What I'm Up To

 I'm sure it has been missed by no one that I have been having trouble finding time for this blog. And it's anniversary has just rolled past. So I wanted to take some time to let you know what has been keeping me busy, as it is mostly RPG-adjacent.

Gaming!

Death in Space

I'm coming up on one year of an intense campaign in Death in Space. My players have managed to survive long enough to salvage a handful of functional ships, hired a crew of salvage and mining experts and built a network of laser communication satellites; they are trying to become a force for hope in the Tenebris system.

The game started as a one-shot pallette cleanser, and just kept going. So I didn't start posting play reports until it is too late.

The Weirth Campaign 

I've also been participating in a long-running campaign run by Stephen Smith that attempts to reconstruct the early 1970s Wargaming D&D experience. We've shifted systems a couple of times, including playing awhile using the 1973 D&D play test rules that were recreated in The Lost Dungeons of Tonisborg, fueled with and eventually replaced by Blueholme, and after a few years shifting to a highly home-brewed iteration of Tales of Argosa.

This game uses domain rules that start for fighters at level 2, one-to-one time, patron players, mass combat played in Chainmail and other retro wargames, and a ton of classic modules including the aforementioned Tonisborg, The Tower of Xenopus, Keep on the Borderlands, The Isle of Dread, Temple of Elemental Evil, Empire of the East, Mask of Nyarlathotep, Into the Depths of the Earth, Veins of the Earth, Please Go to Sleep Arthur Cobblesworth, Sounds of the Mushroom Kingdom, and Against the Cult of the Reptile God among others.

Home Game

My home game with family has had a couple of false starts, but I just brought a satisfying end to a DCC RPG campaign and am setting up a game in AD&D.

I've also been playing a solo game in Grok?! 2e, amplified by Mythic Game Master Emulator.

Summer Game

Every year in the Summer I try to run six sessions of a classic OSR game with family, friends, and my favorite D&D people. This year I am vacillating between PARANOIA SP1 or running Operation Unfathomable and Odious Uplands in Swords & Wizardry.

Podcasting 

Two years ago, I founded an audio production company, Stormhead Productions, with terrible timing. The Descript AI changed audio production overnight about the same time I started my business. I was putting up a freelance profile on Upwork the exact same time that the going rate for that work were cut in half and the available jobs shrank by two thirds.

Undeadwood is live!!

I just launched Undeadwood: Weird West RPG on DriveThruRPG!

I am really proud of this one, readers! It is a heavily play tested unique system. The book is full of detailed maps, and beautiful pulp Art from the 1870s to the 1950s. 

Download includes a form fillable character sheet, as well as a static one, and dungeon Alchemist files as well as Virtual Table-Top exports for three locations. The book has two adventure scenarios. One a full size dungeon call, the other a simple shootout. 

They also has the file for a poster-sized map of the campaign setting.

Check it out on DTRPG!

Making a Zine Accessible to the Incarcerated

Okay, fair warning, I am going to go a bit out of character here and speak my mind on a topic that isn't gaming. I keep my blog apolitical because getting involved in discussions of the Political with strangers on the Internet is exhausting, fruitless, and these days attracts bullshit gestapo behaviour from illiberal assholes on both sides of the spectrum. 

Shortly after I made Drakken in 2022 I was approached by an organization in California that was dedicated to promote literacy in prisons. Apparently, Dungeons & Dragons was their most requested reading material from inmates at the time. D&D being expensive as it was at the time was simply not possible, but the potential benefits of TTRPGs for inmates was too good to pass up. They were hoping that I would be willing to let them, for a modest fee, distribute Drakken, remixed a bit to meet their requirements.

I told them they could have it for free.

Channeling My Inner 10-Year-Old

My last two articles (pt. 1, pt. 2) covered the creating of a cozy campaign I had intended for my family for slow and rainy days. It was a response to the spell that the game Stardew Valley seemed to have over my wife and kids.

Personally I am quite proud of the creation, and thought it could be a lot of fun. But, sadly, its reception was, at best, lukewarm. Serves me right for jumping into a project before getting the buy in, I suppose.

So I asked my kids what they wanted in a role-playing game, and the best answer I got was "I want to do awesome stuff!"

"What kind of awesome stuff?" I asked.

"You know! Awesome!" was sadly as far as the answers got. 

