How do you visualize your gameworld?
- Thread starter Tinker Gnome
- Start date
The overall look and feel of my campaign is closest to "Army of Darkness" and Terry Gilliam's "Jabberwocky". It's an ultra-violent dark comedy. The world is grimy, smelly, and filled with grotesque things. Humans are often greedy, racist, superstitious, and violent. The Elves are too busy screwing and getting high to care about anybody else. The Dwarves are sexually-repressed, self-righteous bigots. Halflings are ignorant bumpkins with a redneck-like culture. The learned Gnomes actually want to make things better, but everybody else thinks they're up to no good. Humanoids are either slaves or brutal marauders. The temples are corrupt, and don't expect any healing miracles from a priest that got his job because he bought it. Wizards are feared, often depraved, and not subject to normal laws. The action is purposely over-the-top gory, with buckets of blood, spilled entrails, and chopped off heads. Its a running joke that whatever can hit the PCs in the face during combat, will. For all that, there are still genuinely good people and things, whose existence demonstrates just how awful everything else is.
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The Green Adam
First Post
I'm a very visual person so the 'look' of my game changes dramatically from campaign to campaign.
My mainstay DnD campaign was very superheroic, with over-the-top combat, flashy armor and weapon designs and magic that is brighter and more colorful the more powerful it is (Magic Missile starts as a pale colored shaft of light and later becomes twisting, vibrant bolts of energy in the player's signature color).
My Ars Magica campaigns are both more bloody and more subtle, with realistic warfare and magic that has few visual effects outside the direct results.
I draw/commission/find/beg and borrow illustrations for everything in my games from the PCs to the surrounding countryside if its significant to my story. Every piece of art is entitled as to what it represents and then placed alphabetically into a loose-leaf notebook. I have created several of these 'Campaign Bibles' over the years, complete with cover art.
AD
My mainstay DnD campaign was very superheroic, with over-the-top combat, flashy armor and weapon designs and magic that is brighter and more colorful the more powerful it is (Magic Missile starts as a pale colored shaft of light and later becomes twisting, vibrant bolts of energy in the player's signature color).
My Ars Magica campaigns are both more bloody and more subtle, with realistic warfare and magic that has few visual effects outside the direct results.
I draw/commission/find/beg and borrow illustrations for everything in my games from the PCs to the surrounding countryside if its significant to my story. Every piece of art is entitled as to what it represents and then placed alphabetically into a loose-leaf notebook. I have created several of these 'Campaign Bibles' over the years, complete with cover art.
AD
WayneLigon
Adventurer
It varies considerably. The world has a particular feel to it - I guess it feels very old, more than anything else. The setting I run has gone through four separate cataclysms, and is dominated by the remnants of old empires and civilizations once again meeting one another after a long period of recovery. Throughout it all, shady groups and powers have played a continuous, subtle game unknown to the vast majority of the world's inhabitants, in which world movers rise and fall according to a greater goal.
Because of all the problems that have happened, a lot of the world is uninhabitable - either an area is heavily civilized, reclaimed borderlands, or basically inhospitable. There are a multitude of strange effects and remnants of ancient wars, cities, technology, and magic. Many of these effects have been around a long while and are well-known (and even exploited as a resource). Others are very strange, very dangerous, or very remote.
In dealing with combat descriptions, that depends a lot on the level of the characters. At lower level, the characters fight like normal people. Through mid level, they fight like well-trained professionals, then heroes, then at high level super heroes, then near-deities.
Magic also varies. Due to the metaphysics of the game, anyone not of a certain bloodline needs to cast through an elemental sigil which appears during casting, pretty obviously giving away magic use. Aside from this, casting is largely an act of will, maybe requiring pointing. (IMC Magic is not something learned through books, but innate. Nobody studies magic in a library, they grasp it intuitively and learn more through use.)
However, there are also 'stealth spells', which have no apparent effect and simply require a silent act of will. Component use is rare for evocative effects, but will be detailed in the spell's description if necessary - all the spells are elementally based (effects like forming a handful of sand into a tool, for example, would be a spell that requires a material component). Ritual spells are a particular type of magic and almost always require components of one sort or another.
Because of all the problems that have happened, a lot of the world is uninhabitable - either an area is heavily civilized, reclaimed borderlands, or basically inhospitable. There are a multitude of strange effects and remnants of ancient wars, cities, technology, and magic. Many of these effects have been around a long while and are well-known (and even exploited as a resource). Others are very strange, very dangerous, or very remote.
In dealing with combat descriptions, that depends a lot on the level of the characters. At lower level, the characters fight like normal people. Through mid level, they fight like well-trained professionals, then heroes, then at high level super heroes, then near-deities.
Magic also varies. Due to the metaphysics of the game, anyone not of a certain bloodline needs to cast through an elemental sigil which appears during casting, pretty obviously giving away magic use. Aside from this, casting is largely an act of will, maybe requiring pointing. (IMC Magic is not something learned through books, but innate. Nobody studies magic in a library, they grasp it intuitively and learn more through use.)
However, there are also 'stealth spells', which have no apparent effect and simply require a silent act of will. Component use is rare for evocative effects, but will be detailed in the spell's description if necessary - all the spells are elementally based (effects like forming a handful of sand into a tool, for example, would be a spell that requires a material component). Ritual spells are a particular type of magic and almost always require components of one sort or another.
Tinker Gnome
Adventurer
Cool replies everyone. 
