Top down, or bottom-up?

[ender_wiggin]

Other

I came up with the grand plot arc first (inadvertantly, actually). Then a slowly built around it.

Simultaneously, I was creating a few villages with no "ties" or "connections". Then, when I was ready, I just plucked this village down somewhere and that's where it started.

 

[VirgilCaine]

I started with a story I wrote about a young bandit and the environment he was in.
Then the world changed and expanded and right now, that "first" area is the most neglected part of my camapaign world, since I don't know how the "original" area interacts with the distant, civilized eastern area.

So, I started in the middle somewhat. I don't have an overall vision for the world, and I don't have much local detail.

 

[Turjan]

Well, I think I use kind of a mix. The origin of my homebrew is definitely top down, as I used the Ultima map as a basis, though you would hardly recognize it nowadays . History and cultures were laid out in a somewhat sketchy way, in order to explain the interrelation of different peoples (and people ), but the whole continent is covered. The actual campaign works more bottom up, with detail only given where necessary. There is still space for alteration in the world, if need be, without running into any problems because of inconsistencies. There are also two other continents, one as the ancient origin of mankind and the other with the promise of the complete unknown, and fortunately, no player wanted to go there yet . Okay, at least the uncharted land has a rough outline, but the other one not .

 

[Philip]

I am troubled by an overwhelming top-down personality, so I always work top down:

- First I think of the feeling I want to get out of the campaign.
- Then I think of the players, and what they want to get out of it.
- Based on those I design general aspects of the world and broad plotlines.
- Then I focus ever more and more, working towards the initial scene of the first adventure, leaving a whole mountain of sketchy information behind, to which I return when the first adventure is done, and so on.
- Occasionally I re-evaluate my original intentions and the way it has been going, and make some adjustments, first changing details in particular adventures or locations, and if neccessary going up all the way to the major plotlines.

 

[Nyarlathotep]

Wait... there's stuff below the top?

I'm not just a top-down designer, I stay so on top that I frequently forget that play occurs down on the bottom . I'm the type who spends three weeks agonizing over a time-keeping system (it's been closer to 3 months), how far the moon is from the planet and how often it turns on it's axis, and has twenty different religious pantheons in foreign countries that will never see play.

I need help

...

...badly.

 

[Agback]

I zigzagged from bottom to top. Some aspects of teh world were created from the bottom up, and others from the top down. The original germs of the world were two quotes, one from Keats's Ode to a Nightingale ("Whose voice hath oft charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam of perilous seas in fairylands forlorn.") and one from an old B&W movie called The Ghost and Mrs Muir ("Oh! I feel as if the house itself were welcoming me"). From those I deduced my way back to animism, a house with permanent portals in it, and a bunch of elves who have deserted their 'fairyland'. I added the high-level idea that the collective unconcious might be PROM rather than ROM, and that dreams might be shared, even become addictive. I filled those in with specifics, and then extrapolated my way back down ot local detail. Made a few calculated changes from fantasy cliché at the broad-brush level, and extrapolated down to the local scale again. Threw in a couple more local conditions, deduced my way back to general principles, and then extrapolated back to the bottom again. Rang the changes on some old tropes, deduced up, extrapolated down. Improvised some stuff for off-the-cuff adventures, worked it in, reconciled it with earlier posits, extrapolated a bunch more detail.

 

[sfedi]

I guess I have a different view of top down than the rest.

When I started my top part... I started from the creation of the world...
next, major cosmic forces...
then Gods...
then continents...
etc.

 

[WayneLigon]

I usually do Top Down but I don't spend a lot of time at the top.

I start with the concept of the campaign, which will almost always include what kind of landforms we're talking about. Like 'I want a campaign in the frozen North', or 'I want a desert campaign'. I almost always go at once to the smaller aspect of choosing City, Wilderness, Mix? as the next step. If it's a City campaign, I skip a whole bunch of other steps, which is why I usually one that kind of campaign.

At this point or before, I usually sketch in some god ideas, and maybe some names that sounds cool.

I do a rough map of the large general area. Usually half a continent, or enough to decide where I'm going to put seas, any large lakes or inland seas, mountain ranges. I might give some tenative names to countries. I look at the geography I've done and see if it sparks any ideas. I rough out some more names and make some tenative choices.

Then I generally jump down to the campaign area and start on the detail work.

I have done bottom-up, as well, if I get an idea for a great setting. Then I just start expanding on ideas it generates.

 

[derelictjay]

I don't think I can answer your poll. As I use both. In two home brews I started with a city and built everything outwards (later they were combined into the same world). However in a a couple of others I came up with a large scale, what does the world (or universe in the case of one of them) look like, first, then narrowed it down to where the campaign would be.