Saturday Worldbuilding is a weekly project wherein yours truly builds a world from scratch in a disorganized bid to express what I think makes a world useful and interesting. Check out last week’s entry here.
So in the first Saturday Worldbuilding post, we scraped away a lot of the expectations. We’re not starting with a map, conlang, pantheon, magic system, or ancestries. Instead, we’ve put all that on the back burner and started with a central tension and a goal. We’re building a world for a TTRPG campaign.
The central tension I’ve chosen is democracy versus autocracy in a Cold War scenario. This week, as I said last time, we’re going to start by building a city. I chose a city because I think it’s good to start small and local and build out and because building a city will have us check off several boxes. Starting with a city and its immediate surroundings also gives us a clear place to start our game.
We’re approaching this with the idea that we don’t really have a specific campaign in mind just yet, but I imagine most folks will have some individual concept that lights the worldbuilding fire for them. It might be a character, plot, object, or location that you want to set into a specific world. It could even be a conversation you’d like two characters to have. Whatever it is, that’s the core to build around, and it’s helpful to start there and work out.
ASIDE: One time, I started (and never finished) a Waterdeep: Dragon Heist campaign for some work friends. Initially, I was going to run it in the Forgotten Realms, but I realized that’d bore me and let down some of my friends. So I ended up building the world up around having that specific group of characters attempt a heist. I spent maybe an hour on it, and it ended up being a really satisfying little world.
So we don’t have a map, and we don’t have our two major powers yet. I think it’d be better to have players start somewhere that isn’t quite the “center of the world.” I think a smaller country allied with one side or the other is ideal.
A lot of adventures start in villages and move toward cities, but I like giving players the option for urban or rural adventures. I think we’re going to go with the capital of an outlying nation, and I don’t want to dive right into the grim end of the things, so I’m going to place this on the democratic side.
Cities don’t just get plopped down in the world fully formed. They need a reason to exist and resources to support them. I think a port town on the mouth of a river is as good a place as any. It’s probably sort of swampy. I think mangrove swamps are cool and underrepresented in fantasy.
At this point, this is just a lot of brainstorming, but maybe it’ll be useful to see that brainstorming expressed here.
We’ve got a swampy seat of monarchy. I think a city of canals like Venice in danger of sinking into the swamps has room for some really cool imagery. I like the imagery of Venice, but I don’t think that’s reflective of local architecture. In fact, I think this stone city is a remnant of a past empire. I think the locals live in stilt houses and tree houses better adjusted to the season flooding (there’s seasonal flooding now).
What do they eat, what do they wear, and what do they trade? With seasonal flooding, I think rice makes sense as a staple crop. A quick search finds that mulberry, guava, persimmons, mangos, and Asian pears can tolerate wet soil. I think this is a pretty good variety of plants to start with and sets us up for some interesting things soon.
I think in terms of animal husbandry, they probably don’t have cows or sheep because there’s just not a lot of good grazing land. Pigs make sense. Manatees are neat. I wouldn’t want to make a fictional civilization that kills and eats a real world endangered species, but some sort of fantasy sea cow with manatee and walrus traits would be really interesting as a staple farm animal. I’m sure fish and other seafood is a big part of the diet. If we’ve got mulberry, we can have silkworms or silk moths. I think cultivating silk moths of some sort could be really cool. (We’re going to revisit those moths.)
We’ve got silk, rice, and candied fruits to trade. I think they could also make dyes from the mulberries, and this might be the source of this world’s equivalent of Tyrian purple.
I suspect these folks have to trade for metal and might prefer foreign weapons. Their blacksmiths probably aren’t too hot, but I bet they have cool ceramics. They probably have some form of rice wine. I imagine they trade for foreign alcohol and dried meats. They probably import most of their wheat flour.
We don’t need to know street names (or canal names in this case), but we can probably split the city into a few districts based on what we know now. I think the “shore” side district is probably built up around a farmer’s market. I don’t know what our religious situation is, but I would imagine there’s also a pretty famous religious structure in this region, too, so that it’s accessible to pilgrims.
The city center is probably around the palace, and I think there’s a politically important temple there plus some sort of artificial parkland. The docks are going to be important, and I think that’s going to be where adventure and intrigue happens. Adjacent to the docks, there’s probably a district for artisans: your potters, dyers, weavers, blacksmiths, etc. I think the city is connected to the shore by a famous bridge, and a disorganized sprawl of treehouses and stilt-legged houses on the other side of the bridge makes up the sketchy part of the city.
We’re going to dig further into landmarks next time, but as my last touch for this week, I want to create The Tavern for this city. I think its owners are an old couple, happy gossips who tailor their stance on local rumors to match the folks they’re talking to. Probably, all they really want are for taxes to be reasonable and for the guards to keep order. They’re probably getting sick and tired of royalists and republicans getting into heated arguments and brawls.
I like the traditional pub naming scheme of having some sort of showy sign out front that represents a name rather than directly spells it out. This is going to be the Globe and Dove, meant to show a dove and something akin to a globus cruciger. But everyone is going to call it the Egret and Egg.
I’ve been working on this on and off for an hour, and we actually know a fair bit about this location already. I’m going to wrap up for now, but next week we’ll dig into landmarks and local politics.
Next Post: Building a City Part 2
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