🎵We can show you the world🎵

World Building

The short of it is simple: we love world building. We are fascinated by culture, religion, magic, and how this all intersects. What's the point of having a campaign if the characters aren't given the chance to immerse themselves in some aspect of the society they're in or reflect where they're from?

We're really not that interested in lots of combat, or delving into dungeons, or world-shaking plots. We're really interested in looking at the cultures of the people around us, what the local faiths are and how they're reflected in the culture, and how these reflect the style of magic used by the local cultures. We're not interested in generic magic or generic faiths or in a culture which matches every other culture in every other fantasy game out there. If it's vanilla, something's missing.

For an example? Well.

We've a campaign world, Inspiritus. We've not had a chance to run things in that world in over 30 years, but we've really wanted to. So, let's show you just how we did this world, in D&D (and may eventually in Pathfinder, too).

First and foremost?  Let's look at the races - which are intricately tied to the history of the setting. On one side you have the humans, dwarves, and titans. On the other side you have the elves and halflings.

The humans are the only line to have innate magic - they're the only ones that can cast spells, and the type of magic used is divided into three bloodlines. You have one bloodline that only uses somatic components, one that only uses verbal components, and one that only uses material components.  If the spell is missing that component, they can't cast that spell. However, they ignore all other components. The bloodline which deals with verbal components?  That's all they use. If the spell calls for material and somatic, they ignore that aspect of the spell.

The titans are necromancers. However, they don't animate the dead - they don't even do resurrection. They act as psychopomps, helping guide the dead into the afterlife, and helping people talk with the deceased, or help spirits finds their peace. That's it, that's all, and only the titans can do that.

The dwarves don't have magic at all. They're immune to magic, they're immune to psionics, they're immune to pretty much anything 'unnatural'.

The elves are an alien race, tall, willowy, inhuman in appearance - beautiful in a very unnatural way. They are also cold and generally thought to be unfeeling. But if they feel slighted - if they get mad - they will turn their attention to the source of those feelings and destroy them. The elves also don't have magic. They have psionics, and they are terrifyingly good at it.  Most races (except dwarves) have access to psionics - even if not everyone has them. It's just a lot more common than, say, magic.

Speaking of elves.  The elves and humans had a war.  The humans lost.  They were able to push the elves back with the help of the titans and dwarves - but not before the elves captured and enslaved the entire halfling race. The halflings you see today are feral, vicious, cannibalistic attack dogs for the elves.  The elves keep their halflings on psychic leashes and use them to scent out and hunt down anyone that's bold enough to come into their territory, or uses them to conduct raids on other lands. The halflings, when they do have psychic abilities, mostly focus on augmenting their bodies, sharpening their senses, and hunting their prey.

The region's currently at a stalemate.  Which is where we had planned to drop the characters for the new campaign. More on that in a moment.

So, religion.
Religion is very much 'local folk beliefs', and there's a solid reason for it.  There's no pantheon.  No heaven for the gods to rest in.  No angels or demons. Nothing like that. Because any divinity who's ever come into this realm has been repulsed, not able to enter.  Well, except that's not true.

A copy of them gets shunted into the realm, and dropped down into the world as an avatar.  They have some fraction of their initial power, their domains and such. But ... well... what happens is local superstition about them literally shapes them, alters who they are, what they remember, how they think, what they look like. The gods of the world are 'local gods' because the local populace is what makes them who they are, and as the local population's beliefs and stories change over time, the gods reflected in those stories and beliefs change, too.  It takes a lot of willpower to stop it from happening, and the gods will lose from time to time.

Anyway, we were totally ready to run a campaign here, but had a talk with the players, who wanted to try out Adventures in Rokugan.  Not necessarily in Rokugan as such, but the ruleset and the general feel of the engine.  We were going to set it in another campaign setting we have, but we just wrapped up a campaign there and the setting's gone through a dramatic shift at the moment, so we're running Pathfinder in the altered setting to shake things up a bit - and don't want to run two campaigns there at the same time.

So, what did we do?
We built another continent in Inspiritus instead.
One with a more Asian theme.

So the legend for the region is that the gods settled down on a series of islands, and populated it with humanity.  Things were going well until the gods decided to add a few other races there.

Humanity didn't take that well, and there was a war. Disappointed, the gods withdrew ... and started taking the islands with them. The humans kind of freaked out, so they built bridges to connect the different islands. An island tethered to the other islands doesn't fade away.  So bridges are very important - both in symbolism and also in what they literally do. An island with no bridge tends to fade in and out of existence, and not necessarily to any regular pattern.