So, I sat down and thought about what my kids seem to think is "awesome."

The Journal of Agatha Fizzyflask -- My Cozy Campaign Experiment (pt.2)

Created using HiDream I1 fast

In my last post I described how I created a tool that let me create a series of magical maladies, their cures, and adventure locations where the important ingredients to those cures would be found.

(I decided to skip the poisons in the end, because the material I already had was more than enough for what I needed.)

The next step was to put it all together! I envisioned a campaign where a few strangers to the Dommar valley would be stopping as their caravan waits for a rock-slide to be cleared from one of the passes through the mountains, and find themselves suddenly called to action to help on the basis that they are bored strangers, intelligent, and literate. The local witch, a she-gnome named Agatha is missing, and one of the villagers has come down with a perilous case of Frostbite Fever. They can't wait for Agatha any longer, so they beg the PCs to read Agatha's book and help them make the cure.

And this would be the core basis for the campaign. The PCs encounter some peril in the village that one of Agatha's cures or potions could resolve, and so the PCs find themselves replacing Agatha as the village herbalist, alchemist, and witch... at least until they can learn of her fate.

The Journal of Agatha Fizzyflask -- My Cozy Campaign Experiment (pt.1)

Stardew Valley is © Concerned Ape Games

My wife has been playing Stardew Valley a lot this summer; a game where you play a young person who has just inherited a farm in a fantastical world that sits at something like 1980s technology. It's what the video game industry, and more recently the TTRPG industry refer to as a "Cozy Game." Meaning it is focused on a small area, the stakes for success are failure are small: you might save a community, but the world is in no danger, and the relationships you build with the characters in the community is very much the focus.

Cozy games are not my cup of tea at all, but the game has sort of cast a spell over the rest of my family. My boys are excited to hear what has gone on in the farm and see the strange new fantasy farm animals and the useful item that my wife's avatar brings up from the dungeon. 

Well, if you want to run a good scenario the key is to figure out what your audience likes, and I got the feeling that something like Stardew Valley might make an appealing draw for a few weeks as we ease back into the school year.

So I sat down and asked myself "How can I make this interesting for me, so that I can get myself into the game enough to make it interesting to them?" 

 As I sat and pondered, my mind drifted to a concept that I have been spending a lot of time considering lately: the idea of prep as play.

My Summer was Full of Games

 I realize I haven't posted on here in a hell of a long time! My Summer was a glorious mix of in-real-life and in-game adventures.

Brier Island North lighhouse,
taken from the deck of the Mega Nova

IRL I took a family roadtrip that put nearly 3,000km on the Mazda, and along the way I attended art festivals, live concerts, joyous family functions, long days on the beach, and a whale watching tour where I got to see nine individual humpback whales and a few minke whales.

I also produced a pile of episodes of my solo RPG podcast Swords Against Madness, following my heroes getting themselves in pretty deep in their gonzo sword-and-planet weirdness, played in Swords & Wizardry.

It wasn't my only solo-gaming time spent. I took a couple of days of lazy relaxing to play through a massive chunk of Jason Sholtis' Operation Unfathomable and Odious Uplands, and had an absolute blast! 

These modules are the best example of making 1st level awesome that I have ever had the pleasure to experience. I have both a review upcoming and possible a few bonus episodes of Swords Against Madness summarizing my playthrough... with all of the running and screaming involved.

Help Me Buck the AI Monkey

 

When I created Swords Against Madness, I wasn't expecting a big hit. I figured that my own LSD-soaked imitation on Tale of the Manticore with immortal space barbarians and killer robots might garner an audience of 20... including my friends and family.

I sure as hell didn't expect it to have over 500 regular listeners and thousands of downloads. I am astounded, amazed, blessed, and humbled by the response  to my show.

Now I want to make it into an eve higher-quality, weirder, wilder, trippier project than before.And the first step to that is to ditch one of its weakest points: the AI-generated music.

Making the Low Levels Awesome

 I've been running a Swords & Wizardry game at home the last few weeks that has been possibly one of the most fun, most campaigns games I have played to date.

