Worlds of Design: Consistent Fantasy Ecologies

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Picture courtesy of Pixabay.

A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”
-Antoine de Saint-Exupery, author of the Little Prince, poet, journalist, and aviator.​

Every world has an ecology; if you want your fantasy world to be believable, you’ll need to pay attention to how it works: how does each living group fit with all the others and with the world? What might your world design goals be in general?

What’s an Ecology?​

Broadly defined, an ecology is the relations of organisms to one another and to their physical surroundings. If the ecology doesn't make sense in your world, you risk breaking immersion for the player (or reader). The more interested you are in making up a world rather than a setting or just an area to play in, the more likely you are to care about consistency and immersion. Perhaps ecology and self-consistency are more important for novels than games, but they are important in games for many people.

Fantasy author Glen Cook (The Black Company series) once said he didn’t like maps, because they constrained his authorial freedom of action. And to some extent, creating an ecology means creating consistency in which the game master (or designer or author) cannot easily break their own rules without it being noticeable. This necessarily limits some creative freedom, although I would argue the tradeoffs are worth it for immersion and consistency.

Monster Basics​

In world building you can look at this as a matter of survival. If there is a very powerful monster, or numerous and prolific species, or long-lived or aggressive species, how do other species exist, how do they survive contact with those species?

An obvious example would be a world with thousands of dragons. Food chains are important. What do dragons eat and how do other creatures survive? Won’t the dragons eat all the other creatures? Relative power, ability to cast spells, ability to rise in levels, all come into play as well. For an example of how this can get rapidly out of control, see Raph Koster's commentary on Ultima Online's resource system-- an ecology that was massively disrupted when players murdered everything in sight.

Don't just throw together a bunch of statistics, try to fit the monster into the world. Monsters can be merely monsters or they can be monstrosities. What is a monstrosity? (see my article, "Make Monsters, Not Monstrosities,” in Dragon Magazine #59) A monstrosity doesn't seem to fit together or make sense, or strikes one as extraordinarily gross. It's a strange combination. I prefer to design monsters that seem more believable (see my Monster Workshop Part 1 and Part 2).

Species Basics​

Typically, a fantasy world has more than one intelligent species and often many more. It also has some very powerful monsters, so an immediate question should be “how have humans survived in this environment?” Why haven't they been wiped out? There is evidence for this in our modern world – genetic data suggests that our human ancestors nearly went extinct 900,00 years ago, down to a group of only 1,280 individuals.

You can ask the same question about other intelligent humanoids and other species, of course. In my world humans survive because they are more versatile than other creatures, and reproduce fairly fast. They depend on magic use and also on their ability to rise in level, which other species can rarely do. Further, few species can make magic items or use magic items. For an example of how this might work between species, see the research around how Neanderthals went extinct.

Differentiation​

In your world design try to avoid duplication. Make sure to practice differentiation deliberately as much as possible; these are also game design goals of course, not just world design.

In game design, whatever you think about differences between species, it's important to avoid treating them as a monoculture. This is bad for fiction and is a common problem with sci-fi settings, in which entire worlds are reduced to one population with one culture; our own planet is host to a dizzying variety. This is also bad for game design, where you want differentiation to provide variety, and if differentiation is not there you probably should eliminate the duplication to simplify the game. In some rulesets or campaigns humans are the only intelligent humanoid species. If all the humanoid species are practically identical, why have anything but humans in the game?

In the end, it’s really about what your design goals are for your world. If you use your world as a playground for ideas (and in some cases for new game masters, their games lack internal consistency to start but form more solid ecologies as they play in their world), then have at it. Many people have enjoyed RPGs that make little common sense, in favor of just having a good time. But if you want your world to have continuity, an ecology that makes sense will pay dividends in believability and consistency later.

Your Turn: How do you plan out ecologies for your world?
 

