Friday 6 June 2014

The Construction of Worlds in Quest, and in RPGs in general

Of particular interest to me is the construction of worlds and the environs that they allow us to work in, my own opinion about these is that there should be enough to have a go at but not so much that they stifle the creative atmosphere.  When I came to design my own game, I looked at it from the point of view that if the world map didn’t grab me immediately, how could I expect it to grab anyone elses attention.  With this in mind, I engaged someone who had a more visual mindset to try and pull the notes that I’d written down into something resembling an actual world.

Between us, we came up with this...




Enough Continents to make travel an option within the game, enough major points to make the beginning part of the game interesting, but enough unchartered wilderness to make the world something of an unknown quantity.  I have two maps of it, the first is above, the second is on the wall of my study, where every time I think of something else to put in there, I write it on in small writing so I’ve still got the space to play with, that map now looks like this...



Now while there’s not much on the face of it (me writing very small doesn’t help), it’s possible to see where the world is starting to go and where it will go as time goes on.  The point about this world is that it has a dark side to the world as well, before the time of trials, when the world found technology but there were concerns over this new development and wars broke out over the use of machines over the use of magic, and those who practised the heresy of technology were exiled to the far side of the world, there to make a life for themselves.  This resulted in the following map...



This is going to be added in when the nature world campaign gets to it and the various factions are introduced, but back to the nature world for a second.  As with all things in the world, I wanted to make sure that the world has a “Just being discovered” feel to it, so the artwork isn’t ultra-realistic, there’s no massive murals or paintings, nothing that Turner would be proud of, it’s just the drawings from where travellers have stopped to take time out and make an image.  There are some places, the dead lands in the north of Invicarn, where nothing lives, and as a result, the images coming out of there would be slim to none, with people relying on the scribbles of those who made it out to make any sense of it.  While a picture can tell a thousand words, sometimes the fact that there is no picture tells the story all by itself. So the world locations look like this (Hotos)



And this (The World Hole)



With places like this added in (The Titans Causeway)



And then there’s the artwork within the cities, wherein the main points of the city are covered, such as Rashenjot, which is the capital city of Zargoldand, a map for the main layout of the city



And then major points within, such as the Path of Careful Footsteps
on the south side of the city

All to build some sort of interest in the world itself and make people want to find what goes on next...


Still, my thoughts, interested in everyone elses...