My idea started out both simple and challenging: "What if I ran a D&D game with as much surreal, plane-travelling weirdness as there was in late-90s Magic: the Gathering. I'm talking the peak insanity of the era of Tempest, Ice Age, Urza's Destiny, and Urza's Legacy, where the game was simulating a war between insane cthulhoid cyborgs and a race of precision-bred magicians with living shards of crystal and an inter-dimensional goblin horde in the middle.

I wanted low-level PCs to be roaming the planes, dealing with truly out-there wizards, and warped magical entities. As always, I subscribe to the theory that level one should feel as awesome as level 10.

My Setup

 Swords & Wizardry played RAW, but using a cosmology based on the AD&D2e / D&D3.X era Great Wheel / Planescape planar layout.

The PCs come from a kingdom on a mostly-undetailed world I am basing mostly on a mix of H.P. Lovecraft's Dream-Cycle mixed with a bit of Lord Dunsany, then brought kinda' down-to-earth with the trippier bits of The Elder Scrolls' Tamriel.

 At the beginning of the campaign the PCs are new arrivals at Armathan, a grand castle on a high-mountian meadow. The Mountain's great workshops are powered by a waterfall and streams that run right through its undercroft. The Castle itself was built as a part of and to defend a silver mine and an important monastery. The mine in turn connected to ancient pre-human ruins. 

The Far Horizon: A Setting Doodle

 I've been toying with a new way of writing campaign ideas down that is fun and idiosyncratic.

Start with the name of a god or faction, and describe its members. Then name how they are troubled by another group in a way that lets you flow into the next paragraph.

So, for example:

The Faction, who are a shifty group of people that terrible at coming up with names. They are insanely jealous of ...

The Appellomancers, wizards who have the power to rename things and transform the thing at a fundamental level. They are in an intellectual feud with...

...and so on. if you have a neat quirk or characteristic that didn't fit this format, add it as a footnote to your document.

I did an extended brainstorming session in this fashion, and found that it does a great job of getting you into a creative flow, and forces the creation of a more cohesive world.

My first experimental setting created in this manner I call The Far Horizon: an arctic tundra and mountain range that has recently been flooded by settlers and refugees. 

Here's what I came up with on my first attempt at using this method:

Finding Art for Undeadwood

Every week both before and after I run a session of Undeadwood Weird West RPG, I work on the book. It has been a truly enriching and enjoyable experience taking so much time to build up a game, and fine tune it. I now have 6 months of playtesting under the belt, too, and I will very soon be ready to both update them development podcast, and release the full version of the game. 

It will come bundled with a VTT-ready 3D map of the sample adventure, a form-fillable character sheet, and a couple of other extras to make sure I am giving people a great head start with the game. 

If you are interested, there is a preview version of available on Drive-Thru RPG at the moment. That will eventually be updated to serve as a quick start kit for the game.

One of the biggest joys in building Undeadwood has been the way I have been hunting for art to fill the manual.  I have been pouring over pulp magazines dating from the 1870s through to the 1950s to find images to integrate into the manual. Because of it, I feel that I have created a very visually pleasing book. 

Uncredited cover from Spicy Western Stories,
A Western Pulp that ran 1936-1942

I wanted to share with you all the method I use for finding the art I am using in undeadwood so that you can use it to find artwork for your own role-playing game materials. 

Now, there is a caveat to this. I am working within the framework of Canadian copyright law. It is a slightly more restrictive form of copyright law than many countries have, but also less constrained than American copyright law. Check your own local laws before you proceed. 

Magazine cover by Rudolph Zirm (1894-1952)

In Canada, a work of art falls into the public domain 50 years after the artist's death if they died before 1973. After 1973 we updated the laws so that the work does not pass into the public domain until 70 years after the Creator's death. This means that currently, anyone who passed on before 1972 has had their work enter the public domain. Anyone who died in 1973 or later will not have their work enter the public domain until the 2040s. 

If a work is uncredited it passes into the public domain 75 years after the date of publication. 

Music and video recordings are not included in this: they enter the public domain 90 years after publication, meaning any recording after 1935 is still not available in the public domain in Canada. 

In order to find large color pieces, I started by looking for exciting pulp covers. Thankfully, there is an amazing blog that publishes nothing but on a daily basis: pulpcovers.com. Every piece of art is well tagged, and if the artist is known it will be mentioned in the tags or in the comments below the piece. 

