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
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.
The Great Chain of Being! Great chain of being - Wikipedia

A fun concept, and Aristotle's biology perspective, including creatures "spontaneously generating" from muck: Aristotle's biology - Wikipedia
 

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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.
Bingo. None of that other science stuff either. Creatures are composed of the four elements and spirit. Diseases are parasitic spirits. Things fall down because they are supposed to (if not held up by forces / magic). The world is flat (it's a giant table set in a crystal sphere that contains the air) and surrounded by mountains to keep the water in. I wanted a world that looked like ours (more or less) but was very different under the hood so to speak.
 

Bingo. None of that other science stuff either. Creatures are composed of the four elements and spirit. Diseases are parasitic spirits. Things fall down because they are supposed to (if not held up by forces / magic). The world is flat (it's a giant table set in a crystal sphere that contains the air) and surrounded by mountains to keep the water in. I wanted a world that looked like ours (more or less) but was very different under the hood so to speak.
That is science.

It’s the science of this setting. Scholars gathering and cataloguing empirical information, posing hypotheses, proving them true, and subjecting their discovery to the review of their peers would get those « facts »
 

That is science.

It’s the science of this setting. Scholars gathering and cataloguing empirical information, posing hypotheses, proving them true, and subjecting their discovery to the review of their peers would get those « facts »
I agree with you, but it's not "real world science". I had to veer away from that because all my initial players in 1974 were wargamers :D Dragon's being blown up with barrels of gunpowder, steam engines and ships / trains, cannons etc. were on the way if things worked like the real world. So, no gunpowder does not work, magic does etc. In original D&D a lot of what the characters "knew" was what the players knew. Hence a "natural science" was needed that produced a D&D world even if it looked like a medieval real world.
 

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