D&D’s Forgotten Realms setting is my all-time favorite campaign world, primarily because it’s packed so full of ideas.
When the latest edition of the setting came out, Ed Greenwood said that you could flip open any page of the book at random, point to any section of that page, and find an idea you could run with.
I think Ed’s right — and I think this approach could be broadened to include nearly any book, for nearly any game. Let’s test this theory.
The Process
I see this working best as a quick multi-step process. The goal is to pull together ideas at random and mold them into the foundation of a campaign world, and you’ll need a few different ideas in order to do that.
1. Decide just how random you want your choices to be. For a high degree of randomness, use something like a dictionary or encyclopedia. For a low degree, use a book specific to the genre you have in mind (a fantasy novel, for example).
2. Close your eyes, open your book of choice, and point to a spot on the page you opened it to.
3. Read the sentence or paragraph around your finger. Jot down anything in there that jumps out at you. Remember that in combination with other ideas, just about anything can be interesting in this context.
4. Repeat steps 1 through 3 until you have enough ideas. You could use the same book for every step (just repeat #3, in other words), but I’d suggest using a different book each time.
5. Brainstorm. Make up connections between the terms and concepts you wrote down. Don’t constrain your ideas too soon, but don’t be afraid to go in a specific direction if it seems promising, either.
The goal is to pull togther a set of ideas that wouldn’t have occurred to you on your own, and that may not seem to fit together at first. Making them fit together is the fun part.
Of course, you might get unlucky and pull out ideas that are impossible to string together into a fun premise for a campaign setting. If this happens, start the whole process over with a new book.
An Example
This wouldn’t be complete without an example, so I give you the world of Nightsturm (cue cheesy horror music).
I grabbed three books off my shelves: In the Heart of the Sea, the history of an early 19th Century Nantucket whaling ship; Freakonomics, which uses economics to uncover odd truths; and a volume of Sherlock Holmes stories. I deliberately chose three very different books, but played it a bit safe by not choosing, say, a math textbook.
My sentence fragment from Heart was good enough on its own: “…’one of the most distressing nights in the whole catalogue of our sufferings.’” I took an element of darkness from that, as well as a focus on weather.
From Freakonomics, another solid fragment: “innovative policing caused the crime drop.” “Innovative policing” sounds like adventurers or monster hunters to me, so I filed that away.
And lastly, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle gave me: “I sprang from my bed.” Night terrors sounded usable.
So I had:
- Darkness
- Weather
- Adventurers or monster hunters
- Night terrors
It wasn’t too much of a stretch to imagine a world where the night is long and terrible — let’s say that instead of 10 hours or so of darkness per day, this world has 20 hours. In a 24-hour day, it’s only light for 4 hours.
And to make matters worse, the night is peopled by horrible creatures, and is rarely quiet because of the cataclysmic storms that rage across the world.
There is a glimmer of hope in this perpetually-dark, monster-infested storm country, however: monster hunters. These adventurers are accustomed to the long night and warded against the fell weather, willing to risk their lives to keep others safe.
And that’s just the basics. From there, I could easily extrapolate things like people with night vision becoming a sort of nobility, houses having few ground floor windows and other details to enrich the world. And I haven’t even touched on genre — horror is obviously a part of it, but fantasy horror, modern horror or sci-fi horror?
I could definitely see running a session or two in Nightsturm, and if my players were in the mood for horror, expanding it into a full-fledged campaign setting. And I thoroughly enjoyed the process — my brain is wired for this kind of directed, semi-free association.
Care to give it a try? Randomly-generated worlds are welcome in the comments!
I like these kinds of techniques a lot. I do something similar with office supplies.
Yes. I said office supplies.
If I’m at my desk at work and it happens to be a slow moment, or maybe I’m working in my office at home and I decide to take a break I will start examining the everyday objects on my desk and begin to imagine what they could represent.
For example, I once came up with an idea for a sci-fi adventure when I put some binder clips together in an odd manner and visualized an intergalactic type of cruise ship. From there I designed a session where the players were hired to be the scouts that piloted small fighter spacecrafts that would go in front of the cruise vessel and make sure the route was free of dangers (space pirates, hostile aliens, etc.).
Of course, I had to explain faster than light travel in my game world and that came from a calculator. Turn a calculator on and it always shows zero first. Nothing happens on a calculator without that zero appearing first. All things start with zero, and that led to my concept of the “Zero Point Drive”. That is what the spaceships use in my sci-fi games: a drive that envelops the ship in an energy field and takes it to point zero (a theoretical state of existence from which time and space emerge). Once you are at point zero you can emerge anywhere in physical space if you know how to coordinate where that location is in relation to point zero.
The further you jump, the more likely you will miscalculate and be hopelessly lost or end up emerging in a star or something and dying. Plus the complex calculations take time to do, so you can’t use the Zero Point drive without some planning. Plus a lot of planets have deployed Zero Point drive negators – sattelites that radiate fields of energy that prevent Zero Point jumps to close to the planet. These limitations helped me to keep the technology in check.
