#RPG Worldbuilding

[enddaysengine]

Changeling the Lost Resources

This is a resource for all Changeling Storytellers and Players, in particular, those who are new to the Freehold. I've included a couple of non-Changeling resources that I think may be useful as well. If there is something you think should be included, please let me know what it is and why it should be on the list and I will take a look.

Hey! This post is designed to be updated as I find more resources! You can click here to get the most up to date version.

2e Changeling Core 2e

Condition Cards Dark Eras 2 - Arthur's Britannia - Mysterious Frontiers - Seven Wonders Hearts on Trial - Jumpstart The Hedge (forthcoming) Kith and Kin Oak, Ash, & Thorn Storyteller Screen & Companion

Consent in Gaming Google Forms RPG Consent Checklist (by @jl_nicegirl)

Dark Eras - A Grimm Dark Era - Beneath the Skin (blue-book) - Requiem for Regina - Three Kingdoms of Darkness Dark Eras Companion - Lifting the Veil (blue-book) Mortal Remains

Chronicles of Darkness

Olivia Hill's Changeling 2e Arc's Paris Freehold

1e Changeling Core 1e Autumn Nightmares Character Sheet [Free] Dancers in the Dust Dark Eras - Lily, Saber, Thorn Equinox Road Goblin Markets Lords of Summer Night Horrors: Grim Fears Ready-Made Characters Rites of Spring SAS - The Fearmaker’s Promise SAS - The Fearmaker’s Promise Compendium SAS - The Rose-Bride’s Plight Swords at Dawn Winter Masques Victorian Lost

Astral Realms Book of the Dead Glimpses of the Unknown

Bundles CofD Dark History Complete Bundle Starter Kit

Fiction Tales of the Dark Eras

Selected Vault

Book of Seemings Curiouser and Curiouser Bargins Lost Entitlements Vol 1, Vol 2, & Vol 3 Venice Unmasked Wyrd Tides

Actual Plays Hedged In The Littlebrook Reunion (The Primogen)

[deafmangoes]

Currencies in fantasy settings and particularly TTRPGs (and the genre of vidya games they spawned) is a personal interest of mine.

Because they're often really boring and plain. I shall now vent about this.

Now, there's one very good reason for it: players can't be arsed with exchange rates and complexity in this area. Gold is just how much wealth-per-stab your murderhobo is currently making.

The less good reason is designer laziness. Even on the rare occasions they decide not to just name them "gold, silver, copper" it's nearly always just a fancy fantasy name slapped on top of a decimal system.

For us that makes sense. Pretty much everyone uses decimal coinage these days.

You may be aware, however, that in the past most coinage was bonkers complicated - at least, to the modern person. Before decimalisation in the 1970s, the UK had a currency loosely based on a Base 12 system.

That is, you had 12 pence (d) to 1 shilling (s) and 20s to £1 (originally, pounds were only of real use to bankers and nobles, hence the shift in number). 1s could be subdivided into sixpence, threepence and tuppence, while 1d could be divided into hapennies (1/2d) and farthings (1/4d). You also had crowns (5s) and half-crowns, groats (4d, sometimes) sovereigns (£1, different name, don't ask) and guineas (eventually fixed to £1, 1s). Plus a whole bunch of short-lived coins, which happens when your system has never been properly reformed for 800 years.

When I, a decimal child, first learned about this I thought it was insane. How could shopkeepers do anything with that mess? But what I missed was that Base 12 is the easiest for the human brain to calculate.

Yes, without computerised registers (for which Base 10 was already standardised), a human merchant, shopkeeper or customer could do more with Base 12 because 12 has so many factors: it's divisible by 2, 3, 4 and 6. 10 is only divisible by 2 and 5. Despite all the weird extra coins tacked in, the basic units of pounds, shillings, pence (£sd) was easy to use. We changed it because everyone else was.

So on a setting without computers or even mechanised calculators, why do they have a decimal system?

Be brave! Confuse your readers and players! Make the currency Base 30 except for some foreign coins used as bullion that are treated as Base 7 for religious reasons.

This also lets you play around a bit with rewards - instead of a sack of coin worth 30 gold, why not present your party with some old gold coins that might be worth 30g to a lord's personal bank, or up to 200g to the right collector.

