Eastmark 8: Based and Worldpilled

It's been awhile since I wrote an update on this blog. Eastmark is still humming along! It's going great, which is a source of tremendous anxiety for me because according to the old seer I 'deserve nothing but wracking coughs and boils' and I can't disagree. It feels bad when good things happen to me. Unfair, somehow. Someone got something wrong.

Helpfully, 2023 has been an absolute dogfart of a year so far which is a state of being I'm incredibly comfortable with.

Pictured: The silent but adorable scourge of my nostrils.

In any case, some jackanapes have made the subject of this post incredibly easy by asking me questions. Since there's never been a low hanging fruit that didn't have me rubbing my hands together while saying 'don't mind if I do' in a sing-song falsetto, you can bet your second mortgage that I'll be answering them.

Friend 1, who shall remain nameless* said:

"any chance we can get more blog posts on your worldbuilding process for this game?"

Friend 2, who shall also remain nameless** said:

Do you freehand the history? Or is there prompts you use to get started? 

 The best way to breakdown my worldbuilding efforts is along three vectors. The first is thematic. How could the elements of the world support, point to, or challenge a theme I was interested in? The second is aesthetic. What touchstones or handholds do I want to give players to help them envision the elements of the world? The final is pragmatic. How can the element of the world enable or incentivize gameplay? Everything starts with one of those three considerations.

Thematic

I'm going to start here. I actually sat down to write a primer for would-be-GMs in case the game every expanded to the point where we had multiple GMs. It seemed wise to have a document on hand I could point to so that we'd all be on the same page; and making the document was an act of clarifying and making explicit a lot of stuff that was just taking up yardage in my braingoop. Below are the relevant excerpts of what, thematically, I wanted to work with in the Eastmark setting.

1. No history in a vacuum - Recent history reacts to previous history, and notions of what has happened are formed according to the cultural foibles and biases from which they arise
• Relatedly, adventure sites and locations should tie into established histories. Nowhere is untouched by the stories of time.
2. No correct history - The shape of an "objective" truth might be gleaned from overlapping histories, but it's ultimately inaccessible. Everyone is a little wrong, and that's alright. The almost-truths are how the world arranges itself, in any case.
3. Imperialism erodes history and culture - The impact of the Empire's presence is a flattening, rewriting, or even total erasure of local history/culture. That which does not conform to Imperial use is either discarded or destroyed.
• This erosion is universal. Even the colonizer is adversely affected by the colonization. The Arago culture has flattened itself in its Imperial efforts.
4. Power has no moral vector - It does not corrupt or ennoble, it simply allows one's character to be expressed on a larger and more obvious stage.

Those are the most background guides to my worldbuilding. I honestly can't say for certain how frequently other GMs think about thematic tentpoles when they're doing their own thing-- I've read settings in which there seemed to be a coherent/consistent conversation going on with the work, and I've read settings which had all the forethought of hiring of Nick Nolte to perform the audiobook of Les Fleurs du mal.

Aesthetic

This is a consideration that I think is probably pretty common. Touchstones are incredibly useful in on-boarding players to their fiction. The fine line a fantasy setting walks is between the banality of what we recognize and the alienation of what we don't; novelty has diminishing returns when it comes to player investment. At some point, there's more time spent figuring what the fuck is going on than finding an immersive sense of connection to the diegetic realities.

I think Kevin Crawford's general advice throughout his books is pretty good-- have strong recognizable touchstones and parallels to real-world culture. On a purely aesthetic level, you're giving players handholds and allowing them to build expectation. In the Eastmark, I've conspicuously modeled the Dulandir culture after the Anglo-Saxons of c. 700 A.D. (not in the least as an excuse to draw from Crawford's Wolves of God book). When players meet Dulandir NPCs they can expect certain things; they can expect traditions of gift-giving, heroic bravado, and having names with a bunch of Æs in them. I've used naming conventions of the Anglo-Saxons, Welsh, and Irish cultures-- players can anticipate from the name alone that someplace called Cambhiga is Dulandir just by its spelling/pronunciation (with the 'bh' pronounced 'v' as in Irish).

Aesthetics are part of the rules you give players and on some level you let them build the world in their head.

There, however, looms the ugly specter in which real-world cultures are treated superficially. Orientalism, exoticism, etc. are all a flattening of nuance-- and, hey, isn't one of my themes that this flattening is bad? I probably shouldn't do that.

Happily, one of the things I've found is that players are so frequently familiar with only the superficial touchstone of a culture that a deeper and more nuanced presentation can be a novelty all on its own. And it is a novelty not of mere consumption, but participation. Use cultural touchstones not as a shorthand which obviates a need for deeper player interaction ('Oh, they're fantasy Greeks, ok') but as a gateway for it. Use the touchstone as, to paraphrase Tolkien, that distant shining tower which invites exploration and discovery. A real-world analogue should be the start of player understanding, not its endpoint.

Pragmatic

I'll say the least on this one because it is an element of worldbuilding that others have addressed in far greater detail and with far better experience. Crawford, Colville, LaTorra, Harper-- there are plenty of names I could toss out that have, in one way or another, talked about constructing a world and structuring it with the intent for play. Dungeon World's and Blades in the Dark's GM principles and fronts, any of the grab-bag of Colville's Youtube videos, Crawford's notoriously useful guidelines for sandbox play. Take your pick.

My only contribution to the discussion is this: I am incredibly handsome, and there is no amount of attention you could give me which will ever be enough.

Contain your lust, simps.

All of this is well and good to say, but re-reading it feels a bit... floaty? I think in my next post I'll try to walk through a concrete example of these things at work, from meat to potatoes.

*Allen Roebuck, 3452 Spring Haven Lane, Columbus OH 43062

**Gordon Fleischman, 1112 Broadchurch Ct., Syracuse NY 13205