#3: Let There Be Light
An update and some thoughts on worldbuilding
Long Time, No See (Behind The Scenes)
Worldbuilding!
What’s New
Recommendations
Bye
Long Time, No See (Behind The Scenes)
Hi, it’s been a while. You might have been expecting an update in November, or December, or January. Sorry about that. As much as I aspire to do with Amor Tali, it’s a one-man show being run purely for hobby, so there are times I will have to shelve it away. These last few months was a time like that, between working seasonal overtime and dealing with the fires in LA, I simply haven’t made the time for it. My goals remain though; I want to write here regularly, ideally once a month, even if it never develops into professional opportunities to work on games, because artistic pursuits are essential in strange times like these to retain our humanity.
Amor Tali needs some extra elbow grease to keep it from losing momentum, so I am going to experiment with new writing strategies. I don’t want to pre-write too much since I want my updates to be recent enough, but I think I can pre-write some core topics/essays and save “what’s new”, “recommendations”, and other updates to be typed closer to the day of release. Other goals on the horizon for Amor Tali include a logo (I have no idea what to make my logo - open to suggestions), and a discord server to keep readers updated on new publications and scheduling delays, as well as connecting readers and building a community to discuss game topics with.
Apologies if these meta, self analytical rambles aren’t interesting, but seeing how this newsletter functions as a sort of journal, it’s going to be a part of my process. Are you ready to talk about something fun, though? I am.
Worldbuilding!
I originally had no idea what I was going to write about for my first “official” general RPG topic, but then I realized I was placing too much pressure on the idea of doing it right or best, and I just needed to write about what I’ve been thinking about - so that’s what I’m doing. I’m no worldbuilding expert, though, I still have a lot to learn.
As someone who enjoys living fictional worlds, as well as a student of philosophy, I have always loved where the two meet at any intersection. If you could take some tiny element of the world as it is, and tweak it, what would be the unexpected results? If you built a fictional world from the ground up, how do you decide the implications of the decisions you make? These implications can manifest socially, culturally, economically, environmentally, logistically, and so on.
When creating a new world, a key distinction that needs to be made early on is whether this world is being built for a book (or otherwise static publication), or for use in an RPG. RPG worlds have massively different needs from books due to their collaborative nature. As an author, you have full control over both your characters and your setting, which tend to remain in flux until the final drafts as their interactions are fine-tuned. Notably, most fictional characters have a destiny; an end point on the horizon that they spend their time hurtling towards as the author warps the setting to pave their way forward. RPG characters, on the other hand, have none of this working in their favor. There is no tangible thread of fate guiding the player forward in the story. Plans may be discussed with the GM in advance, but the dice are stone-faced apathetic gods who care little for the whining of humans. Different tables play it out differently, but usually, the dice fall as they may, and characters may face totally different outcomes than expected. In addition to this constant entropy of fate, GMs face another challenge: they have no control over the motives of the characters coming into their world. Rather than knowing the nuances of their world and characters as an author does, and being able to bend both in an arc towards each other, GMs must put their efforts towards listening to their players, learning their motivations, and working doubly as hard to bend the setting to meet their story needs. This can be a very hard lesson for a new GM to learn; when you begin creating a world, you feel compelled to paint an epic portrait, a rich cosmology with eons of wars and empires rising and falling, feeding into a vibrant cultural setting. This is great fun, but this is also author-like writing, this is, as Brandon Sanderson might analogize it, “architect” writing. True worldbuilding does not begin until the players begin to engage with the sandbox (this would be the “gardener” writing part of Sanderson’s analogy). This is because the world only exists in context at the table. The players don’t care about the war between the lands of Khidian and Brutia, until someone’s ancestral home is on Brutian land and at risk of seige. They don’t care about the evils done by the False Angels sect, until a character’s little sibling is kidnapped by the cult. They don’t care about the secret ancient temple under the mountain until the combat-loving player hears about the fearsome Embersoul Gauntlets sealed within. The point being: everything you try to write as a part of your RPG worldbuilding process needs to be treated as a prologue, not the main story. Ultimately, that means having a complex history of wars or a thorough map of the trading routes of various kingdoms is only going to do so much for you, until you know what kind of world needs to grow around your players.
As an aside, building a world with a mechanical game system in mind, rather than just one table in mind, probably looks very different. I’ve never done it, my current game project is system-neutral fantasy, boilerplate stuff. But there are several RPGs that do it well Blades in the Dark with Doskvol and Heart with, well, Heart. I would expect that writing a game system with a companion world is probably much more about the overall aesthetic of that world than rigid worldbuilding proper. Look at how the earliest versions of D&D intentionally made Vecna vague and apocryphal, they wrote the rules to commit to the feel of the fantasy wargaming genre and left threads and breadcrumbs all over the place for people to be inspired and make their own story variants, since it doesn’t make sense to try and preserve a rigid canon for an improvisational game. Mothership is another good example, despite not having a world that it is strictly set in, the panic engine reinforces the genre of sci-fi horror so strongly that it is arguably a form of worldbuilding!