Uncredited magazine cover for Western Short Stories
Which was in syndication from 1936-1957

Another option is to simply download a pile of pulp magazines to scour for images you like. Archive.org has a vast pulp magazine archive. To be on the safe side, I don't download any from earlier than 1950 for that purpose. 

If the artist is known, the next trick is to go to pulpartists.com and check the biography of the artist. Out of respect, I tend to do my homework on the artist in their life. It's always good to know a little more, and it feels less like a ghoulish activity. 

Interior magazine art by James McKell (1884-1956)

Magazines from before 1936 often didn't publish the artist's name anywhere in the magazine. And before the 1950s they often only credited the cover artist and none of the interior art. It pays to look up the staff artists for magazines of that era to do your own due diligence. If the artwork is signed, it's not considered anonymous even if the magazine does not present a clear signature for you to work with. (Google lens is very helpful for hunting down signatures) Some artists can be quite hard to pin down; either because they use pseudonyms, or were very private people.

Most of them are somewhat easier. If they aren't featured in pulpartists.com, certain Arts auction sites or newspaper archives can be very helpful. 

Once you feel safe that the artist is in the public domain, it pays to look at any other art of theirs available on the internet. And to look at magazines where they were frequently featured artists. It may give you a larger selection to work with. As pulpcovers.com tags by artist, this can be very useful for finding a selection of art you like. I absolutely fell in love with the art of Albin Henning, and was very fortunate to find almost four dozen of his pieces on the internet and in archived PDFs of pulp magazines. 

Now, the photostats of pulp magazines are rarely good quality, and often have a great deal of print on them. Especially in work published after 1930-40 or so, where book design trends had changed. pulps from the 1920s and earlier tend to have better separation of texted image. 

If your image is in a PDF rather than being simply a downloadable image, you may need to use the print screen button on your keyboard to collect a copy of the image at the highest zoom you can manage.

This is where Photoshop or GIMP can be very handy.  I recommend looking up tutorials on repairing images, as it would be hard to provide a good tutorial here. 

Once I got this method down it was easy for me to find hundreds of excellent, thematically appropriate art for my projects, and I thought it might be a helpful tool for the rest of my amateur designers.

Strange Ways is the Deal if the Day on DTRPG

 Strange Ways: Six Classes and Alternate Magical Systems for Any OSR Adventure Game is my Copper Bestseller set of alternative magic systems and classes that use them for OSR games. I'm very proud of my creation!

Red Tidings at Yule, How I Finally got the Never-ready Module Out!

I wanted to mention to anyone looking for some weird fun over the Holidays that my Holiday module, Red Tidings at Yule is PWYW!

Spreading some Holiday Cheer

Back in 2020 I wrote a 0-level funnel for DCC RPG. I ran a solo play-test myself and was very happy with my results, but I was having a hell of a time creating a good map for it, and I couldn't get together a group to play it that year, much to my disappointment. I really intended it as a way to keep some friends of mine who were going to be alone for Christmas thanks to the lock-downs close in spirit if not in person.

It's a fun piece that borrows from Christmas & Yule folklore from across Europe:

• The main villains are the Kallikantzaroi, Greek Christmas goblins.
• They are teamed up with Krampus, the well-known Norse Yule demon.
• They are collaborating with Belsnickle, a grumpy Christmas figure who hands out both presents and whippings from Germany.
• They are  able to meet Knecht Ruprecht a Swiss / German figure who rewards the faithful and punishes the faithless.
• They can receive a magic item related to Morozko, a Russian fairy-tale figure often related to Christmas.
• They can rescue the Scandinavian Christmas Gnome.
• They can free Risia a pagan winter goddess from Scandinavian / Slavic myth.
• It also contains some beats from classic DCC adventures like They Serverd Brandolyn Red. 

With no chance to play it, I took my notes and wrote them up as a module, with an eye to share them the next year.

Heroes & Homelands v.0.9

v.0.9 cover art by David Revoy (CC-BY)

 I just updated Heroes & Homelands on itch.io!

The big version changes I have uploaded include:

Version 0.6

• Added the illusionist class.
• Added an Illusions chapter for spells cast by the illusionist.
• Presented my unique Phantasmagoria rules for what happens when illusions go wrong.