Escape from gold, too - explore your dwarves using palladium or various alloys, mithril fractions set in "less precious" metals, etc. Elves might eschew coinage altogether and use other tokens that represent a value of age or crop yield. Pre-Meiji Japan based their economic system on rice yields, with 1 ryō (the basic gold coin) being equivalent to the amount of rice one person could eat in a year (a koku).

Of course for the sake of ease you should always have a conversion chart handy, but I find that toying with currency is a simple but very effective way to worldbuild and create immersion. Plus, it's just kinda fun.

[tlaquetzqui]

I keep seeing people portray lizardfolk as free-loving “Coming of Age in Samoa” noble savages, which, aside from depending on a long-debunked scientific-racist hoax, is not how they would act. The few gregarious lizards (mostly Australian skinks) are mostly monogamous, probably for the same reason most birds are: without nursing, having fathers also feeding the offspring becomes much more necessary.

Serpentfolk/yuan ti are likely strongly matrilocal and might be polygynous, since most gregarious snakes have strong kin-ties between females, with males as loners (but who probably mate with all the females of a family they come across). Alternatively, they could have promiscuous mating balls—garter snakes are also gregarious, apparently with a strong sense of “go along to get along”—but those, in garter snakes, also involve males giving off female pheromones to trick other males into trying to mate with them, stealing their body-heat and allowing the male doing the fakery to be more active and mate more than the deceived snakes. I don’t know if you want a species with a large contingent of literal “traps” in your RPG worldbuilding.

Boggards and gripplis probably have serial monogamy, since the smartest frogs (a couple kinds of poison-dart frog) have males guarding only one spawning pool per mating season, and monopolizing the eggs of a single female each time. (Intelligent beings will probably just become fully monogamous to spare themselves the hassle of having to find and woo a mate each season.)

[enddaysengine]

Norgorber's balls does have a nice ring to it though

honestly christianity really hit the jackpot with "jesus christ" rolling off the tongue as an expletive so well. the number one problem with fantasy settings is that whatever names you come up with to take in vain will never hit as well as "jesus christ"

[legionofmyth]

Earthdawn by FASA Corporation

🎲 Embark on an epic journey with Earthdawn by FASA Corporation! 🌟 Explore a post-apocalyptic world filled with magic, ancient ruins, and heroic adventures. Perfect for those who love deep lore and thrilling gameplay! #Earthdawn #RPG #TabletopGaming #FantasyRPG #EpicAdventures

Earthdawn by FASA Corporation Note: The reason I use first edition and not 4th edition is because I cannot link to a (legal) PDF for 4th edition. What is it? Earthdawn 1E Earthdawn by FASA Corporation is a high fantasy tabletop role-playing game set in the post-apocalyptic world of Barsaive. After a magical cataclysm known as the Scourge, the world is rife with dangerous creatures called Horrors…

[prokopetz]

"Hidden supernatural world" RPG with an ostensibly contemporary setting where the boundaries on the illustrated map in the setting lore chapter's section on global politics clearly depict an extant Austro-Hungarian Empire. This is never addressed in the text.

[mightofmerchants]

Some people have asked me if I can publish my mapmaking tools. So I developed a software. 🙂

Here is the result:

[brewerssupplies]

Building a fantasy world is like being the world's most specific historian.

[mikethinkstwice]

I'm bored of elemental giants. Use environmental giants instead.

Environmental Giants all start out the same, but their bodies take up the features of the place they live in. They become a reflection of their domain.

Giant takes up residence in the cliffs of dover? Not a stone giant. No, that's specifically The Giant of Dover. Its body is made of chalk. It can create dust clouds of chalk with its breath, its shoulders are padded with tufts of short grasses and blackberry bushes.

Giant takes up residence in the ruins of a highway during an apocalypse? That's the I-95 Giant. It has rebar spines along its back, skin of pavement and concrete, and wears wrecked cars as armor.

And to make this idea more dynamic, the giant's form changes as the ecosystem changes. A river gets diverted away from a Giant's domain? Then the Giant dries up along with its land. Now the Giant has an incentive to protect its dominion, and a weakness that its enemies can exploit.

[screechingpersimmon]

My partner is fuckin RAD and Strange Creations is one of the many Exalted things he’s created. It’s a lot of different settings and NPCs that he came up with and are free to use. The characters in there Giant’s Glen setting are all pictures of and based on several of my BJDs!

This particular link is to a description of his brilliant idea of Living Golems and their part in helping to protect, train, and shepherd those fated to exalt as Sidereals.

