This is doable, even if you don't know what came before and what's around, if you visualize this as living on a river. People lived on the banks of the Nile for millennia without too much thought about where the river came from. they just knew it flooded every year and if it didn't they died. Similarly, you may know that there are all these ruins around, suitable for bandits and other treasure-hunters, without a very clear picture of who built the ruins, when, why, etc.
>Spending eight months detailing Lunar-Uz brothel architecture in
>pre-conquest Tarsh is wasted if your Praxian campaign lasts two sessions
>and then becomes a Babylon 5-CoC crossover cause all this detail is just
>too weird man.
You should, however, challenge players. It's like teaching--you have to get players/students to reach a bit, but not so much that feel incompetent. This makes running a group of players with different experience levels *very* difficult. Accordingly, you should have some in-game methods of assigning characters suitable for the player. If there are no naive farm boys in your world, what is the newbie going to play? An amnesiac, possibly, or just a foreigner.
What I'm saying wrt world design is that it runs backwards and forwards: backwards from the end result you want to achieve and forwards from your first principles. You try to make the ends meet in the middle, like the Chunnel. If the ends don't meet, the campaign will be stuck in a chalk cave under a whole lot of sea water.
>4. Demi-Birds For Courses.
>
>Consciously choose your subgenre.
>***How I Became the Real Argrath and freed my
>homeland from the Lunar *spit* yoke? Each of these campaign types and
>playing styles require developing very different types of background.
And again there are some less-used situations which cry out for gaming. Your world doesn't have to have a big empire, evil or otherwise. It could involve two tribal peoples bumping into one another (cf. early medieval Germans v. Slavs, ancient Aryans v. Dravidians, pre-Shaka Bantus v. everybody else). It could involve two republics, or confederations of city-states, or a far-flung trading monopoly.
>5. Eight Uses For Trollkin Urine.
>
>Keep your vision broad, but love the fiddly bits.
These are good for challenging players. "What do the Lunars DO with all that sticklepick? Bathe in it?"
>7. Ordinary People, Ordinary Lives.
>a) The myths, rituals and beliefs that impinge on the everyday life of your
>chosen group. Creation myths, eschatology.
This requires a familiarity with world religions which few people have. Also, it can't be found ready-made for your particular vision. Some variables to think about:
I) Do the gods act within history? yes or no Most gods before the Hebrew one did not, at least not in the way that YHWH sent the Babylonians to chastise his people. Rather, they interacted with other gods in the godtime, and we humans succeeded or failed in our attempts to emulate them.
II) What are the socially-acceptable ways of approaching the gods? bargaining, devotion, taking for granted, meditation/withdrawal, hierarchical, familial, etc. There doesn't have to be a single answer for all times and places; if you look at just the ways people have interacted with YHWH (see, e.g., K. Armstrong, A History of God), you'll see all of those and more. This variable affects, inter alia, the strength of the priesthood, the moral effect of religion, and through them the structure of society.
III) Is there a belief in the afterlife, and if so, what is it like?
IV) Is the religion world-directed or otherworldly? (highly correlated with
III)
>b) The everyday lives of ordinary people.
What's to know? We know there are bars everywhere, and a magic shop in every city, and some kind of king guy and lots of bearded dudes with major mojo and kewl robes. Obviously someone out there somewhere in the great magic-carpet-flyover area must be raising crops and herds and so on, but *really* it's all so dreary.
That actually isn't intended entirely facetiously, as depending on social class a person might be totally ignorant of the mechanisms which make it possible for one to be an idle parasite.
Note to Gian: I have over 20 years experience in world building. But thanks for asking.
End of The Glorantha Digest V7 #330
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