The Whole World

There are places in the mountains west of Calgary, in the summer, high above Banff, where one can climb two or three thousand feet and stretch out on bright green grass — soft and crisp-smelling, enriched with mountain air.  Laying back, head resting on a pack, fresh water from a cascade at hand ... there's a tremendous sense of reclining on the top of the great ball of the Earth; as though feeling the footsteps of every person as they walk below.  The sensation is just like that described by hundreds of holy voices throughout the centuries — of being one with the universe.  Of knowing one's place in it.  And being at absolute peace.

With the last post, I briefly described putting yourself "in the place" of the events going on around the characters.  With this post I'll talk about what the "place" IS ... because that's what worldbuilding is.  It's the conscious decision to fabricate a fantastic setting from the foundation up ... including the beams and timbers, the struts and braces, the contained shell, the pasteboard interior and even the air itself.  Everything; every molecule, every living breathing thing that walks or swims or crawls; every individual's motive and dreams, every natural horror ... and multiple steps beyond, up to and including the passage of time.

Measured by the limitations of a mortal flesh-and-blood vessel, impossible.  Estimated in hours spent immersed in deep affection for the project, who gives a damn?  If all I succeed in accomplishing is a tiny fraction of the world that happens to be a living thing — energetic, graceful, beguiling to the player, engrossing and unforgettable, why would it matter at all how much of the world I sought to make reached the drawing board?  We think so small.  We rob ourselves of transcendence.

Ah, but let's scratch all this and find the beginning.  A big bang.  There is a point when I decide to make a D&D world.  In the beginning, nothing is begat.  It is an idea: "I will build a world."  This is sometime in late 1984.  I decide to abandon the world I've been designing for four years.   Making that earlier thing, I've gone again and again to libraries to study the time period and the tools and equipment that appear in the books.  What's feudalism, what's a pole arm, what's a galley, how are towns laid out, what is an earl or a thane, what are kobalds, chimerae and lamassu?  I have these books that make reference to all these things, which I can find written about in plain old books that have nothing to do with D&D, from which I can learn so much more than what the original writers tell.  The game's inventors award things like ballistaes and vampires but a few hundred words.  There are whole books about these things.

Armed with knowledge more than game books, I contemplated what sort of world I could run.  There was, however, only one world with which I had more than a passing fancy.  It's all very nice to have a collection of books from Moorcock or Howard describing a fantasy world ... but compared to the whole knowledge available for all the world in which we dwell, these collections are a pittance.  And besides, they are drawn from the same world I speak of.  Why should I follow in the footsteps of others and their visions, when I'm perfectly able to concoct my own in the same fashion they did?  Can I not invent a character?  Can I not imagine a storyline from start to finish?  Am I not composed of the same brain, body and culture as any fantasy author?  Of course I am.  So I discarded any idea of shrinking my potential world to the tiny frame of a book writer ... however many books they wrote.  I could go to any library in the city, find the historical section of Earth's history and find a hundred times the total compended work of Moorcock on one bookcase.

I'm still reading through this material.

Fine, then.  My own world.

I had already created a completely fictional map, drawing in mountains, towns, forests and so on, giving my own names to rivers and plains, seas and deserts, just as we've seen a hundred times.  People were so pleased with the map I drew of my world, they asked me to draw new ones for their world.  I created three of these totally fictional continents for other people, making $150 an effort, which wasn't peanuts in the early 80s.  But I realized how non-sensical these maps were.

If I imagined a desert called "the Devil's Elbow," what in my imagination can I base that desert upon?  I can infest it with monsters; I can propose profound sandstorms with blasted stinging insects and lightning; the landscape can be full of black and red sands that bring sleep, disease or death ... but am I presenting something that can't be done better with a like fantastical desert called "The Great Western Erg" within the Sahara Desert, a real place?   I'm merely crossing out a name and writing in another name, whatever place, people or dreamscape I'm imagining.  There ought to be a better reason for making a world, than to copy a world that already exists, that could simply be modified as a D&D world.

What's more, I can imagine myself in any part of the real world.  I have film and books and personal accounts of people who have been, collectively, everywhere.  There is hardly a place in the world where I cannot find a photograph; thanks to Google Earth, there's no place in the world for which I cannot find a map.  Yet this is more than the convenience of having details pre-written for me.  I have climbed a mountain; travelled through a desert; canoed a river; camped in a forest; argued with musty librarians; dined with members of the criminal classes; experienced hypothermia in a freezing rain; been abandoned in the middle of nowhere in the dark of night.  I've lived.  And when I say, "put yourself in the space," I'm acknowledging that the reader has lived as well, and can imagine lying on a grassy meadow on a mountain side he or she has never seen, in a country never visited, because we know what that looks like and would feel like without needing to have ever been there.

Here is the place that we start the world from.

But this only covers how we see the world.  How does the world see us?  It's an interesting question.  Take any module or description of the game world and we'll find a description from the player's perspective: "As the orc advances on the party, it snarls and waves it's weapon."  Even flavour texts regarding factions or cults are careful to include party-relevant details: "The Knights of Meeg-la resent persons who break the codes, and will hunt down and kill any of the ilk."  But in all verity ... how does the orc see the party?  Do the Knights spend all day and all night resenting those who break their codes?  Where is the real grist that makes the Dungeon Master's perspective when running non-player characters who meet the party?