Please check out their swath of worlds and NPCs if interested!

[forevergoldgame]

✨HERE✨

Forever Gold is a dark fantasy, text-heavy roleplaying game being developed in the Twine engine by Broncoburro and LSDolphin... and the demo is playable now on itch! (And rbs ARE appreciated.)

(A disclaimer: Forever Gold is a game for mature audiences. It does not feature adult content, but the subject matter can get serious in a way not appropriate for all ages.)

[the-burgah]

tiredly shunting this slop here in the hope that people are less insufferable than on twitter

[eitherorcollective]

We're really excited to share with you a free five-minute DEMO of GIVE UP THE GHOST!!!

Taking inspiration from Pathologic, Disco Elysium, and Planescape: Torment, GIVE UP THE GHOST is a mystery roleplaying game set in a strange city in the center of the world.

Assume the role of the OVERSEER ALHART, a one-eyed wanderer tasked to investigate the source of a deadly fire. Explore the remains of the BURNT-UP HOUSE at the edge of town, investigate the bodies, and do your best to find out more.

If you’re into narrative RPGs about cities, history, esoterica, and the apocalypse… this is the game for you!! Click the link above to access our DEMO!! And a huge thank you to everyone whose support has made this possible!!

[sylvanus-cypher]

I see a lot of people asking why the Third Committee in Lancer is unambiguously the utopian good guy. In most other settings and worlds, the Third Committee would be the secretly corrupt allegory for postwar Europe, full of dirty secrets and colonial exploitation under its otherwise pristine exterior.

However, by my estimate, it's not an allegory at all; it's a counter to Capitalist Realism. A major problem with most media is that it takes the premises of modern capitalism as a given, that humans are self-interested to a fault and any system or structures that exist are built first and foremost to enrich the people at the top of the pyramid. Even most openly anti-capitalist fantasy and sci-fi settings seem to accept this premise.

Lancer rejects this framing, and I think that's what makes the RPG special. The Third Committee exists under the premise that non-authoritarian democratic systems can exist for the explicit and unambiguous welfare and self-actualization of the people who live in them. The foundation of the Third Committee is not greed or consolidation of power through wealth; in fact, they use a sort of mock currency to engage with diaspora worlds that still use money in order to smoothly transition them into post-monetary societies.

If we had more media like this, more media that acknowledges that humans can build societies not based on the accumulation of power, then maybe it would be easier to imagine a life without capital.

[legionofmyth]

Cha'alt by Venger As'Nas Satanis

🎲🍌Dive into the bizarre and thrilling world of Cha'alt by Venger As'Nas Satanis! 🦑🧟‍♂️This gonzo RPG combines eldritch horror, sci-fi, and fantasy for unforgettable adventures. Ready for a unique gaming experience? #Chaalt #RPG #TabletopGaming #EldritchHorror #SciFiFantasy

Cha’alt What is it? Cha’alt Cha’alt by Venger As’Nas Satanis is a gonzo, post-apocalyptic science-fantasy tabletop role-playing game set in a bizarre and decadent world. The setting combines elements of eldritch horror, alien landscapes, and dark humor, inviting players to explore the ruins of a shattered civilization, face off against monstrous entities, and uncover strange and powerful…

[prokopetz]

Sword and sorcery tabletop RPG which includes a long, rambling list of magic spells with weirdly specific affects and annoyingly particular casting requirements, kind of like if Dungeons & Dragons decided to be about 40% more precious about its magic system, except it's a group worldbuilding game, and one of the first steps is for the group to collectively choose exactly seven of those spells to be the only ones anyone still knows how to cast. All of the spells that didn't get picked might be spoken of in legend, but the knowledge of them has been lost over time. The remainder of the group worldbuilding phase consists principally of brainstorming what a society built around these seven annoyingly specific spells would look like; for example, perhaps the knowledge of their working is jealously guarded, with each of the setting's great nations constructing their entire cultural identity around Their Spell, or perhaps the setting's industrial base is dependent on combining these spells in increasingly unintended ways to form a sort of sorcerous Rube Goldberg machine of production.

(One of the default campaign premises for this hypothetical game would, of course, cast the player characters as a gang of mercenary scholars on a quest to rediscover an eighth spell. Depending on what sort of setting the group initially brainstormed, keeping their intentions under wraps may be strongly advisable.)