So, I’m just curious what people think about the above issues. I’m currently designing a rather large world, and two problems have revealed themselves to me:
1: If the players can basically warp anywhere in the game world, does it make the vast distances feel fake?
I go back and forth on this. Obviously most parties will have to travel at least to a destination before they can teleport home. But I find that eventually people treat travel trivially. Is it okay to restrict magic teleportation? I’ve considered making Teleportation magic illegal or highly guarded in the game world so that to have that skill required a quest etc. but that is hard when Druids have Teleport via trees or whatever it’s called.
2: How do you make different nations feel unique? I’ve struggled with my kingdoms and city states just feeling kinda similar. Sure I vary the architecture significantly, but there still that element of “Oh it’s a big fantasy city” and that just compounds even more when you’re dealing with multiple continents.
The characters will need to get there the hard way the first time. I suspect that the ability to fly has more impact than the ability to teleport. There are ways around it I suppose, like monsters and inclement weather. The effects of high altitude can be pretty devastating. Exhaustion will take its toll. A high mountain pinnacle or even a place floating up in the clouds is ideal. The location of the loot could even *move*, perhaps phasing in and out of the prime material plane so teleportation to or from will not work. Treasure worth the trouble for a group of high level adventurers is going to have to be pretty difficult to get to or it would have been looted already.
Teleporting back again does not have to be trivial. You can easily justify wild magic surges, interference from the gods, or Sun Spots messing up the ability to scry or teleport. Maybe the stars are not in the right positions. The local weather could do it. An electrical storm could be all sorts of trouble in a world where magic works.
As far as cities in different nations, there are some issues. People are pretty much the same everywhere, so the same kinds of goods will be needed, and there is going to be stores to sell them, shops to make them, warehouses to store them and so on. Even so, without altering the architecture, you can still make thing distinctive. Imagine a maze of tight city streets, high walls all around, twisting passages and dead end back alleyways. Or wide open cobblestone paved roads that are lit with huge lanterns on high poles. Are the city streets filled with noisy beggars and tiny stalls, or pleasant looking stores with glass windows? Are they quiet places where people walk along in stately dignity, surrounded by armed guards? What happens during holidays? Think about New Orleans during Marti Gras.
Once you start messing with the architecture you have all kinds of options. Imagine a city with different levels, in which you have to climb ladders, walk over roofs, and go over narrow wooden planks to get from place to place. The streets of London don't look much like a fantasy Aztec city filled with temples shaped like stepped pyramids and the scent of burning flesh. A beautiful Elvin city woven in around and up into the trees ala Lord Of The Rings or a city filled with crisscrossing waterways like Venice could work. How about a city built inside a long dormant volcano, carved into the rock with tiers upon tiers going up the sides?
Engage the senses. The smell of smoke filling the air and the harsh feel of soot as you breathe it. Perfume or the stench of raw sewage as people dump their chamber pots directly onto the city streets. Perhaps both at the same time. Music in the air, maybe from temples where people are chanting or singing in a choir. Decorations like marble statues and an angel wing motif all around. Leering gargoyles that might even be alive. Towers for Wizards, painted in bright shades and covered in runes. Barking dogs, yowling cats, and chirping birds. Gardens with butterflies and roses. Somber clergy in dark robes or nobles in eye watering bright contrasting colors. A city built in an area like Yellowstone National Park, with bubbling hot springs, geysers, and the smell of brimstone in the air.
The weather can make a difference. Gloomy fog where things come lurching out from the shadows. Chilling rain. Gusting winds that blow away your hat. Snow and ice on the ground that makes things slippery.
Different nations could have different languages. Even the Common Tongue might not be the same one the characters are used to. Multiple languages might be used and the characters could have difficulty dealing with people crying their wares or loudly pleading for alms.
Use such things with care. Players can get bored easily and tune you out. A few brief notes is better than paragraphs of notation. Mention the peaceful park with snow and an ice skating pond. Talk about the claustrophobic feeling inside those narrow streets surrounded by high walls. Make a big deal of the suspicious guards following the party around and talking in some language they don't understand. Have a pick-pocket run off and the chase through streets filled with irritated people trying to shop. Have a Bard keep bugging them for stories of their adventures and trying to get them into a tavern. Brightly colored banners and the sound of trumpets or a store filled with clocks that chime the hours and are all slightly out of sync would be nice.
I can tell you from my experience hiking across a state that it's very easy to take modern transportation for granted. Every 30 minutes driving on the highway represents a full day of walking with gnarly blisters. With driving, you still get a sense of continuity that teleportation lacks, but the perception of time and distance is still heavily warped.
