Taking 20 Podcast - Ep 20 - Homebrew 101 - World Design

Episode Date: May 10, 2020

This episode of full of questions.  What do you need to ask yourself when making a world?  What decisions are potential pitfalls?  What does the world buidling subreddit have to do with any of this?  Why is Jeremy still asking questions? Resources Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America World Building Questions

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for tuning in to Taking 20, Episode 20. We're continuing our series on Homebrew 101, this time focusing on world design. Our sponsor this week is electricity. The best way of staying current is to avoid it. By the way, for those of you who audibly groaned at that pun, just know you're only making the pun monster stronger. I want to start this episode on homebrewing entire worlds by unashamedly stealing an idea from Matt Colville, DM of The Chain. He said that if you're going to homebrew, for every decision you make, you need to ask yourself why.

Why is that city there? Why are the elves in your world so reclusive and xenophobic? Why is there a huge mountain in the middle of that lake? Why is the city of Tannisport ruled by a despot? The what of your world is given depth and context by the why choices that you make. As I started putting this episode together, I realized that this episode will ask more questions than it provides answers. My hope is that some of the questions that are asked and the ideas that are presented will spark your own imagination for homebrewing your entire world. So where to start? The first question you can ask is, is your world that you're homebrewing Earth-like? Is it warmer near the equator, colder near the poles? Are the days about 24 hours long?

Does physics work the exact same on your world as it does on Earth? Are the days about 24 hours long? Does physics work the exact same on your world as it does on Earth? If the answer is yes, then obviously you have a lifetime of experience to draw from for how your world can behave. But if not, what could you change? Could you give your planet a larger axis tilt to make the seasons more varied? Turn the planet sideways so it rolls around its orbit like a ball instead of spinning like a top. Now you have a mostly tidally locked planet with one side of the planet in perpetual daytime

and the other side in perpetual night. Maybe give it a slight sideways wobble so it wobbles back and forth as it rolls and now part of the planet will have very short day and night cycles. Does the planet even need to be round at all? What if the planet was shaped entirely differently? This is sci-fi or fantasy. When we are homebrewing, we can make things whatever we want them to be, even if the physics maybe wouldn't work in the real world. What if your planet was a cube, a torus, so it's shaped like a donut? It could be an irregular chunk of rock maybe that broke off something bigger.

They could be floating islands in space that are just gravitationally attracted to one another so they maintain somewhat of an orbit around each other. Dyson sphere megastructure surrounding a star. Oh, it's an ancient Dyson sphere where parts of it are starting to fail. Maybe human beings occupied it but don't really understand the technology very well. So now you have areas of the sphere that's kind of home to, for lack of a better term, wildlife. So that could be where the adventure actually happens. Whatever your world is and whatever the shape of it happens to be, one of the questions you need to ask is how many different ancestries or races are there?

Are they all human or is it a mix of human and lizardfolk, or human, lizardfolk, and giants, or maybe it's 45 different species all competing for the same resources? How many of those races or species are considered part of quote-unquote civilization? For those that aren't, what sort of civilization do they have? Is it rich history that maybe is not acknowledged by the other civilized races? Or is it tribal and nomadic and much of the civilization is oral history? Maybe they don't build monuments. Maybe they tell stories.

When it comes to history, while I'm on the subject, how much of that planet's history will you be making up? My first recommendation would be to make up very little of the history starting out. You don't want to spend weeks and weeks and weeks My first recommendation would be to make up very little of the history starting out. You don't want to spend weeks and weeks and weeks filling in every little detail of what king bequeathed what queen, and who married whom, and how many kids did they have. Maybe just start with the huge events. Things like cataclysms and floods, extinction events, or mass culture shifts or relocations. Maybe gnomes are a brand new race

on the planet Delunia. They arrived 150 years ago during what they call the Great Migration because the first world began to fragment and shatter. Be very, very careful because you can easily get lost in the weeds and it may not ever even come up as part of your campaign. But knowing those broad strokes and having that broad view of history, you can demonstrate to your players how that history affects your world. If gnomes are brand new, for example, then are they feared, revered, shunned, marginalized to the fringes of society? When a gnome walks down the street, do mothers hold their children close because they're scared of what the magical thing will do?

