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What Mundane Details Are Important In Your Fantastical Game/World?

I tend to do more and more-exotic world-building for the settings of my read-only fiction than for the settings I run games in.

In my game worlds, for example, there will usually be a single moon that's Luna-like in apparent size, brightness, and periodicity, and calendars will be either the standard modern Gregorian one or a lightly modified variant. In my read-only worlds, I might have a different moon, or two moons, or something else, and so there are no months and the calendar is otherwise different.

My Etan game is the oldest and therefore most well-developed. In it, adventurers typically have weird names because adventurers choose to adopt weird names as their adventuring names. Because it's cooler to be known as "Boronor Moonblade" that as "Jeffery Drunkard's-son." Most people use 'ordinary' names, with what counts as 'ordinary' varying with location and culture.

I try to avoid high tech or (especially) magic that's bolted on, in favor of magic that's an integral and organic part of the world. So mundane things will often have a magical or supernatural component. Not a wizardly spell-casting type magic, but more subtle and sometimes deep and important. To reference Etan again, the different cultures are all multi-racial because it is very important to have at least one friend who is not of your race when it comes to marriage and having kids. You need at least one such friend to help you make a fertility charm, and fertility charms are important for certain magical reasons.

And speaking of fertility charms, there is no such thing as a true love charm or love potion in Etan. There is lots of junk that purports to be "love charms," but they're mostly low-grade fertility charms combined with a lot of wishful thinking. They're also the reason why unexpected and out-of-wedlock births happen in the world.

Being an unchurched free-thinking sort myself, I tend to ignore religion in my worldbuilding - unless there are (or were) actual gods in the setting, in which case religion and holidays will be built around them. There's also my alt-history setting for read-only fiction, with a subtle twist to religion, and with holidays the same as our timeline but with certain holidays having either greater or lesser importance.

My settings will often have a few exotic and fantastical creatures that are not at all exotic and fantastical in-setting, but rather are ordinary domestic animals.

Something I commonly use in my magical settings is alchemy to make a bimetallic gold/silver standard stable. Yes you can transform lead into gold, but it's expensive to do so (and mass is not conserved in the process). It's easier and in fact routine to transform silver into gold and vice versa. The amount of gold you get from a given weight of silver (or vice versa) sets a (super)natural, stable gold/silver exchange rate.

Patricia Wrede has a big set of worldbuilding questions


She also has a number of posts in her blog about worldbuilding in fiction. It's intended for writers of read-only fiction, but still useful for worldbuilding gamemasters.

And there was a "loretober" thread here on ENworld.
 
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novel executions matter a lot to me more than believability.
Now there's a twisted thought: What strange ways are used by the cultures in your game world to execute criminals?

Now I have a world that features the bad guys performing human sacrifices - and executions resemble those sacrifices too closely for either psychological or magical comfort. (You risk having some Dark Power exploit an execution as if it were a botched ritual sacrifice.) So instead of simple hangings, beheadings or other forms of the death penalty, there are creative methods used to make the condemned criminal go away and stay gone.
 

Oh I love this topic!

I leave a lot of my worlds as blank spaces on the map, and the lore tends to build organically based on what characters explore and what they're interested in. But small details definitely make the world seem more lived-in and can lead to higher player engagement.

When I'm detailing a new area for the characters to explore, I want to make sure I know...

The weather
Common or exceptional foods
Common plants and animals
Usual jobs people work
Fashion

Sometimes I'll make a "random non-encounter" chart that I roll on for travel montages around the area. It's not meant to lead into an encounter, but just to add flavor. So I might make a list like...

1) Two travelers stop to compare their brightly-colored hats bedazzled with prismatic feathers.
2) A giant squirrel runs by, carrying an entire watermelon in its mouth.
3) Merchants carrying barrels of melon ale roll by in their carts.
4) The clouds part, revealing a rainbow.

And so on.
 