Then we built the human races, the different other races, pointed out to the players there's near-countless islands, each with different cultures and traditions the players could draw from.

We also noted - only humans get sorcery/wizardry.

And them, and everyone else gets ritualism.  This means if you want to get something done, you petition the local spirits (gods) to act on your behalf. And if they like what you're doing - they will.

Which falls into the pantheon thing for this part of the world.  The islands are teeming with 'small gods', which of course, are altered by mortal perception, and each of the cultures have their own local gods and spirits and such.

We dug through our 5th edition and Advanced 5th edition books to figure out what species we wanted available for the PCs, looked at how they'd fit into the setting and culture, and went from there.  It's still 'fresh', so over time we'll make it a deeper setting, but we think the players are going to enjoy themselves.

Until the elves show up. *evil grin*

We don't expect to see 'dungeon delves', the culture isn't one for dungeons. There aren't a lot of monsters for the PCs to face.  Exploration?  Sure.  Fighting pirates on the seas, preventing incursions from rival nations, exploring forgotten shrines and facing mad gods and spirits?  Not a problem.

Looting the dead is right off the table. Magic items need to be crafted, gifted, or recovered and returned to the family of their original owners.  That's part of the culture and baked right in.

But yeah, the shift in the pantheon, how magic functions, and the cultures and how they interact? That's what will make this campaign world a whole lot different from other campaign worlds. That's the point.  Why should the world our players are going to explore be 'vanilla'? How would anyone find that interesting?

"This is a medieval town in the style of European middle ages, just like every other town you've come to.  You find an inn which is just like every other inn you've run into.  The people are just like every other people you've run into in these towns."

"Magic is generic, everyone has the same spell lists, casts the same way, with the same results. No matter which kingdom you are from or go to, it's the same."

"The gods are a pantheon with generic domains, you won't see any temples unless you look for them specifically, and their ethics are generic and the same from town to town."

"Now, let's get you to the dungeon so you can beat up monsters."

Bleah. Why would you do that to your players?
This is why we take a bit of time setting up new campaign worlds.  We write out the important bits, and make a 'player's guide' so they know what they're getting into and can set up for it.  And over the course of the first few sessions, we'll drop some extra bits of lore and culture so the players can ease into it over time.  By the time we're a few months to a year in, the players can feel comfortable and don't need that much reminding on key points - they know the drill.

This is what happened with Legend of the Five Rings.  None of us knew anything of actual feudal Japanese culture, but through the course of a 5+ year campaign, we figured it out, and the game grew stronger and richer as we went along. It's the culture and faith and magic that made L5R interesting and a go-to.  It's also why games like Godbound and Exalted are interesting - because they're not in any way, shape, or form, generic.

This is one of the things we've struggled with in D&D - the rulebook is supposed to be 'generic fantasy' as in 'build your own world around it' - but they try to force you into a specific feel for those worlds. There's a lot put on the game master if they want to do anything different. Thankfully, experienced game masters have figured out how to tailor things, and creative players do their own stunts.

• A verdant sorcerer using the druid spell list and restricting themselves to plant-and-healing spells only.

• A summoner wrapped up in the avatar of their god, using spells from the cleric list, not the summoner list -- and in fact can't summon at all.

• A paladin who doesn't wear armour, doesn't cast spells, and rather than using holy magic, everything is built around fire, because they're an ifrit who worships the sun.

• A ranger who can't cast spells, but their hair is alive, and is used to grapple and bind enemies, travel along rafters, or to lift up the ranger and carry them.

• A barbarian who, rather than having a bunch of hunting and survival knowledge, knows things from other locations - that they've never heard of.  Can name you creatures and plants, spirits and elementals, pantheons and nobles, rumours and events - for places they've never been and never heard of.

• A rogue who is the lover of the goddess of thieves. Who comes to visit them each time they stop at an inn or tavern, or sometimes when they've set up camp for the night. Always in the shape of a different woman. Sometimes she's there to bang her lover senseless, sometimes she's there to teach her lover new tricks and how to be a better rogue.

Doing this kind of thing helps to shape an idea of how the local cultures function, what kind of societies are there, how the local pantheons work, and how magic is built into the world. It makes the world a lot more interesting when you allow things like this - or even help the players by suggesting ideas which veer from the normal course of things.