So I backed the kickstarter and set the game aside in my mind to wait until it was finished. A week or so ago I saw there was a Quick Start packet and I was able to sit down and read it last night. Suffice to say I’m really excited about playing this game. So much so that I’m going to run it for my grognard gamer group who are all older, more experience with different game systems, and more critical of rookie GMing. Is there a resource for more information about Duskwall yet? Should I just run the Quick Start game as a one-off adventure then wait for the full release to start a full campaign?
So I backed the kickstarter and set the game aside in my mind to wait until it was finished.
So I backed the kickstarter and set the game aside in my mind to wait until it was finished.
That “Quick Start” can be as long as you want. Turn your players loose on Duskwall, and watch the city tremble!
Okay, so where do I get more information about Duskwall so I don’t have to make it all up out of whole cloth?
Make it all up. There are snippets here and there, but you’ll mostly have to deal with yourselves.
And I think it might be the intention.
There are a few posts in the general stew of this community that have more info – like https://plus.google.com/+JohnHarper/posts/7RuHDYjsL7A – but they can be kinda hard to sift from the chaff of general discussion. =/
Just peek around at what other people are doing. Play some Dishonored to get the vibe right.
Read The Lies of Locke Lamora if you got the time. Everytimes there is a setting questions just think of the three themes.
Corruption, Industrialism and Haunted.
There’s not a lot of wrong answers in this game
What sort of things would you rather have filled in than fill in? What sort of background are you looking for?
I’m looking for some of the necessary inner workings of a fantasy world. What’s the city’s food supply? What technology or magic is used to assist in food production? Are there any special tech/magic methods of transportation? Who has access to those methods? How advanced are public utilities? Are there any technological or magical means of communication? Who has access to those? What’s the city’s political structure? Is there true private ownership of real property, or is it all technically owned and leased by the Crown? Is there a written legal code with infractions and violations you can get in trouble for in addition to the usual crimes? Is there an organized judiciary with an appeal hierarchy, or are they just appointed magistrates with complete authority in their respective districts? These are the foundations on which a civilization is laid. They’re background details that someone will invariably ask about during a game. If I’m making it up on the spot, I’m going to find later after further reflection that my answer doesn’t make sense for X reason, or creates Y problem. I like my fantasy to be internally consistent, with recognizable rules. I can come up with this stuff on my own, but if the game designers are already going to do that (or already have done it), I’d rather use what they’ve made. If the intent is for each group to fill in a skeleton of Duskwall, so every iteration is unique, that’s fine too. I guess I’m wondering what the plan is.
I’m not having any issues with the tone or theme of the game. I’m a huge Gentlemen Bastards fan, and one of my players is a bit obsessed with Vlad Taltos. Honestly I was just wondering if anyone else had already done a bunch of worldbuilding so I wouldn’t have to.
I think right now virtually none of those questions are answered – each group answers them individually, as they need them.
I don’t know what the final plan is, for how much is filled in and how much is left to each table to do, but I can share some world-building I’ve done. I encourage you to keep what you like and ditch the rest, but if you want some ideas, here you go.
https://fictivefantasies.wordpress.com/2015/09/29/summary-of-blades-in-the-dark-worldbuilding/
Wow…there’s so much to work with here I’m sorta flabbergasted. I didn’t know Duskwall was supposed to exist in a world without a sun, partially swallowed into the underworld. I’d definitely have to modify that. I already tried coming up with an internally consistent society in a world without a sun while novel brainstorming, and that’s way too much work. I’d rather it just be that the piece of the world that fell just inside the Gates of Death sees the sky and the sun through a hazy screen. There’s still sunlight, but it’s only about half-strength. Every once in a while while the realm of death ebbs and flows the sky may get a bit closer, or pull a bit further away. But that way crops would still grow, just not as well. We don’t have to completely rewrite agriculture, it’s just a constant scarcity problem, so the civilization can never really advance beyond these dirty barely-governed city-states.
And I just got a plot hook idea. A secret society of super rich citizens is funding the acquisition of massive amounts of electroplasm in hopes of breaching the Gate and returning to the world of light. The first glimpse of the possibility is that their scientists have grown these huge succulent tomatoes (which are really just normal tomatoes irl) by making small breaches to let real sunlight through.
Okay fine, fine, I’ll make up my own stuff. Yeesh.
You’re already doing fine.
And remember, there’s electrical stuff around. Just add Leviathan Blood and you can probably do anything to get stuff to work like in the real world.
