Worldbuilding 2b: Land & Sea

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

Before settling on our first continent, take some time and envision the whole game world.  This doesn't mean we need to start drawing shapes on a map, assigning names and gawd forbid, official monarchies and empires.  For 15,000 years, the Old World had no idea the New World existed ... and we can make the same assumption with the wholistic map of our world.  Starting with a single slab of land, we can suppose that other slabs are out there, to be one day investigated and discovered, without our needing to draw anything.

As an example, suppose the game world is an "archipelago;" say, fifty continents in various areas ranging from Formosa to the size of Greenland.  We can pick any of them as our starting place, simply proposing that other lands are out there, but the characters don't have access to ships, or perhaps the nearest of these other continents is at war with the character's present location.

Such a world would have a great emphasis on ships and shipbuilding, on the players eventually owning their own ship to allow free passage to other places.  Continents that came close to touching one another would make important trading points, with strategic elements that demanded heavy tolls for ships moving through navigable straits between islands as narrow as 800 yards.  Likewise, all the most important cities would be harbours, since sea trade would be vastly more important than land trade.  All internal transport of goods would be directed towards getting things to port; just as it's always been with Britain, where no part of the island is more than 72 miles from the sea.  An archipelago worldbuild would include 50 Britains, all vying to produce the greatest fleet; but the party need never leave one island, and we need never build more than one, perhaps two, in the first ten years of our worldbuilding.  Yet, as the theme for this series argues, while we needn't do the work today, we'd know what work needed to be done in the future.  And we'd have plenty of opportunities for creating unique islands that are unimagined to us now, but which we could realise later.

The tendency is to opt for a more "continental" world, which despite having differently shaped continents, would still be familiar to our sensibilities.  In such cases, we need not start with an entire continent; a mere corner of one, or a peninsula, is sufficient, with the rest of the continent being "out there" for when we need to make sense of it ... while other continents are likewise on the other side of small seas or large oceans.

Like the archipelago, two giant continents separated from each other by a straight as narrow as the Bosporus of Constantinople, or even the English Channel, produces a fascinating political and wide-scale strategic component to a setting that's just wedges of land.  Internal bays and large lakes help separate monarchies and promote opportunities for one part of the continent to trade with another.  A purely rounded continent is somewhat boring politically.  Consider how the Baltic Sea or the Gulf of Mexico complicates interrelationships between regions, political divisions, peoples and trade.  Consider what effects a large internal sea like the Caspian causes with regards to climate, access, the movement of armies or subdivisions made by mountain ranges along its edges.  Naturally, we desire large open plains like the Germanic, or vast low hill areas like Russia, or a giant land basin like the Mississippian ... but continents allow for the creation of nooks and crannies too, like twenty tiny valleys in Switzerland or the chaotic terrain of Afghanistan.

A continental map can be made cramped by imposing an "Ice Age," expanding the frozen poles so that only a narrow band of the world is forested with something other than conifers — and there are no jungles at all.  The characters can begin in some small enclave surrounded on four sides by mountains and enormous glaciers ... yet able to thrive through the presence of open water, a warm current and the quirk of westerly winds.  The players are encouraged to gather sufficient supplies and wealth before daring to venture into the desolate empty heaths beyond their homeland ... because it takes a journey of a thousand miles through barrens and bare rock to reach the coastline far to the south, where decent civilisation starts.  This lets us imagine a whole giant game world, yet build only one small part of it for now, knowing as ever that the main world is out there.

An ice world of this kind would have dangerous sea voyages, as even the open sea would be fraught with bergs and treacherous seamounts.  With so much of the world's water bound up in ice, the seas will have lowered fifteen or twenty meters world-wide; islands that were once at sea level are now plateaus surrounded by low cliffs.  Trade in food is hypercritical, even with a dwindling population — once numbering a billion and now, after a thousand years of ice age, barely a hundred million.  The game world can imagine that the ice age began in the time of the Romans; or in the age of Charlemagne; or even after the Black Death ... with crops failing and populations on the move, seeking new places to plant their seeds.  This need not be dystopian; despite mass world migrations, innovation and invention might have continued; the world may even be more intra-cooperative and civilised, because scarcity and weather have smashed all pretense of self-reliance.

Why not lower the sea level further and suppose a world composed of contiguous land with scattered fresh and salt lakes?  Now we can go anywhere overland, with isthmuses between lakes being strategic political and trade centres ... but so much of the land suffers from desertification that we can easily produce an "island" of green and blue surrounded by ice caps and barren Gobi-like deserts all around.  As ever, we can eventually plan to allow the players to take the necessary journey to find some other part of the setting, but for the time being it's enough that they manage themselves amidst the four or five large monarchies — or even small city states, if we want to suppose a very small arable region.  We might even argue for a chain of these regions, following a string of fresh water lakes between high rocky mountains and highlands, like Inverness in Scotland, Northumbria or British Columbia.

The largest seas have the greatest potential for convection, producing rainfall that feeds the largest political empires; the trade winds would sweep these moist air flows against mountains; which would have extensive deserts on the other side.  Trade in water, actually carrying it from place to place in giant water wagons, might be an important lifeline for some parts of the world.  Merely locating a spring could be an adventure; in fact, the players might begin their first session having discovered an aquifer that only they know about ... setting them to argue what they could do with it.  Though granted, this wouldn't appeal to a droll, dull traditional party.

Different parts of the world could have aspects related to all four of these examples.  The East Indies have characteristics of the archipelago, and could be twice or three times as large if it stretched across the Pacific.  The Australian continent could be five times as big, stretching south to form up with Antarctica.  Siberia, detached from the rest of Asia and moved north, could serve as an "ice age" continent.  And we could merge Africa and South America together, making a larger desert with a great inland sea following the mid-Atlantic Rift.

But let me repeat: there's no need to draw the whole map out, not now, perhaps not ever.  Stress making enough of the world to keep the players busy today, and learn how to distract them should they take it into their minds to head off in a direction that hasn't been designed yet.  Put an insurmountable obstacle in their way, like an enormous desert, a mountain range with no known passes ... or an army of fifty thousand unfriendly humanoids.  Make the players understand that passage to other places in the world is for LATER.  Write "there be dragons" on the map the players have of the sea and MEAN IT.  When the players try to cross that sea, kill them with dragons and say, "I warned you."  Have no guilt.  They were warned.

'Course, you can always give them an opportunity to turn back.