existing facts and history. This is especially common in superhero or urban fantasy games, where an alternate history needs to exist that allows for at least one such city over which the GM has complete creative control.
Alternate History Earth
Like so many stories, an alternate history Earth is just like ours, except that there was a key moment in history where things took a different course. Maybe the Japanese never bombed Pearl Harbor, so World War II turned out much differently, or the Roman Empire never fell and is still strong today. The world might be a very different place, even if it still looks like our own Earth from space.
This is a common tool in fiction dealing with alternate universes or parallel worlds, as well as "What If?" stories.
Earth-Like World
Under this option, the world a game takes place on isn't Earth: it has different landmasses, a different calendar, a different history, different stars overhead, and a different name. However, in spite of this, the world is very Earth-like. Leaves still fall in autumn, the sun still rises in the east, humans still populate the world, and waves still crash on beaches. In this scenario, the fundamentals of the world are still familiar to the players, but the history and details of the world are unique.
Fantasy stories in particular often make use of Earth-like worlds with a different landscape. This offers the GM plenty of flexibility to create a unique world while leaving it familiar enough for his players to be able to get by and make realistic presumptions about how the world works.
Fantastic Worlds
Worlds that are rather unlike our Earth in some overt way, or emphasize a particular aspect of Earth and make it global, are referred to as fantastic worlds. These worlds might be built entirely in the clouds, or be vast expanses of desert, or possibly even beneath the surface of a world. But beyond this strangeness, the world still follows Earth-like laws of physics and nature.
Fantastic worlds like these are common in science fiction, where different planets the characters travel to are differentiated from one another by their over-arcing appearance and theme. They are also less commonly used in fantasy, where their strange features allow them to stand out from the norm.
Bizarre Worlds
The further you get from the world we know, the more you choose to deviate from known natural laws. Bizarre worlds start to break from what would be common knowledge about how planets look or how they behave. These might lead to the creation of ringworlds, or places where the natural flora and fauna are so startlingly different from Earth that their very presence is jarring and unsettling. It becomes almost impossible to justify the nature of such worlds using common sense or our own natural laws.
These sorts of bizarre worlds are sometimes used in fantasy and science fiction as brief stop-overs in an adventure, though occasionally they become the main setting themselves.
Nightmare Worlds
And the far-end of world design are nightmare worlds, where the basic presumptions about reality, natural law, and causality are thrown out the window as you see fit. On such worlds, reality might be governed by thought or belief, or the entire world could be an endless flame out into infinity.
Nightmare worlds are sometimes used in fantasy as dreamscapes or mindscapes. They are also sometimes used to represent abstract ideas or elemental planes. Some horror genres also used concepts such as this to describe non-Euclidean places of madness and insanity.
Populating the World
Once you have an idea for what your world is going to be like, you need to populate it. The more like Earth it is, the easier your job will be. You need to decide what sorts of creatures and people inhabit your world, where they live, and what they're like. And most imortantly, you need to decide how available they are to your players.
Races
Especially in fantasy and space opera games, it is common for non-human but sentient species to co-exist alongside human beings. These might be alien species or fantasy races, but they are often very human-like (possibly even just "humans with funny ears"), or at least recognizeably humanoid (with a head, torso, and limbs in a human template).
You need to decide just how much these races are like humans, and how they're different from humans. They need to be different enough from humans and from one another to justify their existance, both mechanically and flavor-wise. And most importantly, they need a place in the world. Decide where these creatures hail from, and how they fit in with the rest of the world and other races. Are they friendly? Violent? Isolated? How will the PCs meet them, or if one of the PCs is of this race, how will that PC meet the other characters?
If you choose to make racial packages for these races, you need to be sure to price them so that the ones which are appropriate for PCs are available to them with their starting character points in mind, and the ones which are inappropriate for PCs are either designed to be mechanically unappealing or are simply too expensive. Of course, as the GM, which races are available to the PCs is a question that is up to you in the end, but you can make your job much easier by making certain options more or less attractive to your players.
Roles
If you choose to make use of roles, you should decide which ones are common to your world (and more specifically, the segment of the world your game focuses on). Pilots might be more common in a world built in clouds, and in a game focused on organized crime, enforcers and fixers and face-men might be more common for the game than machine gunners and snipers and tank drivers. And if you choose to use these tools, be sure to use them to your advantage as well in designing NPCs.
NPCs
Finally, once you've painted out the broad strokes of potential alternate races and archetypal roles for your world, you need to populate it with interesting NPCs. Again, focus on NPCs who the characters will interact with, whether they'll be friends or adversaries. Make them interesting enough that the players will be interested in investing their attention in. For help in designing NPCs, see Chapter XII: Stock Characters.
Informing the Players
And now that you have your world all ready to go, you need to know how you'll inform your players about it. What do they need to know about the world to play in it? Should they come in completely blind, or should you tell them about some of it beforehand? Most importantly, how will you tell them?
In-Game Exposition
By far the simplest and most common method is in-game exposition, by which NPCs (or possibly even the PCs themselves, with successful knowledge check. In this way, the GM tells the players what they need to know when it's relevant, or when the players ask about it. In this way, you limit yourself to only needing to give out information when it's relevant. This approach has two advantages. It limits your workload at any given time, and it allows you to have the flexibility at any given time to come up with the best possible answer for that given situation.
On the other hand, limiting yourself exclusively to this strategy can be problematic in terms of consistency (especially if you don't keep good notes about what you show in exposition). It also means that the players don't know about the world until they are motivated to find out about it, and when they are motivated, they might catch you off-guard and leave you scrambling for an answer to something you never considered.
World Primer
Another tool you can make use of is a world primer, a short one- or two-page document you can give to your players to pain in broad strokes what your world is like. You can give them key points of common knowledge that everyone would know (such as the name of the current ruler, some important current or recent events, or some information on important locations in the world). It doesn't spell out everything in the world, but it gives players a basic idea of what the world is like.
Under this method, you'll still need to be able to answer additional questions through exposition (as above), but your players will have an idea of what the world is like thanks to your primers.
Maps
Especially useful when the game is set in a fictional land or city, a map can help players feel more like they're a part of the world, and that they know what it's like and where they're going in the area, rather that traveling blindly through the area. Players like being able to look at a map and determine where they are and where they need to go. It allows them to make informed decisions about travel and movement as if they were actually familiar with the world, and it makes them feel as though their characters better belong in that world.
Campaign Guidebook
Finally, for the truly dedicated GMs, you can create an entire guidebook to your campaign world, outlining everything in advance for your players (other than a few world-secrets). You let them know well in advance what they need to know about the world, and if they read through the entire thing (which is indeed unlikely for many players), they'll be able to answer many of the questions you might need to turn to exposition for either. This has the advantage of helping to ensure more consistency in the future.
d20 Advanced was designed with campaign builders in mind, to give them all the tools needed to build exactly the game they want. It provides options to choose from in building your world, and building the player options and rules for your world.
