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Quiver
2016-05-15, 09:39 AM
Cards on the table; this isn't exclusively an RPG question. I do have a few ideas for campaign settings batting around, but this question is also more of a...general query.

Basically, when doing research to build settings -whether that's for role-playing games, single campaigns, or even your own original fiction-...well, how do you do it?

I'm having difficulty figuring out where to start where to start. Human history is so vast and expansive that figuring out how to start researching is...kind of daunting.

So...that's what I'm wondering. Has anyone got any good advice on how to gather research materials for and/or build settings?

hymer
2016-05-15, 10:01 AM
Start anywhere, and then keep going.

Less glib, and perhaps more helpful: You start by reading anything really; Construction of the Great Pyramid of Giza, Second Peloponnesian War, First Punic War, the Crusades, Japan under the Shogunate, Dutch colonialism, whatever really, as long as it is vaguely appropriate. Just read, and when you happen on something that makes you feel inspired, make a note. Keep going until you have a lot of ideas in your head, and quite a few notes.
Then you start writing your world. Again, start anywhere: Political systems, military organization, conflicts over territory, local cuisine. And then you go from there, realizing new topics that need to be fleshed out, and you do. If at any time you grind to a halt, it's back to the books for fresh inspiration.

You could also work with far more structure, but I expect someone is about to come around and tell you just how to do that in a minute. :smallsmile:

Edit: An important tip is to keep revising. Revisit your texts and correct according to other stuff you've written in the mean time, add new sections as they occur to you. This also helps you master your material, seeing it again and again.

Beleriphon
2016-05-15, 10:34 AM
Cards on the table; this isn't exclusively an RPG question. I do have a few ideas for campaign settings batting around, but this question is also more of a...general query.

Basically, when doing research to build settings -whether that's for role-playing games, single campaigns, or even your own original fiction-...well, how do you do it?

I'm having difficulty figuring out where to start where to start. Human history is so vast and expansive that figuring out how to start researching is...kind of daunting.

So...that's what I'm wondering. Has anyone got any good advice on how to gather research materials for and/or build settings?

My suggestion is pick a small area. Maybe a barony or county with three or four small villages, or one larger town you want to build stories from. As you game then you add more to it.

I'm working on a setting I've called Pegbarrow, after the city I'm centering it around. It's the last bastion of civilization on the far reaches of the civilized realms. I have a good level of detail for the city of Pegbarrow, the town guard, the duke and his family and the major churches/religions of the area and what I want to do with the elves, dwarves, etc. I have names for the villages beyond the city walls and maybe one NPC for each one that the players would interact with and nothing else. Beyond that I know that to the south and east there is safety and civilization and trade flows from Pegbarrow to the south and east, and caravans come to Pegbarrow. North is the realm of goblins, and hobgoblin raiding parties strike south a few times per season, to the west is wilderness and who knows what else (maybe there's a great treant empire out there somewhere).

hifidelity2
2016-05-16, 05:04 AM
My suggestion is pick a small area. Maybe a barony or county with three or four small villages, or one larger town you want to build stories from. As you game then you add more to it.


I agree and this is what I do.
I might draw an outline of the wider area / continent but I only go into any detail around the starting area
You have to realise that in medieval times lots of people never left their area and any news would have been sketchy. You can therefore fill in the blanks as the party leave their area. Any inconsistencies can be explained by the pedlar who used to bring the news to their village was either lying or just made an mistake

Joxeta
2016-05-16, 05:24 PM
What I do with my settings, both on the table and off, is think of some interesting over-arching concepts for the world. Things like:

-what if magic ceased to exist hundreds of years ago, but just started working again?
-what if the elements of the world were contained within "titans?"
-what if every myth we've ever heard - vampires, demons, werewolves - were true, but misrepresented?

Then, I kind of work from the small-parts out.
Build some characters in the world.
Create a town.
Make a county.
Forge a country.
Write its history.
Form a continent out of the mists.

That's my overall process.
But I don't follow any particular formula.
I've done settings from the outside in before, and those can be quite interesting.

LibraryOgre
2016-05-16, 05:39 PM
Pick a point and work outward is a good way to do it.

For a recent project, I started with a general idea... "Like Canada, West of the Hudson Bay, before you had heavy European incursion." So, I started by looking into the geography of that area, trying to get an idea of what the land was like. I then translated that to the game world map I was working from. I then looked at the culture of the First Nations folk in the region, and started to fit that in to other aspects that have already been established ("There are wargs in the hills, and an old goblin kingdom in the mountains, and lots of orcs, and if you look at the range maps for wyrms...")

