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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Sword of Spirit" data-source="post: 7421124" data-attributes="member: 6677017">I like to have a lot of space to work with in my world design. I've seen too many fantasy settings where they put something exotic on the edge of the setting, and then expanded the setting until what was supposed to be the core of the setting became a speck surrounded by a whole world of other stuff they rarely did anything with, but made the core focus area feel less significant to me. Forgotten Realms is a great example of this. I'm a big picture thinker in a number of ways, and map space = importance in world design for me. The best way of avoiding such issues (assuming you dislike them), is to leave a lot of not yet defined space on your map. Don't put China adjacent to Germany just because your game is set in western Europe and you want to mention China. Say that it is in the far and mysterious east, past "the unknown lands" or such. Then you can fill them in as needed. You can leave distances vague or make them specific on your side of the screen ( maybe you decide you want 2500 miles to work with--now you have reserved space).Timelines can be done exactly the same way. First, decide how you want the knowledge of the longer lived races to impact things. If you want a civilization to be unknown to the elves, it probably needs to be a long time ago. Put plenty of time between your major events. Feel free to arbitrarily decide that your "second empire" is actually the fourth or fifth empire. Leave vague time periods, making sure there is room for various feels at each time by location.The way I did it is to make a world that is something like 64k miles across (it is flat). I vaguely specified where the ancient ethnic groupings traditionally have lived or migrated to, and what sorts of cultural milieus exist as of the main campaign's "present date", in very broad terms, like that this general area and that general area are both Viking kinds of places. That way if I make some stuff up for one of them that sees play, and later decide I wished I had done Viking lands different, I can do the other one differently. I also leave plenty of room for fitting extra space between the defined areas. So if I want another smaller third (or fourth) Viking land somewhere, I still have room to add that one in. The same applies to all the sorts of general cultural areas I thought of when creating the world. And I have room to add others.The timeline has a few long ages (the more ancient ones were longer than the more recent ones). I decide what I want the general character of each to be like, how it started and how it ended. I think of movies and such for examples. Then, I divided each age up into a few smaller segments with their own general character. I haven't fleshed out details, and won't need to unless they get played in. But I said that one certain time is like Conan and Red Sonja in feel, another is like Legend (the old 80s movie), etc. I separated my ages with the rise and fall of world spanning civilizations, and/or cataclysmic destructions. Cataclysms are great for removing knowledge of the really ancient ages. My first age is so distant it doesn't even feel like the same world. It started out with the creation by the immortals, including the creation *of* the younger immortals in/on that world, passed through a stage a little like The Dark Crystal, and culminated in a civilization that's kind of a cross between Netheril, steampunk (or maybe "clockpunk") and some other things, where dragons and other powerful races shared in the same great civilization of science and magic and the planet was like those Star Trek multilevel chess boards. Suffice it say, about all that remains of that age is the equivalent of creation myths. My current age is the fifth age and the last great empire of humanity dwindled only a few thousand years ago. That empire was sort of like if the Romans had been culturally English. The current age is mostly a traditional D&D style--very much like Forgotten Realms and Greyhawk. I made it to intentionally showcase a D&D baseline. The specific flavoring I gave it to make it unique was that there are two human pantheons with a complex relationship (it isn't as simple as saying they are opposed to each other, and different cultures view the pantheons themselves and their relationship differently). One is a very tight pantheon--essentially a single religion--with each god having  a specific place, and the alignments and portfolios all designed to fit together and support a functioning society; while the other pantheon has a more emergent organic feel that more closely mirrors real world pantheons. I also am coming up with my own take on subraces that starts with the most iconic ones (essentially the Greyhawk presentation) and then makes them more like I would have done them. That last paragraph was mostly irrelevant, but once I get talking about my world... So the point is, make plenty of room. Then you don't have to create a new planet if you realize you want something you didn't initially stick on the map or timeline-but you can actually *have* a skeleton of a map and timeline too.</blockquote>

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