Version 0.9

• Adds the Bard class, inspired by the AD&D2e version of the class.
• Adds the Carl class: a semi-skilled dabbler, perfect to use for Hirelings, henchmen, and recurring NPCs that need simple stats. Loosely inspired by the NPC class system of D&D3e.
  
• Adds the Monk class, based on the OD&D and AD&D versions of the monk, but with fewer powers to make it simpler to play.
• Adds a Warlock class based on the D&D3.5e version of the Warlock - a dark an thoroughly gothic class. My version has mechanics to determine what the warlock's patron demands od them, and why they might recruit a warlock in the first place.
• Adds a chapter on Incantations that gives a list of spells for bards that is mostly inspired by the role of Bards in Celtic society - a mix of Druid and Clerical magic with a few illusions mixed in.
• Adds an Invocations class that gives a list of spell-like powers a Warlock can earn from their patron.

You can download Heroes & Homelands v.0.9 in PDF from my Google Drive.

Or you can get it in .PDF, .HTML, .DOCX, and .ODT formats on itch.io.

I am also tinkering with POD options on Lulu right now, but before I would be willing to release it in something as permanent as print, I would want to see a copy for myself, which means waiting out the postal worker strike here in Canada. And I might want to both add a few more character options, and be started on a GMs Toolkit for H&H, too.

Revised Pact Magic for OSR games.

First off, let me say that spinal headaches suck. I have been out of commission for two weeks with the mother of all migraines after getting a lumbar puncture. 3.2/10. Would not recommend. 

Second, a big thanks to Johnny Price for alerting me to some link rot that has occurred on my early articles. My old version of my Pact Magic system for Ær is gone, and so I wanted to share a newer version.

Illusionists added to Heroes & Homelands

 Just a quick update to say that I have updated Heroes & Homelands to a v.0.6 that includes an illusionist class, spells, and a unique mechanic for illusions going wrong.

Get it here!

or get it in multiple formats here!

A World-Building Experiment: Heroes & Homelands (pt. 2)

 So, now that I have a mechanical framework, let me share with you what I have so far in terms of the campaign design.

(Unless you are someone invited into this campaign, in which case, there are going to be spoilers of a sort.)

I will be using the campaign planning techniques I described in the article Game System Hacking 101.

The Vision Statement

I want to provide PCs with a setting that is a journey into places of wonder and weirdness. The further they journey the more ethereal, strange, and magical the setting becomes; a movement from the Mundane to pure psychocosm.

The setting will have dark moments, but overall be more focused on the strange and inexplicable. Monsters are not there to torment, enslave and devour, so much as they are just so alien that their natures and human understanding just don't fit well together. The PCs will be rewarded for pushing farther from a place of stable reality ("The Homelands") and into a farther realm.

I intend to take a lot of inspiration from The Ultraviolet Grasslands and Black City.

I also intend to use existing modules and materials such as my collection of DCC modules and the Hill Cantons collection when I need quick material.

Here's my Poster Pitch:

Heroes of the Mistlands

A Mystical and Psychedelic Saga Through a World Warped by Magic for Heroes & Homelands.

200 years ago the Great Assembly, an academy of magicians in the East of the continent of Eraskas were on the cusp of bringing Man into a new golden age. Their experiments in magic had held back a terrible plague, and cleared the Eastern Marches of many of the monsters that lurked in the hinterlands. And then some grand experiment went wrong. All of the lowlands of Eraskas were covered in swirling, brightly colored mists that brought with them strange phenomena, fey creatures, and warped everything it touched. Only a few Northern kingdoms, protected by the Raski Mountian range and the Great Shelf were spared. They are called the Homelands. They have survived in an uneasy peace, ruled over by an emerging group of Plutocrats who work hard to control every aspect of life in the Homelands.

You are a villager of Tollun, a small silver-mining town on cliffs that overlook the mists. With the vein exhausted and trouble on the roads, the town is starting to become desperate for new ways to support itself. The temptation of plunder form the ruined cities of the mists is strong. And somewhere far off on the Eastern Horizon, a voice is calling those blessed with the ears to hear...

Inspired By

Movies: The Winds of Change, Oblivion, Jack the Giant Killer, Stardust, Mirrormask, Fantastic Planet

Video Games: Legend of Mana, Final Fantasy IX, Elden Ring, Divinity: Original Sin II, Starbound, Majesty

Music: Vol IV - Black Sabbath, Solar Hits - Glitter Wizard, Le Roi est Mort, Vive le Roi - Enigma

For this game, I will be customizing Heroes & Homelands.

