Players designing the world

[Mikaze]

MY PLAYERS STAY OUT

Possibly heading into wild territory soon after the current campaign I'm running wraps up, and I'm wondering if anyone has had any experience with this sort of thing.

The long-story-short bare-bones premise:

The players will create high level characters from a conventional fantasy world(Golarion most likely in this case) for a short plane-hopping adventure.

This adventure ends with them stranded and plane-locked on a lush, vibrant-with-life planet with no sapient races.

The players and the few NPCs that wind up stranded with them will come into contact with artifacts called lifewells, composed of proto-organic matter and souls waiting to be born. Each character will bond with at least two wells. From each well they can craft and create a new sapient race using a set of mechanical guidelines* that still grants them as much creative freedom as they can reasonably get. If they want to create Twi'leks, Tau, or Thri-Kreen, it would be possible. They can pick the general alignment tendencies and craft their culture as they guide their newborn races, but their destiny will be their own eventually.

The lifewells also allow them to craft the biosphere of the surrounding area as they see fit.

After all is said and done, the players will be saying goodbye to those PCs forever(as they have been told ahead of time). Fastforward at least 20,000 years later.

The races they've created have multiplied and spread out over the planet. The old PCs are now minor ancestral gods to their child races along with whatever other gods they brought with them. The players can pick what their domains and general tenets would be. The child races' cultures will have evolved and adapted with their neighbors over time. There are no standard D&D races, only those that the players created.

At some point during this, probably at the end, the players are informed that if they wish, that planet and its new player races will be their next campaign setting for a while.

I've heard tell of communal world building with everyone being in the know, but I'm thinking I'm going to try and keep this IC as much as possible, with the payoff at the end.

Has anyone tried anything similar to this? If so, how did it turn out? What would you have done different, if anything?



*Most likely pulling from and adapting the Eidolon building guidelines from Pathfinder Advanced Player's Guide, along with other sources.

 

[FreeXenon]

Sounds Kewlzors! Sign me up! =)

I participated in a purely narrative based game here on ENWorld called Ever Dream. It was high level and we were playing gods, so we did not get into the mechanics. It was a lot of fun. If the players have some say in the historical evolution and interaction of the sentient races it will be quite interesting and may will lead to some really surprising results.

I would love this sort of game! =) Please tell me you are on Wisconsin! =)

Good luck with this and please do tell us what was the results, especially for the sentient races.

 

[FreeXenon]

Since the players are going to have great say over the races, you may want to have the flora and fauna kind of mapped out, since that may have a great impact on what they want for races.

A world with heavy rain forests and a lot of dinosaurs may inspire different races than one that is mostly mountains and water with man eating plants.

Just a thought. =)

 

[Wednesday Boy]

Brilliant idea!

I think it would be interesting if you added characteristics of the PCs into the races that they created as if part of their essence was subconsciously instilled into their creations. So if a PC created a race of diligent, winged fish-people and throughout the short plane-hopping adventure that PC was always sampling planar delicacies, I might add a penchant for eating to those fish-people.

I'd also add that you should feel free to change elements (though not necessarily drastically) of what is created to better suit the story you're going to present to the players.

Good luck and let us know how it turns out!

 

[Mercurius]

Great idea and it sounds like it could work around the inherent problem in collaborative world building, which is that the sense of mystery and wonder can be hurt if everyone knows what's going on. But 20,000 years is a long time so you can really build a lot with that.

You might want to check out Dawn of Worlds, with a free pdf here. (the link is to the PDF itself, so if you don't want to download it don't click on it). That's not exactly what you are doing but it might be a good resource.

One possible problem I see you running into is if a player creates, well, a stupid race - either because they aren't taking it seriously or because they're just not very good at that sort of thing. But the 20,000 years gives you a long time to iron out any of these sorts of "wrinkles," so if you don't want katana-clawed lobster-tigers you can have them evolve out of that, or even go extinct (that might an interesting element to throw in).

Anyhow, please keep us updated. I'm intrigued!

 

[Mikaze]

Sounds Kewlzors! Sign me up! =)

I participated in a purely narrative based game here on ENWorld called Ever Dream. It was high level and we were playing gods, so we did not get into the mechanics. It was a lot of fun. If the players have some say in the historical evolution and interaction of the sentient races it will be quite interesting and may will lead to some really surprising results.

I would love this sort of game! =) Please tell me you are on Wisconsin! =)

Good luck with this and please do tell us what was the results, especially for the sentient races.

I'm quite a ways further South, sorry!

And thanks! I'm going to be looking into Ever Dream to see how it played out. It may be a while when(and if) this gets run since we've still got a way to go in our current campaign, but if it takes off I'll definitely update.

Since the players are going to have great say over the races, you may want to have the flora and fauna kind of mapped out, since that may have a great impact on what they want for races.

A world with heavy rain forests and a lot of dinosaurs may inspire different races than one that is mostly mountains and water with man eating plants.