From there, you start weaving things together.

Beleriphon
2016-05-16, 05:56 PM
Pick a point and work outward is a good way to do it.

For a recent project, I started with a general idea... "Like Canada, West of the Hudson Bay, before you had heavy European incursion." So, I started by looking into the geography of that area, trying to get an idea of what the land was like. I then translated that to the game world map I was working from. I then looked at the culture of the First Nations folk in the region, and started to fit that in to other aspects that have already been established ("There are wargs in the hills, and an old goblin kingdom in the mountains, and lots of orcs, and if you look at the range maps for wyrms...")

From there, you start weaving things together.

This is oddly enough similar to what I did. The map I picked was Peterborough County in Ontario, Canada, and then did the city of Pegbarrow located on the site where Peterborough, ON exists in the real world.

Aotrs Commander
2016-05-16, 07:21 PM
Cards on the table; this isn't exclusively an RPG question. I do have a few ideas for campaign settings batting around, but this question is also more of a...general query.

Basically, when doing research to build settings -whether that's for role-playing games, single campaigns, or even your own original fiction-...well, how do you do it?

I'm having difficulty figuring out where to start where to start. Human history is so vast and expansive that figuring out how to start researching is...kind of daunting.

So...that's what I'm wondering. Has anyone got any good advice on how to gather research materials for and/or build settings?

I tend to start worlds as very long-term projects. the most recent fantasy campaign world (by "recent" I mean, "ten plus years old now") I'd got enough experience from previous attempts to decide very carefully what I was doing. I use wikipedia as my prinary resource these days - if it doesn't know it's a good place to start and the accuracy is sufficient for most purposes anyway.



If you will permit me, perhaps an illustraive example of how I, at least, work, might be of use?

In general, I start at the top-level of the world and work down, and then skip to the street-level details as I start writing the adventures as the basic questions propose themselves.


When I created Dreemaenhyll, I started with a concept - a border between the lands of the good and the lands of the Dark Lord, a cliff dropping away from the sunlit lands to the permenantly shadowed lands of the Dark Lord.

(This came from one day, when me and my Dad went for an afternoon wak near a reservoir. still relatively new, the trees had not grown and you could see all the land. We were walking in sunshine, but further away, beyond the damn, the weather was very poor - a storm was coming. But the contrast grabbed my imagination.)

One of the first things I did was decide what Earth-equivilent tech level the modern time would be (circa 1300AD) and draw up a technological timeline, approximating from what I could find about real-world technologies. (I have to tip my hat to Civilisation III's documentation for a fair chunk of this.) I'd done technological timelines before, but I'd made it up, rather than researched it, and the results were less good. This time, I got a much better result. I then added the major histroical events on the timeline and add to it every so often when I write another piece.

I thought about what other nations would populate it. Being a bit of a Tolkien fanboy, it would principally be the big four (human, elf, dwarf, halfling). But the last aside, there would be more than one nation ofor each and most for humans. I decided then on a concept for each nation. The largest and most important one would be not-Roman; a fantasy empire with the technology of a medieval empire combined with that of ancient Rome. Another one was not-Egypt, andother not-Aztecs on a small archepeligo off shore. With these cultures, I am able to draw on the history as a starting point; and with a bit of modification (and often simplification), it gives them all a different flavour for that locale that I would otherwise not be able to come up with out of the whole. It means I have some idea of where to look when I ask the question of "what sort of farms would this place have."

With the basic idea, I created a map in Civilisation III's map editor (of all things) which among other things gave me a distribution of resources (e.g. iron, good cattle or grain land). I painstakingly screenshot that map piece by piece, sticked it all together and traced over it in my CAD package. Then, I could start putting cities on the map by dint of placing them at senible locations - principally along the largest rivers (trade routes) and resources, so that there was method to the madness. Many of them still don't have names and are just dots on the map, since I haven't had call to detail them yet.

I didn't do them all at once, either, but I tend to do detail on that part of the world as I set the actual adventure. In all the various nations of Dreemaenhyll, we have only played in four, and the other exist in nothing more than a few dertails

I also took the 3.x bestiary and chucked it aside, re-imagining the bestiary of mythological scratch, with a strong bend of my own natural history bias.

