Aldarc
Legend
A bit of a follow-up, but apparently someone in the WWN Subreddit has already done a WWN conversion of the ship rules from SWN for an "Age of Sails" sort of campaign.
Stars/Worlds Without Number (General Thread)
Okay, wow. I’ve been working on the regional part of setting generation for most of this week a few hours every evening. It’s a lot more involved than coming up with the world setting. It could be I had an evocative idea that wrote itself (for the world), but I struggled with the region-level details a bit at first.
The first challenging part is it asks you to name the region. Naming things is hard. I eventually decided that it would be named in the languages of one of the nations, and then decided that would be Old English. I spent an evening just digging through Old English stuff looking for something that stuck out to me. I kind of wish the naming came last, so you would have all the other elements of the region there to provide potential ideas.
After that came the distinctive terrain features. I struggled with that too, but that is because I took the suggestion to use the tables as advisory. I eventually abandoned that, and things went much better. When Kevin Crawford suggests you can use some tables to help you out, what he’s actually saying is use those tables unless you have a strong idea for that element. It’s much easier to roll up some ideas and riff off those than it is to come up with them out of nowhere.
I’m almost done with region creation. I just need to finish up the relationships between the groups and decide which factions I want to detail. I’m doing my creation in a mind map (so I haven’t even written anything yet), but the word count is going to be about triple what I wrote for the world setting. After all that is done, I get to do kingdom creation then go through religion and society creation.
The amount of content you generate is quite impressive. I think I’ve written more about this one region than I have about the entire setting in previous iterations. The thing that really sticks out to me is that the setting details are all adventure focus. All of the groups have their histories and issues, and those are all potential sources of adventure. That’s in contrast to prior attempts that wasted a lot of words on things like army composition.
I started watching the first set of videos you linked @Aldarc, but I never got far enough into them to see where feathers got riled, but I can guess. I had to learn to trust the process. Oh, I rolled this, but I had some other idea instead. It turns out that riffing on the dice almost always produced things that were more interesting than what I had in mind originally (like decadent nomads who supply the region’s exotic drugs or a republic that has been stuck in perpetual war for generations or a group of Blighted who are both horrifying and tragic).
The first challenging part is it asks you to name the region. Naming things is hard. I eventually decided that it would be named in the languages of one of the nations, and then decided that would be Old English. I spent an evening just digging through Old English stuff looking for something that stuck out to me. I kind of wish the naming came last, so you would have all the other elements of the region there to provide potential ideas.
After that came the distinctive terrain features. I struggled with that too, but that is because I took the suggestion to use the tables as advisory. I eventually abandoned that, and things went much better. When Kevin Crawford suggests you can use some tables to help you out, what he’s actually saying is use those tables unless you have a strong idea for that element. It’s much easier to roll up some ideas and riff off those than it is to come up with them out of nowhere.
I’m almost done with region creation. I just need to finish up the relationships between the groups and decide which factions I want to detail. I’m doing my creation in a mind map (so I haven’t even written anything yet), but the word count is going to be about triple what I wrote for the world setting. After all that is done, I get to do kingdom creation then go through religion and society creation.
The amount of content you generate is quite impressive. I think I’ve written more about this one region than I have about the entire setting in previous iterations. The thing that really sticks out to me is that the setting details are all adventure focus. All of the groups have their histories and issues, and those are all potential sources of adventure. That’s in contrast to prior attempts that wasted a lot of words on things like army composition.
I started watching the first set of videos you linked @Aldarc, but I never got far enough into them to see where feathers got riled, but I can guess. I had to learn to trust the process. Oh, I rolled this, but I had some other idea instead. It turns out that riffing on the dice almost always produced things that were more interesting than what I had in mind originally (like decadent nomads who supply the region’s exotic drugs or a republic that has been stuck in perpetual war for generations or a group of Blighted who are both horrifying and tragic).
Aldarc
Legend
I got stuck here as well, partially because one of the main things that trips me up about world-building: maps. I like having a basic sense of the geo part of the geo-political and cultural landscape, but I don't have the greatest map-making or artistic talent. I noticed the map in the one WWN world-building video I mentioned, and so I just flat out asked them what mapping program they used. It's apparently Inkarnate, so I've been toying with that the past day or so.
As a side note: (1) islands are a lot of work and (2) no matter how weird or unrealistic you think that the shapes of your lands look, the real world produces far weirder and more varied geography. I'm beginning to think that one reason why fantasy maps look unrealistic is simply because people don't make their geography look weird enough.
