Manifest Destiny

[jachilli]

Without a doubt, a lot of the fun I get from gaming is in the world creation. I've said as much here, and many, many other GMs find the same joy in it, whether the malicious glee of a cleverly designed trap, or the dramatic turning point of a story or scheme that's going to provoke an emotional response from players.

Something like Ben Robbins'

Comments

[anonymous]

That's an incredibly interesting read and already has me thinking about how to create a similar situation in WoD. Applying it to a game like Werewolf, Hunter or Promethean is pretty obvious, but I think similar tactics could be taken with the other lines. A Lost game with a focus on the Hedge, for example

[jachilli]

Yes, I think there's lots of room to elaborate on it in a WoD model in just the way you describe. Kindred are the most "grounded," but even they can do with a little exploration, turning their discoveries into territory that's the Kindred's most valuable resource.

If you wanted, you could even get a little fantastical with it. For a long time, I wanted to publish a citybook about a fictional city that dealt with topics like dream property, expanding but unknown borders, etc. It never came to fruition, but it could work like a Vampire-game version of a William S. Burroughs novel or maybe Calvino's Invisible Cities.

[anonymous]

Makes me think of Dark City, too, where the cityscape is inconstant.

PAS

[eskemp]

Ah neat, you found the Western Marches, too. It's the sort of thing that made me wish I had the free hours of a high-schooler and the dedication to one system of... well, I guess "a zealot" works. It's hard to imagine doing a proper full-bore worldbuild on that scale if you also run other games.

Mostly those stories really made me want to draw maps. I don't think I'm over my unhealthy addiction to graph paper acquired from a misspent adolescence.

[jachilli]

I am a terrible cartographer. I would just loot the maps from somewhere else and turn them 17 degrees to one side.

What I really like about it is the punch-in, punch-out playstyle. Here are the people who can make a session today: They explore this thing, and it's concluded by the end of the session. Then, two weeks later, when someone's out of town but someone has an unexpected schedule opening, it's no grief -- a different buncha dudes explore a different thing in the same shared world. Such a beauty.

But, yeah, the schedule flexibility trades off for the worldbuilding monomania.

[eskemp]

I've been mucking around with "heavily episodic" for a fantasy Champions game in which things are set up with heavy influence from animated series. We even have a cold opening sequence before "title roll," and the pressure to come up with an interesting way to end a session is good for me. Because every session should end on an interesting note, right?

Every time I do a "to be continued" two-parter, though (usually because a session runs late or things get complicated: the PCs lose the climactic battle and next session will pick up with a deathtrap, for instance), schedules get wonky. It's all the more argument for done-in-one sessions. Of course, optimally we'd have six hours for those, but with dinner and drive time and all, it doesn't really work out that way.