Post/Author/DateTime	Post
Woas 03-09-05, 01:39 PM	Howdy-do... Today I was putting to paper/brainstorming/applying some aspects of history of my campaign world. For the most part it is going smothly. Alas, I have run into some problems. So I was wondering, what methods and forms have you, the DMs of the world employeed to formulate the history of your world? I know all about Top-Down/Bottom-Up world building methods. The strengths and weaknesses of both. "Use what you need" etc. Do these same princples apply when developing the history of your world? Let me give some background info: The history that I am working on is very indepth. The reason for the depth of the history is because as maybe some have seen in the Races forum, I am developing a single playable-race world. The single race is humans. Thus, I want lots (as per Luminuos Crayon's suggestion ;)) of history to distinguish the many cultures and peoples that make up the humans of the world. I'll be honest: I really really dislike campaign worlds where history is broken into nicely packaged 'ages' that are exactly 500, 1000 or 2000 years long. :mad: YUCK! I can't stand that. So I have basically been working on a history that only goes back a generation or so. Well as always, thanks for any feedback! - Woas
Darth Syntax 03-09-05, 01:53 PM	[Historian hat] -- I understand your dislike of so called ages with round numbers (they do seem artificial and overly simplistics unless you have a reason that the numbers are so exact, for example every 1,242 years a total solar eclips occurs durring the acendant phase of some plane or magical doo-dad and generaly causes death and badness on the world, for an example of this sort of thing see Nightfall by Azimov) that being said, why do you only want to go back a generator or so? That seems an awfully short time for a well developed history to have emerged especially with a variety of distinct cultures. Here on mundane old earth we have nearly 7,000 years of recorded history (granted the early stuff was a bit dull what with it being mostly merchant records and the like, but then there was Gilgamesh and all was good for the historian) and quite a lot more of unrecorded archaeological history, and thats just counting humans. Anyway, in designing a world history i would take a two front approach to start with, first i would lay out the world as it will appear when the players are gleefully destroying it, and then i would go back and try to piece together how the world got to where it is today. Focus perhaps on migration of people, languages, the rise and fall of kingoms and empires, that sort of thing.For example, where did these many cultures come from, what languages do they speak, are the languages related or not, what is the level of technical development in the marjor cultural areas, what role has religion played on the formation and policies of both major and minor groups, how common is warfare, etc. More to come, most likely. [/]historian hat[/I]
Woas 03-09-05, 01:59 PM	that being said, why do you only want to go back a generator or so? That seems an awfully short time for a well developed history to have emerged especially with a variety of distinct cultures. Oh no, don't get me wrong. What I meant was that currently, I have only worked on that period of time in history. I full intend to go further back. But it's just the method of 'going back' past the 'recent history point' is what I lack, or at least find difficult.
Gargs454 03-09-05, 02:01 PM	Not entirely sure if you are looking for actual ideas, or just how we get them, but I'll tell you how I go about getting my ideas. I generally start with a simple brainstorming session where I cluster my ideas on paper. I'm looking for "What-ifs?" here. "What if Country A is a theocracy?" "What if Country B has outlawed religion?" Then I'll shoot possible stems off of each of these ideas. Once I have a nice cluster going, I try to formulate some kind of order out of all of it. Some ideas may be scrapped, while others might be molded to flow with other ideas. At this point, the clusters are going to be pretty messy and will require me to go to a new list. I'll take the surviving ideas and start to create an outline (yes I know, the ugly "O-word"). The outline is really just a number of small paragraph descriptions as opposed to the type of outline you may have done in history class. I start to describe each of the different regions/cultures/countries etc. in more detail, establishing an identity if you will. I'll start with one and then move on to the next. Naturally, as I am doing this, I am constantly revising. If I note that Region A has developed a deep distrust of Mages, and that Region C is ruled by mages, this leads to an obvious series of conflicts that can be incorporated. All in all, the most important thing for me is to try to develop a one or two sentence tag line for each region/culture/country that you want to develop. If you find this tag line (which should sum up the region nicely) then it becomes easier to expound. If you are actually going to write out the entire history so that your players have something to read, then I would recommend the outline even more. Obviously the outline is not set in stone, but a good outline will help you get around the many writer's blocks that you will otherwise encounter. I hope that this is what you were looking for, but if not, please advise.
