After completing it, my group was already asking about the possibility of running another campaign, possibily set in the same world, some time later where they could see the repercussions of their actions and also to get the chance to play in a world that they had helped to shape so much. The only problem was that our one campaign had taken place almost entirely in one mega-city and had ended with world-spanning consequences.
This is where Dawn of Worlds came in. Dawn of Worlds is a really simple little system for creating worlds with a little bit of history and strife and personality. It won't generate the world for you, but it will allow you and your players to get really invested in the campaign setting, while also giving the GM a load of material to work with and a good sense of what the players want from your game and what sort of things they might want to do.
I sat down with my players and ran through the rules, which took a few minutes, but that was only because they kept getting up one at a time and requiring me to repeat and re-read certain parts. That's fine though, because Dawn of Worlds, specifically the rules you need to run the game, are laid out in a succinct 5 pages. Everything else of the 12 page PDF is pictures, design intentions, and sentiments from the creators.
We mutually agreed to a few stipulations. While I had not fully defined the world for our first campaign, I had made allusions to other nations, cities, and places, some of which the players had their origins tied to. So, even though you are supposed to play Dawn of Worlds with everyone just kind of throwing their own two bits into the stew, we had to establish certain house rules regarding historical events that had to happen to maintain some semblance of connection to the part of the world we had already established.
With all of that in order, we started with a single blob of land that I hastily scrawled on a sheet of paper that I had penned a roughly 1" grid onto. At this first stage of the game, the idea is really just to futz around with the map and create places where things can happen. Create some land, make it bigger, plop some trees on that fucker, maybe throw in a mountain, or some rivers, and so on.
Normally, the idea of drawing a world map is a paralyzing for me. You just have all that blank space and you don't even know where to start with it all. However, under the pretense of playing Dawn of Worlds, and having someone else or several someone else's around to scribble their own wiggly blobs of land makes the entire endeavor seem just that much easier.
We started with fairly large block of land which we decided was going to be the main continent where much of our previous game took place. We add some islands, mountains, started picking out places where the various cities, civilizations, and races might go. Nothing incredibly interesting there, to be honest. We doodled some forests and mountains and islands, as expected.
It was around this point that plans started forming. One of the players had decided that they wanted to create the original race that many of the existing races would descend from. This idea was particularly useful because it filled the place of a lot of the standard cliches by giving us an ancient race, and it also meant that we'd have a reasonable starting point to split off all the standard Fantasy Races without having to waste what few points we received every round making sure there were Humans and Elves and Dwarves.
We also discovered and interesting loophole of sorts that made it so we could establish a few races for a much lower cost. In the first portion of the game it is cheapest to add to and shape the geography of the world, but adding races, cities, and so on is almost not worth attempting because of how many points you waste establishing them before the second age, where it costs significantly fewer points to create and advance a race. However, if a player has enough points, they can create an Avatar, who can be commanded for barely any points at all, to create a race for you. This became our vector for populating the world, as it proved to be the most efficient way to create new races and then start doing things with them.
Once we all understood this, another player decided that he wanted to get things rolling ASAP also, and created Bahamut as an Avatar and used him to create the Dragon race. On the next turn, we also had our proto-race, founded by a second Avatar, known for the time being as The Originators, who were a sort of hyper-adaptable, magically focused race that predates all other humanoid races. Soon after that, we had a Machine God Avatar and the Leviathan, mother of all Monsters.
The Machine God was a very unexpected element for me. One play had pooled his point and created a perfect square of land out in the middle of the ocean. He insisted that he wanted it to be absolutely lifeless and unnatural compared to the rest of the world. Then he created his Avatar, who we dubbed Optmactio, after rolling through captchas for a while to find a decent name, who was used to create a race of independent constructs. Over the course of the game they expanded and grew their small city til it enveloped their 1000 mile wide island.
We were gearing up to move into the second age on the next game day when one of our other players showed up, after having missed the first session. Things got.. Interesting. I think this late player may not have fully understood that we were building a setting for our next campaign and may have thought that Dawn of Worlds was simply something to play for its own sake (which it can be) but in either case, it led to a lot of shot down ideas. He wanted a race of Ghostly soldiers who had died in battle led by Valkyries when there had been no wars. Then he wanted all animals to descend from the inbreeding of a race of Beastmen. Needless to say, we made sure that was not part of our world's history. The Beastmen stayed, but we mutually agreed that the animals of the planet should just be animals instead of the retarded offspring of Animal people.
Progression slowed as we hit the Second Age. This is supposed to be the point in the game where everyone starts setting up little Kingdoms and Cities to create the pieces for the Third Age, which is all about War and Relations between the different nations and countries. This was the age where a chunk of our previous Campaign's history had to kick in. As part of the larger plot of our original game one of the Gods had more or less lost his shit and spent the better part of a century just sort of fucking things up. Another Goddess, under the guise of benevolence and aid, gathered up the Originators and used them as a sort of conduit for her Divine Might. With their help she dropped a small Moon on the rampaging God, driving him into the Earth where her followers bound and imprisoned him. Over the following centuries the proceeded to build over his prison in spite of his influence occasionally escaping and nearly destroying everything. This process repeated over and over until it became the Mega-City that our Fantasy Craft campaign took place in.
As part of the Godly Rampage, we decided that the Originators, as part of that whole hyper adaptability thing we said they have, fled to all different parts of the land, and to better survive, quickly developed into various typical Fantasy races: Elves, Dwarves, Pech (think Gnomes or halflings), Giants, and Humans, who ended up being Originators who gave up their cultural identity to serve the Goddess who saved them from destruction. During the second age, we also had Greenskins (Orcs, Ogres, and Goblins) show up, as a slightly more civilized subrace of the Monsters, the Beastmen split into Beasts, Fish, and Bird people, with the Bird people living on a floating mass of land in the skies.