Something I had started doing, but greatly refined once I started reading it in first the 3.5 Raveloft players Handbook country descriptions, and later Paizo's Golarion, is to think about "if I was writing an adventure in this country/region, what adventures would there be?" It's something I had not done properly previosuly, but I've found it ENORMOUSLY helped differentiate countries and regions.

It's an ongoing process. Dreemaenhyll's "not-Rome" is now quite well-detailed, but adventures set in other places have filled out other cultures.

One of the big results of the above revalation concerned the nation of Ciracan. It started out as a vassal of the not-Rome, a generic fantasy melting-pot trader sort of place of Generic Medieval technology. When I asked the above question about "what sort of adventures would you have" it took me quite a while to get a satisfactory answer. In the end, it became that the trade power made it a very wealthy nation, with cobblestone streets and timber-framed buildings and advanced clockwork technology... But, drawing on Ravenloft inspiration, countered by being a somewhat haunted land where the superstitious people (in a land where the general magic level had bee very low for centuries) were afraid of what might haunt the fog-filled streets... Almost but-not-quite sort of steam/victorian horror (only with Roman legionaries instead of police), as it were. And from that, Ciracan, far from being a dull generic land, had proved fertile ground for several adventures.



While Dreemaenhyll is still a steady work in progress, it was far enough along I have begin the slow process of startig my next pet project. This is something I have wnated to do for decades (and eventually, I even found the original scribbles I did one day, drawing inspiration from a little display of dried plants my Mum was given once): an entirely alien "fantasy" planet. No humans, no elves, no dragons - just aliens. It is something I have toyed with once or twice, but this was the first time I started in anger.

This congealed into form with another of idea I had - about a land where darkness woud fall, putting the protagonist nations into perpetual twilight. And that gave me Andorlaine, the Evenstar,. A planet tide-locked around a variable star, where every few hundred or thousand years, the stellar dust-clouds cause the visible light from the sun to dim for centuries. And the event happens infrequently and sufficiently fast that when it occurs, the civilisations are caught completely unprepared and fall, leaving a world of forgotten civilisations and ruins. (And a little bit of sci-fi in the fantasy, as the most advanced nations, where the period between the dimming was unusally long, were not-quite-FTL level technology.)

I spent a LOT of time crunching numbers and doing astrophysics to set the parametres up and I'm at the point where - if I ever get any time free from quest-writing - I can start to actualy populate it with creatures.



As you can probably gather then, I am an example of someone that probably spends FAR too much time in the research of his quest-writing; these days, no writing session goes past without consulting something on wiki for details... Be it determining what is the third in the triad of metals to complement Cold Iron and Silver for Neutral-aligned creatures, to what gradient of slope a spiral ramp should have to be able to push a wheeled cart up or (as today) is the limit for a city street. But I like to think that the level of detail I put in gives my worlds a versimilitude for my players - especially as I have a particular tendancy to have very "explorey" sort of quests. (To the point I gave up last year and started a new part whose specific goal is exploration!)

RazorChain
2016-05-16, 10:10 PM
My research usually starts on wikipedia and then if I have to dwell more on the subject I search the internet. This usually ends up with me buying a book or two on the subject.

So today I have a small library on various myths and legends, weaponry, armour, history, wars and battles, and more. This coincides with another hobby of mine which is strategy gaming :)

Yora
2016-05-17, 03:29 AM
I start by looking for works of fiction that have a style that I like and want to hav in my setting. Once I have a general idea what style the setting will have, I start researching regions and periods of history that have inspired those works.

That greatly helps to narrow down the search.

ImNotTrevor
2016-05-17, 04:27 AM
I find that spending a lot of time building a world is pretty much a mentally masturbatory endeavour unless you're writing a novel with deep lore. 99% of the time, players don't really care who the king was 400 years ago until it directly affects them. And only until it stops affecting them.

My favorite methods is to sit down and build a world with my players, either using the methods in Apocalypse World or Spark or Microscope or whatever. It makes the players feel invested. And so long as I have a notebook, I can keep track of it all. I just like asking questions.
"So is this a normal occurance, or is this odd?"

"This old lady in a wheelchair is coming up to you, and you have an immediate gut reaction to her. What is it? Why?"

Questions like that have led to the creation of incredibly interesting NPCs. The latter ended up being one of the PCs mother, and ancient withered old hag who ruled a settlement with an iron fist and who everyone was afraid of because she weilded so much power. And all that because I asked a couple of questions. It could have gone any way, but they chose to make their own enemy. I find that players will usually create their own nemesis if you allow them to. And it will usually be a good one.