In the absence of watching the mountains drift by, you can lend a sense of serious to teleportation by making mishaps a more common concern. If there is any chance that the teleportation spell might fail and drop them somewhere randomly along their path, then, if they're smart, they will spend a bit of time doing a "pre-flight check" before each jump. If they intend to cross an ocean, they had better be prepared to spend a night on the rough seas, just in case. The time they spend checking maps and securing their gear will give you some of the weight you're looking for.
You could also introduce a teleportation deterrent. For example, have departure and arrival be accompanied by a massive burst of energy that essentially pinpoints their location to anyone in a 10 mile radius that's paying attention. That will prevent them from teleporting right into a dungeon without alerting everyone, and motivate them to spend half a day traveling on foot to find a safe space to travel from/to.
Re: Unique Nations
(1) Timezones. If the party is teleporting a long distance east/west during the day, they may arrive in the middle of the night. (2) Climate. If the party is traveling north/south, then there will be significant shifts in temperature. (3) Demographics. (Racial diversity, religious affiliations, etc...) (4) Government. (5) Economics. (6) Culture.
However, more valuable advice may be to let "Big Fantasy Cities" be "Big Fantasy Cities". At a certain scale, everything blurs together and looks the same, so it's better to focus on the smaller, more personal experiences and let that guide the player's expectations.
Focus on the lived experiences of a few individuals that the players interact with. If a city is peaceful and relatively affluent, tell the players about an old couple walking through a park alone. If it is rough and tumble, then they might see someone hobbling out of an alleyway after being mugged.
Letting the players empathize with NPCs is a great way to give them a taste of the city as well as making them more invested in the world around them.
~~~Find and read Invisible Cities by Italio Calvino~~~
1. Yes, and there’s not really an easy solution: this is one reason why I don’t particularly like high level campaigns. In the early days of D&D, there was a very small chance that teleporting could instantly kill a character and annihilate their remains as they accidentally appear in a solid object, like beneath the ground. Implementing even a 1% chance of this permadeath could make players and characters think twice before teleporting in any but emergency situations. If teleporting everywhere was an issue at my table, I’d add that as a houserule.
2. Fantasy worldbuilders can wax poetic about all the anthropology behind making cities feel unique, but this is a game, not a novel, and usually you just need a quick fix to entertain your friends. In that case, stealing wholesale from an existing culture, taking it to extremes, and fantasy-ing it up a bit is the way to go. Maybe the elf city Mairondal is filled with canals and gondolas, and is known for its warm summers, close families, and good wine. Players will recognize the parallel, of course, but that’s often a good thing: it helps them picture it more vividly with less flowery description, because they already have an idea of it in their heads, and they’ll have no trouble remembering it later.
Some Nation/CityState Archetypes you could use other than the "Standard"
1) Forbidden City: The main city is inaccessible to non-citizens or to certain classes. This can be to hide secrets (anything from technological/magical secrets to demon worship) or to maintain a caste system (see below). An example of this would be the Bene Tleilax society in the Dune series of novels, which is also a caste society.
2) Caste Society: Society is rigidly ordered into castes determined by physical or other attributes. Works well with segregated enclaves or "Forbidden City" type. See the Bene Tleilax society from Dune above.
3) Failed State: most of the nation or city is in chaos without true leadership, leading to gang or warlords taking control. There is opportunity here to help install a new leader/government (or for the party to become that leadership). Bellinzona from the Gaia Trilogy (specifically the third book "Demon") is an example here, but there are loads of others
4) Militaristic Society: Most of the nations infrastructure is focused on military pursuits, possibly expanding an empire, or waging a neverending war (possibly civil?). This could be due to a rapidly expanding population, a scarcity of resources, or similar reasons.
5) Theocratic Society: a dominant religion dictates the actions and laws of the nation or city.
6) Kleptocracy: possibly similar to a failed state, but one where the government is an all-consuming taker, stripping all wealth and resources for its leaders and upper classes while oppressing or neglecting the lower classes.
5) "Dream" City: the city is magically protected or otherwise separated (partially or fully) from the main world, possibly to avoid a disaster or cataclysm that would have otherwise destroyed it. Zanarkand from FFX is an example of this. Other similar examples would be cities of undead, phased into the ethereal or astral planes, etc.
