Worldbuilding 6a: Functionality

Okay, I'm going to do a deep dive with this post, discussing methods to provide the game world with an overarching structure, regardless of the level of zoom.  Those readers who feel that everything should be "done on the fly," or who believe "the world doesn't need a structure because this is all fantasy," may feel free to stop reading now.

When I began mapmaking, I chose to use 20-mile hexes because the world is a very big place.  My informational maps were primarily of 1:4,000,000 scale or larger, loaded with cities and geographic features, but with 1 hex = 1 inch = 20 miles, the result is a lot of hexes that look like the one on the right.  Empty.  However, the commitment of making a map, and therefore the hexes (or the open space of that map, whatever form it takes) is a commitment that if the players enter that hex, I must use my imagination to put something in it.

If I'm running a game and the players enter this hex, I have some base information at hand.  I know the hex is in western Moldavia (of modern Romania); that it's on the border with Transylvania; that the Carpathian mountains run along the border.  It has this stream in it which the little "3" tells me carries about 30 cubic meters of water a second.  The stream may be wide, or deep; it may be narrower and fast-flowing, or slow-moving and wider.  It could be shallow enough to be walked across or 2 metres deep and only 4 metres wide, so that the players have to swim.  The map doesn't actually give me this information.  I have to draw on what I know of the geography of the area (which isn't, frankly, enough or even remotely "accurate") to run the players when they arrive in this place.

And keep in mind, within just 30 miles of this hex's center are 18 other hexes, most of which are also empty and just as vague.  I could concentrate on providing detail for these 19 hexes, but then my game world would only be 100 mi. in diameter.  Yes, I could run a campaign in such a space, but the campaign would necessarily be missing London, Paris, Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria and Moscow ... not to mention other vast parts of the world the players might like to visit.  There are quite a lot of such places.  And though I've undertaken to map them, it's worth considering that of the above empty 20-mile hex, I have some 70,000 other like hexes.  Without about one-fifth of the world's area mapped.

I'm not imaginative enough to create 70,000+ unique hexes, or even to do a thorough job with just 1% of that number.  So my approach has been to construct a generation algorithm that might transform hundreds of low-detail hexes into higher-detail hexes, without my having to be exceptionally creative long-term.  I need only use common sense and some additional information gathering to complete the process.  The result transforms the above image into this:

The adjustment provides me with more information than previously, to use when the players enter the former 20-mile hex.  I've added in hills, low mountains and high ones, roads, villages, additional water courses and separated the hexes according to their "infrastructure" and therefore the amount of civilisation they possess.  I've also added symbols for food, labour and wealth, which clutter the map ... but they also provide immediate information for my creativity to hinge on while the party travels through the area.

Tazlau is rich; with a type-1 hex it's as civilised as nearly any place in the world (there are exceptions, but that's another post).  In that one hex, the landscape is heavily cultivated, the roads are patrolled, there's are seasonal fairs and a village market (though not a world-trade market), a library, a money lender, probably a castle, inns and perhaps even a bathhouse.  Zemes isn't nearly as wealthy, but it's still important; it has an inn and a forge, and a village market twice a week.  Tarcau has a village market only on Sundays, has no inn or forge, but has a "way station," a sheltered yard and kitchen-house where travellers can bivouac.  The roads have various forms but there's lots of them; it's easy to get around.  I can see where the wilder parts of the hex are, where some participate in mining or quarrying ... and I can see a collection of other villages outside the hex, giving our original hex character through its relationships with other places.

As such, during the game, my imagination has much more forage to feed it, at a glance, which is the reason for the preparation that goes into elaborating on the previous hex scale.  Yes, it remains true that a single type-5 hex, which appears in the middle of the above, is very like the type-5 hex next to it.  This one has a deep river in it, that gives it +1 hammer; and it has a road, while the next like hex does not.  And yes, the system is set to produce hundreds and hundreds of type-5 hexes, all alike, or nearly so.