The last worldbuilding thought I’ll leave you with is one I found on an episode of Adventuring Academy and have mused on a lot in the past few weeks. It’s about where the impossible meets the logistical: when you as a worldbuilder have some far-fetched “what-if…” idea, it can feel very necessary to justify each idea well, despite being grounded in fiction. Instead of focusing on the “why?”, it can be vastly more interesting to spend time thinking about the “what then?”, which will often end up being things that influence play. If you say “What if we have a city that’s underwater?”, rather than saying “Well, why is it underwater? Why would people still live there?”, it can be a lot more interesting to say “There must be a demand for water-breathing magic then, as well as aquatic transportation. Perhaps there are special plants and resources underwater that cause the underwater city to engage in active trade with a city the players are in”. This kind of “yes, and” thinking can help to remind you that you are playing a game, and it’s important to let yourself have fun and let your ideas run free in that setting.
What’s New
The Agon Jam mentioned in my last issue went well! We had 6 very cool submissions that can be viewed here. The Agon community jams have been an awesome tradition, and I really enjoyed helping to carry the torch. I’m looking forward to the next one!
You may remember a project I mentioned in previous issues called Twelfth Rib, which is my first TTRPG that I plan to publish. I do have updates, but they’re not major, so I’ll tease some extra information as well. First off, I have no projected release date. I hate promising things and not delivering, which I’ve already done running this newsletter, so I won’t be doing that. Twelfth Rib will continue to be polished as a hobby until I’m ready to publish it. On a brighter note, I completed a playtest of the game! It was my first time playtesting a game of my own creation and it gave me so much to work with. The game existed as a draft for months and actually playing it revolutionized the core mechanics and overhauled how combat and stats functioned entirely. It’s important to understand that Twelfth Rib started as a 1-page micro-RPG on Affinity Publisher, then it became front & back, then a few pages, then 7 pages. At this point, it has been extrapolated to a Google Doc so it can be expanded and heavily revised until a final version exists to be decorated in Affinity Publisher. As it is now, the core rules could still be made into a one-pager, but there’s so much interesting stuff to do with those rules, that it feels worth the time to flesh out the game fully.
To provide a sneak peek of what I can, the game is about sneaking around and looting a dungeon while an Undead Lord slumbers within. As players stumble through the dungeon, they discover clues about the Undead Lord. However, the more clues they find, the more likely the Undead Lord is to awaken & trigger a boss fight. Genre-wise, it’s similar to D&D and other high-fantasy games, with a splash of Scooby-Doo. However, I am making an effort to make the classes unique and evocative enough that it’s not a simple fantasy knock-off. The dungeon I playtested was set in my homebrew world, Baljord, and it was named Cloudstar Castle. It was a castle on a sky island that had been exploded into several pieces and was held in place by a magical gravitational singularity, as well as having magic portals to jump from one part of the castle to another. Cloudstar Castle probably won’t make it into the final product because it’s got lore that’s a bit niche (the Undead Lord was a Parrot bird-man-king reincarnated through the power of an Angel Mask. Doesn’t really make sense without the accompanying lore), but it was a really fun exercise in mapping a dungeon using nodes rather than a traditional map, and it gave me a better understanding of the dungeon structure needed to facilitate a good play experience for this game. The next dungeon I develop will probably be the sample one I provide with the rules. I’d like to provide one dungeon with the rules, as well as guidelines to help a GM make their own, and then release a bundle of dungeons to buy separately, we’ll see what happens in the end. The sample dungeon will probably either be the hollow of a Dracolich (Mines of Morinrock) or a Vampyr Lord’s gothic lair (St. Norrix’s Cathedral).
TL;DR: Twelfth Rib is my “Fantasy Heartbreaker”. I hope people love it, and I think it’s got an innovative core mechanic, but it’s not breaking any new ground, it’s just got some neat stuff in it.
Recommendations
I just recently found out about the War for Rayuba, which was organized by Tom Bloom of K6BD and CAIN. It’s a gigantic tournament arc between a bunch of OCs made by talented artists - and the tournament matches themselves were drawn by the OC artists and judged to determine which endings were canon. I think it’s a fascinating concept and a really cool project, here’s a video by People Make Games going into more depth about it.
The Hades II Early Access also just released their Warsong Update, with the final area after Olympus, the final boss, and Ares boons. I have not played enough of it to get to the final boss, but I have seen some crazy spoilers. It also looks like lots of boons and effects have been retooled as well as polishing up some of the game visuals. It’s really coming along!
Bye
This one was written up fairly quickly but I hope it still gave you food for thought. Feel free to comment if you’d like me to expand on the worldbuilding discussion in a more in-depth way, or if you have other topics you’d like to read more about. If you enjoyed reading, please subscribe and share!
Godspeed,
Amor Tali