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Lewis Pulsipher

Lewis Pulsipher

Dragon, White Dwarf, Fiend Folio
I shamelessly invoke magic for my various and sundry fantasy settings. Magical worlds have deep magical effects beyond allowing spell-casting and the use of supernatural abilities. And those magical effects can be different in different places. Dragons, for example, might be limited to certain mountain ranges because those mountains are magically dragon-friendly. Similarly, elf-forests might be the only place elves can maintain their population, because of the elf-friendly magic there, with elven settlements elsewhere being population sinks, and the elven populations there either dying out or being dependent on immigration from the elf-forests.

I do try to keep the number of sapient species limited, usually with limited success. Likewise the number of large fierce creatures. (See: Why Big Fierce Animals Are Rare: An Ecologist's Perspective by Paul A. Colinvaux)

I tend to make food abundant, with population growth being limited more by those magical effects than by food shortages.

I prefer cosmopolitan cultures to species segregation, even though I will use the latter because it sometimes makes sense. Although even with "Forest-Lands of the Elves," "Kingdoms of the Dwarves" etc. I try to have multiple examples, with the different elf-lands, dwarf-kingdoms etc. being different from each other.

In my D&D worlds, I have Dwarves and Gnomes as a single species for biological purposes, even if they count as two different ones for magic and game mechanics. So the various dwarf-kingdoms and gnome-settlements are actually dwarf/gnome kingdoms and settlements. This has also affected the language: Dwarven is Gnomish spoken with a dwarven accent and Gnomish is Dwarven spoken with a gnomish accent, and depending on where he or she grew up, a dwarf might speak gnomish as his native tongue, or a gnome might natively speak dwarven.

I went full-out with cosmopolitan cultures in my old game-world of Etan. Elves, orcs, and lizardmen in the Million Kingdoms have more in common with each other than with those Northern Barbarians with whom they share a species. I've invoked that shameless magic for this. When the gods of the various species all died, they laid dying curses of barrenness on the species of their enemies. The overall result is the "Curse of Djerassi," named after the wizard who studied it and worked out a counter.

The counter is fertility magic in the form of fertility charms, and creating a fertility charm for yourself requires the aid of friends who are not of your species. So the mundane "humankin" species who were willing to do the cosmopolitan thing survived, and the clannish & isolationist species (like halflings/hobbits) died out.

I once joked that the ecology of Middle Earth runs on sheep. Sheep are super-abundant in most places, with trolls, orcs, eagles, and to a great extent dwarves living off of mutton as a staple food. And Mirkwood was such a notorious, dangerous "food desert" because sheep don't do well there.
 

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You may not take it seriously, but the 10th level party that cast Thunderwave on a lion near to a water hole at night and wound up with a herd of gazelle plowing into the party and nearly resulting in a TPK takes it REAL seriously.

Turns out 60ft darkvision on a cloudy night doesn't provide a useful amount of warning when speed 50 creatures are taking double moves.

"Is that thunder? I Didn't see a lightning flash....."

Then there was that Cape Buffalo that was hunting the rogue after they got too close to the herd. Good times.

I love when 5 minutes of web browsing for background color results in two memorable stories plus the lesson "̀herbivorous' is not the same as ̀harmless ̀"
Heh. Sounds like a lot of fun--at least for the GM.

But I actually meant making sure there were enough gazelles to feed the lions or dragons.
 

The first is that we think of populations in the millions, rather than the historic reality of much smaller populations of a few thousand in Empires and ac province having a few hundred.
Which historic reality?

Egypt had 1+M (est) ~3,000bce and up to 3M prior to Alexander & roman conquests (after which the population went up). The Persian empire of 500BCE had 20M+ (est). Carthage had an empire of 4M (est) in the 200s BCE. The Roman Empire had an estimated 60+ Million in the 100s AD. The Gupta Empire of India had (est) 75M in the 500s. The contemporary Sixteen Kingdoms of China had (est) 51M. The Mayans of Guatamala were around 2M (est). The Aztec empire was 5M (est). The Edo kingdom in Nigeria had 1+ million in just the capital city of Ubini before the British leveled it and turned them all into a historic footnote.

