Worldbuilding 1b: Systems

This post is part of a series on worldbuilding; links for the whole series can be found on this page.

Very well. As with any world, we'll need to start with a map. Here are two possibilities. Option 1 can be an island surrounded by an ocean, or an inner sea surrounded by land. Option 2 can have land on the left and sea on the right; or sea on the left and land on the right.

Not showing are Option 3 and Option 4, all sea and all land.  All sea is doable, but not suggested for a first time out.  In any case, it's needful that we choose one.

There, now that we have the map sorted, for now — remember, we're storyboarding — we can forget mapmaking and move onto more important things.

All right, yes, I know, it's instinctive to set about making a deeply complicated map of one kind or another, and virtually every worldbuilding video and tool interface manager pitches HARD that you've got to start with the map ... but that's because computer generated maps are easy to program, they look pretty and slick and the goal is to win your clicks and take your money, NOT to actually help you create a game world.  There is zero reason to make a map until we know what it is we're mapping ... which puts it firmly in the category of filming our movie without story, actors or a shooting schedule.  Let's not put the cart before the horse.

If it happens that you've already started a map, or have one completed, well, you've got a choice to make.  Maybe, what you have is salvagable.  Maybe not.  That's not up to me.  I'm here to ask questions you should have asked before you made a map.

Let's begin with the basics.  Is your game world a sphere, or like Earth, "sphere-like?"  I ask because if it is, we've got to address the physical laws inherent in large spherical bodies with atmospheres, located — presumedly — from one or more central suns in your world's solar system.  Now, I understand that may seem completely irrelevant.  Yet we have to start from one or two perspectives: (a) either the game world makes sense, in every respective way that human beings on a planet understand, from the ONLY example they have of how a world works; (b) or the world doesn't make sense, which discards millions of useful ideas, facts and documents we might have relied upon for providing our world structure and function, for the sake of one choice.

Let's say we decide to create a world that's a flat surface on an enormous plate resting on a giant turtle's back; and that the turtle is standing on a larger turtle, which is on a larger turtle, so that it's turtles all the way down.  Fine.  We can do that.  It's a fantasy world.

How does night and day work?  How do the tides work?  How is the atmosphere affected by the sun?  How does this affect ballistics?  How far can you see from the mast of a ship, or standing on the world's surface?  What keeps the atmosphere from circulating off the world's edge, or in a circle around the world's edge? 

If a section of the edge runs along a deep ocean, where the water flows off in trillions of cubic miles yearly, then how is all that water restored to the surface quickly enough to ensure the world doesn't turn into a desert?  Rain, as we understand it, wouldn't restore that much water, even if it rained all day and all night, in volumes a hundred times what we think of as "rain."  If magic restores it, incrementally throughout the entire system, then why doesn't the magic simply disallow the ocean from falling off the edge?

In any case, to describe this world, we can't avail ourself of any knowledge we have to explain how this fantasy world works, since all our knowledge is designed for a sphere.  This means lots and lots more work to fix, with the added bonus of lots of hours explaining the unfamiliar principles to the players ... for what sort of gain, exactly?  Because it's "cool"?  Or "different"?  How does this improve our regular game play?

Be wary of adopting ideas that create work rather than ease of use.  It may seem "easy" to handwave the physical issues I've highlighted, but there are thousands of physical issues I haven't mentioned.  And the more handwaving we do, the less depth the world has.  Handwaving isn't a substitute for function-offering design.  On the other hand, simply saying the world is spherical requires no special explanation; it simply is.  The world is round and there's one sun.  There, we're done.  We can move on.

Let me insert a warning.  Every step beyond this point requires knowledge.  Where worlds are concerned, all the knowledge in the universe.  We're limited as human beings by the knowledge we possess and can manage, but the more knowledge we have, and the more we can apply to the game world, the better a world we're going to make.  As we move forward, I'll try to keep the knowledge we need at any given point as bare bones as possible; I'll fill in the gaps by giving as many examples as I can give, so the reader gains a feeling for what's needed without exhaustive detail given about the discipline or field being discussed.  Okay?  I'll do what I can.

Pick one of the maps above.  Let's say Option 1 and say it's an island in the middle.  Draw an imaginary horizontal line through the middle of the map and imagine it's a latitude.  Latitudes are convenient lines that designate a distance from the Equator.  If the equator is latitude zero and the pole is latitude 90, we can get an idea of what sort of climate we'll get, if we call our imaginary line through our imaginary game world, for each ten points of latitude.

Lat.10 is the south edge of the Caribbean, Costa Rica, Ghana in Africa, Ceylon, Philippines.  Hot, wet, jungle, tropical ocean.

Lat.20 is Mexico City, Yucatan, Haiti, Saharan Africa and Arabia, central India, Burma, Hawaii.  Still hot and wet, but with dry seasons and in some places, very very dry.

Lat.30 is Texas, Florida, Morocco, the Middle East, the Punjab and the Himalayas, Shanghai.  Hot summers, warm winters, large dry areas and lowland swamps, very cold if the mountains are high enough; very populated but few needs for group survival.

Lat.40 is Colorado, Illinois, New York, Spain, Constantinople, the Caucasus, Sinkaing, Beijing, Korea, Japan.  Warm to hot summers, cold winters, traditional seasons, intensely heavy population, more socially conscious.

Lat.50 is Canada, Holland, North Germany, Central Russia, Siberia.  Very cold winters, cool summers, high urban population and scattered rural; high need for social cooperation.

Lat.60 is Northern Canada, Norway, St. Petersburg, Yakutsk.  Non-agrarian, cold, highly cooperative, scant population.

Just gets colder and largely unhabitable from there.

Ten degrees of latitude equals about 690 miles.  If we decide what the central latitude on our map is, and then what we'd like both the most northern and the most southern parts to feel like, we can get a scale on our map.

For example, suppose the central line on the map has a latitude like Ohio or Portugal.  And that we'd like the southern edge of the island to feel like Louisiana and the northern edge to feel like northern Minnesota.  Or in Europe, Normandy on the north and Cairo on the south.   Or in Asia, Okinawa on the South and the southern tip of Kamchatka on the north.  This makes our map about 1400 miles from bottom to top ... and no matter where we stick a pin, we can measure in degrees from the bottom to the top, look up a place on earth that corresponds to that latitude and get a reasonably good idea of the climate, the kind of food grown, the length of seasons and growing time, the warmth of the sea water and of lakes, the kind of flora growing there, the kind of fauna living there, what sort of buildings the people need, how different seasons are managed, when festivals related to the season ought to occur, the practicality of wearing armour, etcetera, etcetera.

By understanding this simple number, we can invent a completely different map and — even if we don't want to make any part of it exactly like Earth — we can cherry pick from the Earth's surface in a rational, plausible sense and apply it as we will to the game world.

This is the fundamental value of using systems instead of handwaving or merely drawing a map that has no underlying substance or worldly implication.  Now, we know how to achieve what we want.  We can designate a random place in the game world as "like Myrtle Beach" or "Jeju" without that designation having anything to do with politics, people, tradition or anything except what it's like geographically.  The other things we can figure out later, as it suits our needs.

The world exists before the people do.  Therefore, we build the physical world before we build the civilisation that lives on it.  Everything in its order.  And we've just saved ourselves a lot of time, while providing ourselves with a LOT of information we can easily apply to play, when we need it.