Or are they these wondrous things that kids always run up and want to spend time with and ask a million questions to? Having those broad strokes of history can show the reasons why gnomes are shunned, the reasons why half-orcs are embraced, or whatever your history would show. Other things you need to consider about your world, even if you don't disclose it initially to your players. What sort of general climate and environment exists? Is it a forest? Is it a desert? Is it a lake town? What's the flora and fauna look like around that starting area? I'm sorry George Lucas, but rarely is an entire planet a forest or a desert or a city. Most planets have varied biomes and varied environments,

so it could be forest to steppe to desert to marshy swamp. So knowing what kind of environment exists, at least in the starting area, will give you a good idea about what kind of monsters may be there and what dangers your players will face. Another thing you will want to consider, even if you don't disclose it initially, is what level of technology and what level of magic are available for the players. Is the technology in the Bronze Age level, or are there auto-docs on every corner that can remove cancer?

Is magic this rare thing that garners a lot of attention when it's used? Or are there continual flame lanterns every 30 feet on the street? The answer is somewhere on a spectrum usually. It's not at one extreme or the other. But the interesting thing you can ask is does this answer vary based on the area of the world? Is there a high-tech society with one set of technology availability while cities on the edge of the wilderness are lower-tech and struggle with basic necessities? If that's true, then why? Is it like the Hunger Games where there was a rebellion, so the fringes of society are kept under the thumb of the capital?

Is there socioeconomic disparity? Is it an availability of resources issue? Is it a military issue? Is it a governmental presence issue? Speaking of government, what type of government is there? Is it a monarchy with a single ruler? If it is, is it autocratic where one person makes all the rules? Or does this person have an advisory council that assists the king or emperor or empress in making the rules. The government could be feudalistic, with a tiered set of rulers based on land ownership, nobility, and military obligation. You could set it up as an oligarchy, a small group of the elite,

whether the elite is defined as being financial elite, intelligent elite, species elite, hype elite, whatever. That group makes the rules for society to follow. Perhaps it's a subset of oligarchy called aristocracy, where the wealthy nobles are given all the power. Is it a full democracy, where the people make the decisions and every decision of the government is put to a popular vote? Is it a republic, where the people elect the people who make those decisions for them? Or a variant of the two between like a representative democracy? Is it communistic where all people are equal and the state owns nearly everything? You could set up a meritocracy where authority is given to those who have demonstrated traits that are deemed important

or desirable. Perhaps the government's authoritarian, like a military dictatorship, or theocracy, where the government is controlled by the church and the church's beliefs. Or you could take us to crazy town and make it an anarchy, where people can keep what they can grab and defend. Regardless of the type of government, another thing you need to ask, what do most people think of the current government? What do they say about the government in public versus what do they say in the privacy of their own homes? How bureaucratic is the government? How easy is it to get an appointment with the Empress? Two months of red tape or can anybody stroll up and petition the leadership? Moving on to gods. So what gods exist in your world?

Is it a monotheistic world or is it a polytheistic world? If it's monotheistic with only one god, does the god represent himself, herself, or itself the same to the entire world? If it's polytheistic, how do these various gods represent themselves to the entire world? How do they view the world? Are they invested in the world at all? Or is it just one area or species or even belief system that they take any interest in at all? Flipping the coin of how they view the world, how does the world view them? Are the gods consistent in the way they interact with the world or are they ever-changing, flighty, capricious things that make decisions based on whatever their whim is for that particular moment.

So looking at the map of your world, whatever it looks like, what's in what we could call the wild lands or the bad lands? The areas of the map that would be beyond civilized lands, if you will. What's interesting is what's considered wild lands will likely differ by civilization. Human beings may treat the Underdark as this untamed wildlands where danger abounds, whereas Drow or Duergar may treat the surface world as the same wildlands, crazy things happen, and this weird glowing orb in the sky. In this wildland, has civilization made any foothold in this wild area? If they have, is civilization winning against the wild, pushing it back so that civilization can expand? Are they losing where the wild lands are

slowly encroaching on previously settled areas? Or is it a stalemate? Are they just holding their own? Are these early outposts where explorers, scientists, and the military are the primary presence? Is it one city clinging to the coast of a remote continent as the wilderness encroaches? Did civilization once have a foothold there and lost it? Looking at the history of your world, did civilizations rise and fall before the current one? Maybe there was an age of glory before now with some powerful civilization with amazing abilities that fell to cataclysm or plague or war or maybe their own pride and hubris. So finally, what are some tips for success?