However, they are only like other type-5 hexes.  They aren't like type-4s or type-6s.  And while the hex itself is the same, some type-5s are a comparative backwater to the surrounding hexes, while elsewhere in the world they are the most important hex for dozens of hexes in every direction.  Relationships really matter.

Still, I look at the type-5 image and again, I'm left to my imagination to put something in it.  I have three hills and a bit of another.  I have that road.  I have the three food, which tells me there's fields and livestock and eating.  The two hammers promise that the river has a waterwheel on it, running a mill.  There's probably a quarry here, providing stone for building in Tarcau, Zemes and Tazlau.  But these aren't D&D Adventure notes, are they?  They don't tell me the sort of things that player parties care about.  So why go through this generation at all?

To DM, we've got to have a dungeon master's sensibility.  Where other people see the symbol of a hill, I see wild, uncertain country, filled with various denizens who aren't passive farmers — or even intelligent.  Historically, as an area is developed, the unwanted original residents are steadily exterminated or pushed back into areas that are unwanted by settlers.  This type-5 hex, occurring between three fairly dense built-up areas, has had plenty of history to build up itself, only it hasn't.  Which means the wild areas of this hex are too stony for farming and too barren for herding; the forest and its layout is impractical for wide-scale logging.  In short, parts of this hex have turned into those places where the players can dig into and find all manner of strange things.  With 5,000 years of human habitation of some kind, there may be ancient Roman shrines or covered over burial grounds.  A battle between Christians and Arians may have taken place here a thousand years ago.  A wizard-hermit could easily have retreated to such a place; there might be a hidey-hole full of kobalds or goblins, living right under people's noses.

Perhaps a 30-acre area of dead, rotting wood is spawning the occasional giant bombadier beetle that staggers outwards into civilisation, with such incidents killing two or three people a year.  The pile has to be located and cleaned out; even in an area only three miles across, this could take a couple of weeks.  There may be as many as twenty beetles in such a place.  It would take a party with resolve, resilience, time ... who might care whether or not a few peasants die now and then.  Perhaps the local manor lords just don't care about such things, at least not enough to risk a few of their cherished soldiers.  And when the beetle lair is cleaned out, and some of the rotting field of logs is broken up and burnt, who knows what evil lays beneath, that caused the logs to cluster in just that spot.

Now, I've made this just now, as I'm writing the post.  I had an idea of what I'd write about, and that eventually I'd need an adventure, but I had no particular adventure in mind.  And the "evil beneath" thing?  Didn't occur to me until the last paragraph was nearly written.  But I think like a DM.  All the time.  I can always create some valuable horror that draws in the party, from habit if nothing else.

What matters to me is not the adventure, but the context the adventure occurs in.  I can make the beetle pile just as conveniently for the top map of this post, the single 20-mile hex.  But then, it's just an adventure that happens, that's completed and walked-away from.  But the same adventure in the context of the three villages of various importance, where there are quarries and somewhat backward farms, creates other consequences after the adventure occurs.  Very well, the beetles are dead; the pile is broken up; the evil is vanquished.  There's more left.  There are neighbours to inform; for surely the neighbours would be interested to know the story of something that's happened in their backyard.  The locals will be grateful that no more hapless hunters will have the flesh boiled from their bones; even the manor residents might take notice, offering gratitude, dinners — and the ever standard, "Since you were able to do that, I wondered if you'd be willing to do this?"

The structure and detail of the map provides a sense of why a particular adventure is important to the locals.  How it affects their lives.  Even if the players don't want to advantage of themselves of economic opportunities, the local NPCs have no such qualms.  These will have the players to thank.  These will be able to tell the players of other small problems they have.  Meanwhile, the players can't help but acquire a sense of place.  Even as they leave the area, because adventure pulls them elsewhere, they'll remember that dinner they had in the castle of Tazlau; and those beetles they fought near Zemes.  It's a much more durable memory than stumbling across beetles in the middle of nowhere, killing them and moving on.  Place gives personality; and personality gives significance.

