World Building is a Complimentary but Separate Hobby to RPGs

My map of Wonkatonkwa County,
Created using Campaign Cartographer
Poster-sized version below.

I've been going all-out trying to get Undeadwood ready for my play testers this week.

I know it is not the most efficient way of going about it, but I have been arranging and laying out the manual as I work. It gives me a great sense of accomplishment when the rules and ideas that I am putting out there look good and are easy to read.

Hunting through old pulp art for illustrations has been an engaging way to keep me inspired. And has got me reading some great 1930s Western pulp for fun.The end result is that I now have a pretty good-looking 60-page manual that is growing rapidly as I hammer away at it whenever I have a free moment containing a game engine that is custom tailored to the exact campaign experience i want

• It is designed to be extremely fast and robust.
• it is entirely player-facing.
• The way rolls are played out feels at least a little like shooting craps at a casino table.
• It is saturated with cowboy slang and mechanics to evoke the conventions of the game.
• It puts a heavy emphasis on players making hard choices when 
• Mechanics to make the environment as deadly as combat is.
• It is a system where there is magic, but it is not complex, and does not rely on things like complicated spell lists.

I embraced the Free Kriegspiel Revolution philosophy that "we are playing the World and not the Game," by making every design decision in service to making sure my players were experiencing the Weird West setting in as high a resolution as I could manage.

It is very liberating making the game to suit the world rather than the world to suit the game. You stop wondering about how you can fit or modify magic-users in your setting, and instead wonder about how exactly magic works in your setting, and how you can represent that without creating snarled and unweildly rules.

I also found that once I had a map, it was much easier to figure out what content I needed. I made some random encounter tables for Olvidado flats, the central desert area east of the big river on the map, and suddenly I knew that I needed stats for Skinwalkers and poisonous snakes, because I knew that they are something I wanted PCs to have to worry about at different times of the day.

In the ghost town in the centre of the map, I decided that there would be a haunted well with a lesser Lovecraftian horror down at the bottom of it that had infested the aquifer for miles. One that whispers terrible secrets if you have the guts to be out in the town after dark. What and how Lovecraftian horrors work in my world is something entirely down to me.

Often, I didn't feel much need to work rules out at all. That is a bridge I can cross when I get to it. If I even need to.

World Building as Hobby

It has left me with some thoughts on World Building as a separate hobby from Table-Top Role Playing Games. And it is a hobby that I enjoy quite a bit. In many ways, I use role-playing games as a medium to help me know where to start in building the world. Which,is backwards from the original AD&D method:

 In Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st edition, it was recommended that you make a dungeon and a village, or borrowed one from a module, and then built the world outward from the starting point as needed, often using random generation, and only when your PCs are ready to explore outward.

This isn't news, of course. World building first and then exploring later was a passion of many of the fantasy and weird fiction authors that informs Dungeons & Dragons.

J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle Earth certainly had an influence on D&D, even if it was only a integrated to increase the possible market audience for the game. Tolkein was forever building lore, languages, cultures and history for Middle Earth as a way of exploring a world where the best element of the Pagan ethos could stand side-by-side with Salvation and the Christian ideals of the Divine. It is clear that he spent a lot of time in his head just creating the nuances of the world, and then used fiction to invite others into it.His method of building maps, and then placing stories within them has remained a template for modern World-Building for good reason.

Jack Vance rightly awards for his incredibly rich world building with the Dying Earth. He set a new bar for creating a rich and immersive experience for his readers... and for leaving so many questions you always wish you could go into it and find out more for yourself.

Edgar Rice Burroughs' later Pellucidar and Barsoom books became less about a cowboy story of a hero settling a new and untamed land, and became about an adventurer experiencing a strange world with totally alien history and ways. The Chessman of Mars is a perfect example of this: John Carter takes advantage of the fact that he lives in a world of wonder and ancient advancements, seeks out some lost technology or knowledge that might repair Deja Thoris' broken spine, and along the way encounters strange and terrible beings who breed perfected slaves in order to steal their bodies when they have need of them (Probably the inspiration for Stargate's Goa'uld). This is definitely not the Western saga in SciFi drag that the first couple of John Carter novels were.

 Roger Zelazny's Amber has a rich cosmology of shifting planes in multiple worlds as characters move through. Often taking advantage of the differences in flow of time and availability of resources to make themselves rich and powerful on different worlds. And where the stakes of the game are the cosmos itself, with the enemies taking advantage of their own quirks of the laws of the magic of the setting.It is a compelling and challenging series to read, and deeply immersive precisely because Zelazny had spent so much time exploring the possibilities. 

