A journey through a land of fantasy…

It’s been a while, hasn’t it?  I’ve been busy in real life, so much so that most of the work on my campaign has been directly on it, or on organizing all the information I have about it.  I have set up a personal wiki, using the Wakka Wiki engine, to record all of the information and have it available to me anywhere I can get Internet access.  I chose Wakka Wiki because it allows me to deny permission to secret pages — most wiki systems do not allow that.  I’d link my wiki here, except that all the interesting stuff is closed to the public, so there’s not much there.

 Things have been progressing nicely in the campaign.  There has been a bit of party in-fighting, when one of the members finally snapped under the pressure when he realized that his goal of a quiet life had just been demolished, but another player stepped up and pulled the party back together.

The thing I want to discuss today, however, is more about how to build a believable world.  I started at first with a map of the land, an idea of what the different regions were like, and a concept of its theology (with the intention of letting the players build the actual gods, since my pantheon is so free).  I made sure the regions were sufficiently different so that they would have different flavors as well as different climates and monsters, and filled in the details as I went along.

However, I discovered after a while that ideas that I had needed to fit with other ideas that I had used before, and that the things that the players enjoyed the most were those that had a story behind them.  Why is this particular lord so domineering and greedy?  Because he’s not actually the lord — the real lord disappeared centuries ago, leaving behind only an artifact that identifies the true lord of the town, and the current lord, actually a lord regent, is constantly afraid that some peasant will walk up, touch the artifact, and rob him of his title and power.  Why does this particular humanoid race seem to appear and disappear every century or so?  Because they move from place to place, and many of their places are not within the human realms.

It occurred to me that to have an interesting, consistent world, you need to also have a history.  It actually does matter what happened a century ago; things that happened back then may actually affect what happens today.  In my campaign, for example, the elves lost the human/elf war and went into hiding centuries ago, long forgotten by the humans.  A large faction of them are waiting for the human monarchy to fall apart, so that they can burst out of hiding and sweep over the human cities, leveling them to rubble.  The party doesn’t know this, and if they can salvage the monarchy and unite the nation, they might never know, but if they don’t, they will discover the consequences.

I’ve always felt that giving the players choices made the game fun.  In this particular game, the players make all the choices; very little of what they do is dictated by me, the gamemaster.  But I have also found that if you can make their choices actually mean something, the game becomes epic.