Agreed. This is the other thing that I find challenging. There is a reason why I often find myself reusing names. Right now, I'm just putting placeholder names and flagging them so I can come back to this point at a later stage. I do try to apply certain guidelines for name generation though. For example, one naming guideline that I put in place for this current project is "no 'th' sound."
I am having a different sort of issue. Fantasy adventure often imagines these incredibly varied landscapes: e.g., small islands over here, mountains here next to the "blasted lands," desert next to the jungle, grasslands next to the ancient farmlands, etc. But in my case, I know that I'm basically dealing with a large tropical mega-archipelago with volcanic mountain chains.
I'm impressed with the guidelines in this book. As you say, if you follow the advice, it forces useable content creation.
I may be overstating how riled their feathers were as they took it in good humor. I believe they were reacting with bemusement to the part in the book about players generally not caring about your WB, don't WB for things that you won't need, how it's often gratuitous, etc.
While I had previous versions I could use as a base (see: v1 and v2), I ended up having making some fairly big changes. I followed WWN’s advice not to go too detailed, so it’s just a sketch currently. I did the first of those prior iterations in Campaign Cartographer 3+ and the second in Tiled using a couple of pixel hex tilesets I bought on itch.io (tileset 1 and tileset 2). I’m probably going to go with CC3+ again, but I’m just leaving it as a sketch for now while I work through kingdom creation.
I wonder if starting with a fractal terrain tool would work better. I assume part of the issue is the coastlines and other features don’t match our intuitive expectations of what they should look like, so it’s like some uncanny valley thing.
Aside from naming the region, I’m just using generic names too. “Orc Nation”, “Kobold Nation”, “Vuple Nomads”, and so on. I’ll give them proper names once I go through kingdom creation and pick linguistic touchstones. It wasn’t worth further delay trying to figure out names for everything while I was trying to put together the framework.
Kevin Crawford’s makes a pointed observation on fantasy names devised by GMs. I’ve opted to keep the English names for the distinctive features because those can be evocative to players in a way that foreign ones won’t, but I’m going to lean heavily on linguistic touchstones for everything else. (Also, no “th” is a good guideline!)
Roll a bunch of stuff then try to figure out how it makes sense?
So if you get: pit, ancient farmland, canyons, swamp, rain forest, weathered mountains. You could have the pit be a permanent whirlpool that legends say leads to paradise, but no one who has entered has come back alive. The ancient farmland is an island chain that was terraformed to support growing food from non-tropical climates. The canyon is a trench on the bottom of the sea where a sea-dwelling, sapient species lives. The swamp is a fouled, boglike area between several islands where sea-dwelling Outsiders went to die (like beached whales except more evil). The locals are deathly afraid of whatever could be in there (so that means treasure, right?). The rain forest is the default biome for islands. The weathered mountains are a central chain of islands with a large, dormant volcano at the center that hasn’t erupted for eons and has worn down over time into a big hill with a caldera.
Aldarc
Legend
Nice work! I decided to stop here as far as my notions for the archipelago. This was all done with the free version of Inkarnate and toying around with just the land stage. The inspiration should be familiar:
Pretty much.Aside from naming the region, I’m just using generic names too. “Orc Nation”, “Kobold Nation”, “Vuple Nomads”, and so on. I’ll give them proper names once I go through kingdom creation and pick linguistic touchstones. It wasn’t worth further delay trying to figure out names for everything while I was trying to put together the framework.
I may do that. I do know that I will be lifting at least one thing from Pirates of Dark Water. There will be some cavernous atolls where some "pale warrior" elves live.
Another update! I’m almost done with my first kingdom. It’s like a rabbit hole that never ends. I think I’m done, and then I flip through and see the community section. It’s all good though. I’ve only encountered a couple of issues with the process so far, and one is self-inflicted. The self-inflicted issue is that the campaign is set in an area of conflict, so I’m going to have to go through kingdom generation a couple of more times to get everything established for the players. I’m getting better at it, but I’d be done if we were just in the middle of one or the other.*
The other issue I have is the religion construction section seems rather biased towards monotheistic religions. It doesn’t really give any advice or guidance on doing a polytheistic one. Historical religions tended to be polytheistic, and it’s a common trope in fantasy, so it’s something I want in my setting. I ended up just picking an arbitrary number of deities and rolled for each on the society function and portfolio tables.
