Sports and Recreation in My Homebrew Setting

Throughout history and now more than ever, sports and games have captured peoples' attention. In the contemporary United States, I find it virtually impossible to escape mention of professional sports, and games are so popular that you are reading this right now, proof of both your and my interest in games. Surely, then, there would be some kind of recreation in the gameworld as well. That's why I've developed a profile on all of the different ways that people occupy themselves in my setting. 

Just as with the other areas we develop information on, we are drawing in part on real world information and in part creating from scratch information. So, in general, your path to determining what sports and recreation look like in your world should involve consideration of what could realistically occur in the world and what people take an interest in. It's entirely feasible to write that all of the world's modern sports are pretty faithfully recreated in your world--global football/American soccer is an easy enough game to make, especially when you consider the many ways people make makeshift fields and goals around the world, as one for instance. Most other sports could be ported into the game with one small technological development each--rubber for a basketball, a safe puck for hockey (a stone could kill), and so on. 

But my profile includes no modern professional sports. I've opted to create one of my own and rely on other forms of recreation. As I have often said, my goal in tabletop gaming is to lead collaborative storytelling, so I'm primarily concerned with recreation that allows or ideally aids storytelling. While a sports match can be narratively compelling in different ways, I prefer allowing players to create their own dramas with as few rules in place as possible. (Most of the time, at least. There 's a time and place for that challenge, too.) Read on for the full guide to sports and games in my homebrew setting.