Worldbuilding Diary: Layers

I have talked about “Layers” before, in brief, and probably in other web sites and not this one. There is a price to pay in memory when you make disparate comments about your projects on other people’s blogs. Anyway. I write The World of Adel using a three-tiered system of Layers, dividing topics of interest for different groups of people. You can read as many or as few Layers as you want to get started playing a game. This way, I reward greater interest in the setting and greater time commitment, but I do not penalize lesser interest – you can run a perfectly fine game off of Layer 1.

So let’s look at how I arrange these layers. This article will contain a lot of my opinions, which tend to wildly diverge from conventional gamer culture. I do not say these things to offend, just as my observations, and to explain why I did certain things, and why I advocate certain things. These diaries are just as much about the setting as about me – since the setting is a product of myself, and what I want to see in my gaming and hopefully in gaming as a whole.

Layer 1: Bare Minimum

For my first layer, I wrote the articles in the first column of the Index, under “Introduction.” These articles host information largely redundant and shallow compared to other, deeper articles, and therefore probably appeal to most RPG gamers, who, from my experience, are likely to be intimidated or aggravated by the amount of detail I provide in other areas (such as looking at the culture’s viewpoint on sexuality or race, or their food, their dress culture, and other such tidbits that don’t involve direct action). The introduction is a section of articles to read so you can host one very typical campaign fairly quickly after reading them, and leaves many blanks for the potential GM and players to fill in however they feel like.

For Layer 1, you want to answer some of the following questions for potential players/GMs:

•What is my character like?: This includes basics like “what fantasy archetypes are at work here” (do you have mages/clergy, don’t you have mages/clergy is the typical sticking point), “what fantasy creatures can I play as,” “what fantasy gods do I worship” and so on. Basic character-building question for players. For this, I talked about religion which is a major part of Adel, as well as the four Adelian races, and some basics on national identity.

•What is the world like?: Things like a map and some very basic history (when the world started, one or two major events along the way like a huge war or a god rising or falling, and how the world is now) answer here.

•What does my character want?: In other layers, this is basically impossible to answer, and I don’t really answer it myself because I’m very used to treating Adelians as a culture of disparate individuals, like the real world is. For most people, they want a campaign setting for a specific plotline happening there (“take out the Sorcerer Kings”) so you can cite one or two specific goals that big damn heroes in the setting will want to chase after for the utmost glory.

•Who do I fight?: Essentially you want to present enemy factions in brief here, for things like Favored Enemy. In World of Adel, these are groups like the Sorians, Elves, Furies and Angels. For this layer, that’s probably too many. Your campaign can have an empire of genocidal orcs led by a sorcerer and that could well be the only enemy needed. I tried to shy away from having too many completely irredeemable or depraved humanoid enemies, and opted for enemies who could go either way, or who have no culture (the Sorians are not Always Chaotic Evil; the Angels are robots with a genocidal directive).

•How Do The Rules Change?: If you’ve got a game system you’re using, like D&D, and you decide to prohibit the use of Clerics, it is best to ground those changes into the setting. Briefly explain such changes: perhaps there are no Gods in your setting so there would not be Clerics who have magical powers (there may still be theists, of course).

Those basic questions will get you through Layer 1, and they will get any GM started imagining how to tweak things and make them his or her own. There is no canon in Layer 1, only vague ideas to get people started. I’m not a huge fan of Layer 1, either as a reader or as a writer, but you need Layer 1 there because gamers are usually huge, huge proponents of what I’m calling Layer 1, and the briefer (yet expandable) you make your Layer 1, the better.

Layer 2: Filling Holes

Layer 2 involves things that a character will see just by being around, but that the average RPG player is unlikely to participate in or have interest about. This is the stuff you mention as flavor text while they’re walking through a town or sitting in someone’s house. This is not to say all RPG gamers dislike for this stuff – after all, I’m writing this, and I like it. And I’ve met a lot of people who like it too. But in my experience most people will not want to read beyond Layer 1.

I’m not saying this to be snide, but to warn you that the practical utility of this material may be low. A lot of times, your players just don’t care about what the Festival of The Burning King is, even if you really do. That shouldn’t stop you from adding it in – you are there to have fun too. So think of Layer 2 as “your” layer and have your fun.

Nonetheless, you want to go ahead and start talking more about the things happening around the characters, that they may participate in, but that are generally not required for most campaign plots.

•What Is Society Like?: By this, I mean things like the predominant political systems of the world and what the majority and minority populations are like (racial, economic divisions), and so on. In Layer 1, we might hint at these things, or we might write them off as being exactly like some place else (“this setting is heavily inspired by medieval Europe”). In this layer though, we want to actually look at them and describe them in more detail. Are we taking it for granted that everywhere is a “Kingdom of” or do we have a few “Republic of” or even socialistic communes? Who (as in, what race/culture/sex/class) rules it?