In one of the first games that I worked on for somebody else (that I believe is still on the drawing board), there was a specific focus on slice of life details - clothing customs, local foods. social taboos, and such. I've never read another RPG that went into such details to the degree that this one did. I rather liked that.
 

Now there's a twisted thought: What strange ways are used by the cultures in your game world to execute criminals?

Now I have a world that features the bad guys performing human sacrifices - and executions resemble those sacrifices too closely for either psychological or magical comfort. (You risk having some Dark Power exploit an execution as if it were a botched ritual sacrifice.) So instead of simple hangings, beheadings or other forms of the death penalty, there are creative methods used to make the condemned criminal go away and stay gone.
It's not an old tradition, but now they have the greatest martial artists turn people into giblets as a form of execution.
 

I was scrolling through my FB feed and in the Shadowdark group some asked whether Western Reaches would come with a calendar with holidays and all. This got em thinking about the sorts of mundane details that people often find important and/or satisfying in world building.

Note: when I say "fantastical" in the title I mean any sort of fantastical, not just "fantasy."

So what mundane elements of world building do you find important, interesting and/or necessary? Things liek calendars with month names and holidays? Fashion and dress? Food and culinary? Languages? Cultural practices? Consumer goods or brands? That sort of thing.
All of the above*, and then some. Weather, climate, moon phases, tides, some astronomy, at least a vague history that tries to explain how things came to be as they are, professions not related to adventuring or support thereof, culture-based legal systems, different societies finding different things (un)acceptable, etc. etc.

There's a reason why it takes me a while to flesh out a new homebrew setting. :)

* - I'll immediately confess to not always following up on "consumer goods or brands" though.
For my part, I am not much into deep world building and I don't mentally assimilate things like different names months or fashion well. I prefer my world building shallow (Star Wars levels of shallow) or modern earth plus some minor bits.
Specific to the different month names piece: I tried using Earth's months in one campaign and found that doing so came at cost of a lot of 'atmosphere'. Won't do it again.
 

I'm a massive world builder. I build a lot. This is a big source of fun for me.

I weed out players and look for ones that like lots of details too.

I love things like making songs with setting details in them.....having the PCs sing the songs.....and then use them when they find the song as a vague base in something in reality.
 

I love things like making songs with setting details in them.....having the PCs sing the songs.....and then use them when they find the song as a vague base in something in reality.
Off-topic perhaps, but can you elaborate on this?

Are you writing the songs and then having the players sing them in character? Or are you recording the songs yourself then playing them to the players as clues to the adventure? Or... ???

I once wrote and recorded a song that had clues to an adventure; when the players had their PCs ask for info about the place I told them "This is what the Bards are playing in town" then sat back and pressed 'play'. :)
 

So what mundane elements of world building do you find important, interesting and/or necessary? Things liek calendars with month names and holidays? Fashion and dress? Food and culinary? Languages? Cultural practices? Consumer goods or brands? That sort of thing.
For a fantasy world, Calendars, preferably by culture.
Cultural sketches and maps.
I don't want brand names for fantasy - it snaps my WSOD.
Fashion and dress are nice if well done, wasted space otherwise.
I want some major plot hooks to hang adventures upon.
I want stats for all the culturally iconic tools and weapons. Including vehicles.
 

Thinking more on this, a lot of the times for a new area of the campaign world I'll come up with a theme and then make a big list of mundane details that support the big idea.

So for example if this area is under constant threat of undead and home to a fledgling church of light, I might make a list of mundane details like:

Graveyards have high fences and ornate graves, posted guards
People wear bright colors (especially yellows and whites)
People greet each other with little mirrors tied to their palms or fingers
There are small stone churches with symbols of light: the sun, a lantern, a dragon, etc
Food comes from above the surface of the earth, not below: eggs, fowl, nuts, flowers and greens.
Protective charms hanging from doors
People give little prayers when passing a graveyard or entering a dark room.
Strict curfew, very few people out at night other than lamp lighting guards.
 

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