When it comes to developing setting and characters, my homebrew setting, Evanoch, has a wide range worldbuilding details. Politically speaking, none of the governments in my major cities or even secondary cities share a governmental system. Some people might argue that this is an unrealistic presentation of a world. In real life history, governments across the globe tend to share many details in most time periods; this is a huge generalization, but there was generally a period of kingdom rule in most places, followed by increasing democratic governments over time.
But in my gameworld, having many similar governments doesn't really serve much of a purpose beyond a sense of realism. Consider this: if I come up with a story I like for my gameworld that needs a particular political system, having a few dozen kingdoms might get in the way because I wouldn't have a settlement with the government system I want. If I instead go with my route (creating diverse political systems), I can instead choose the settlement that best matches my needs for story. This is one major way that breadth can help us: it gives us a range of places and people to work with when we have new ideas.
Years ago, I had an idea for a Western-inspired setting that still used D&D rules. This did not reference a particular political system, but it did require a specific geographical setting: it needed a desert area which was lightly populated. My map for Evanoch didn't really include this type of setting. Evanoch has a desert area, but it is not populated at all and is known for being uninhabitable, so I ran into an issue. My pre-planned world did not have the setting I needed. That presented a problem. Fortunately, there's another breadth-related strategy I used that allowed me to solve it.
The heart of the breadth strategy includes the idea that we have room for literally everything we want to do in the gameworld. But we can't possibly prepare for all possibilities any more than we can begin to even anticipate all possibilities. The solution is simple: leaving things open for later development. When I created Evanoch, I decided that it was the most notable continent on a planet that I left otherwise very open. So when I came up with the idea for Ramsey, the western island, all I had to do was throw a new continent into an open stretch of ocean. If we're aiming for breadth, we need to allow ourselves room to continue to develop, and that means leaving some things open for later development.
The Ramsey example is an extreme case--dropping a whole new continent into the world is a big step that most ideas won't require. But the example does show us that such a move is possible, which can be greatly helpful when needed. For less intensive needs, though, the same strategy can be implemented on a smaller scale: we can simply add a town to the map (which we have left some open spaces in for later development). When I ran the mystery campaign, I needed a town which was beset by chaos storms and which had a clearly divided social structure, so I simple picked an undeveloped part of my map and began designing the city I wanted.
You may be saying to yourself, "how does leaving things undeveloped allow us greater breadth of possible experience?" After all, having a wide range of options and having an incomplete world are not exactly the same thing. But the fact of the matter is, unless you are publishing your homebrew materials, you will never be able to say that you have a complete picture of your world. It will always be growing and changing, it will always need new details to match your players' input, and it will need to be a place that you can work with even after you set the original details into place. So it's not that undeveloped parts of your world increase breadth, but rather that they allow you to continue to increase breadth as needed.
I imagine that other readers still will be thinking, "But if I leave things undone, how will I know how to handle situations in the game?" That's a valid concern, but it's rooted in a misconception about the art of DMing. I have written literally hundreds of pages about my homebrew setting (almost all of which exists on this site), and I think it's fair to say that that's more than most DMs bother with. And yet after all this time and effort, there are still huge things I don't know about my world. After more than a decade of running in-depth, detailed games in my homebrew setting, I realized only in the last few weeks that I never spent any time outlining the major knowledge and research issues in the world, which is a massively important and characterizing set of information. My point is, if I run games (many of which have included knowledge and research issues) for a decade without ever formalizing that information, doesn't that communicate that we can live in gameworlds that are partially incomplete? I would argue that it does, and that means we shouldn't be afraid to leave some things for later. Future you will thank you.
Let's get back to the heart of the breadth argument: that it gives us more potential than a completely unique world. This can be explored on a number of levels. Let's begin with an overview of Izar, the planet on which my homebrew setting exists. There are a number of continents, large and small: there is Dalton, a small island with little natural resources where one line of humans hail from; Fanin, a small forest island with peaceful humans; Ramsey, the Western-themed desert island; Cetin, a massive island with no inhabitants which Evanines would recognize; and Evanoch, which I designed to be a broad fantasy setting. These five islands allow me to access different types of stories than would be possible if all of them were more similar.
Dalton allows me to tell stories about industrial humans with dogmatic religion and imperialist aims. Fanin allows me to tell stories about peaceful humans with tight-knit communities and humble demeanors. Already, these two islands allow me the possibility to tell vastly different stories even though both islands are home to humans which Evanines can't tell apart. Then with Ramsey, I can tell Western-style stories with a supernatural bent. Cetin is an old idea that I've never used yet; I don't run much in the way of high fantasy, but Cetin is covered with magical beasts and all sorts of mystical happenings that would feel out of place in my more grounded settings. And Evanoch itself is intentionally broad in every way I can make it.
Let's investigate Evanoch more closely. I like a story that feels dramatically realistic but has room for the excitement of magic and deities, so I made Evanoch to be a fairly realistic place with as much variation as possible. I've done considerable work on the worldbuilding in Evanoch because it's the main setting I use for D&D. I've written about major ideas like what nature is like and what each god is like, but I've also developed things like sports and even senses of humor are like across the setting. I mention this not to brag about my worldbuilding, but to say that the actual details of each of those profiles are as different as I could conceive of making them while still fitting the setting. Take a look at any of my homebrew setting materials, and you'll see that literally every detail of the world shows how the different groups in it are distinct.