•What Is The World Like?: You have your map from Layer 1, probably, and if you didn’t make one, I recommend Hexographer as it is easy and visually descriptive. Talk about things like natural resources and weather. Are the players ever likely to be in a place hit by a monsoon, or even something like a volcano? You can also, if your setting is magical enough, talk about cosmology. Where did magic come from, where do magical creatures come from? Did someone make them?

•What Are The Peoples Like?: Instead of treating the setting’s people as a homogenous mass of the “non-players,” look at them and their cultural differences, which are likely influenced by things like their environment, predominant sources of food and industry, and their major religion. When a player talks to folk in the desert, they’ll likely dress differently, eat differently and live differently than those in the city, or those in the wood, or those high in the mountains.

•What Are The Antagonists Like?: Try to humanize your antagonists. As I said above, I tried to do away with things like “always chaotic evil” cultures that are “acceptable targets,” mostly because I’ve always found that distasteful and reductive (your opinion may vary – I know always chaotic evil orcs are a beloved tradition). When someone becomes an antagonist I want them to have a reason why. When an entire culture is antagonistic, the question is even more important.

•What Are Other Heroes Like?: Starting with Layer 2 I start to accept that the world is bigger than just the players, and so there are probably other people around who can do “their job.” These include organizations like the military, guilds, secret societies, or even just other adventuring groups. So why do the players still “have a job?” There could be more trouble than anyone could solve; trouble may be more insidious and the response time of other groups slower than your own; or the classic “the players are just outright better than everybody” (which I really don’t like, but gets the job done).

•Why Did The Rules Change?: In Layer 1, you mention briefly you changed the rules and offered a quick explanation. Now it’s time to pull out both your game design hat and your amateur sociology hat. Why did you change the rules? What does this do to the game, and to the setting? You’re not being interrogated (usually) so just express your opinion freely about why the changes are interesting. For our cleric example, maybe you really don’t want healing and resurrection magic. Expound upon that – what makes magical healing boring, why did you axe the cleric instead of just the healing spells, and so on.

Layer 3: A Living Culture

I treat the World of Adel as more than just for RPG games. To me it is a worldbuilding project. It really is its own kind of hobby to me, that just happens to have a lot of use in my RPG games. I build it for more than just running one or two campaigns. You can think of it as a creative writing project more than just an RPG setting. So in Layer 3, I look at the world’s culture, and really think deeply about their issues on things that “players” will probably not want to engage, but that if I were writing a fiction set in the game, or if I was writing a fake “nonfiction” book about the world, I’d have to address.

I consider Layer 3 to be the most reviled layer by RPG gamers. These topics tend to start flame wars, unless you’re in a really enlightened space, because the majority of RPG gamers feel “their fun” is threatened by them. I call it the “issues” layer. This is the layer where game and metagame bleed into one another. You want to talk about things you’re probably not comfortable talking about, but that a lot of gamers (whom you might not usually think about) will feel glad that you did address, including women and minorities. This is stuff that a lot of gamers just take for granted about fantasy titles: including awful things like slavery, racism and sexism. Fantasy titles do not require any of the above to be present. You don’t need them to have the drama, action and adventure of fantasy. But if you do include them, you should talk about why. What does Slavery do in your setting? Where is racism included and for what purpose? Is it just “the big bad” who does these things, or are there “good folk” who participate in it, and why?  Don’t just take these things for granted. Examine them; you may find you don’t need them, even if you are really invested in the “realism” of things like D&D as medieval fantasy Europe.

In the world of Adel I opted for a very egalitarian world, because I know a lot of people don’t want to confront the same ugly prejudices they confront in real life, while playing a fantasy game. I also did it because I know I can have fun and interesting stories in a world that is by and large free of such prejudices. So I looked at the culture, and how it is different in a way that our own (or medieval Europe) isn’t, how it can be better about certain issues, and why that is so.

At no point, by the way, should a notion of “realism” or adherence to a particular culture keep you from using unique ideas. You are likely putting things like trolls and dragons that have no basis in reality, as well as magic, and strange religions of real, extant deities that everyone agrees exist; all of which could steer a culture in ways that the real medieval Europe or whatever would never have been. I have written articles about things like sexual orientation in Adel. I even include small places where prejudice does exist, for those people who do want to confront it in the game. But I made sure they aren’t the norm for the setting. The idea is, if a player is making a character, you want to be able to say “your character fits in and has agency,” and you don’t want to say “women can’t become adventurers” or “your character starts off a slave, because it was that way for your character’s kind.” The latter are really uncomfortable for a lot of people to hear, and gaming is better off without those attitudes.

I don’t begrudge the people who add these things to their games. I feel like they don’t need to be there, but I don’t begrudge them. I do feel ticked off when they’re simply written off as “things fantasy does” without examination of why they are there, what they are doing – and without acceptance that other people find them extremely uncomfortable.

You don’t need a Layer 3 – this is probably the “layer for other people” if we’re reading Layer 1 as “the layer for players” and Layer 2 as “the layer for the GM.” But I feel it is helpful to examine these real issues in gaming culture.