Just a thought. =)

Yeah, I'm going to try and provide an analogue for as many real Earth-type climates as I can, along with some completely fantastic/alien options, both within and outside the biosphere shaping range of those wells. They'll likely have a map of sorts that tells them where each well is and what sort of environment it's located in, so players with specific tastes might be inclined to head in those directions.

I'm really thinking of going the Athas route and avoiding having exact representatives of Earth wildlife. Rough analogues maybe, but I'm thinking about steering towards more alien and exotic species.

That reminds me that this also means there would be no intelligent creatures like harpies, centaurs, dragons, medusae...

Perhaps each lifewell-born race is going to come with a number of "monstrous" offshoots, both malign and benign?

Fey might show up spontaneously once the planet becomes properly inhabited, but they'll be shaped by the wildlife already present. So a dryad on this planet would look entirely different from what one might expect on a standard world.

Brilliant idea!

I think it would be interesting if you added characteristics of the PCs into the races that they created as if part of their essence was subconsciously instilled into their creations. So if a PC created a race of diligent, winged fish-people and throughout the short plane-hopping adventure that PC was always sampling planar delicacies, I might add a penchant for eating to those fish-people.

I'd also add that you should feel free to change elements (though not necessarily drastically) of what is created to better suit the story you're going to present to the players.

Good luck and let us know how it turns out!

That's definitely in the plan! The PCs are going to be an influence on their races both consciously and unconsciously. Not all are going to cleave to type, but there will definitely be stereotypes attributed to each race stemming from their roots and early centuries.

Great idea and it sounds like it could work around the inherent problem in collaborative world building, which is that the sense of mystery and wonder can be hurt if everyone knows what's going on. But 20,000 years is a long time so you can really build a lot with that.

You might want to check out Dawn of Worlds, with a free pdf here. (the link is to the PDF itself, so if you don't want to download it don't click on it). That's not exactly what you are doing but it might be a good resource.

One possible problem I see you running into is if a player creates, well, a stupid race - either because they aren't taking it seriously or because they're just not very good at that sort of thing. But the 20,000 years gives you a long time to iron out any of these sorts of "wrinkles," so if you don't want katana-clawed lobster-tigers you can have them evolve out of that, or even go extinct (that might an interesting element to throw in).

Anyhow, please keep us updated. I'm intrigued!

Thanks for the link! The more resources to pull from the better, I always say.

And yeah, goofy races are my big worry at this point.

One the one hand I don't want to stifle their creativity.

On the other hand: Googly-eyed hamburger people.

I don't think it will be a huge issue if they all buy into it early on. I'll know for certain once we start if any of the PC's are "whimsically wacky". Or a gnome. Then I'll really have to start worrying about laying down some gentle guidelines. I'd really rather not have to have them wiped out later, for the player's sake.

Although....if someone were to create the Spathi....I don't think I'd have the heart to object.

Thanks for the links guys. I'll definitely keep you updated if this takes off.

 

[steenan]

The general idea is great.

The only part I don't like is the time period you fast-forward through. 20000 years is extremely long. It's hard to even imagine what could happen in such a long time - the world would bear no discernible traces of what players did in the beginning.
I suggest shortening it to 1-3 thousand years. That's a time period for which we have reasonably complete historical data on evolution of societies and political powers. It's long enough to place various important events on the way, but short enough to keep what players did in the initial game meaningful.

 

[Chrono22]

Well, I encourage this as much as possible in my games. It helps the player get attached to/care about what happens in the world.
In one of my current games (planescape/3.5 multiverse) a player invented the plane of his character's origin.
Basically it's a pocket plane that was created by a powerful psionic being 500 years ago. It's inverted (like the inside of a sphere), and its internal circumference is ringed by large amounts of farmland. Beyond that are two locked freshwater sea rings (to the north and south). At the poles are two massive cities, each with an extraordinarily tall tower. The tops of the two towers come close, but do not meet near the center of the plane. Suspended between them is a massive disk- one side illuminated, one dark. It revolves, casting light upon the rest of the plane and imitates day/night. Time on the plane is variable, with time passing at 1/10th normal speed (relative to the prime) near the farmlands, and 10xs the normal speed in the cities. This means that to a viewer on one of the poles, night and day cycle once every 15 or so minutes. This doesn't bother people much, though, since about an equal amount of light reaches the poles during day or night.
The plane's creator merged his mental powers with the plane itself- he's a kind of construct, or unliving god, and uses his mental powers to protect the stability of the plane and its operations. The occupants of the plane vary, but are mostly humans or human-like beings such as Elans. Warforged aren't uncommon, and many humans have mechanical-psionic augments. Conversely, some of the stranger warforged have human augments
Anyway... it's kind of fun having a place the pc can fall back on, and it's a pretty exotic and unusual addition to the cosmology of the planes, so I thought I'd share.