Starting Worldbuilding

As mentioned in my initial post, when I started worldbuilding I used a few ideas that I'd had in the back of my mind since the early 1990s.  They were only vague ideas and certainly not something that could be turned in to a game world.  In fact, the stories I'd written back then were more steampunk than what I'm currently running (though I think it was probably about another ten years since I'd first encounter the word steampunk).  Generally the world I'm now running could be considered the ancient past of the (fragments of) stories I'd previously written.

The world has a few basic concepts, some of which I won't go in to as the players don't know about them yet!  



The main and most obvious one is that the geography of the planet is based on Pangaea, the most recent prehistorical super-continent that once covered Earth.  Being a hypothetical continent, there are a host of different versions of how it was laid out, so I spent quite a while looking for a variety of maps, picking a few I liked the shapes of.  I've drawn up a few master maps at different scales of the entire continent or smaller regions, none of which I've shared with the players.  My reasoning there is that accurate maps simply did not exist in the pre-modern era.  It's a struggle to recognise what areas some of the oldest maps actually represent - refer to Ptolemy's Prima Europe Tabula for a case in point (on that map, from the 15th century, Giant's Causeway is further north than John O'Groats).  So, as far as I'm concerned, the idea that players will have access to Ordnance Survey-accurate maps of the world they live in stretches belief (even with dragons, magic and the rest).

Speaking of which, what is the technological level of my world?  It seems that most fantasy worlds have fallen empires and long-lost cities a-plenty.  I wanted to try something different.  Rather than my PCs adventuring around ruined temples and combating ancient evils which have been reawoken I want them to visit the newly-built temple and encounter the evil before it's imprisoned for banished.  As I was already creating the history of a world I'd visited before, I also wanted this time period of my world to be as early as practical.  Rather than the generic pseudo-mediaeval oeuvre we're all familiar with, I wanted mine to go further back, but how far?  I spent my spare moments for a few days or weeks researching everything from the stone age to the Graeco-Roman era and trying to pick an era that suited what I wanted without requiring me to re-write half of the D&D rulebook.  There's nothing wrong with basing your fantasy world on Roman or Greek mythology, but it has all been done a thousand times before.  The stone age, iron age and bronze age aren't quite as clear-cut as one might think but in general I picked a late bronze-age setting, where different civilisations have access to differing levels of technology and there are changes in social structure to cause conflict and drama.  I looked through the full equipment list in the Players Handbook and to my surprise only one or two of the items in there were recent inventions so pretty much everything could be used without too much anachronism.  This gave me a selection of ancient cultures, mythologies and locations to work from.

One of other early steps I took was to try to figure out exactly what world-building would entail, so I took to the rules books and sourcebooks I already owned.

Sourcebook-wise, Titan: the Fighting Fantasy World has everything, from divine pantheons, the creation of the world, a geographical tour, maps at world, continent, city, village and building scale. alphabets, coinage, price lists, biographies and run-downs of the major races (though not a monster list, as this was published in Out of the Pit).  Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay had to provide rules, but did provide quite a bit of the same kind of thing that Titan did, this time including a monster list and is really everything you need to run a game in the Empire of the Warhammer world.  The D&D rulebooks by contrast only really have the pantheon and planes, though the Dungeon Masters Guide has quite extensive world-building guidelines including some bits which helped to solidify some ideas I already had, notably the following paragraph:

The World is New. What if your world is new, and the characters are the first of a long line of heroes?  The adventurers might be champions of the first great empires, such as the empires of Netheril and Cormanthor in the Forgotten Realms setting.

When creating a fantasy world, using ideas from the ancient world was a great help to the creative process, whether from the previously mentioned inaccurate maps or now disproven beliefs.  I didn't want to tie down religion at this point as it can vary so much by location.  I did a little preliminary research though, and decided to start from the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European religion, at least for the central regions of the continent, with animism as the default for other regions until I had cause to revisit the topic.

Another thing to note is how I constructed the calendar.  I had the idea that as the speed of the Earth's spin is slowing, perhaps the length of the years and months would have changed over time.  I did some cursory research in to this and ended up with shorter days and months but longer years (or at least more months and days in each year).  I constructed a spreadsheet including new moons, full moons, solstices and equinoxes.  I'd looked at some traditional holidays and festivals and decided I'd only use the calendar as a basis for local customs, depending on where the players decided to go (rather than put the festivals on to the master calendar).

So, I had the following:

• the world geography is based on Pangaea
• individual regions are based on a combination of prehistoric archaeology and mythology
• the mythology takes the reconstructed proto-Indo-European pantheon as its basis
• a base lunar-solar calendar