cheerleading

Give your world-building free reign

I mentioned previously that I’m a heavy hex-crawl prepper. To be clear, I’m just in love with the world that my players and I have co-created. And so I spend a lot of time in that world, even when I’m away from the table. I’m always thinking of what’s behind the next turn or over the next rise, and when I have time, I’m closing my eyes and going to take a look.

This of course is the direct opposite of the world-building advice you hear most often: start small, and don’t spend time on areas and lore that will never come up in your game.

Fie, I say! Fie! World-building is a game and hobby unto itself, and I’m here to tell you to indulge yourself in it.

  • Imagining is good for you — According to this Mental Floss article, imagining improves cognition and self-worth, and keeps your memory healthy.
  • Creativity is good for you — It boosts your immune system, staves off dementia, and makes you happier (Forbes).
  • That last thing you created? It’s all the locals can talk about — Time to populate your rumor mill? Well wouldn’t you know it? That dungeon complex you spent three days on is the talk of the town. Maybe your characters won’t ever choose to go there, but by golly, they’ll have heard of it.

When I give my imagination free reign, I end up with an incredibly haphazard set of notes, maps, scribbles and ideas. Some areas I have envisioned in painstaking detail: I can tell you the texture of the moss on the stones in the quarry, and how it gets damper as one descends further. Other areas are just a name on a map or a blank space waiting for a name.

And that’s okay. That’s the world-building game outside the game. And when–as they will–my players set off in an unexpected direction and occasionally reach one of those spaces that I haven’t filled in yet, because I have that pile of haphazard notes, I have a vague notion of what’s there. I know that they are traveling through hilly, forested country, and if the party rides far enough West, that they’ll hit the Whiteflow, which no horse has ever forded. I know these are gnoll lands and that their matriarch has a hunger for horseflesh. So now I see the party’s horses balking at the river’s edge and the gnolls closing in with nets and spears. I can hear the barking of the hyenas. Suddenly we have an adventure!

Water the things that you want to see grow

A good friend of mine gets into arguments all the time with his partner when election time comes around. He refuses to vote for the lesser of two evils, and often casts his votes for idealistic and independent candidates. And often those candidates don’t have a chance of winning. But he says, “I don’t want to spend my time and energy supporting compromises that I don’t believe in. I just want to water the things that I want to see grow.”

I think about that idea a lot. What if instead of spending all my time criticizing and complaining about what I don’t like, I spend my time celebrating and championing the things that I love? It’s definitely more fun, and I wonder if sometimes it isn’t more effective. Or maybe it’s a both/and: sometimes we water the things we like, and other times we weed the things that we don’t like.

So what does this have to do with role-playing games?

Well, for one thing, I want to spend my time celebrating and getting excited about what’s great in role-playing games. So this blog is going to spend more time cheering on new games and pointing out great things about existing games, and less time criticizing and bashing them (that’s less time, not no time. Sometimes I need to call things out.)

But more importantly, I want to encourage you (and myself) to focus on what’s going right in our games instead of obsessing over what’s not working. Lean into the fun, the joy, the good stuff. If someone hams it up with a great character voice, encourage them to use it. If the party loves spending three hours shopping for new gear, find interesting things to save for. Let’s spend more time hitting the good notes, and less time worrying about the off ones.

And also, if there are things you love in the game, by all means, WATER THOSE THINGS! If you like combat, you better be picking some fights. If you like exploration, you better be asking what’s beyond that next hill. If you like interactions, start speaking in-character. Water the things you want to see grow.