That carved out a vast labyrinth of tunnels beneath the plains, accessible through occasional sinkholes where the roof of the tunnels caved in.
And, because it was a fantasy world, somebody opened a portal to Hell in the caves. The heat differential caused permanent stationary storms to form over each sinkhole on the plain.
So there was a vast flat grassy plain dotted with eternal storms, with forested mountains rising on one side and steep limestone cliffs dropping into the sea on the other.
And a whole underground ecosystem linked to Hell lurking beneath the surface.
I never actually drew that particular map, but I did go through about five-seven years of mappery before I stopped running games that needed complex pre-made worlds.
It was part of a general move toward campaigns which needed less away-from-table prep and were more responsive to player input: instead of the players being surprised by what I'd carefully planned, now we're all surprised by what we come up with together during play.
But I had a LOT of fun with worldbuilding, and I may return to it in a lesser capacity in the future if/when my gaming situation changes again.
The middle one is closer to how I'd be designing maps in the future; the first one is a bit too gimmicky for its own good while the third is defined by its medium (D&D 4e) more than by me.
Well, early on in my GMing I'd make copious notes about all the major places and NPCs, statting up the significant players and coming up with detailed setting notes like laws and politics for each area.
Then my players would wander through the world discovering the things I'd made and interacting with them.
These days we use systems that are a lot looser. My prep is largely the first session of the game, where we all sit down and brainstorm general ideas about the world and specific ideas about our situation together.
Some major NPCs and organisations are loosely defined during the prep session, but many of them are invented spontaneously during play; prep is about creating a framework to fill in as we go.
For example: in our current campaign, one of our PCs had been involved with a cult when he was younger. So we knew there was a cult from the very beginning, but that was about it.
Later on we learned that it was called the Black Raven Cult (someone asked what it was called, so we had to give it a name), and that it had a lot of splinter groups (we had adventures with than one group of cultists using the same name but obviously not working together).
Then we did a flashback session, because we thought it would be fun: the young PC's initiation into the cult. And the other two players rolled up other cult initiates so they could be part of the flashback too.
From that we learned more about the cult, and those two new cult initiates were interesting enough that we decided they grew up to become major NPC antagonists in the modern-day campaign.
I come up with cool, dramatic problems and situations, and awesome setpieces.
Like, for our current adventure:
I did a little prep with how to describe their new headquarters and how they'd be greeted when they arrived.
Then I needed a new mission to give them.
I wanted it to help establish the new status quo, since the world has recently gotten very Weird while they were away in space, and I wanted it to take place locally to help them get a feel of their new HQ's location.
Their HQ is in Hollywood, and part of the world's newfound Weirdness involved most electric infrastructure going fzzt a few months ago.
So, I decided that Hollywood's new power station was having trouble and they were gonna be sent to troubleshoot it.
...Hollywood's new power station is a studio sound stage built like the engine room of the Enterprise from Star Trek, which actually works and provides power because of how Weird the world is now. But something's going wrong and it's not working too well anymore.
I thought about how to describe the set, and how to explain the problem without defining it too narrowly.
At the start of the session we used the Mission Briefing rules found here, so each player got to invent something their organisation's intel said would be a problem they might run into on the mission, and a skill that might be necessary to succeed on the mission.
And when we finally got onto the set (after running into a couple of the problems from the mission briefing), we used the Brainstorm mechanics in the same document: the PCs investigated and discovered facts which they then synthesised to figure out what was going on: the engine only works when the actors are in character, and William Shatner was collaborating with a psychic being to make them break character and stop the engine.
@user507974 I'm pretty much the only person in the group with much/any experience running games, much less worldbuilding for RPGs (only one other player has really built and run a world before, until we recently got a new player with more background as a GM).
We play a lot of one-shot games, and our main ongoing campaign is divided into short episodes like a TV show with individual plot-of-the-week stories that add together to become a season arc.
I know a lot of games that are only once a month. It works out okay for them.
My group is actually more of "All my friends know they can come by any Saturday and we'll hang out," and most of the people who show up want to play RPGs so that's what we do most weeks.
Like, 3.5 was awful at scaling encounters. D&D 4e did much better, but had a hard floor on certain types of encounters and scaling up increased runtime dramatically.
