World Creation Minigames

Recently I’ve been working on several new campaign settings from a horror time travel mashup to a rebooted version of Spelljammer. Whenever I’m working on large projects like these I try to make the process as enjoyable as possible. Mostly this involves breaking them up into bite-size piece, each with their own little puzzle and sense of reward. In other words I make a game of it.

World Creation Minigames

Here are a few specific ways I do that. These work for me and maybe they’ll help you deal with the tedium and complexity of campaign creation as well.

Plot Jigsaw Puzzle

By viewing the plot as a jigsaw puzzle, I turn the project of creating a story into the arrangement of tropes, adventure scenarios, mini-campaigns, and story seeds into a cohesive plot.

For example, in my Demon: the Descent game I’m combining material from several books to create the overarching story of my Chronicle. My first story adapts the “Alligators in the Sewers” from Urban Legends, inserts the “Dendra Light” relic (and the related Dendra Reliefs) from Reliquary, ties in a MacGuffin for a later story stolen from Mage: the Awakening, and incorporates a monster from my previous Hunter game (taken from Antagonists).

The fun of this project is working out how many crazy things I can add to the story without ruining it. The Dendra Lights originate in Egypt which fits nicely with the themes of the antagonists in “Alligators in the Sewers”. Moreover their power ties closely to religious fervor which allows me to expand on the sewer cults. The layer of plots and devices also fits with the themes of the God-Machine and its occult matrices.

In my Vampire: the Requiem game, the jigsaw manifests between session as the players advance the story, resolve scenes and bring new problems to the fore. Between games, I focus on figuring out how each NPC reacts, move and adjust unvisited scenes, incorporate new player character Aspirations, and shift this all around into a satisfying story (subject of course to the decisions my players make).

The Translation Game

Another of my favorite tools, this is a different sort of puzzle: translating statistics from one game system to another. Sometimes it means updating a monster from one edition of a game to another, other times I translate an adventure from a different game setting. And sometimes I just pull whole subsystems from one game and import them into the one I’m running.

With the update of the new World of Darkness from first to the second edition (renamed to the Chronicles of Darkness), most of my games involve this to some extent. Virtues and Vices need updating to the new more flexible format, ethereal creatures need to account for different rules, powers have altered and so forth.

In the past I’ve translated 3rd Edition D&D dungeons to Arcana Evolved and Mage: the Ascension adventures to Mage: the Awakening. Each featured unique challenges in converting specific aspects over (what is the cleric equivalent for Arcana Evolved? What do you replace Marauders with in Awakening?). These made the projects interesting and thus fun and easier to resolve.

In Unusual Suspects, my Demon game, I’m doing some adventure translation. Beyond the system update, I’m incorporating a series of adventures from first edition Mage: the Awakening, translating the Mage antagonists into Demons and Angels and giving the stories a God-Machine gloss.

Custom Creations

Often I just want to make one small thing: a monster, a character, a cult or scene. Smaller is better. The more compartmentalized a project is the quicker I find I can finish it and get to that sense of accomplishment. For me a lot of these projects are monsters or NPCs, often ones that do something new mechanically.

For my game Heartland Orphans for example, I’m combining aspects of Beast: the Primordial to the antagonists of Vampire: the Requiem. In the mythology I’m building, the strange shadow birds that plague the setting are equal parts Strix and Beast. So which powers combine and how each individual Strix manifests this dual nature is the short fun puzzle.

Conclusion

So in summary: break up the work and make organizing and writing it a game.

How have you made world building fun for yourself?