Things did take an interesting turn when I got “It was an artificial construct built by humans” for a deity that was also declared illegal. I decided to tie that into the current religion (since that was a previous one that had fallen out of favor) by making it an ancient A.I. that had secretly then overtly taken over after the old institutions faltered and lost trust a while back.
Something I wish I had done differently (and plan to change) is not use a mind map. It was good for generating ideas at first, but it did not scale up as I started adding more and more information. I’m going to need to move what I have so far, which is rapidly approaching 5k words of just notes, over to Scrivener, so I can take advantage of its ability to organize information while I write.
* Why not change? Continuity with the pre-WWN/retcon campaign. The PCs had established a settlement near what is now an opposition settlement. There are a few touchstones I and my players have identified that I wanted to keep, and that settlement is one of them. It doesn’t make sense to have two settlements right next to each other, but it should when they’re on opposite sides of a river on opposite borders and with different allegiances.
The other issue I have is the religion construction section seems rather biased towards monotheistic religions. It doesn’t really give any advice or guidance on doing a polytheistic one. Historical religions tended to be polytheistic, and it’s a common trope in fantasy, so it’s something I want in my setting. I ended up just picking an arbitrary number of deities and rolled for each on the society function and portfolio tables.
Things did take an interesting turn when I got “It was an artificial construct built by humans” for a deity that was also declared illegal. I decided to tie that into the current religion (since that was a previous one that had fallen out of favor) by making it an ancient A.I. that had secretly then overtly taken over after the old institutions faltered and lost trust a while back.
Something I wish I had done differently (and plan to change) is not use a mind map. It was good for generating ideas at first, but it did not scale up as I started adding more and more information. I’m going to need to move what I have so far, which is rapidly approaching 5k words of just notes, over to Scrivener, so I can take advantage of its ability to organize information while I write.
* Why not change? Continuity with the pre-WWN/retcon campaign. The PCs had established a settlement near what is now an opposition settlement. There are a few touchstones I and my players have identified that I wanted to keep, and that settlement is one of them. It doesn’t make sense to have two settlements right next to each other, but it should when they’re on opposite sides of a river on opposite borders and with different allegiances.
Fanaelialae
Legend
I used to use Inkarnate myself. It's quite good, but I felt it was a bit too limitIng (at least the free version). I ultimately found Wonderdraft, which is a desktop application that produces very similar quality maps to Inkarnate, but has a broader toolset. Just in case you're interested.
Aldarc
Legend
Much appreciated. My main need for a map program was just to get a better sense of the geography. But I may need this for when I have to go into further detail.
I've done additional work and alterations to the map about a few days ago, and put a bunch of names up.
Yora
Legend
I've been looking at the gameplay rules sections now, and I quite like it. I might actually use it instead of B/X for the campaign I am working on.
But one thing that just seems very odd to me is shock damage. I fully understand how the mechanics work, they are not that difficult. But why does this mechanic exist in the first place? What's its purpose and what is it supposed to add to the game? Dealing damage to enemies even on a miss unless they have really good armor just feels weird.
Is it supposed to speed up combat? Or to make ranged weapons worse? I'm tempted to just outright ignore it, but I assume there was some kind of reasoning to add this new mechanic to a game that otherwise is just regular stuff we've seen many times before.
But one thing that just seems very odd to me is shock damage. I fully understand how the mechanics work, they are not that difficult. But why does this mechanic exist in the first place? What's its purpose and what is it supposed to add to the game? Dealing damage to enemies even on a miss unless they have really good armor just feels weird.
Is it supposed to speed up combat? Or to make ranged weapons worse? I'm tempted to just outright ignore it, but I assume there was some kind of reasoning to add this new mechanic to a game that otherwise is just regular stuff we've seen many times before.
Fanaelialae
Legend
I wouldn't get rid of Shock damage if you're going to use WWN. It's fairly core to the Warrior's ability to deal damage (it's even called out as such in the class entry).
The game describes Shock as "the inevitable harm that is done when an unarmored target is assailed by something sharp in melee range."
I see it as the wearing down of an enemy who isn't so heavily armored that they can largely shrug off your attacks. If you've done martial arts, or even play-fought with tree branches, you know that blocking a hard strike hurts. It sends a shock, up through your arms, all the way into your shoulders and torso. Shock damage wears opponents down and leaves them open to a lethal blow in a similar manner, IMO.
I think it's too core to the combat to remove without completely breaking at least the warrior class. If you don't want to use shock, I wouldn't recommend using WWN.
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