Fate, on the other hand, scales dynamically and responsively by escalating the GM's side of the fate point economy in proportion to the players at the table.
And games like Roll for Shoes and Great Ork Gods just don't care.
I ran a nine-player game of RFS last year. Half of the players were brand-new to RPGs, and none of them had played RFS before ever.
But that's the closest I get to cooking with meat; for my family's dinners I cook basically vegan-plus-fish, as that's the best intersection of everyone's health needs and dietary preferences.
And lately most of my meals are based on what you can put in a cast-iron skillet.
Been doing a lot of hashes and stir-fries.
(The trick to a good stir-fried tofu is not draining it so much as broiling it for a little while.)
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Equal parts dry rolled oats, chunky peanut butter, and milk powder, and a bit less honey (ie, if everything else is 1/2 cup, honey is 1/3 cup). Mix it all together.
Make balls of the mixture roughly 1 tablespoon each, and roll them in more dry rolled oats so you can pick them up without getting your fingers sticky.
Fry up hashed potato, diced string beans, and tuna with onion and garlic, adding ginger, soy, brown sugar, and Tabasco to taste. Blanch chopped kale on top at the end, serve on quinoa.
Dice and broil tofu until it's just barely turning brown on the corners. Fry in a pan with onion, garlic, and veggies of choice, slowly adding a mixture of Worcestershire, honey, apple cider vinegar, and ginger over the cooking time. Mix in toasted walnuts and serve with steamed sweet potato on brown rice.
(I like using a steamer plate on top of the rice cooker.)
Sautée diced bell pepper with onion and garlic (are you noticing a theme?), then add a mixture of apple cider vinegar, honey, and Tabasco. Simmer until it becomes a lovely relish for putting on hot dogs or other foods.
last night i just spontaneously ended up eating dinner with a friend/neighbor and i just ran back home and prepped a light onion, garlic, and mushroom topping
Not a stir-fry: cut tofu into thin wide strips and place on a bed of large-chunked veggies in a baking dish. Drizzle with something like this. Bake.
Also not a stir-fry: mash garbanzo beans (chickpeas) with a potato masher. Add tuna, diced pickle, paprika, red pepper, turmeric, garlic salt, lightly sautéed onion. Mix in (hot) mustard, (organic) ketchup, and lemon juice until it sticks together. Use as a sandwich spread.
Drain and mash leftover strew. Mix with oats and egg (or sticky-like-egg substitute) until it can be made into patties. Fry your stewburgers.
> Cranteade. Mix ingredients to taste. cranberry juice (not punch) lemon, lime, calamansi, or similar juice ginger salabat punch powder (you'll probably have to fudge this one; it's ginger powder with a little bit of cayenne pepper, lemon, and sugar) hot tea (I like using red herbal teas, like Celestial Seasonings' Red Zinger) carbonated water brown sugar until it's not too strong for your guests
(Also called the Pink Ranger.)
Lately I've been using a mix of black and wildberry tea; wildberry is sweet enough that I don't need to add any sugar.
@nitsua60 The difference between a Cleric and a Warlock is whether your patron wouldn't channel enough power through you to make you explode if it was convenient.
just about to end the night. Wrestling with Cauchy sequences, and I'm going to let some other parts of my brain work on it while some parts take a break =)
@nitsua60 ah. wondering what'll happen to the question about clerics vs. warlocks. :p (it'll be interesting to see the answer, especially in light of Jherala)
I'm definitely interested in the cleric vs. warlock question (I favor keeping them together, in hopes of developing a single useful taxonomic test, sort of like regex golf but with power level.)
Unrelated: what do you do when you, as the GM, get tired of a campaign while your players are still into it? It's a large enough multiverse that theoretically almost any idea in a fantasy-adjacent genre could be worked in, and yet when I'm reading/watching something and get excited and start thinking of how that item/theme/character/location would work in an RPG, as soon as I remember that I could/should put it towards this campaign I get un-excited.
I would say it's that I'd rather be playing adventures than writing them, which is probably a good chunk of it, but I recently started playing in 3 different DND games and was plenty happy to do character development (including a fair amount of world-building) for those.
