I am big fan of non-cardinal directions like upwards, downwards, nearby, faraway, towards the sun, deep, redwards, deathwards, and whimwards. I think that the origins of Tabletop RPG's in war-gaming made an implicit necessity of spacial alignment of locations. Personally, I don't like that. I feel that locations in fantasy don't need to be constrained by only 4 directions. Instead, I prefer to treat my locations as more of a tesseract. If you go north of the tribe of shining men you may find yourself at the mountain of truth, but if you dive deep into the lake in between the two you may find yourself in the cloud castles high above the lands of the shining men. I think that the concept of witch-ways (or at least the thing I imagine witch-ways to be) the ability to travel elsewhere not by distance but by completing an occult algorithm are really cool. Rather than driving two hours to the next city over, you can instead make a specific series paths inside of the local woods, and after entering a storm drain, you end up on top of a skyscraper in the next city over.
One of my favorite things about the OSR style of play is that player knowledge and character knowledge is the same. Players know that dragons have upwards of 10HD and deal their HP when they breath flame. They then implicitly roleplay their character's being scared of dragons because they themselves are. As a Referee one of my greatest joy is the players gaining insight into the world due to character actions such as researching the past, entering dungeons, or interacting with non-human entities. It allows me to "show the setting, rather than telling it", I think this helps player immersion a great deal because as their characters learn something new, they do so as well. For this very reason I tend to have the character's start out as foreigners, and then if they die the players can roll up a native. I feel that this mimics the Player knowledge of the setting and explains how their character now knows so much information that the previous character didn't. I like to do this with maps as well.
Cartography Process
At the beginning of the zeroth session, where the Players and I all agree on certain aspects of the world and make characters. They create the proximal world. I believe this reinforces the notion of the foreign as truly foreign. Players, and in turn their characters, will have an understanding of what is proximal to them because they have been there. However, as the players have their characters travel outwards, they will have no idea what they encounter save for a name.
After everyone rolls up a character, I have the table go around and ask the players questions that describe the town where they are living in. Everything a player says is now a fact. I might disable certain facts or ask to compromise on certain things which I don't feel reflect the tone of the setting to well, but otherwise what they say goes. I feel this also help players by immersing them in the world a bit more and legitimizes their knowledge base. For those familiar with the RPG Beyond The Wall, this is where I got (shamelessly stole) this concept of collaborative world-building.
After their hometown is made I go around the table twice over. Each player will give me a direction and I will have them roll on a table for what type of local they will describe. I will then give them the type of local they rolled and ask them to describe what is there and how they know about it. These aren't facts but instead are inspiration for me to place things in proximity. This populates the region and educates the players in what is nearby.
1d8 Table of what players describe for the referee
1. Ruins of civilization within historic record2. Ruins of civilization before historic record
3. Human town
4. Human city
5. Non-human town
6. Mythic monster lair
7. Magical resource
8. Otherworldy entrance
I then make a hex map for myself for purposes of distances, terrain, and geographical encounters. After I have made the mechanical aspects of the hex map I will add thematic elements to match the mechanical such as giving forests, mountains, or oceans names. Then I usually spend an uncomfortable amount of time in front of my computer screen consuming media to steal and tint in order to fill up what the player's described. Then the players decide to visit about only half of the locations on the map and begin writing up my lore/mechanics of each location to put out here so that I haven't wasted all of my time.
Bonus Rant on Creativity
I don't think there is anything wrong with reusing your settings/things you like. In almost all of my settings, I include a sprawling cavern complex filled with fungal spiders and their god. I think it's one of my thematically tightest encounters/dungeons/locals. There is nothing wrong with you doing the same. You can simply take the best encounters/dungeons/npc's/myths/ect and drop them piecemeal into new campaigns. Creativity is a false god. Steal Everything! If you like a character from a piece of fiction, steal him and change his name. If he reacts to the party instead of being just reference, congrats you just made a NPC, you'll enjoy playing. If you like the visuals of a video game/anime/music video/film/comic/tv show/whatever, steal it! Simply put it into your own words effectively and congrats, you have your own aesthetic. I have ran about 3-4 campaigns using the Pokemon Red and Blue setting, all I did was remove 95% of all the Pokemon creatures and used the original Japanese names of things/etymologically similar German/ etymologically similar Norse. No one figured out that they weren't playing a medieval eastern fantasy/medieval western fantasy/viking campaign. Most importantly steal from your own life. If you think your life is boring, then just go out and meet new people/have adventures to fix that. Simply take something that you know well, tint it in some manner, and boom you're a creative genius.
No comments:
Post a Comment