Page 41 of the quickstart ef version says:
‘The islands have wildly different climates due to magical weirdness from the
cataclysm. The “water” of the Never Sea seems to be composed of opaque black ink,
but it’s possible to see constellations of shimmering stars far below the surface. The
sun is a dim ember, providing only purpleish twilight at dawn and dusk; leaving the
world in darkness otherwise.’
Of course different game groups interpret that differently. =)
That’s why I asked what you were looking for–worldbuilding that’s done step by step becomes daunting to someone who comes at it as a mass. That’s why one of the strengths of the quickstarter was a refusal to present a finished world; in building your own, step by step, you invest in it and own it and love it.
I like this quote better: “Don’t expect realism here.”
😛
Heh, yeah… To some extent I can get on board with that, since it’s a city inside the Gates of Death. BUT even there, events have causes.
Andrew, I evidently glossed over that part of the quickstart. So the world is supposed to be upside down? The sun is underneath the Never Sea? I can work with that too.
Page 41 has the most information on overall world stuff. I don’t know that the world is supposed to be upside down; there are other reasons constellations may shine beneath the waves. It’s a detail you can flesh out however you want, or discard at will. =) Just wanted to point out where I was pulling from when I did my own more in-depth explanation.
The “stars” beneath the Nether Sea are actually the pyres around which the Leviathans gather to worship their New Gods.
(this is something I just made up. There are no “real” answers)
There is a portal in the depths of the Never Sea that connects with the leviathans home dimension.
The lights are the spirits of the drowned.
It’s a fluorescent algae, but nobody ventured that deep to know.
Make things up. When you can’t think of something, ask another player. Collaborate with them, and don’t plan too much to start with. This is a game that encourages retroactively filling in blanks. Play to find out what happens.
The more holes you leave the more chances for amazing ideas to fill in those holes later either from you or the players. If you try to flesh too much of the world at the get go and and make it internally consistent now you’ll miss out on that beautiful magic emergent world building that comes from co-narrative play with your players.
Also, the more world building you have in place, the more levers you have you can pull during the game because you already know they are there.
Sometimes existing threats, background myths, and known structures lend themselves to quick exploitation for jobs and twists, if you’ve got them on deck already. Emergent world building can add flourishes at a smaller level and not be injured at all by having some of those broad strokes in place and ready to use in play.
So, of course, your mileage may vary.
Regardless how you do it, one issue to bear in mind is how you’ll record this. When I’m in maximum creative mode, my brain doesn’t want to code what’s going on to memory. So either I stop and jot notes during the session, which really does damage the speed and flow of the game, or I salvage what I can remember after the session. Or I make a recording and take the time to go back to it to fill in blanks of stuff I was wildly improvising at the time.
Because a number of sessions of wild improv in, it gets difficult. Players want their characters to talk to people I made up on the spot back then. They revisit locations I only vaguely remember. If I haven’t gone back and tidied up my notes, then as the sessions go on and the elaborations pile up it can get difficult to remember what you’ve established in the fiction.
That’s why for me it’s really helpful to have some things nailed down in advance, or big picture stuff in place. It’s established and I can revisit it easily enough, and it’s easier to remember how I riffed on it, rather than things I was making up whole cloth at the table and spinning out at a generous rate but will have difficulty reconstructing later.
I admire and envy those whose minds just keep all that straight. I run a lot of games, and I have hundreds of NPCs in various genres and systems and campaigns. So when I play a game it’s important to nail down some of that improvisation for later reference, or just shrug and admit I don’t remember so it doesn’t really matter.
Improvisation is great and has a key role, don’t get me wrong. (I have run open tables where I see the characters, ask a few questions, and make up an adventure for them on the spot.) However, for most players, if they internalize that you’re just making stuff up and it won’t matter later, then that makes it a lot harder for them to engage in the game because it feels a lot more fake at that point.
Persistence is one of the things that separates improv that builds a world from improv that makes it frictionless and bland. So, before you launch into making it all up as you go, think about how it will persist past the session and how you’ll refer to it later.
One more thought on this: there is a key quality in the detail that determines whether it is useful or a bloat: inspiration. If the detail gives you more ideas for games and opens possibilities, it’s useful. If the detail is instead something you feel you’ll have to remember, and it weighs you and your setting and your players down, then it’s bloat.
After all, the quickstart has factions in it. It lists other countries. It has some information on the supernatural. While each table could make these things up, the details were included because they were inspirational. Those details give you a sense of the setting, an idea of the sorts of things you can do here, and a variety of flavors to import.
The trick to this is that what inspires one person or group will be bloat for another group. The only really telling criteria is whether adding a detail fires up possibilities for more stories, and more interesting stories. If not, drop it.
Yes, that is good advice generally for worldbuilding in roleplaying games.