World Building 101

 ''There's an old saying about those who forget history. I don't remember it, but it's good.'' Stephen Colbert, The Colbert Report, March 10, 2008

== Designing the World==

Building the World around the Campaign
Start with the story. The world that you build must meet the needs of the story. If it doesn't, change it or throw it out. Once a Game Master knows what they need in their world for the story to work they can simply add those things and begin building the rest of the world around that essential skeleton.

Without this essential central element, then the campaign will sputter. This applies to established campaign worlds as much as to worlds that a Game Master might create on their own. Every existing campaign world has all sorts of nooks and crannies that Game Master can use to fit that essential skeleton of a plot, and must, because without it, there is no campaign.

=== Building the World to Accommodate later campaigns===

When Game Masters design the first campaign they should always remember to build in tensions so that there can be later campaigns. Leave openings that are not filled in. Add cryptic clues that are not fleshed out and don't lead anywhere. Things that the players will notice, but will realize aren't immediately relevant. When the first campaign is done, look to the stray clues and decide what to do with them. Keep out of the way areas of the world drawn in only the broadest strokes- this leaves possibility for later adventures.

=== Adding Mysteries to the Campaign===

Doing rough drafts and laying a few pieces

Leaving openings in the stand-alone adventures

== Building the World by Salvage==

Worlds don't have to be made either entirely from scratch or entirely taken from a box. A Game Master can easily take their own ideas, and graft on anything that they think is cool from other areas. Keep in mind that some things will need to tooled with to make them fit. You may love the Ravenloft Campaign setting, but it will need to be reworked fit into a traditional campaign world. It can be done, but you have to be willing to do some dirty work.

=== Stealing from Existing Game Worlds===

You can steal characters, story ideas, parts of the geography or even whole chunks of a setting for your own world. Like the Dales from the Forgotten realms? Move them to your world. Many localities have local gods- you can given them new names or adapt them to your own mythology if you like- but it isn't necessary. If you are trying to graft something from a different gaming system more surgery is needed, but it can be done without too much work. Many automatic NPC generators can be found online, all a Game Master need to do is decide what the character would roughly be like in this system and let the program do the rest. Even if you can't find a generator for your system, most game systems come with some stats for generic NPCs which can be easily applied to characters from other games that you've salvaged.

====Stealing from the same Genre or Similar Games ====

This is risky, because people are more likely to recognise it. Only do this for ideas you can rework dramatically or for ideas that are fairly widespread and won't look sleazy being copied. Batman and Superman analog characters are practically expected in Super Hero rpgs for instance.

====Stealing from Radically different Games ==== Some of the best ideas can be found in totally different games, because it looks original and won't be obvious as swiped from Tolkien. This is especially true if you swipe an outline from one place and a few key features from others.

As an example, let's say you really like the borg from Star Trek, but you are playing a modern fantasy campaign. Rather than cyborgs let's steal the assimilation idea from Matrix Revolutions that Agent Smith used, writing over the others to make them copies of himself. We can use a Science Magick excuse of magic nanites that write biology with the help summoning circles encoded into them. So now we need an extra twist to keep it looking original. The mystic nanites is fun gibberish, what matches that? Now I'm thinking vampires, because vampires infect things too. What if our nanites are transmitted by saliva and injected from the teeth? There we go. Nano transmitted vampiric borgs. Give them a good gibberish name.... Cyberfangs. That works... it's crazy cheezy, but it gets the point across and has a kind of Syberpunk retro cool to it.

There you go, a bunch of good ideas stolen and re-worked in roughly six minutes of brainstorming.

====Stealing from other Sources ====

This is the traditional approach. When a Game Master looks at the latest half-baked fantasy movie and yells in frustration “I could design a more plausible world than that!” Do it! Let you imagination go wild. Just remember game balance.

This has a grand old tradition that started with Tolkien and will never end. You can take a culture and use it for the culture of anyone in your campaign world you want. You can simply plunk the actual historical nation down into your setting. You can mix more than one culture and create an apparently new culture surprisingly easily. You can then apply that to a non-human race if you like. Viking might be dwarves (and would thus probably raid by tunneling into town or something similar). Mongols might be wolf riding hobgoblins with an advanced pony express (worg express?). Lizard men would make good Egyptians. Imagine what elven Spartans would look like (Spartans hated bows) and really surprise your players. Klingons are really just Vikings mixed with Samurai and a nodd to Elizabethan Fashion redone in leather with some in face latex.

What if you really love a monster from World of Warcraft or Diablo 2? What if you think Q would be perfect in your Traveler campaign? What if you want to bring Stargate to your fantasy Egyptian campaign? Go for it! This will require the same sort of work as converting material from a different gaming system, but that's it. However, if you want to avoid the “Oh Come on!” factor from your players you may wish to modify them at least a little bit.
 * Steal from Film or Television


 * Steal from Video Games


 * Steal from Books and other Print sources


 * Steal from History

Stealing from the Internet
The Internet is a awash with good stuff you can steal or adapt, and more good brain candy that you can munch on to inspire you to create your own ideas. Here are a few choice sites that are solid inspiratione and sometimes even legal swipe pages.
 * 1) Project: Rooftop (http://www.tencentticker.com/projectrooftop/)
 * 2) Public Domain Super Heroes (http://pdsh.wikia.com/wiki/Public_Domain_Super_Heroes)
 * 3) Encyclopedia Mythicia (http://www.pantheon.org/areas/mythology/)

===Making the World Yours ===

If you have used the salvage system, then you will likely have a lot of apparently unrelated things cobbled together. Take some time to unify these parts together. The best way to do this is by generating some history. How would these nations interact? How would they get along? Create a rich and interesting history. This will make the world real to your players and make it interesting as well.

====Finding the overall theme ==== Do you know what kind of story you want to tell? No, well pick something. Without a theme, or a style or a direction or something to underly your world, it will always seem patched together and badly made. Middle Earth is about duty and history. Marvel comics is about freaks and being misunderstood (Spider-man, the X-Men, Runaways, the Incredible Hulk). DC Comics, by contrast is about morality and godilike mythology (Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, hell practically any A lister in the DC Stable). Dragonlance is about seeing through prejudice and seeing the grey beneath the black and white (Raistlin, The King-Priest of Ishtar, the Kinslayer Wars, The Knights of Takhisis, Paladine as Fizban, Tanis Half-Elven, Lord Soth, Kitiara Uth Matar). Pick something and go with it.

====Making it feel real ====

Add discrepancies and mysteries. Add contrdictions and excpetions. Have several official histories, maybe none of them are true. Add some wierd stuff. Who would have thought that reality TV would become so huge? Who would have expected that computers would leave us working more, not less? Add surprising consequences and mistakes and weird stuff.

Making the players feel the history
Countries don't keep the same border forever. France was carved out of the Roman province of Gaul. And in fact Roman roads are still in use all over Europe. Imperial Egyptian statues and monuments still stand. Ancient Vedic Temples are still in use. Aboriginal art 40,000 years old is still visible on rock walls. The Great Wall of China still stands. Stone Henge still stands. Chernobyl is still abandoned. The Aral Sea, which has dried up from Climate Change, has rusting hulks of ships slowly sinking into the now dry lake bed. Everywhere you go on Earth, there is hsitory.

Add some of this to your world.