You may be thinking, "But making the groups distinct--isn't that a form of uniqueness?" To an extent, I agree. And to that point, I am not arguing that worldbuilding should be all breadth and no uniqueness. It's a spectrum, and we want to be somewhere towards the middle. But when I worldbuild, I want to fall closer to breadth than uniqueness. Because in the end, deciding what makes an orc laugh versus what makes a halfling laugh is less about what makes them different and more about the fact that there are different senses of humor in the world. A player who makes a joke to one character and gets a big laugh but gets no response from another character with the same joke immediately discovers that your world is bigger, broader, and more detailed than they would get if all of the fantasy groups had the same sense of humor (even if it's distinct from our real life sense of humor).
The sense of humor example shows us how characterizing the world can show shades of variation, and these are what do the bulk of the work of making the world seem real. But bigger details do the same work on two levels. Not only does knowing the architectural styles of any culture allow the same kind of sense of reality and complexity as the sense of humor example above, but it can help give the players access to information that can affect the game. For instance, the breadth of different styles of house at first tell the players that the groups are distinct and make the world more colorful, but once learned allows those same players to understand the world: seeing a hexagonal house means meeting a gnome, for instance, and players searching for a particular person's home might ease their hunt by looking for the right style of house. Now our breadth of worldbuilding also contributes to the players' ability to interface with the world, and that matters.
So how do we go about focusing on breadth while still allowing room for unique additions? I undergo a three-step process which is really quite simple. Step one: Identify what you want to accomplish with your addition to your worldbuilding. This is a vital step, because worldbuilding should always be deliberate. We should know before writing specifically what we want to accomplish. In the Ramsey example above, I wanted a place that could support the narrative style and aesthetics of the Western. In the Cetin example, I wanted a place that could support high fantasy while still giving myself a designated space for more grounded stories. Knowing our goal allows us to move forward with the confidence that our work will honor our world while still growing it.
Step two: Consider how to add the new material to your setting by focusing on the new addition. In the Ramsey example, I knew I wanted a Wild West setting, but that was all I had. So I did some mechanical considerations--what weapons and armor would need to change to fit the Western style?--and some worldbuilding considerations--what physical features would the setting have? The answer to this second question probably won't surprise you: I wanted breadth. Ramsey has two distinct island chains, both of which are very different. It has big cities on canyon edges, mountain forts, swamp outposts, and dense treetop fortifications. This means that I can explore essentially any classic Western story because I've developed the breadth to support it.
Because Ramsey involved inventing an entire island, I was able to make it as one big place more or less in a vacuum. But if you were going to add a town to an existing area, you might face other challenges. You may need to ask yourself what the political situation of a region is like and whether your new town would fit into it, and you may need to consider why your new town would exist in your setting at all. It really just depends on how different your new town is from your established world. But don't give up if it's hard to place the new addition in your existing world; in real life, there is huge breadth between even similar places. Think about the difference between the major cities in the country or state you live in--doesn't it make sense that you might have a distinct settlement in the middle of a quite different area? Having grown up across the United States, I've seen places that seem, well, out of place where they are, and that only makes them more interesting.
Step three: solidify for yourself what makes this new addition to your world different from the rest of it. Knowing an encyclopedia's worth of information about something in your gameworld is great, but until you can figure out how to convey that information, it's not very useful. So ask yourself some questions. If the players are used to the world or even just the game you're playing, you will want to communicate specifically what makes this new place/person/event special. Don't spend dozens of hours worldbuilding and then unveil your work like it's just business as usual. Highlight the colorful details so that your players understand exactly why you've given them the breadth and detail that you have.
The ultimate goal of worldbuilding for breadth is to make the world useful to you and your players. By this, I mean that making a world with lots of different ideas is like stocking up on ammunition before a battle; it gives you the resources you need to run your game at your best. It allows you to move between different ideas, offer your players more possible adventures, and expand your creativity. It also allows your players to gravitate towards the parts of the gameworld that they enjoy, and it gives them the impression that your gameworld is as big and exciting as you've designed it to be.
A final word on the power of designing for breadth: as someone who has DMed for more than half my life at this point, sometimes we come to prefer some parts of the experience over others. I got my start as a DM running silly antics campaigns with little narrative, and I am today much more hesitant to be a part of games that revolve around silliness and lack of direction. They're not bad games, mind you, but I've done many of them and prefer more serious roleplaying. But of course, some groups enjoy the antics and don't enjoy the serious side of things, and so I've developed certain areas of the world that are ripe for rich roleplaying and others that contain all the ingredients for silly antics. This gives me the ability to keep my world consistent and useful to me--I can stick with my world even when my players are playing practically different games.
So in the end, a broad world is kind of like a Bag of Holding, where a highly specific world is like a fancy coinpurse. The fancy coinpurse is great and probably fits many occasions, but the Bag of Holding can handle almost anything. Personally, I would rather have the range and potential to do anything that I can imagine than trying to make my world so unique that it's unlike anyone else's. And of course, breadth and detail are not mutually exclusive--I hope that the worldbuilding that I've done here on this site shows that you can have both if you work at it. This, then, is just a reminder that a broad world presents you an open canvas, which is after all what we begin with as DMs.
So there you have it: many of the reasons that I aim for the most diverse world I can, all of which benefit me and my players. You can enjoy the same benefits if your worldbuilding allows your to constantly expand the realm of what is possible in your game, and I hope that you can make the most of your worldbuilding by pushing the boundaries of what you include.
That's all for now. Coming soon: how developing random details from your world can benefit your game, a list of conspiracy theories believed in my homebrew setting, and how to use inspiration from your favorite media. Until next time, happy gaming!
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