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So, I’m just curious what people think about the above issues. I’m currently designing a rather large world, and two problems have revealed themselves to me:
1: If the players can basically warp anywhere in the game world, does it make the vast distances feel fake?
I go back and forth on this. Obviously most parties will have to travel at least to a destination before they can teleport home. But I find that eventually people treat travel trivially. Is it okay to restrict magic teleportation? I’ve considered making Teleportation magic illegal or highly guarded in the game world so that to have that skill required a quest etc. but that is hard when Druids have Teleport via trees or whatever it’s called.
2: How do you make different nations feel unique?
I’ve struggled with my kingdoms and city states just feeling kinda similar. Sure I vary the architecture significantly, but there still that element of “Oh it’s a big fantasy city” and that just compounds even more when you’re dealing with multiple continents.
thoughts?
The characters will need to get there the hard way the first time. I suspect that the ability to fly has more impact than the ability to teleport. There are ways around it I suppose, like monsters and inclement weather. The effects of high altitude can be pretty devastating. Exhaustion will take its toll. A high mountain pinnacle or even a place floating up in the clouds is ideal. The location of the loot could even *move*, perhaps phasing in and out of the prime material plane so teleportation to or from will not work. Treasure worth the trouble for a group of high level adventurers is going to have to be pretty difficult to get to or it would have been looted already.
Teleporting back again does not have to be trivial. You can easily justify wild magic surges, interference from the gods, or Sun Spots messing up the ability to scry or teleport. Maybe the stars are not in the right positions. The local weather could do it. An electrical storm could be all sorts of trouble in a world where magic works.
As far as cities in different nations, there are some issues. People are pretty much the same everywhere, so the same kinds of goods will be needed, and there is going to be stores to sell them, shops to make them, warehouses to store them and so on. Even so, without altering the architecture, you can still make thing distinctive. Imagine a maze of tight city streets, high walls all around, twisting passages and dead end back alleyways. Or wide open cobblestone paved roads that are lit with huge lanterns on high poles. Are the city streets filled with noisy beggars and tiny stalls, or pleasant looking stores with glass windows? Are they quiet places where people walk along in stately dignity, surrounded by armed guards? What happens during holidays? Think about New Orleans during Marti Gras.
Once you start messing with the architecture you have all kinds of options. Imagine a city with different levels, in which you have to climb ladders, walk over roofs, and go over narrow wooden planks to get from place to place. The streets of London don't look much like a fantasy Aztec city filled with temples shaped like stepped pyramids and the scent of burning flesh. A beautiful Elvin city woven in around and up into the trees ala Lord Of The Rings or a city filled with crisscrossing waterways like Venice could work. How about a city built inside a long dormant volcano, carved into the rock with tiers upon tiers going up the sides?
Engage the senses. The smell of smoke filling the air and the harsh feel of soot as you breathe it. Perfume or the stench of raw sewage as people dump their chamber pots directly onto the city streets. Perhaps both at the same time. Music in the air, maybe from temples where people are chanting or singing in a choir. Decorations like marble statues and an angel wing motif all around. Leering gargoyles that might even be alive. Towers for Wizards, painted in bright shades and covered in runes. Barking dogs, yowling cats, and chirping birds. Gardens with butterflies and roses. Somber clergy in dark robes or nobles in eye watering bright contrasting colors. A city built in an area like Yellowstone National Park, with bubbling hot springs, geysers, and the smell of brimstone in the air.
The weather can make a difference. Gloomy fog where things come lurching out from the shadows. Chilling rain. Gusting winds that blow away your hat. Snow and ice on the ground that makes things slippery.
Different nations could have different languages. Even the Common Tongue might not be the same one the characters are used to. Multiple languages might be used and the characters could have difficulty dealing with people crying their wares or loudly pleading for alms.
Use such things with care. Players can get bored easily and tune you out. A few brief notes is better than paragraphs of notation. Mention the peaceful park with snow and an ice skating pond. Talk about the claustrophobic feeling inside those narrow streets surrounded by high walls. Make a big deal of the suspicious guards following the party around and talking in some language they don't understand. Have a pick-pocket run off and the chase through streets filled with irritated people trying to shop. Have a Bard keep bugging them for stories of their adventures and trying to get them into a tavern. Brightly colored banners and the sound of trumpets or a store filled with clocks that chime the hours and are all slightly out of sync would be nice.
<Insert clever signature here>
Re: Teleportation
Does driving in a car make travelling feel fake?