But I guess that's a lot less pressure than writing an adventure that's fun for the whole group. Especially since they're very much a "So what happens next?" looks expectantly kinda group so the GM's primarily responsible for driving the story forward.
@BESW I'd be more comfortable with that if I wasn't trying to bring things to some kind of satisfying conclusion before 2 of the 5 of us move away. But again, that pressure is probably part of the problem.
@BESW What's the relevant feature of Dungeon World? I'm not familiar.
Dungeon World does two things that seem relephant.
First, it cues specific moments in the narrative when players are asked to say what happens next. It's not an open-ended question, though, it's narrowly defined enough that people don't get choice paralysis.
Second, it does the same thing for the GM: the system lists the things that the GM can do, and triggers for when the GM is allowed to do them. This, again, offers a supporting structure to narrative creativity which can mitigate burnout.
For example, if a cleric casts a spell and rolls poorly but not horribly, the player chooses one thing from a list of possible drawbacks.
These include losing the spell or taking a penalty to further spell rolls, but it could instead be "You draw unwelcome attention or put yourself in a spot. The GM will tell you how."
So when the player fails a roll, the GM asks the player what happens because of it, and the player might say "I get into some trouble, but I want you to tell me exactly what it is."
And then the GM has a list of moves that he draws on to decide what that is.
Like, "put the player in a spot" means "A spot is someplace where a character needs to make tough choices. Put them, or something they care about, in the path of destruction. The harder the choice, the tougher the spot."
So there's still a lot of creativity, but it's very carefully guided because the player has asked the GM specifically to give them a tough choice they have to make.
This would reduce your creative overhead by giving you structure and prompting the players to make choices they're normally leaving to you.
And when they do turn to you and say "What happens next?" there's a list of moves for the GM to make in response, so you can glance at the list and tailor it to the situation instead of having to come up with something from scratch.
That does sound like a good time, though I'm not sure it would have much effect on other games, unfortunately. I've brought up the question of "y'know... you guys can also make things happen and make things appear in the game world and stuff..." and the response was "nah, participationism sounds good"
Although more than one has expressed interest in GMing and one has done so a few times
Last night in our Fate game, while we were all captured in the brig, @doppelgreener compelled the antagonist (William Shatner) to arrive and reveal his evil plan through dramatic monologue.
Overall, I guess it probably is just burnout, so I should 1) scale back my expectations for how much can happen before the end of the summer (spent several weeks on the first adventure and have been trying to zoom out and scale back ever since; a year later, we're about halfway through what I initially thought of as the prologue) to the point where I can 2) ask others to GM more
(Turns out, Shatner is making an actual working Enterprise which he will use to force TV producers to make a Star Trek reality show starring himself as captain of an actual starship.)
So. Current, unrefined thoughts. Each port has a small table of how much it values all items. For simplicity, have a generic table with maybe even random variations. > Fuel 2 > Food 4 > Trade goods 2
@Shalvenay I'm adapting Sunless Sea into Fate. A major component is a trading game, bringing goods from port to port.
@Shalvenay It could change over time if needed - this isn't a pre-programmed computer game, after all. And I'm not concerned with them going back and forth.
@BESW Well, an example that recently came up in the game was a prisoner (not quite, but doesn't matter right now) the party wanted to talk to. They decided they will break them out, but the idea of simply buying them out was also brought up.
So, like a brainstorm or a conflict, I imagine trading would start with identifying the problem that triggers the mechanic: "We need a new flux deflector before the ship blows up" or "The Abbess of the Hand won't tell us where to find a cure for lycanthropy unless we get her a flock of blue sheep" or "We owe the Stone Prince a favour and he wants us to establish trade between his city and the spider-silk weavers of Far Genosha."
That's the point of tracking fuel and supplies, too: it forces the party to stop along the way to replenish them one way or another, not just zip from destination to destination. Which offers more opportunities for stuff to happen.
You have an economic stress track, with consequences. It gets filled in as you go along. Economic stress and consequences go away primarily through trading, though you might also be able to get rewards or convince people to clear debts for you.
