World Building for West Marches and Lore 24: January

-

Lore 24

Lore 24 is a worldbuilding challenge similar to Dungeon 23, but instead of working on one dungeon room every day you work on one piece of lore for a campaign setting. The original concept is to create lore everyday. 


Drawing inspiration from this challenge, I plan to do a monthly blog post focused on fleshing out different aspects of the campaign setting I am using for my West Marches game: Strotherhine.


I learned about Lore 24 on the NSR Cauldron discord server, but if you are looking for more information on the challenge check out these two blog posts:

https://spriggans-den.com/2023/12/10/lore-24/

http://gamerblog.twwombat.com/2023/12/welcome-to-lore24.html


The Roots of West Marches World Building


Ben Robbins deserves a lot of credit for creating West Marches and shaping that style of campaign. If you intend to create your own West Marches campaign I highly recommend reading his series of blogs posts and if you are interested in creating your own setting for this type of game then this post specifically is an excellent place to start:

https://arsludi.lamemage.com/index.php/949/west-marches-layers-of-history/


In that post he lays out a strategy that he describes as “Layers of History.” The idea is to build a rough framework for the history of your setting by creating 3-4 “layers” or key phases of history. The goal is for these layers to be concise and focused. Each of these layers should have left some kind of imprint on your world, with parts also built over or destroyed by time.


In addition to these layers Ben also stresses the need for the Warden running this setting to be a “Keeper of Secrets.” The Warden will know more than the players, but it is important that they do not lecture or tell their players this lore, instead it is their job to hide these secrets in all of the nooks and crannies of the region. Despite this the Warden must also keep in mind that West Marches games are specifically focused on player choice. While the hope is that the players will uncover the layers of history you created, they ultimately decide what to uncover and when. 


But that is okay because these layers of history still have a lot of benefits to the Warden. They make improvisation and populating the world easier because they present a consistent logic and framework to base decisions on. These layers serve as inspiration to fill in any gaps you come across, and as you play you will begin to organically flesh out the layers of history you created, and possibly create new ones.


Applying These Lessons & Creating Lore in the Form of Layers


To start I wanted to create some much broader history for the world Stortherhine exists within. I was heavily inspired by the setting in the The Broken Empire book series. I certainly don’t love everything about those books but, while reading the first book I really enjoyed slowly realizing that it was occurring in our own world. 


On top of this I was also inspired by my experiences playing games with modern settings. I always enjoyed being able to quickly map distances on google maps, draw inspiration from real places, and pull names easily from real locations. So the idea is to overlay my West Marches setting on top of a real region in the world, altered by rising sea levels by 50 meters.


Thousands of years in the past the world of my setting is actually our current modern world. Little is known of the people of this time and they are referred to as the “Ancients.” They are long dead, their relics and ruins are our own. 


Nuclear war, and climate change destroys most human life on the planet, it levels most major cities and sets off a series of natural disasters and rapid biological changes across the planet.


Civilization begins to reform creating small villages at a bronze age level of technology, and before long kingdoms.


Powerful god-like beings thrive in the Americas & Australia, causing most of the reformed societies there to collapse or survive by worshiping these beings as actual gods. Meanwhile Africa, Asia, and Europe are united under a single powerful Empire and a state supported Religion.


The game is set in a time period where the Empire has now begun exploring the further reaches of the world, making contact with the Americas and Australia again for the first time in thousands of years.   


This gives me a great place to start, and now that I have a concept that will shape and define the larger world I can start to drill down into the specific layers of history that exist within the region that the game is set in: Strotherhine. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Strotherhine, West Marches or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Cairn 2e

-
Image
The town of Strotherhine  Introduction I have been running a West Marches campaign using the Cairn 2e Playtest since September. There are currently 8 players and 1 warden and we have played a total of 8 game sessions. The entire campaign is organized on a discord server which is also what I have been using to run the games. We use a bot for dice rolling. There is a joint Inkarnate account that is used for mapping the world (the image is the current map the players have created) and we use a discord whiteboard "activity" as a place to make quick drawings for clarification (this activity has recently added the ability to save work so it has become very helpful). When I am running the game I also occasionally use screen share and a lot of screen snips that I post in the discord chat. My players really only need discord open + character information and notes during the game. I really look forward to character keeper, because right now I am hopping between a lot of Google docs in ...
Read more

Diegetic Growth In Strotherhine

-
Image
When I was still in the planning stages for my current campaign I was concerned that some of my players wouldn’t be satisfied with how Cairn approaches character growth. Many of the folks I play tabletop games with seem to relish mapping out a character’s level progression. They enjoy theorycrafting, tinkering with different builds, and min/maxing those choices. I have long found this kind of play tiresome, but in recent years have grown to realize that there isn’t anything wrong with that kind of game, but it's not why I got into TTRPGs. Nonetheless I was worried about how I retain those players' interests, in a game that doesn’t have a rigid structure for growth.  Cairn’s approach to growth is entirely narratively driven. It encourages growth as the result of how the events of the game impacts, shapes, and changes those who experience those events. This is more akin to how a character might change over the course of a book or film. This means that characters are routinely gro...
Read more

At Our Table: Town Projects

-
Image
When I started planning my West Marches campaign I had initially been concerned that the death of a character might result in a player losing interest in the game. So I knew I wanted to set up as many incentives as possible to get players invested in the setting and world. One way I sought to do this was to make sure that characters had as much agency to shape the world as possible. This would hopefully mean that even if a character died, there would still be a meaningful impact from their existence and a sort of legacy or mark left by them.  Finding ways to allow that to happen is relatively easy in a game like Cairn, it has agency and player choice literally written into the rules, but I wanted to take it a step further. I wanted players, not just characters, to feel like they were working toward something that could improve and grow. West Marches games generally have things like lore collecting and collective map making to help facilitate this but I double downed on the concept ...
Read more