Defining a Campaign by its PCs

Setting map created with
Campaign Cartographer 3

 I'm doing things a bit out of order here. I have quite a few articles planned, and finally a good rhythm in which to get them done, but I wanted to share an example of world-building done backwards that I attempted last month.

Quick Context

My wife and I have had constant interruptions from family emergencies to illness to extreme levels of stress that have prevented us from getting a role-playing campaign off the ground since late August. We were getting to the point where she was feeling frustrated, un-creative, and had no idea what she wanted to play.

In the past when we have had this kind of creative logjam I have simply made up a short scenario and handed her a character for it I thought she'd find compelling. We'd play a one-shot (IRL, usually a three-shot with the meandering way we like to play) and  that would be enough to get us grounded in the game, which suddenly got us a better sense of what we actually wanted to do.

A few weeks ago I decided to do both that, but also give her choices and try an experiment in world-building at the same time. I wrote up eight characters, each with a one-page backstory and statistics for Low Fantasy Gaming, one of my favourites for a good swashbuckling, high-action adventure. Each backstory had common elements, bits of history, common contacts, and small samplings of lore to play with. I figured one of them would sing to her, and I could mash up the plots to Torchlight II's act III and Diablo III's acts I & II with a touch of Warhammer: Vermintide II  and a copious amount of Legend of the Bones to have a good gothic fantasy.

I made it specifically a point to ensure that each PC had a family member who could be a useful PC, connections to some interesting cultural institution that would need some history, and would find themselves poised to get involved with one faction or another.

I've put the characters behind a spoiler if you don't want to sift through the specific content and want to just get to the conclusions I have come to.

Campaign Reports and PWYW Preview of Undeadwood WWRPG

I really enjoyed creating podcasts for my players to summzarize our last play sessions and build up lore for Xen this past Spring. I've decided to do that and take it up to 11 for my current campaign Undeadwood Weird West RPG, especially as I have been building a game for scratch that has turned out to be pretty darned good.

And so, with two episodes now live online that are a mix of developer's blog, world building, and play reports, I wanted to share that podcast with you here. It will be live on major podcasting platforms over the next month or so.

Sharing Your World Enhances it

One of the great things about sharing a world that you're creating with others is that the way others interact with it, the characters they want to be in it, and the kind of things they suggest putting in (either directly or by way of asking questions,) it can really help energize your creative process.

The World I Am Currently Building

In my game Undeadwood the player characters start as people who have been transported on a mysterious Phantom train crewed by demonic entities to a pocket dimension called Wonkatonkwa.

The characters arrive in 1869 with no memory of anything that's happened since 1867. To them, the Civil War is over and the grudges were starting to smooth over, a new host of opportunities were opening, and Manifest Destiny is at its high point in American Consciousness.

During character generation, they can find themselves in possession of strange objects. One of the Pin my test group started the game with $16, and a photograph of a recently assassinated politician from the north with an X-drawn across it. 

Wonkatonkwa is a haunted country. Hoodoo magic, Santeria, Alchemy, and Pow-wow rites all work. At night, the spectral forms of people who have died in the desert rise up to drain the life out of the living so that they can once again experience the pleasures of being a living being themselves. The Devil himself hangs out had a crossroad in the eastern part of the county. And creatures from American folklore like hodags, the wampus, and the snallygaster plague the people who have no choice but to make a life there.