Books: Eyes of the Overworld by Jack Vance, The Hand of Oberon by Roger Zelazny, Magic's Price by Mercedes Lackey, A Spell for Chameleon by Piers Anthony, Stealing Magic by Tanya Huff, The Light Fantastic by Terry Pratchett

Other Role-Playing Games: Numenera, Lamentations of the Flame Princess, Ultraviolet Grasslands and the Black City, The Hill Cantons, Overlight, Cha'alt

Next Steps

So this tells me a few things that I want both in the world and in the mechanics.

In the World

• A home base where the PCs feel pressed to risk the mists, either for the well-being of the community or for a higher cause.
• A place that feels familiar and Earthly (or perhaps middle-earthly) as a starting place, but that allows rapid travel into an otherworldly place.
• NPCs who care about the PCs and show them support, and who are suffering from hard times.
• A world where magic was once wondrous and made a better world, but is now constrained out of fear.
• Mysterious lands where the old and familiar has been transformed into something new. 
• Regions where the magic takes on different character.
• A stifling element to the culture that might encourage misfits to leave: an oppressive old money-driven Plutocracy, combined with a failing, power-grasping aristocracy, and a cultural climate with a touch of Janteloven might be just right.
• (I suspect an early-modern Nordic theme might be just right.)
• I don't want to make the religion oppressive: the characters will want a strong moral guiding light and a sense that there is something worth protecting and rebuilding. But perhaps a culture that abuses the religion might work.
• A divine being or place to encourage PCs to begin a pilgrimage at some point.
• Leads on lost arcane power that might make life easier in the Homelands that requires deeper journeys into the Other.
• A small fragment of a once-larger pantheon, so that PCs might discover lost ways that make their homeland make more sense.
• Some hints of the lost wonders. 
• Some lost Kingdoms the PCs will know something about from History that were destroyed by the Mists.
  

In the Mechanics

• A system for PCs and things to be warped by the magic of the mist.
• Tables for encounters and wonders that are coded by themed regions, like "illusory", "dark", "sensual", "wild", "primordial", "mechanical" and "holy." (I might be able to draw some ideas by revisiting my old Magic: The Gathering decks.) 
• Tables for encounters that get more strange and dangerous the farther from the "Homelands" the players go.
• Tables for discoveries to become more powerful and wondrous as the PCs head Outwards.
• The Homelands can have familiar fantasy races like Dwarves and Halflings, but once out into the wilds, I want new creatures... perhaps a people transformed to match their theme in each region.
• A pantheon based on an existing one, but fragmented and reduced in its scope.
• A custom class based on survival in a world where the knowledge of a standard ranger will be initially troubled. And a custom class based on dealing with the Mists. 
• I may consider removing druids and switching rangers to AD&D style Divine / Arcane casters.
• Barbarians don't fit for a starting homelands character, nor does it fit the more fantastical theme. This is a place for Kugel the Clever moreso than Conan the Cimmerian
• Dual-class rules that let wanderers change (dual-class?) to custom classes based on survival in a magical world.
• Abstracted supply mechanics to help facilitate long journeys. I might hack some further material out of Deathtrap Lite for it.
• For the sake of familiarity, a world that feels more Early Modern that Medieval. So muskets, renaissance-era muskets. Perhaps a higher base AC for PCs so that they can be more flexible in combat without. (All stuff that can be pillaged from Lamentations of the Flame Princess.)

In the next article, I will create a version 0.1 of the new RPG based on these notes.

Thematically, after thinking about people living in high, rugged mountains, mention of Janteloven, and Plutocracy, I think I will use elements of Swiss and Danish culture as a template for creating my setting. 

A World-Building Experiment: Heroes & Homelands (pt. 1)

 

So I am starting a new campaign this weekend, and I have an idea for the world that I want to develop.

I've decided that, in order to get me producing more content for this blog I am going to do my campaign planning here on the blog.using tools I have presented in a number of my game hacking and experience design articles. I am going to discuss my world ideas first, then consider how they are going to be reflected in the game, and in the end, I will have what should amount to a pretty solid custom TTRPG.

But to do that I needed a starting place.

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.

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.