Blog Carnival: On creating elements for a setting

To participate in this months blog carnival - hosted by Codex Anathema on the topic of On creating elements for a setting I want to write on some of the tools I draw on to do this.

The first block are deterministic - me staring at what there is and building it out myself. The second block are the generators I use to twist the straight-line thinking of my own ideas and surprise my players.

Block One - Following the Obvious Leads

The first piece is generally the campaign theme - what is the premis of this game? Recent examples have been 'expedition into a lizard kingdom', 'outlaws set up shop in the ruins of an ancient empire', 'dragonblooded nobles delve into the secrets of their great house'. From that I generally get a few things that need to be explained or included from the get go.

If there is a general motif that can be identified, I try and collage in ideas around that. For the dragonblooded nobles, each noble house was of a certain draconic lineage - so how do they lean into that? How do they interact with the actual dragons still living around the place? What does this realm think of dragonslayers?

One of the guiding stars for me for worldbuilding is geography is destiny - even with magic in the world it holds. Looking at who is beside who, what is the terrain, where are the rivers, the connections, etc, these provide ideas for the setting. If the sea is nearby, what of the things that live in the oceans? If there are mountains, what of those that live on and under the mountains?

Often at this point a cultural analogue (or group of them) becomes apparent - and those can be a useful hook to fish for other ideas. I like to choose a 'substrate' and then log the differences - a campaign a while back was an imperial chinese setting which had Wang Liangs in the flower of their ascendancy - so how do very long lived rules who can speak to each other telepathically change the setting? When all the architecture is scaled up for them? Too large for horses, how do they prefer to get around?

Block Two - Introduce Randomness with Generators

At this point I have a deep shelf of tools to use for this. I find cycling through the different tools keeps the process interesting for me as well as generating random ideas.

Books: Worlds Without Number, the d30 Sandbox Companion and the Kontext Spiel Collection are my go-to's for random tables. I like the 3.5e DMG for random tables too and any number of dedicated compilations of random tables like a Dungeon Dozen or similar from the OSR.

Art inspiration: I have my Grim Tarock - given its awesome Ian Miller art, this is a great source of inspiration to just draw a card for something strange.

Worldbuilding decks: specifically designed for world-building with lots of possible permutations and a guide to a workflow; I have two different ones of these - Deck of Worlds and the Wilderness Generator from Izirions Enchirdion of the West Marches

Blogs - for almost anything you care for, there is a random table on a blog. Isolated city states that had gotten somewhat weird was a motif of the lizard kingdoms game, giving great exercise to the In Corpathium and Infinigrad generators combined with Stupidly Quick City-Building from r/DNDBehindTheScreen coupled with steps 3 & 4 from creating fantasy villages, towns and cities to get the layout.

Map creation tools: Azgaar's Fantasy Map Generator being the king of these - mash the buttons until you get a realm that looks right for you - then you can just read ideas off it, geography as destiny as I mention above.

Magazines and Zines: like the amazing NOD Magazine by Jon Stater, which has hex crawls for all sorts of terrains and all sorts of cultures - grab his index, look up something that fits and pull out a couple of hexes to populate your own setting.

A lot of this is about using analogue sources, turning away from the computer and using pen, paper, dice and tables to generate up some stuff. Once I have used whatever generators to get some results, I will often loop back to deterministic thinking - what are the implications of the stuff I have rolled up, how does it interact with the bits I know are there already, etc. This way the random inputs are coherent with the whole, once these implications and interlinks have been thought through.