The flip side to adventuring is when you’re not under the ground
grubbing around for coins, but out in the air, in the places where people only
dream of. I believe that more than half
of any game that we ever play is enjoyable because of the scenery, no one plays
because they want to go walking around Barnsley, that’s something they can do
themselves, why would they want to do that in game? People play because they want to go out to
places no one’s been before, to wonderous, mythical places and see what they
find there.
And so it is with me, but I always believe that the places that are so
different as to be unbelievable lack a certain something when it comes to
having your character run around them.
Take a look at the Labyrinth
from Labyrinth, an interesting place of many different types of encounter, but
when you got to the end, things got a little....
Weird...
 |
| And I'm not talking about Bowie's Pants, although.... |
Throughout the whole film, everything had been squarely rooted in
things that could be possible, which for me made them all the more real, and
that’s how I’ve always looked at locations when it comes to providing things
for people to go running around in.
Could it be real? Is the question that needs to be asked.
There’s plenty of inspiration out in the world, and it’s often when you
look out there that you find these things, things built that probably made
sense at the time, but have since been affected by time and nature in ways that
were never envisaged by their creators.
Most of the time, adventurers are dealing with reasonably mundane
things, so it’s important to make sure that from time to time the sense of
wonder is retained, so that the whole world doesn’t seem like Search, Loot,
Repeat…
For me, it’s those things that make you wonder what the creator was
considering when they made it, the things that someone obviously built, but for
the life of you, you can’t figure out why…
Such as completely man made islands when there’s land easily within
range.
A house built in a place that would be suited to holding an emergency
shelter rather than a full sized house.
Train stations that were so busy being built that they didn’t check
that the trains would fit in them…
And other such places, these are the things where people were so busy
proving that they could build them
that they didn’t stop to ask if they should.
I have impossible places in my worlds, but they’re impossible for a very
good reason, and they’re very few and far between when it comes down to
it. Selvarin is known as the impossible
city and takes a good number of its cues from the works of Escher, but it’s a
city where an uncontrolled outbreak of magic twisted the reality within the
city boundaries and continues to do so to this day.
Most places I have are simple in their nature, but the larger cities,
castles, and hideouts tend to have the more mundane parts of them taken away
and replaced with things that would prove unique or interesting, because if
every place was built the same, the only thing you’ve got in it is different
people and I know that a lot of people think that the whole of Roleplaying is
about the interaction between people.
I’m not decided on that, it’s possible to involve people in a game far
more when they find it interesting than when they’re just going through the
motions.
Sometimes it’s the change in circumstances that make a place
interesting, a city that was built below the level of the sea that steadily
sank, leaving it untouched and intact, but forever out of the reach of those
who once lived there.
A Mill built in a gap between three large hills, eventually left behind
because it was too difficult to move the product out and get more resources in
there.
And as with the underground things, the question is asked, what do you
do with the places like this?
Unlike the dungeons, intact buildings above ground can attract
anything, because for the most part, you don’t need to have special abilities
like seeing in the dark or breathing toxic air to survive down there. You can come and go as you please, and in
many cases, there’s a number of exits that you can get out of when someone does
come raiding and you don’t end up barricading yourself in and hoping that they
don’t have a Cave Troll…