These are, however, perhaps too precise as examples.  Let's take, instead, a whole town.  Now from the first half of this post, we have the name and location of the town on the Earth's surface; from that, we can postulate what the town looks like and even feels like in the 11th, the 14th or the 17th centuries, depending on how much we've read about real towns and history in the area.  As the players approach the town, they too have in mind the part of the world they're in, and either a little or a lot of background from which to reason out their behaviour.  If they know little to nothing about a town in, say, 14th century Spain, and choose to believe that it's exactly like a present-day town in Indiana, they're going to land in trouble pretty quickly.  And I've had that happen, with players supposing the central square operates just like a tourist kiosk along the Canal Walk.

This is not, as I've said, my problem.  My problem, from the viewpoint of a DM, is how does the town view the players?

In some games, the group of adventurer's entering the town would be viewed as a spectacle.  The eyes of the townspeople would follow these strangers as they moved along the avenue, perhaps feeling threatened, perhaps a little hostile.  Who are they?  What are they doing here?  And perhaps someone from the town would come forward, to create a little role-play, to ask the players who they are and what they want.

This isn't the game world I imagine.  A "town" has five to ten thousand permanent residents and at least three times that many day visitors who arrive with goods to trade, cart goods in from the hinterland, are there to visit family or bring messages, and who are generally passing through on their way to another place.  In this kind of atmosphere, "strangers" wouldn't be noticed or thought odd.  In our present world, 5,000 people is a lazy bedroom community filled with ex-farmers or folk who service a few industries — where the strangers drive cars and have no reason to leave the highway.  This is not a medieval town.  What we can deliver with a single truck takes scores of people and animals to haul; while fueling cars can be done at a pump, we need warehouses full of feed for animals; what are nice clean streets for us are full of mud and gong, requiring an army to drain and fill and collect.  What's more, they packed 5,000 people in an area we barely press 300 to live in.  Being cheek and jowl, without being able to see further than five bodies deep through a crowd, is ordinary.

As such, I don't build game scenes with strangers noticing the players arriving — certainly not to a town, at any rate.  In my game world, "adventurers" are a common sight ... because I see them as no more than armed groups of mercenaries or press gangs, or a dozen other sorts of group sponsored by some part of the culture to wander around in small groups for some purpose.  There's no such thing as "adventurers" — the word, in my game world's parlance, has no meaning.  They're landless squires; ruffians; brigands who haven't broken the law around here; outriders on the king's business; bounty hunters; or something else.  While the party may not see themselves this way, outsiders can't tell the difference.  They're armoured, they have weapons, they lack heraldic symbols and they have plenty of money.  "Who cares what their business is?" thinks the townsperson.  "It's no business of mine."

This is, unfortunately, too vague to be real practical advise to a worldbuilder, so let me take another step back.

In deciding what sort of world I wanted, I chose to create one that would be largely indifferent.  I wanted a very big world, with millions-upon-millions of people and hundreds of petty states, in a time period educated enough to be "worldly."  In a 13th century world, it's believable to have someone return from China and be all the rage in Europe, with hordes of new things to tell the population about the magical land of China.  But a 17th century world is perfectly aware of China; there are Chinese newsheets being printed in Paris for Chinese readers in 1650 — though, admittedly, it's a small audience.  The educated persons know all about the whole world; though it can still take years to get from one part to another.

I wanted a game world where science had ceased to be a big mystery.  My world has magic in it, though the magic has been invented much the same way science will be in the 18th and 19th centuries.  Magic in my game is very limited by 5e standards, slightly limited by AD&D standards; and a character can still get burnt at the stake as a witch — though not out of ignorance, but because having magic is not an excuse to wave it around like a gun.  Use too much magic in town and a stronger, more capable spellcaster will emasculate you and arrange for a nice public roasting.  This is how I chose to have my game world see magic: as a dangerous weapon that's fine for use in the bush, but rude when used too much in public.

These decisions matter.  They provide a large, visionary framework for the intrinsic little details, such as how knowledge is acquired and imparted to others; or how the state functions; or how cabals and factions compete to control power.  The better I comprehend the huge, sweeping functions of the game world as a whole, the better I can visualize how one solitary NPC acts within the grand tapestry.  Knowing the ebb and flow of the macro-economic trade system for the game informs me as to how a single teamster fits into the maelstrom, and how that teamster would respond if the players desired to hire a team and wagon.  It makes perfect sense in my head because I have an overall vision of how a teamster, who would be in great demand in my gameworld ordinarily, would be more interested in continous work than a one-time job, no matter how lucrative.

But this is how I see my gameworld.  It's not how a gameworld necessarily has to be.

Would-be DMs must decide precisely upon what vision they perceive for the world as a whole.  Getting into the particulars of a single adventure or happenstance is a trap; it gets you through the business in the short term, but lacks any offer of a grand plan.  As a result, there is no tapestry in the work; only a frayed patchwork quilt made of rags and whatever came to hand.  This is well enough as a blanket to keep us warm, but it hardly serves to impress anyone.

And let's have that plain.  The players are looking to be impressed.  Single adventures and one-offs do the job of supplying the players with a running, but they reflect very little glamour upon the maker.  The players know the effort being made — and the message that sends regarding their importance as participants in the DM's eyes.  A game on the cheap, where elbow grease is measured, gets the respect we save up for convenience store owners.  We like the convenience store and we're glad it's there; it is, after all, convenient.  But it's nothing to write about.

To impress players — and thus vastly increase the perceived value of the DM, not to mention how much latitude and attention the DM can count on when setting up an adventure — depends on building something BIG.

I'll try to continue in that vein with the next post.