Even as they travel through such a world, the players will find themselves recognising other map patterns and interconnections.  This place is not like that place.  And even, "Hey, we kind of like this place," with it's combination the players haven't seen before.  The kind of place the players may want to invest themselves.

This isn't going to happen just because we make a bunch of maps.  It won't result from a generation system or even a lot of detail.  The DM's got to know how to massage the information, how to use it to build not just an adventure, but a whole campaign.  I've said multiple times that the DM must know the world in depth, with a vision that lets the world feel real to the DM.  This is only part of the formula.  The DM's also got to transform that vision into the sort of movement that grasps the players by the short hairs and makes them pay attention.  In a way that doesn't disappoint, or make the players feel abused or micro-managed, AND provides for tremendous flexibility on the players' part.  For a DM with very little experience, this is like throwing a baseball through a tiny jiggling window 30 yards away, while aware that failing to do so might mean losing your job and your house, the respect of your associates and family, and a lifetime spent selling auto-parts at a store in a shithole town in Oklahoma.  You know, like a professional baseball pitcher feels.  All the time.

We get past this difficulty by knowing what disappointment looks like; specifically, what we mean by disappointment and how we did that last time, and every time before.  Or what "transforming a vision" means.  Many DMs don't even have a vision, much less the least concept of how to transform such a thing.  Where are the players' "short hairs" — what is that even talking about?  These things are necessarily express in fluid, abstract terms because they are ABSTRACT.  I can't tell you where your players' short hairs are, or how to grab them, because I'm not sitting with your players and running them.  All players are different and their short hairs are in different places.  And we pull them in a variety of ways.  I only know that if I were sitting with your players, running them, I'd have them sorted in my mind within an hour, setting up strategies in my mind automatically.  Just as every pitch a pitcher throws tells him something valuable and critical about the batter.  It can't be explained.  But the technique can be acquired.

How?  To begin with, by embracing at fundamentals of the game.  We appreciate why there's a necessity for preparation and thoughtful design — because it saves us time during the complex game while urging us towards greater inventiveness and intuition.  We take the unimportant stuff at face value, things like "what do hit points mean" or "what's my character's job," because we can waste decades debating this stuff while failing to advance one iota at the thing we're supposed to be getting better at: How. To. Run.  It shouldn't matter if the players are wizards, sorcerors or turkey farmers.  The fundamentals remain the same.  Tell me what you do — not what your character does, not your backstory, not what you think you ought to do or what you're worried about doing or even what you should have done.  That's all crap.  Tell me what you DO.    Right now.  And I'll tell you what happens and what you see.  And then you tell me what you DO again.  And everything else that results, that we don't have to think about, like what's the story and why are we here and what sort of game do I want to play and blah blah blah, will sort itself out without our needing to pay attention to it.

The trick of running a game isn't found in understanding the underlying philosophy of the game's various terms — though I'll grant, that stuff is interesting and fun.  No, the trick is having an answer when the player says, "I do this."  That is, having an answer every time.  For hours at a time.  And then doing it again next week ... and being so capable of having an answer, that it doesn't matter what the action is.  Our goal is to rebuild ourselves so we can do that.  To prepare ourselves to do that.  To have tools, like the world we build, or the rules we engineer, that helps us give plenty of play while producing hard limits that deny players the ability to jack-ass their way out of a problem.  We have to think faster than they think.  In fact, we have to think faster than that, because we're staying ahead of four or five people, who all have more time at the table to sit and think than we do.  They can sit back, hand the reins to their fellow players and do nothing but think.  We can't do that.  There's no one to hand off to ... except our earlier selves, who were diligently creating answers and explanations and results for their actions to players who hadn't sat down yet.  Months, even years before they sat down.

So if I seem to get a little loony in my worldmaking, it's that these tools provide me with things I need in the middle of a game.  The only thing that matters to me regarding the game world is how functional it is, and how functional it makes me.