Petty trumped up kingdoms existed through history but most empires were significant. Even the Holy Roman Empire of Germany had 5M (est) in the 1200s and the Venetian Empire was over a million even if most people don't realize Venice had territories on multiple continents.
 

Heh. Sounds like a lot of fun--at least for the GM.

But I actually meant making sure there were enough gazelles to feed the lions or dragons.
Oh, I didn't do hard math. I planned a lion-PC encounter and added the herd of gazelles several hundred strong to reflect the prey for the pride of lions mostly as background.

With dragons it's mostly thinking about the territoriality and not putting them unreasonably close together, at least for the big ones. Any dragon less than huge is, IMO, ecologically indistinguishable from a bear or panther, so I never sweat them. To be honest, given the hunting range their flight speed gives them, they probably have less impact on any particular area than slower quadruped predators.
 

Petty trumped up kingdoms existed through history but most empires were significant. Even the Holy Roman Empire of Germany had 5M (est) in the 1200s and the Venetian Empire was over a million even if most people don't realize Venice had territories on multiple continents.
When I visited the Mediterranean the fact that Venice terrorized just about every coastal city was really eye-opening, and it had a tremendous historical impact on every place we toured.
 

In short, i don't spend time on it. Our main campaign world is based around real life Earth. Animal&plant life is more or less same as in real life. There are very few dragons (5 total). Creatures under monstrosity category in MM are unique, some magical beasts are very rare, some don't exist.
 

I'm a big sucker for settings with a consistent and coherent ecology/geology. Note that consistent and coherent does not need to be indisputably realistic, and things don’t need to be realistic to be relatable. Ultimately, "relatable" is what I’m truly going for.

Magic can be part of a setting's ecology. Actually, magic has to be part of the setting's ecology to be consistent and coherent (and by "magic" I'm also including advanced technology like hyperspace or artificial gravity). Magic and technology must have their strengths and limitations.

I like to think that Fantasy and/or Sci-Fi settings are just as defined by what they contain and allow as by what they don't. Therefore, I like when settings tell us (or somehow telegraph to us) what magic/technology can and cannot do; what is a hard "no" and what is a notable exception.
 

In Cyberpunk 2020, campaigns typically revolve around a group of PCs who are criminals operating from the shadows, very often running missions against corporations. You might say the PCs are shadowrunners, but that might run into copyright infringement territory. Anyway, when you take a snapshot of the setting you might ask yourself, "How can these PCs operate with either the law or the corporations coming down on them? Someone would crack down on such lawless behavior, right?" But the setting kind of explains how these people are able to exist on the margins of society.

Cyberpunk 2020 is set in the far flung future of, uh, 2020, and it's a place that is still recovering from political, economic, technological, and social upheavals. The United States government collapsed and the country has fragmented, there are "free" states with various levels of autonomy, technology has rapidly advanced bringing with it a lot of unexpected social change (something we can relate to even if I don't have cyber legs yet), AAA corporations are the near peers of nation states, millions of Americans became homeless in the 1990s and formed nomadic clans that still roam the country, the countryside is lawless, and in the cities crime is rampant.

Because organizations within the setting are still dealing with the ramifications of recent history, the edgerunner, or cyberpunk, is able to exist.
 

In most campaigns I do not use "physics", but many medieval misconceptions being true. Long story made short, in my ecologies there is spontaneous generation. There is no reprodution of insects. They brust from earth or trees. Frogs emerge from mud. Rats from filth. Why that creature is so deep down the dungeon? It was generated there by environmental circumstances. If it does not find food and die, it will rot, disappear, and other such creature will be spawned soon or later.
 

In most campaigns I do not use "physics", but many medieval misconceptions being true. Long story made short, in my ecologies there is spontaneous generation. There is no reprodution of insects. They brust from earth or trees. Frogs emerge from mud. Rats from filth. Why that creature is so deep down the dungeon? It was generated there by environmental circumstances. If it does not find food and die, it will rot, disappear, and other such creature will be spawned soon or later.
That's a very cool setting conceit.
 

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