Number one, when your PCs build a backstory, use that backstory to help fill your world. That backstory can fit into your world like a puzzle piece. You may have to shave some pieces off. You may have to work with that player to make sure that PC's backstory fits into certain areas of your world. It does make that PC feel like that they're part of this storytelling and building process. I also recommend you build your world from small to big. Focus on the starting town and expand from there as you need to. The exception to that being, I would have an entire planet, rough-drawn continents, at least available to me. So when you reference the far-off land of Sportia, you know what you're talking about. Unless you want to go to a tremendous amount of trouble making a new divinity,

just use one from a published game system. If you want to be a a tremendous amount of trouble making a new divinity, just use one from a published game system. If you want to be a little creative, reskin the existing gods, so that Thor is now called Hotei, and she's the daughter of Spress. Hotei's the goddess of lightning and farts. Oh, Hotei, forgive my transgressions. Forsooth the goddess doth speak to me. She's very displeased. Using published gods is easier, simpler.

You don't have to go to the trouble of designing everything from pantheons to domains to how clerics worship, the church structure. Designing all this from scratch, it may only be tangentially referred to during the entire campaign. Using published gods, a lot easier. Reskin if you need to. As I mentioned earlier, have a map of the world, whether you draw it or generate it randomly. You can use software to create it. There's all sorts of tools out there, online and offline. As an aside, by the way, as somebody who subscribes to the Worldbuilding subreddit, make sure your rivers go from the mountains to the ocean, high elevation to low,

and they tend to join together and not split apart. The Worldbuilding subreddit will thank you for this, because as soon as you publish your map, they say, and what do you think? It seems like they always go for the rivers first. Whatever your world looks like, have a wilderness area of the world where civilization isn't prevalent. Game of Thrones, for example, had the area beyond the wall, where monsters reigned and there were these mystical things that people thought were just legends. Have an area like that. Deep forest, far north, beyond the asteroid belt. I actually started to say Beyond the Aquila Rift.

Fark me, that's a great episode of Love, Death, and Robots. It made me go read the short story by Alistair Reynolds, and it's even better. So if you haven't seen it, haven't read it, please do so. When you're thinking about your world, your earliest cities, therefore your oldest cities, first tend to form near water and around places to grow food. As trade formalizes, cities form at major crossroads so that trading can happen there. But anytime you drop a city into your world, you need to know how that city sustains itself. What does it trade? What does it offer

others? Why does it exist? Is it a slave market where the vast majority of its income comes from people outside the city who venture there to buy and sell slaves? Is the city the number one source for feldspar? Does the city make money by mining this very rare mineral that can be used in fusion engines? Know how the city sustains itself, how it makes money, and why it's there. Give your world more than one creation myth because each ancestry, each race, is going to design their own where they are the focus. For dwarves, the world was forged at the anvil of some major dwarven god, while human beings may say that the gods breathed life into them from dust on the

earth. The elves might think that the world was sung into existence as they were created. So set up more than one creation myth and don't forget the major monster races because the dragons probably believe that the world was created in the belly of a great beast. Finally, a good world provides a lot of the why for adventuring and context for activities there. The world gives the players opportunities for adventure. Dangers to face, treasures to recapture, people to save, and rules to follow. Maybe the 78 degree arm of the Dyson Sphere depressurized 25 years ago and has no atmosphere. The Badlands contain tribes of cannibalistic marauders that civilizations call Prize, short for Prion Disease. Taking time to build a custom world for the players is a huge undertaking.

It can be very rewarding if done correctly. With a little thought and a little time, I think you can do a great job of doing it. Thank you so much for listening to Taking 20, Episode 20, Homebrew 101 World Design. I once again want to thank our sponsor, Electricity. Remember, resistance is futile. My name is Jeremy Shelley, and I hope that your next game is your best game.