Worldbuilding - tell me about your world

[Shades of Eternity]

I love world-building

Wolfgang Baur on Worldbuilding: Sly Flourish Wolfgang Baur on Worldbuilding: Sly Flourish
Looking Back on Dungeon World Fronts: Sly Flourish Looking Back on Dungeon World Fronts: Sly Flourish
Top Tips from a Sample of 4,000 Dungeon Masters: Sly Flourish Top Tips from a Sample of 4,000 Dungeon Masters: Sly Flourish

besides an excuse to post the following blog entries on worldbuilding, I'd like you to tell me the three most interesting things about a world you build.

It can be as small as your gaming group, or it could be a published product that sells a ton, but I'm interested in seeing what you consider makes your world that awesome.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

My current homebrew realm of Zuur:

1 - It is a world of earthmotes. Some are the size of a studio apartment, others run for miles.

2- There is no moon.

3 - There are no horses (or centaurs or cows, for that matter), so beasts of burden are replaced with clockwork automatons.

besides an excuse to post the following blog entries on worldbuilding, I'd like you to tell me the three most interesting things about a world you build.

 

[prabe]

On Erkonin

1 - There are no gods, as the result of what can best be called an accident.

2 - In the absence of gods, the fey nobility (which are organized and work much differently from anywhere else that I've seen) have increased in power almost to the point of godhood, but without a key spark.

3 - As a result of the ... accident, the planar boundaries are more porous than before.

 

[pogre]

My world Building always starts small and expands with the length of the campaign. Some things that have emerged so far:

1. Humanoids do not have a fixed alignment, only tendencies. Orcs for example have proven to be pretty honorable thus far.

2. There are different styles of magic in different areas of the world. The players just learned that most of the magic in a land based on Ancient Egypt is based on alchemy.

3. Falling stars and the meteorites that reach the world are almost always laden with a message from a deity.

 

[Aldarc]

My current homebrew realm of Zuur:
3 - There are no horses (or centaurs or cows, for that matter), so beasts of burden are replaced with clockwork automatons.

Kinda reminds me of Tékumel, where the main beasts of burden are slow, lumbering beasts that lack the advantages of horses for transport, trade, warfare, and communication.

 

[Retreater]

A thousand years ago the Immortals entered the world. About half of them sought to spread law and order, to conquer and subjugate the world - these became the Lawful aasimar, who founded the vast Grand Sultanate of the western continent. The other half sought to experience the pleasures of this new world, consuming the natural forces - these became the Chaotic tieflings, who founded the magocracy of Vaal Turineth of the eastern continent.

South of Vaal Turineth, there are other nations. Alceyon is the forested land of elves – where the high elves are transcending from the physical world, the cutthroat wood elves are fighting off excursions of the other races, and an undead giant warlord known as the Horned King seeks to conquer all. Just south of that is the Principalities of the Eight, a collection of Halfling city-states that rule eight rivers and a vast trading network throughout the eastern continent. Below that is the Middle Empire, the strongest bastion of mankind, ruled by an Empress who believes herself divinely chosen. The Dwarven Holds form a barrier between the lands of man and the Ogre Kingdoms, while the Goliath Steppes provide an unofficial homeland to the half-giants.
South of the Grand Sultanate are the Djinn States, home to the elemental wizards and the transitory City of Brass, which has been rooted in this land from the Elemental Planes for a generation.

Between the eastern and western continents is a vast sea, where piracy and naval warfare is common. The nations are taking sides – either with the Sultan or the Prince of Vaal Turineth. The defiling magic of the tieflings is also creating a new problem: the growth of Chaos. Chaos is a spreading wasteland that is encroaching into the lands of the Sultan, Goliath Steppes, and Ogre Kingdoms. This is the main impetus of the Sultan’s open hostilities against their fallen brethren.

Currently, I have two campaigns in this world. The first just drove off the Horned King and proceeded south to the Middle Empire, where they are getting embroiled in a battle against a successor state known as the Dominion – which may be falling to undead influence. The second is in the Dwarven Holds, trying to stop a giant incursion while attempting to locate an elemental wizard to restore balance in the City of Brass, which is being overwhelmed by different elemental planar factions.

 

[John Dallman]

1 - There are no gods, as the result of what can best be called an accident.

Would that have been an adventurer-related accident, perchance?

 

[prabe]

Would that have been an adventurer-related accident, perchance?

Yes, but not adventurers from Erkonin. It happened ~1,000 years before the campaigns I'm running. I'm being vague because I have a party that's kinda interested in this and I don't know for certain that they don't come by here.

 

[Celebrim]

I had no desire to make my setting publishable or unique. It's too much work to really fill in all the details of the world for the purpose of gaming, much less publish it. It's purpose was to accommodate any published material or home-brew material I wanted to include in a framework that I felt made sense. Thus, it's definitely not a trope world where a small number of key ideas sell the world, but a more traditional kitchen sink environment where I've really only thrown a few things out of the kitchen sink (notably orcs). Rather than being defined by its tropes, I'd like to think the world of Korrel is defined by its coherence.

1) It's an intensely animistic world were small spirits dwell in almost every environment. It is the world of Grimm's Fairy tales, where things can go bump in the night, fairies live in garden and wood, fairy godmothers are real, princes can be turned into frogs, and third sons of millers can inherit kingdoms.

2) It's a world of deep and frightening mystery, where ancient half-forgotten civilizations lie hidden in taboo regions, secrets man was not meant to know are hidden in lost tomes, and experimental magic threatens the health and sanity of anyone that fails to respect it. It's a world of strange radiations, mad scientists, and things beyond comprehension that see people as mere food.

3) It's a world of deep historical grounding, where social and government structures don't mimic those of the modern world, where race, ethnicity and class matter intensely to most people, where there are old wounds and grudges between peoples, and cultures rather alien to mainstream Western thinking thrive. Indeed, if anything, it's a world where things are rather more diverse than they ever were in reality, because instead of one race of people (humanity), or a bunch of Star Trek aliens as humans with bumps on their forehead, you have seven different races each with their own distinctive biology and emotional framework. It's a world where superstitions are mostly true, ritual has physical power, and Plato's ideas can become reified in his metaphorical cave and come off his shadowed wall in a very real way.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I'd like you to tell me the three most interesting things about a world you build.

In a post Apocalyptic setting:
1: Elves who are part plant
2: Psionic Dwarves in mechanical bodies (tweaked Warforged reskin)
3: Council of Trees (awakened trees, all with Spellcaster- mostly Druidic- levels)