Captain Anorak's
Guide to Gaming
Building from the Ground Up
Building from the ground up is a concept I try to apply
to game design on many levels. I generally find it's easier to
create something by thinking about how it develops.
CREATING SOCIETIES
I like to write world-backgrounds from the geography up. First I
draw a map of the geography. Then I very briefly work out the history
of the place, siting settlements and the territories of different
groups. Plot usually develops spontaneously out of this, as obvious
conflicts arise.
Example: There's a plain in the east and a mountainous region in the west. The
earliest inhabitants of this area were the Anak people. They were hunter-gatherers and
herders. Later the Zel people gradually infiltrated from the east. They were farmers who
cleared the land for agriculture and slowly cut into the territory of the Anak. There
was war over land. The Zel gradually pushed the Anak back into the mountains, though
many Anak gave up the nomadic lifestyle and became farmers themselves. These settled Anak
partly mixed with the Zel. The Anak in the hills remained 'wild', ie. nomadic herders
still. Fifty years ago the Domu Empire invaded and made the plains
area a province. They brought in colonists, who were also farmers, and built military
colonies in which Domu soldiers lived off the surplus produced by the colonist farmers.
The Domu never conquered the mountains which were too defensible. Five years ago the Domu
Empire collapsed and the the military governor of the plains province declared himself
an independent king.
I've there written one paragraph of background, and in it you can see the seeds of
a whole campaign. I can distinguish from it five potential racial/cultural groups: the 'wild'
hill Anak, the settled Anak farmers, the Zel farmers, the mixed-blood group descended
from both Zel and Anak, and the Domu. Each of these would have its own cultural
traditions. It's easy to develop from here the following religious picture: The Anak had
their own original religion, which is still followed in a relatively pure form in the
hills; the Zel had another religion, and the people of the plains before the coming of the
Domu followed a group of religious traditions resulting from a fusion of Anak and Zel
beliefs; the Domu had a third religion which they tried to some extent to impose on the
people of the plains, which varying different degrees of success, resulting in a merging
of religions which hasn't progressed very far yet and is seen by some on both sides as
undesirable contamination.
The potential for game action from this is huge. From a military standpoint, there are
the possibilities of Anak incursions into the plains and plainsfolk rebellion against the
Domu. From a social standpoint, there are the old tensions between Anak and Zel farmers on
the plain, which smoulder on underneath everything else, as well as the resentment against
the Domu. Domu rulers and the leaders of the local community have to try to enforce their
own version of how things should be, while different people wanting different things
struggle against their tutelage in different ways.
The point I'm trying to make here is that this isn't hard to do and doesn't take a lot
of effort. People will say that writing a social background in this much detail is too
much work. The above proves them wrong. The three paragraphs above contain a sketch on
which a campaign could easily be based. You could write this on one side of A4 and it would
take less than half an hour to think up. Writing game worlds like this is easy, because
everything flows from what came before in such a logical way that you don't have to work
at it; game plot just developed naturally from the background
conditions that you've written.
OTHER SYSTEMS
The concept of building from the ground up can also be applied
when designing systems for other things, such as technology,
magic and
economics.