Creating a World

GameMastery Guide, page 137

In this section

• World Building While running games within a published campaign setting or a favorite fictional universe is a lot of fun, many GMs enjoy creating an entire setting from scratch—a world in which every idea, NPC, and location, is an…
• Detailing Your World Game designers work for months on setting sourcebooks, novelists agonize for years over how their world might work, and screenplay writers have production designers and art directors helping them present a movie’s…
• Geography One of the greatest joys of creating your own campaign setting is the thrill and challenge of crafting an entire world, shaping it out of the primordial clay and setting it spinning in the void.
• Cultural Considerations While such things are undeniably important, creating a world is more than merely drawing realistic geography and political lines and then slapping down analogues of real-world societies.
• The Primitive Society All historical cultures—and nearly all fantastical ones— spring from primal forebears.
• The Feudal Society As cultures emerge from ignorance into knowledge, as the people band together for mutual protection, certain leaders—whether strong, smart, or charismatic—rise to guide, lead, and protect.
• The Rural/Agrarian Society In general, civilization hinges on a people’s ability to move beyond the hunter-gatherer model, to settle into a place, learn to understand, and it harness its resources.
• The Cosmopolitan Society While countrysides, farmlands, mountaintops, forests, and tundras all have their place in a well-developed world, the city is where the heart of civilized culture beats.
• Other Societies The cultures presented in the preceding sections are broad categories, and certainly not the only ones available to a fantasy world. Others have flowered from similar beginnings and taken dramatically different paths.
• Technology One of the most important factors in building a world is its level of technological advancement. Technology affects every aspect of the game, from what gear PCs carry to what kinds of adventures a GM can run.
• Time Even the most superficial treatment of a campaign setting needs to deal with history and the passage of time.
• The Cosmos Space. In many fantasy games, it’s not even the final frontier, but rather completely beyond the bounds of the campaign setting.
• The Planes Perhaps the most prominent question in any society is that of what happens to us when we die.
• Parallel Worlds In physics, a theory called the “many-worlds interpretation” asserts that for any given choice or event, a separate reality is created for each possible outcome.