What I'm after is... "We're at Island A. We need to get to Island B. On the way, we'll have to stop at Island C to refuel somehow. And if we take a detour to Island D, we could sell them the goods we have, which'll make our lives easier." Which is all to make the party go to all those islands along the way, and have stories happen there. Which is different from Firefly (at least in the show) which didn't have the planning aspect.
@BESW I had started with something like that. But... stress on the track does not translate well to goods in the cargo hold, or lack thereof.
@BESW Well... Yes. It's like "hit point damage" vs "broken arm".
If Fate easily accommodated this, I wouldn't be coming for advice here :)
I think I can point to same Diaspora SRD as an abstract option, for those who prefer that. But for both my game and the post I'm writing, I want something more solid.
Economic stress is inflicted when you buy stuff or otherwise lose money/capital. Stress and consequences don't go away on their own, you have to gain money/capital to do that.
The ship lands at a port which Has wool. They take a point of economic stress to acquire A hold full of wool. (This might require some convincing rolls if, for example, there's hostility between the wool merchants and anyone the party is known to associate with, but is otherwise just role-played.)
They may also take economic stress to begin recovering from a ship consequence like Tattered sails while they're in port.
Then they set sail again, and take a detour to stop by a port that Needs wool.
Provided they don't get robbed by pirates, or the wool catches fire, or anything like that, upon reaching the port which Needs wool they can clear their economic stress track and empty their hold.
(This may require rolls again if circumstances conspire to make the trade more difficult.)
However, the GM might offer a fate point to say that they were misinformed about the port's need for wool, or that trade agreements have changed, or the like.
Economic stress is a tool for solving problems, and running out of it creates problems. Trading is the way to regain use of that tool.
Trading itself involves moving goods from a place which has them to a place which wants them.
Aspects representing goods imply problems like overfull holds, awkward cargo (live cattle, anyone?), being a target for pirates, etc.
Drama arises when goods, or the politics of people who want/need goods, get complicated.
Successfully trading especially rare or difficult goods, or trading goods while your economic track is already empty, gives you extra wealth-related aspects.
Grrrr, weapons-rules wonkiness in Pathfinder. You're an update of 3.5e D&D, you should have improvements over it such as explaining why in the world a cold iron point on a wooden spear shaft and a steel point on a whipwood shaft both work, but a cold iron point on a whipwood shaft doesn't.
(In a fashion more involved and/or reasonable than "If you make a suit of armor or a weapon out of more than one special material, you get the benefit of only the most prevalent material".)
@GuidingLight Lord Gareth will have worlds to say about how they were claiming to fix all of D&D 3.5e's problems, and then yelled playtesters out of the forums who were saying the very same problems had only been exacerbated.
For dnd5's call lighting spell it indicates a point in air 100 feet up. Then it states (for example in a room that can’t accommodate the cloud). But the cloud itself is only 10 feet tall, is the 100 feet high a must or can I cast it in let's say a warehouse that can accommodate a cloud?
Slightly longer explanation:The spell fails if you can’t see a point of air where the cloud could appear (for example in a room that can’t accommodate the cloud).
@Magician I think @BESW's description sounds pretty good in Fate terms. This isn't too far from how trading with the natives works in Colonization.
In that context, the thing that prevents you from profiting too much from reliable trade routes is that villages (especially small ones) tend to lose their "Need" aspect as soon as you bring them some, to be replaced with another one.
If you trade with your home port in Europe, that's lower-risk, lower-reward, much more reliable, but offered price of any given good will drop over transactions and recover over time, so you need to diversify more the more you're trading at once.
The first model is more dynamic, less bookkeeping, and more story-driven; the second (or at least including the second as an option for larger ports with ongoing needs) is more detailed but more bookkeeping.
Also, I haven't played Sunless Sea, but if it's similar to Fallen London I don't see a problem with treating the trade goods like jade and pearls as fungible, interchangeable currency - until you want to make a Thing of it, by ruling that some port is at odds with the Gracious Widow's empire and won't accept their jade in payment. Cue story!
@Magician On the other hand, it sounds like travel in your game is dangerous enough that you wouldn't need any of the 3 obstacles above to keep it from being too easy.
On an unrelated note, I think this question has been edited to make it a single question and could be reopened.
