Worldbuilding 105: 6 Worldbuilding Shortcuts For GMs

[@bigblue344]

People love to world build and players love to learn about the world but limited scope is a great tool to have around. Like you said before, unless the lore affects the players it doesn't need to be seen or heard about.

[@drivinganddragons1818]

Absolutely. Unless you are building a world you plan on distributing to other GMs for use, there's no need go more than a few degrees from your players.

[@Archaeo_Matt]

On the whole, this is good advice, and has made for a good series of videos. That said, I would advise against directly lifting ideas, piecemeal, from historical sources. Each culture, historical or contemporary, is an integrated collection of subsystems, which must be considered holistically, because effects in one subsystem are not easily assigned to particular inter-systemic or intra-systemic causalities, plus almost nothing is reducible to monocausal explanations. It is much better to take the main idea that one wants to implement, and create an abstraction based on the same or similar occurrences in other historical or contemporary cultures, plus consider the potential for warping other analogous causes/effects from the source side, before applying them to the subject side (i.e., in this case, the shared imagined setting of the game). For example, if you wanted to put a system of land grants for service to the kingdom into your game's main "civilized" area, then you might consider not only how the Roman Empire administrated land grants to soldiers, but also had the newly formed United States administrated land grants to soldiers in the Revolutionary War. Beyond that you might also compare those two land grants programs for individual soldiers, to the various railroad land grant programs in under the Public Land Survey System in the U.S. What does is say about the kingdom, its needs, it priorities, etc. when soldiers who served in the kingdom's wars might be granted 80-160 acres of land, compared to a railroad company who might be granted 6400 acres (in, for example, alternating one mile by one mile sections) per one mile of track completed? In the Autropa setting that I've been developing as my example setting, for my own series of world-building videos it's all set in a physical terrain that is explicitly taken from western Europe, and the historical cultures of the region are being exploited as source material. For example one empire, set along what we would recognize as the Mediterranean Sea is based on the question what if the Etruscans had never given way to the Latins; however, the internal politics actually draws more on the factional conflicts of the Guelphs and Ghibellines during the 12th and 13th centuries. For those who aren't sure where to start with teasing out specific traits, and analyzing them cross-culturally there is a great org site called D-PLACE, which provide data under a Creative Commons license. It is very similar to the Human Relations Area Files (HRAF) that have long been an ethnological resource for academic and professional anthropologists. It's pretty much limited to contemporary cultures though, so one would have to do more digging to get at archaeological cultures (forgive the pun). Cheers!

[@drivinganddragons1818]

Definitely solid advice top to bottom. If my entire video were about lifting from history much of this would be there too. In this video, much of this is boiled down to that sentence about WW1, "if you understand why it happened and why it was always going to happen". Bare minimum that understanding process starts with the Congress of Vienna. It certainly doesn't all boil down to an archduke getting popped outside a sandwich shop. I actually have a very early video series on using history, but the audio is awful so I plan to reshoot them as part of Worldbuilder University and You're Doing It Wrong respectively. Great comment, I'd love to see more on some of my other worldbuilding content.

[@Archaeo_Matt]

@@drivinganddragons1818 The upside of not putting every idea into a video is that it leaves more room for comments and discussion. I enjoy the discourse about the nature of these games almost as much as actually playing the games. I believe I've caught two of the previous videos in this series, but both times I was kicked back on the couch, and watching on the TV. I don't have a keyboard hooked up for the TV, so that's a big part of why I hadn't commented earlier. I'll definitely endeavor to watch more of the series, and leave some more comments. Best!

[@drivinganddragons1818]

@Archaeo_Matt happy to have you. I am a big fan of discourse, debate, and discussion as an engine for the hobby to evolve. So much so that I have videos lamenting the bad faith and disingenuous arguments that often derail those discussions. Enjoy