Anyways, that's my 2cp. Your Mileage May Vary

hymer
2016-05-17, 09:18 AM
@ ImNotTrevor: Are we supposed to be ashamed for enjoying ourselves doing world-building? :smalltongue:

ImNotTrevor
2016-05-17, 07:30 PM
@ ImNotTrevor: Are we supposed to be ashamed for enjoying ourselves doing world-building? :smalltongue:

I think this is said in jest about the whole "masturbatory" thing, but I'll treat it seriously just in case someone does take issue with the sentiment:

I'm not arguing that worldbuilding is shameful or boring or useless. I love me some world building. But I also know that the one who will get the most out of it is me, not my players.

I also know that most of the time, the players won't care unless they feel involved in the world. The quickest way to make someone feel involved in something, is to give them a piece of the responsibility for it. For instance, you'll feel more involved in mowing the lawn if you are responsible for edging than if you are watching the lawn being mowed and being prompted for your opinions about it.

Note that the worlds that really suck us in are the ones where either we follow someone discovering that world (Harry Potter) or that leave unresolved questions behind (Star Wars) for the consumer to delve into. Those two things create intrigue about the world. Humans are slaves to curiosity, and allowing both yourself and your players to be curious about the world will lead to good things most of the time. It really is ok when faced with a player question about the world to go "I dunno. What do you guys think?" And frequently, someone in the group has a way more fascinating and mysterious answer than you do. Like this:

Player 1: "What is the currency around here?"
GM: "I dunno. What do you guys think it is?"
Player 4: "Well, it's a seaside town. I bet they use shells dipped in gold or silver or copper."

Or maybe

Player 4: "Their coins have an image of a skull."
GM: "That's odd for a happy seaside town. Why is that?"
Player 3: "Maybe no one remembers why. It's just been that way as long as anyone remembers."

Then you have a tiny thread that might lead to a discovery about pirate troves or ancient necromancy or whatever might end up happening, and all because the players were allowed to touch and manipulate the world.

Max_Killjoy
2016-05-17, 08:05 PM
My thoughts on worldbuilding.

1) A well-built world is like an iceberg. The players (or audience or readers) will only see a fraction of what's there, but it just doesn't float without the part that's under the surface. A world that's just props on a stage won't feel real, even if the players never become consciously cognizant of why.

2) Do your damn homework. If characters are going to use firearms, learn some things from reliable grown-up sources about how real firearms really work. If you make the conscious decision to have them instead work in Hollywood fashion, then so be it, but don't pretend you know anything because of what you saw in some stupid movie. Likewise with computers, or swords, or religion, or politics, or anything at all.

3) Decide how your world works, and stick with it. Don't treat the setting like a contrivance that's just there to serve as set dressing for stuff to happen in front of, and don't constantly screw with how things work every time they're inconvenient for "THE STORY". Internal coherence and consistency matter for a setting as much as they matter for a character.

goto124
2016-05-18, 03:47 AM
1) A well-built world is like an iceberg. The players (or audience or readers) will only see a fraction of what's there, but it just doesn't float without the part that's under the surface. A world that's just props on a stage won't feel real, even if the players never become consciously cognizant of why.

3) Decide how your world works, and stick with it. Don't treat the setting like a contrivance that's just there to serve as set dressing for stuff to happen in front of, and don't constantly screw with how things work every time they're inconvenient for "THE STORY". Internal coherence and consistency matter for a setting as much as they matter for a character

because the character has the freedom to interact with the world in many, many ways, much like a real world. Consistency prevents players from going "wait what, why did X do Y last time but did Z this time?" when they're actively trying to explore the world and see how it works. If the way the world works is "some pre-planned plot the GM really wants to stick to" aka railroading, or "twists in whatever way messes with the players the most", it won't be long before the players realize there's nothing underneath the surface. Their choices don't matter, nothing makes any sense, why continue to play the game?


2) Do your damn homework. If characters are going to use firearms, learn some things from reliable grown-up sources about how real firearms really work. If you make the conscious decision to have them instead work in Hollywood fashion, then so be it, but don't pretend you know anything because of what you saw in some stupid movie. Likewise with computers, or swords, or religion, or politics, or anything at all.

Reality has all the details and history and consistency one could ever have, because it's made by years of living, breathing humans doing what they think works best, with limitations by actual laws of physics/biology/what have you. At least draw some inspiration from RL, it's a huge resource you can count on.