Of course the corporate entities, governments, and militaries of this gameworld are all feverishly pursuing the technology to use the zero point drive to navigate time as well (destroy your enemies before they are even born – HAHAHAHA!). So now there was an element added to the adventure where a brilliant scientist who might be on the verge of cracking the “Zero Point Time Barrier” was on the cruise vessel taking a well needed vacation. And unbeknownst to the PCs a rival government has assembled a team of fighter pilots to attack the cruise ship disguised as priates and to disable it so that they can board her and kidnap the scientist.
All of that from binder clips and a calculator. 🙂
This reminds me of the great but saddly unsuccesful game Everway which I recently stumbled across. A central part of the game is using fantasy art cards to stimulate ideas from which to design characters, worlds and adventures. Also part of the resolution mechanic is drawing cards from the fortune deck of cards and interpreting them according to the plot line and character. Only played it once, but the scope is fantastic.
Oh, I LOVE these! Let’s give it a go.
Books: Anna Karenina, The Annotated Sherlock Holmes vol. I, and a volume of the Talmud.
Passage 1:
“Alexi Alexandrovich had forgotten Countess Lydia Ivanovna, but she had not forgotten him.”
Ooh, promising.
Passage 2:
“Well, Watson, we shall see who will win in the long run.”
Looks nice with the other.
Passage 3:
“Or alternatively, if the creditor claimed the deed was lost, he should have arrained for the creditor to write another deed for the land, indicating that the deed now belonged to the debtor.”
Ooh, that’s nice. A noble robbed another of her ancestral home, and did it so long ago that he’s forgotten — but she hasn’t! She’s plotting her revenge, even now…
GREAT idea, Martin!
T
I have a bookshelf filled with classics and old oddball books my grandmother gave me recently. Random grabbing of books from said shelf has produced:
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: Volume 3
“His prophecy was soon verified; the death of Palaeologus devolved the command on several chiefs, alike eminent in rank, alike defective in military talents; the Greeks were oppressed by land and sea; and a captive remnant, that escaped the swords of the Normans and Saracens, abjured all future hostility against the person or dominions of their conqueror.”
A long sentence, but meaty.
The Atlas of Early Man
(I skipped the first page where I landed on an explanation of the use of doric columns in architecture.)
“These tombs had well-constructed revetment walls and cult pillars which stood outside in the ritual enclosures.”
Cult pillars? Cool!
Ulysses
“This is the very worst hour of the day. Vitality. Dull, gloomy; hate this hour. Feel as if I had been eaten and spewed.”
Huh.
One more for good measure.
The Great Automatic Grammatisator from The Roald Dahl Omnibus
“In three minutes, it can produce a calculation that by hand (if it were possible) would fill half a million sheets of foolscrap paper.”
An era setting, perhaps early steampunk for fantasy, or early 20th century for a more realistic approach.
Very cool. I’ll have to let this stew a bit before I can figure out how it all might fit together.
Forgotten Realms
“In the last dozen or so centuries, the gold dwarves have opted to remain separate from their northern cousins, who seemed to them to be laboring under a curse.”
The Complete Sherlock Holmes (since it’s a popular choice)
“Take it at read it to me, for I have neither the strength nor the courage to do it myself.”
Last, but not least, The Shadow of Ararat, by Thomas Harlan.
“She is swift, like the wind over the water, and light, like a young girl dancing.”
Possibilities.
Dare I reach for Ayn Rand?
This sound like a neat idea for adventure generation. Combine it with Rottwang’s Funnel, maybe?
But do you really have so many gaming opportunities that you need a system to make up a random campaign setting?
As a GM, I only run games in one setting these days – of course, I’m lucky to play once every two months.
Yep, Everway and Dr. Rotwang’s Adventure Funnel both informed my thinking on this one. I made a character for Everway at GenCon once, but we never played (I can’t remember why). It was a very cool process, although my noodling didn’t produce a character that would have played particularly well with others.
As for needing a system to generate random settings, I’d say “need” is much too strong a term. 😉 For me, the more arrows I have in my GMing quiver (up to a point), the better.
This process involves putting your creative muscles to use in what can be a pretty unusual way, and it has the potential to produce unexpecedtly enjoyable results. Generating the basics also takes so little time (for this post, about 2 minutes) that it’s useful just as a creative exercise.
Need, no. Enjoy and get some mileage out of, hopefully. 😉
Plus, while this can be used for a whole setting, you could use the technique on a smaller scale– for the next adventure in your existing setting.
For modern day games, I like setting my games in other cities, then using context free newspaper articles to create opponents and motivations. What happens when you combine a mall renovation and a murder?
…
…
…I am totally gonna try this.
By the way, Ed Greenwood was right about that 3.0 FR book; independently from his claim, I actually tried that one night, only I used the map instead. And I DID come up with a one-player campaign for my wife.
Well, actually, she was my girlfriend then.
Dare I reach for Ayn Rand?
I hadn’t seen the Oracle (although I dig Abulafia), but I’d seen its predecessor, the C&C Fantasy Game. Good stuff.