hobbygamers ~ View topic - World-Building Workshop

All right. I just finished the 1st four chapters of Orson Scott's "How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy". As Revan promised, it was helpful reading. In particular, Chapter 2: World Building is helpful to us. here i will outline the pointers he made for World Building, and we'll see where it goes.

This is a Workshop. feel free to comment/add to these ideas. i will edit the master post as appropriate.

1. Where Ideas Come From.
*The campaign seed that Revan came up with at the start is where our general idea comes from. I also remember Revan coming up with a bunch of titles that will help us envision deicide on this grand a scale.
*Recently there has been talk about making the dead gods Cthulhu-esque. This idea appeals to me, as dead we could shift our campaign feel from post-apocalyptic (which, in my opinion, is already grossly overdone by WotC) to a venture into the unkown, post apo type of thing. (Think of running a Cthulhu game and add in the high fantasy). because suddenly it shifts to something mysterious, we don't have to explain everything when we publish the pdf (but see #2,3, below).

2. Make Rules For your World
*The main concern here, I believe, is magic. How does magic work?
*Cosmology is also a concern here. Note that while we shouldn't explain everything (especially if we are indeed adopting the Cthulhu-esque setting), we as the creators should know how it works.
*Recent spoilers by WotC has lead me to believe that the supported campaigns will all follow the Astral Sea cosmology. So we'll probably have to pattern our cosmology after that as well. However, if I am to make a 3.5 analog regarding Cthulu-esque, I think this particular material plane World is unusually close to the far Realm.

3.Invent the Past
This much has been established:
*When the gods beheld creation, they sought to dominate it.
*The gods created the various firstborn to fight amongst each other
*The power of the Firstborn and their godmasters threatened to destroy the beauty of Creation
*The gods created mortals to work, toil, fight on a smaller scale.
*Certain firstborn became sympathetic to mortals.
*gods can be killed, as attested by the 1st deicide
*Kal Dathra
What remains unresolved:
*Events after KalDathra- b_b has a skeletal timeline fix. The dates have not been agreed upon as of yet, and it is notable that no specific events are mentioned.

4. Language
Believe it or not, this part is important. Naturally the survivors of a post-apocalyptic world (that is very possibly going to be filled with tentacles all over the place, lol) wouldn't talk like a bunch of UP students. And to achieve the right way of speaking (including their own variety of cussing, jargon et al), we need to develop their culture. Culture includes a lot of things that we keep for granted, like time-keeping, food preferences, etc. Understanding language helps us craft individual stories set in this forsaken world.

5. Scenery
*Here comes the feel. What does our World look like? How does it behave? Post-apocalyptic, as the various post-apo settings have proven, can mean a lot of different things. Athas comes to mind, a vast desert heated by an unforgiving Sun (see, this is wh i don't like the Wild Sun idea and voted for the Dead Sun instead). D20 apocalypse also has three scenarios, all of which fit a post-modern feel. the challenge is this: How do we make our little post-apocalypse unique?

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