As kid I developed a fascination with the world of Pern. I honestly didn't have much access to the novels. I lived way out in the country and the public library was a 50 minute drive from home. But, for Christmas when I was 11 my aunt gave me a copy of the Dragonlover's Guide to Pern, which is a beautifully illustrated text covering nuances of clothing, creature anatomy, early history, and the geography of Pern. I could look at that book for hours and wish that I had a chance to go and visit it.

At the time I lacked any knowledge of an existing Pern role-playing games, nor did I have the design skill necessary to build one for myself, but I certainly spent a lot of time there in my imagination thanks to the richness of details that that book could give me. 

Thanks to all that detail, I yearned to be able to explore it first-hand.

Role-Playing as Exploration Tool

Role-playing games offer a new way other than reading to enjoy the complex and nuanced worlds that these authors created. And I suspect the opportunity to go fighting Tharks in Barsoom or pitting your wits against the Courts of Chaos in Amber was a big driving force behind the development of role-playing games.

Ed Greenwood created The Forgotten Realms about ten years before Dungeons & Dragons really hit it stride. The original short stories created a view of Waterdeep and other places along the Sword Coast from the viewpoint of a canny merchant living in a fantasy world that once connected to Earth by magical portals, but those portals had become mostly closed, connected to realms of darkness, or were taken over by evil cabals. He saw the potential in Dungeons & Dragons to allow him to step into and explore his world and share it, and so adjusted the Realms to fit the D&D paradigm, and shared it through The Dragon. And his efforts eventually led to The Forgotten Realms going from his private World-Building creation to the default setting for D&D.

I think that is also why we saw the incredible success of Dragonlance. Not only did you have the Dungeons & Dragons modules, but you also had the deeply engaging novels by Weiss and Hickman that created a world that one would really want to go see and explore. Characters one would love to be able to meet. Then D&D offered you the portal to do exactly that.

I also think that you can safely say that Matthew Mercer's World building in Critical Role is a good portion of its success as well. There is not a session of the first campaign that I watched where he doesn't build up some details about the culture, people, and landscape of Tal'Dorei, and there were a lot of fans who enjoyed that part of the viewing experience, even if they weren't Dungeons & Dragons players. Prices back at the colossal sales of the Tal'Dorei world books for D&D were in part people who never had and never intended to play Dungeons & Dragons, but we're intrigued by his world building.

I have yet to have a chance to look at Daggerheart, but, I expect that the richness of the material that is being built out of helps build a game that has some interesting flourishes and nuances that will set it apart from its Pathfinder / 5e roots. 

Why Understanding That World-Building is a Separate Hobby is Valuable

When you understand that World building can be its own hobby, and that there's a rich tradition and a great number of examples and tools available for you that are not directly linked to role-playing games, you suddenly will find yourself with an incredible range of resources available to you

And when you embrace the idea that rules are, and ought to be hackable, or the FKR idea that you play the World first and let the rules be subordinate to its logic, it can allow you to create a far more tailored role-playing experience for your group.

And as a corollary to that, as they are separate hobbies, you needn't necessarily engage with World Building if you don't want to. It isn't required in order to run a fun, loose, beer and pretzels kind of game. So much DMing advice is actually rudimentary World building advice that doesn't need to be there..

It's one of the reasons why I recommend anyone who runs role-playing games check out the AD&D1e Dungeon Master's Guide. It had within it an endless supply of tools for building a game that didn't need the world to exist a priori. It allows the DM to explore and experience it as well at the same time. Chaos, after all, is one of the best sources of fun 

Back to Undeadwood

In Undeadwood, I started building the game in order to create a fast and easy system for building Cowboys who fit into a pulp Western as you might read and Lariat, 44 Western, or Spicy Western Stories. 

The game didn't start really developing the richness it now has until I had what I needed to offer that character generation mechanic to my friends then put the rules aside, and instead drew a map.

Once I had a map broke it into 10 sections, I made promise to myself that would make it last four pages of each area, complete with two settlements for each, several points of interest, and some terrifying supernatural threat lingering at each location. Once I staterd on that project, the game really started to come into its own, and I really started getting excited about making it.

And it made the rest of the project flow so much more quickly, I no longer need to ask what the game needs in it. Now I just need to get the time to get these ideas out of my head and onto paper.

Over the next couple of them articles, talking a little bit about the World Building separate from role-playing games, then the complexities of role playing games using role-playing games to explore them, then discuss how to play a role-playing game without the burden some task of building a world in the first place.

In the meantime, check out this awesome map!! I am very proud of how it turned out. Created with a mix of Photshop, GIMP and Campaign Cartographer.

Enlarge it to see more!