aaron3579 03-09-05, 02:15 PM	Patchwork quilt method (aka the John&Paul method): Because I am currently taking 23 (twenty-three) hours, I choose to build my campaign history/geography with a little help from my friends. I say "Hey, Bob, what kind of character are you going to play?" Bob says, "I want to play a dwarven fighter." I say "Great. It's your job to give me a history of your character and a history of the dwarven homeland. Here is your blank spot on the map." To which Bob says "Wow, that's really cool." I award the writer of the best history with an in-game door prize. I judge based on grammatical correctness (I'm a bastard), believability, and creativity. I put the most weight on creativity. After everyone has done their part, it is my job to reconcile the discrepancies and mesh them into a cohesive world history. There are always some blank spots leftover, but it is much easier to fill those in then do the whole thing alone. Players are encouraged to discuss amongst themselves when writing about interaction between various regions. This cuts down on the time it takes me to reconcile everything.
Tusz 03-09-05, 03:25 PM	So, you've thought up the most recent history, but are unsure how to continue backwards? Fits my method perfectly. It's called the "Why?" method. You have an event in the recent past. Why did the people involved act the way they did? Probably because of some earlier event, which you can then create and repeat the method on. Example from my campaign setting: Event: Large empire collapses. Why did it collapse? Because of internal rebellion. Why was there rebellion? Because the people didn't like the empire, and the imperial army was mostly elsewhere. Why were the troops elsewhere? Because blahblahblah. You get the idea.
Morka 03-09-05, 07:51 PM	Use the Roman Empire as an example. In the beginning, the common roman citizen knew there was Rome and her seven hills, Italy, probably Athen and the Egyptians. Not so bad, three different cultures! Then there is the Punic Wars against Carthage. You learn there is a few cultures that are based on trade, and the evil Carthage want the monopole of boat trading. Rome finally wiped Carthage up; it's one less culture, but you learned about a few more. Then Rome conquer the Gaul, and then everything between England and the Midwest. Then the Goths from the north of the Black Sea, hunted down by the Huns, destroy your empire. And the hundreds of roman provinces that were your empire are now independant people, each with his culture.
Woas 03-09-05, 08:05 PM	Use the Roman Empire as an example. :yuck: Nothing personal, seriously. But Romans are the last thing I want. I'm just really tired of them :cool: But I appreciate the thought of the reply. :thumbsup: So a little update/response: Thanks everyone so far for all the feedback. I'm working on doing event chains right now and it has worked out pretty good so far. That is, instead of trying to take a culture and work in events that made it the way it is, I'm working on taking events and deciding how the cultures shaped them. If anyone cares, perhaps I can write some of it up on the boards to show people (probably on the Campaign Workshop boards) how it came out.
Vatras 03-09-05, 09:07 PM	I usually do a rough history line for a country with the hated round numbers :cool: , to fix down historical epochs, and then start to flesh it out with various events. Last but not least I change all the round numbers to some number close by and thats it. I repeat that for the neighbouring countries - discovering mutual past events :) - adding all the dates to a general timeline. When done with the main continent I have a historical table of events, which serves as background to the players (and I can hand each one depending on his origins a modified version of it). I did that only once in the past though, when doing my own world. As we play in the FR now, who have a historical timeline, I have much of the work cut out for me.
