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.
I didn't want to remove the setting completely from the time. And so, well the beings that run the number nine won't let anyone buy tickets and dispose messily of stowaways. Things like newspapers and goods can still be delivered to the station by mail order, and a general flow of newspapers, books, and mail still flow into the county. One can even send mail out on the Number Nine... just never people. And anything that leaves the county by way of the train is cursed so that the people reading it go into a kind of hypnotic state, and simply accept, then forget about anything supernatural described in letters.
There is also a 200 mile long trail through perilous Canyon country haunted by flesh-eating spirits and worse that ends in a cave that serves as a portal back to Western Texas... although only one man who's being crazy enough to attempt the trail has come back to assert that, yes, you can get back to Earth that way.
White, Black, Mexican and Chinese settlers have been arriving for about 20 years to settle the county. Most have learned to simply live with the strange and evil energies of the place that call home. But before them, for at least 400 years, exiles from Pueblo, Navajo, Zuni, Hopi and Ute nations have shown up there. These lost people have formed their own new culture with a unique language and system of religion and mysticism based on the ways and beliefs of everyone who came before.
How it Grew When I Shared It
When my players saw that I was keeping it at least partially connected to the real world Old West, it inspired them to tell me some of their favourite stories, discuss their favourite historical guns, horse breeds, and cool cultural trivia. One of my players has an ancestor who is kidnapped by Indians from her Homestead in Ohio no less than nine times. He has asked that I sneak her in somewhere in the setting... she is going to be a major NPC in one of the three sample adventures included in the manual.
Another player's enduring sense of the heebie-jeebies from the movie Bone Tomahawk inspired me to change the character of the vicious giants found to the South of Wonkatonkwa. And endless movie quotes inspired me to add in my own take on the graboids from the Tremors movie series.
Because of their interest, the breeds of horses in the region, habits and practices of the lost people, and even the equipment list has become a much richer. The qualities of the Wonkatonkwa Pale horse and its mustang Half-Breed are far better desinged thanks to one of my player's horse-crazy phase of her childhood.
One of my players has also brought in a very colourful depiction of American folk witchcraft that has inspired a great deal of hell demons and spirits will work in Wonkatonkwa county. The way he plays has shaped the way magic works in the setting. NPCs have a lot of arguments about how "Christian" magic and those using it really are thanks to the way he has worked bible verses and hellfire preaching into his magical spells.
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| Setting page spread example from Undeadwood |
I could have spent months working on Wonkatonkwa County on my own, sharing nothing, and made a pretty decent setting... but thanks to my players, the world is richer, more interesting, and more complex than it would have otherwise been. Different knowledge-bases and interests.
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| Setting page spread example from Undeadwood |
This is perhaps one of the two most compelling reasons to use tools like TTRPGs to access the world that you are creating in a dynamic fashion: your own specialized interests will never make it as rich as it can be when you bring a diverse collection of minds into it.
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