The Base, Part 3

One of the keys to designing a world is to never force yourself to design more than is necessary. This, according to Dungeon Magazine's Ray Winninger, is the first rule of Dungeoncraft. Enthusiastic world builders often get bogged down in unnecessary details, such as weather patterns, monetary exchange rates, and the correct orcish insult to use when addressing your mother-in-law. Just as often, we design massive civilizations with hundreds of cities, each of which we try to map down to the last bakery, or try to generate a fifty-god pantheon. Players really don't care about your lovingly crafted world nearly as much as you do, and if your force all these details on them, they're going to be bored. Granted, players want to see that you've put time and effort into your world, and enthusiastic role-players may look for as many juicy bits of lore as they can. But the majority of your players want to go have fun adventures in your world. Your job as a world builder, then, is to give them the opportunity to do this.

At minimum, a game world should contain two things: an adventure site and a place where players can rest, sell loot, and buy equipment. Usually, the place where they rest is where they will start in the game. It makes the most sense, really, as it gives the players a chance to stock up on equipment so they don't get slaughtered in their first adventure. The ideal location for a home base like this is a city where all the PCs needs are met... if they have enough money. A home base also needs to have adventure hooks so players have a reason to go out and kill things and take their stuff (something that's all too lacking in many of the modules I've played).

But even going around killing things and taking their stuff gets old after a while. You'll want to keep plenty of things around for the players to do. This means having plenty of quests, new things to discover and, of course, more things to kill. You don't want to design all these new things up front, though. Remember the first rule of Dungeoncraft: never force yourself to design more than you need. What you do design, though, should have lots of hook-ins for you to later expand your world. Mr. Winninger thus states the second rule of Dungeoncraft: Whenever you design a major piece of your world, make some secret to go along with it. That can be just a bit of lore that changes how people would see your world (or, at least, that aspect of it) if they knew it.

You don't want everything to be a big, jumbled mess, though. Everything should flow together logically. Your players may not have all the details as to why things are the way they are, but you should, and everything should make sense from your omniscient viewpoint. I'm going to create a third rule of Dungeoncraft, then: everything you design should make sense in the context of the whole world.

Let's start building my world, then, by thinking up a home base. In accordance with Rule 3, I want a place that embodies many of the themes of the world. This will help the players to understand right away what kind of world Shadows & Silver is. My first inclination, then, is to make it a city, one that reeks of the problems of modernization. I've already talked about wanting to have natural disaster and famine play a part in the daily struggle for survival that so many face, so we'll start by supposing this city was one of many battle grounds for a fairly recent war that destroyed much of the terrain. The ground no longer supports hardy crops, and the water has become poisonous. That's some war! Well, in accordance with Rule 3, we've got to make it make sense. Why do people still live here if it's so bad? The obvious answer would be that the rest of the known world has gotten so bad that this is simply one of the best places to be. But how do they get their sustenance? I've long imagined that the city straddles a river at the mouth of an ocean, and a ways upstream they've built a large facility that purifies the water. It does this, of course, at a cost of high air pollution. But it's more important to have drinkable water than clean air, right? This is a great example of people turning to technology to answer problems technology caused, all the while making things worse. I'll also suppose that the city itself wasn't the site of the battle. No, that was further upriver, and all the fallout washes downstream. It's soured the soil, but the treatment plant is slowly allowing things to return to normal... except its air pollution makes crops suffer, so there's a limit to how well crops grow.

So what I have here is a sort of environmental hook. Our city is a place where people find it very difficult to get anything to eat. Because of where it's situated, it's probably a trading hub, since it can send ships up and down the coast as well as up and down the river. This means it can also likely get food by trade, but that food is bound to be expensive, especially if other lands are having similar troubles. What does that imply about the nature of the city? Well, it gives me an opportunity for a classic rich vs. poor conflict. The rich hoard all the food while the poor starve.

Okay, Rule 2 demands we make some secrets to go with the major pieces we've put together. Now, I don't want to make anything too spoiler-ish here, in case future players of my module are reading this, but I suppose it's necessary if I want to show the build process in action. I expect that no future players will use this information to metagame.

There's three major pieces I've shown so far: a major war that devastated the countryside, a water treatment facility, and rich people hogging all the food. The first one, I think, is that this huge war was instigated by industrial corporations hoping to profit from selling war machines to the government. That may not be much of a secret. I imagine that, while plenty of people have a patriotic streak and think that their country was justified in whatever war it entered, many are cynical and see no gain from the war. Oh, and we'll also say they lost (as may be guessed from the devastation caused to the countryside). The second one is fun, too. The corporation that owns the treatment facility is one of those that instigated the war. All lands watered by this river now have to pay them as much as they want unless they want their people to be horribly poisoned from the fallout. The one about the poor people starving: no matter how little food they receive, they still manage to catch enough fish to survive. How they can catch anything reasonable in the still somewhat poisoned water, though... well, I'll hang onto that one. I've got a wicked idea that will probably become one of my adventures on down the line.

So now I've got a great start for my home city, some neat hooks to tie future plot lines into, and some basic conflicts. We need an adventure hook, though. How's this: the other party in the big war was an alliance of orc tribes, which took up residence in the spoiled parts of the land. They're hardy enough to survive in those places, but they're spreading. The local authority wants them pushed back. This suggest an adventure area where you get to fight orcs. It's not because the orcs are evil that the authority wants them driven out; it's because they have something he wants.

Which leads me to a secret: the spoiled land isn't worth much in its present condition, so the argument that the land only wants its territory back is a weak one. I decide that there's something of incredible value in that territory that civilized leaders want badly enough to risk war to get. I don't know what it is yet, but that's okay. If they told anyone, there would be a risk that the orcs would find out and they'd start looking for it. No, instead, they just pay top dollar for any magic items brought back, regardless of what they are. I'll further suppose that it's not the ruler of this city but the head of the Church that wants them, and he's only told the local nobles that he wants any magic items that are found. Oh, and magic items have been declared contraband by the Church anyway, so anyone caught using them is committing a crime. Turning them over to the Church and getting paid is better than rotting in a jail cell any day.

Great start! Next time we'll tackle some more of the specifics of the world like government. In the meantime, I'll keep working on building so I've got some more good screenies of home base.