Lord Asriel 03-09-05, 10:54 PM	What seems to work for me most of the time is to somehow (use your favourite photo editing program or whatnot) generate a massive world map, of either a single continent or the entire world, depending on how much breadth you want in the world. Then examine this world. Where would cities likely be? Crossroads? Temples? Mining, lumber, trade, etc, and from those, areas of great wealth and prosperity. Think about where various races could have originated from, and give them cities, fortresses, strongholds and the like where it would make sense. Dwarves from the ice caverns to the South? Give them towns of beautiful ice construction which use glaciers as defensive emplacements, go crazy! Think of possible points of contention, the rise and fall of nations, potential present-day conflicts, alliances, ancient war sites, etc. Then connect everything up with roads and add high level details like town ages, populations, race distributions, wealth limits and the rest of the technicial stuff from the DMG (comes in VERY handy to know the max wizard level per town, for example). Perhaps you may want to add notable NPCs, governments and power centres, though don't go too far yet or you could get lost in the fine details (I've done this before and gotten things mixed up while juggling town concepts) So now that you've established the breadth of the world, it's time to go deeper and give everything depth. Now, you certainly won't be able to do the entire world map in great depth in a single sitting, so I'd recommend planning out the few initial sessions in great detail, drawing flavour and concepts for quests, plots, characters and dungeons from the high-level overview. Before you know it, you'll have a world of motivations and plots to draw from, and lots of depth in the locations that count during the session. Should things go awry and the players "run off the rails" into lands uncharted, you'll have the few scraps of high-level information to fly by the seat of your pants from. Hope this helps!
The Great Dugano 03-10-05, 04:12 AM	I like the earlier posted idea of starting with geography and then finding where communities would logically lay; it adds lots of realism to the game and that's where I start too. But to address your problem more specifically, you want really well-developed, concrete cultures, right? Well, when I get to the point where I'm actually adding all the cultural quirks to a kingdom (you know, values, norms, laws, special festivals, etc. -- the stuff that makes it feel real to players) I look at where the kingdom came from originally. How was Human Group A made to be different than Human Group B? Was it that they rose up in different geographical areas, some to the north of the river, some to the south? Or was it that at some point an aristocrat from Human Group A decided that if s/he couldn't rule Group A they would make their own kingdom? Or did a group of ancient adventurers decide that the laws of Group A weren't what they liked? Whatever it was, there was some defining ideology behind making that political boundary. What was it? That, at least to me, creates believable kingdoms. Want an example? In a game I'm running at the moment, the play is based on one island that humans just got to a couple hundred years ago. It was a group of adventurers who hated the place they were from because it was a pretty dark and nasty place. So I created characters for each member of that party and had them start their own kingdoms. Caletlan, the cleric of Ehlonna, made a kingdom that is much more on the line of Native American cultures. Jerrat, the rogue that was always in search of more (benefits, treasure, power), started a fairly standard Medieval England kingdom. Meralla and Mendiv, who were in love and wed shortly after reaching the island, formed Matrimar, a society based around marriage and complementary pairs. Ralewan, the wizard brother of Jerrat, made his school neutral in political matters because he knew his brother would manipulate their relationship for more power. Anyways, from that point I was able to create a fairly long-ranging history regarding that party coming together and their exploits, and left anything before that out since the players wouldn't know anything about it a few hundred years after the fact. P.S. Don't be afraid of those round numbers. I hate them too because they are really unrealistic, but I've found that players remember more of the important details if the numbers surrounding those details are easy. Peace
maximusprime 03-10-05, 07:54 AM	I'll shaer what I've done with my current home grown: I took as mnay ideas from my older games frmo many years gone, and I packaged them into a bit of history to use as bench marks. You don't have to take them as they were, but you knock off your old stuff, and say "what if this happened instead" and you get a lot of good ideas. The other thing you can do is create a "known" history. This can be a series of events spread out through a more recent time, and have them focus on the region that you will be starting in. Then as you expand out, you can come up with more. make sure you take notes and remeber what you say on the fly. The best part of the known history is that it doesn't have to be true...it can be all lies if you decide you like other stuff better. After all, history is fluid in how it is precieved, and there is a lot to that idea that lends itself well to campaigns. I'd say first, create soem geography, after all, that determines everything. If the noly inhabitable land is land locked then you won't have a sea faring people, and so on. It will also determine the the lifestyle of the people...do they build houses out of wood, or clay brick, or do they just have teepees, or what? if you think of your feel, then you can create that place first. Oh, its also good to knwo where the world came from. If its magical in nature, then boom, there's probably gonna be a lot of magic orriented events. But whatever you do, don;t get bogged down with too much detail :P