I can tell you from my experience hiking across a state that it's very easy to take modern transportation for granted. Every 30 minutes driving on the highway represents a full day of walking with gnarly blisters. With driving, you still get a sense of continuity that teleportation lacks, but the perception of time and distance is still heavily warped.
In the absence of watching the mountains drift by, you can lend a sense of serious to teleportation by making mishaps a more common concern. If there is any chance that the teleportation spell might fail and drop them somewhere randomly along their path, then, if they're smart, they will spend a bit of time doing a "pre-flight check" before each jump. If they intend to cross an ocean, they had better be prepared to spend a night on the rough seas, just in case. The time they spend checking maps and securing their gear will give you some of the weight you're looking for.
You could also introduce a teleportation deterrent. For example, have departure and arrival be accompanied by a massive burst of energy that essentially pinpoints their location to anyone in a 10 mile radius that's paying attention. That will prevent them from teleporting right into a dungeon without alerting everyone, and motivate them to spend half a day traveling on foot to find a safe space to travel from/to.
Re: Unique Nations
(1) Timezones. If the party is teleporting a long distance east/west during the day, they may arrive in the middle of the night.
(2) Climate. If the party is traveling north/south, then there will be significant shifts in temperature.
(3) Demographics. (Racial diversity, religious affiliations, etc...)
(4) Government.
(5) Economics.
(6) Culture.
However, more valuable advice may be to let "Big Fantasy Cities" be "Big Fantasy Cities". At a certain scale, everything blurs together and looks the same, so it's better to focus on the smaller, more personal experiences and let that guide the player's expectations.
Focus on the lived experiences of a few individuals that the players interact with. If a city is peaceful and relatively affluent, tell the players about an old couple walking through a park alone. If it is rough and tumble, then they might see someone hobbling out of an alleyway after being mugged.
Letting the players empathize with NPCs is a great way to give them a taste of the city as well as making them more invested in the world around them.
~~~Find and read Invisible Cities by Italio Calvino~~~
1. Yes, and there’s not really an easy solution: this is one reason why I don’t particularly like high level campaigns. In the early days of D&D, there was a very small chance that teleporting could instantly kill a character and annihilate their remains as they accidentally appear in a solid object, like beneath the ground. Implementing even a 1% chance of this permadeath could make players and characters think twice before teleporting in any but emergency situations. If teleporting everywhere was an issue at my table, I’d add that as a houserule.
2. Fantasy worldbuilders can wax poetic about all the anthropology behind making cities feel unique, but this is a game, not a novel, and usually you just need a quick fix to entertain your friends. In that case, stealing wholesale from an existing culture, taking it to extremes, and fantasy-ing it up a bit is the way to go. Maybe the elf city Mairondal is filled with canals and gondolas, and is known for its warm summers, close families, and good wine. Players will recognize the parallel, of course, but that’s often a good thing: it helps them picture it more vividly with less flowery description, because they already have an idea of it in their heads, and they’ll have no trouble remembering it later.
Wizard (Gandalf) of the Tolkien Club
Some Nation/CityState Archetypes you could use other than the "Standard"
1) Forbidden City: The main city is inaccessible to non-citizens or to certain classes. This can be to hide secrets (anything from technological/magical secrets to demon worship) or to maintain a caste system (see below). An example of this would be the Bene Tleilax society in the Dune series of novels, which is also a caste society.
2) Caste Society: Society is rigidly ordered into castes determined by physical or other attributes. Works well with segregated enclaves or "Forbidden City" type. See the Bene Tleilax society from Dune above.
3) Failed State: most of the nation or city is in chaos without true leadership, leading to gang or warlords taking control. There is opportunity here to help install a new leader/government (or for the party to become that leadership). Bellinzona from the Gaia Trilogy (specifically the third book "Demon") is an example here, but there are loads of others
4) Militaristic Society: Most of the nations infrastructure is focused on military pursuits, possibly expanding an empire, or waging a neverending war (possibly civil?). This could be due to a rapidly expanding population, a scarcity of resources, or similar reasons.
5) Theocratic Society: a dominant religion dictates the actions and laws of the nation or city.
6) Kleptocracy: possibly similar to a failed state, but one where the government is an all-consuming taker, stripping all wealth and resources for its leaders and upper classes while oppressing or neglecting the lower classes.
5) "Dream" City: the city is magically protected or otherwise separated (partially or fully) from the main world, possibly to avoid a disaster or cataclysm that would have otherwise destroyed it. Zanarkand from FFX is an example of this. Other similar examples would be cities of undead, phased into the ethereal or astral planes, etc.