Along with lots of other little things that happened, the Machine People on their perfect, lifeless continent, had expanded their city to the edges of the landmass, making it the largest city in existence. Somewhere in there, the Leviathan ate the island nation of the Pech and made them an endangered race. That particular player hates those sort of races (gnomes, halfings, kender, and the like) and figured he'd use his points to just fuck them over. Also, right towards the end of the Second Age, we got a race of Mimics. While not outright evil in their actions, the Mimics were decided to be a race that's only identity is stealing the identity of others.
Things were moving along, but there was one distinct problem that was becoming clearer as we continued. Even with 5 players, no one had enough points to make meaningful additions unless they poured all of their focus into one portion of the map or only into one race. This was likely because the rules don't easily allow a person to gain too many points in a turn and because we had so many different Kingdoms and Cities and Races all over the place.
As we approached the Third Age, we had numerous points of interest all over the world and more material for me to work with than I had anticipated, including no less than 5 world threatening antagonists and several other really interesting places that could each serve as the focus for their own campaigns. Unfortunately, there were still large chunks of the work that were left relatively undefined and sort of featureless.
At present, we have finally stopped throwing things into the pot and have decided to move onto the Third Age after a brief intermission. When we wrapped up the previous campaign, all of the players were eager to continue in a world that had been shaped by the consequences of their actions. They wanted to play decades later, after their characters had come and gone and become a part of history. Before we can get to figuring out what the entailed, though, we still need to figure out what their characters would have done during their lives after the events of our first game, wherein they freed an imprisoned God of Chaos, overthrew and conquered a Kingdom, and took over the most powerful city in the world. Needless to say, there's a lot of things that could happen.
I'll be adding another article, hopefully in a few days, after we've updated the map further and added even more details.
We mutually agreed to a few stipulations. While I had not fully defined the world for our first campaign, I had made allusions to other nations, cities, and places, some of which the players had their origins tied to. So, even though you are supposed to play Dawn of Worlds with everyone just kind of throwing their own two bits into the stew, we had to establish certain house rules regarding historical events that had to happen to maintain some semblance of connection to the part of the world we had already established.
With all of that in order, we started with a single blob of land that I hastily scrawled on a sheet of paper that I had penned a roughly 1" grid onto. At this first stage of the game, the idea is really just to futz around with the map and create places where things can happen. Create some land, make it bigger, plop some trees on that fucker, maybe throw in a mountain, or some rivers, and so on.
Normally, the idea of drawing a world map is a paralyzing for me. You just have all that blank space and you don't even know where to start with it all. However, under the pretense of playing Dawn of Worlds, and having someone else or several someone else's around to scribble their own wiggly blobs of land makes the entire endeavor seem just that much easier.
We started with fairly large block of land which we decided was going to be the main continent where much of our previous game took place. We add some islands, mountains, started picking out places where the various cities, civilizations, and races might go. Nothing incredibly interesting there, to be honest. We doodled some forests and mountains and islands, as expected.
It was around this point that plans started forming. One of the players had decided that they wanted to create the original race that many of the existing races would descend from. This idea was particularly useful because it filled the place of a lot of the standard cliches by giving us an ancient race, and it also meant that we'd have a reasonable starting point to split off all the standard Fantasy Races without having to waste what few points we received every round making sure there were Humans and Elves and Dwarves.
We also discovered and interesting loophole of sorts that made it so we could establish a few races for a much lower cost. In the first portion of the game it is cheapest to add to and shape the geography of the world, but adding races, cities, and so on is almost not worth attempting because of how many points you waste establishing them before the second age, where it costs significantly fewer points to create and advance a race. However, if a player has enough points, they can create an Avatar, who can be commanded for barely any points at all, to create a race for you. This became our vector for populating the world, as it proved to be the most efficient way to create new races and then start doing things with them.
Once we all understood this, another player decided that he wanted to get things rolling ASAP also, and created Bahamut as an Avatar and used him to create the Dragon race. On the next turn, we also had our proto-race, founded by a second Avatar, known for the time being as The Originators, who were a sort of hyper-adaptable, magically focused race that predates all other humanoid races. Soon after that, we had a Machine God Avatar and the Leviathan, mother of all Monsters.
The Machine God was a very unexpected element for me. One play had pooled his point and created a perfect square of land out in the middle of the ocean. He insisted that he wanted it to be absolutely lifeless and unnatural compared to the rest of the world. Then he created his Avatar, who we dubbed Optmactio, after rolling through captchas for a while to find a decent name, who was used to create a race of independent constructs. Over the course of the game they expanded and grew their small city til it enveloped their 1000 mile wide island.
 |
| How things looked for a while |
We were gearing up to move into the second age on the next game day when one of our other players showed up, after having missed the first session. Things got.. Interesting. I think this late player may not have fully understood that we were building a setting for our next campaign and may have thought that Dawn of Worlds was simply something to play for its own sake (which it can be) but in either case, it led to a lot of shot down ideas. He wanted a race of Ghostly soldiers who had died in battle led by Valkyries when there had been no wars. Then he wanted all animals to descend from the inbreeding of a race of Beastmen. Needless to say, we made sure that was not part of our world's history. The Beastmen stayed, but we mutually agreed that the animals of the planet should just be animals instead of the retarded offspring of Animal people.
Progression slowed as we hit the Second Age. This is supposed to be the point in the game where everyone starts setting up little Kingdoms and Cities to create the pieces for the Third Age, which is all about War and Relations between the different nations and countries. This was the age where a chunk of our previous Campaign's history had to kick in. As part of the larger plot of our original game one of the Gods had more or less lost his shit and spent the better part of a century just sort of fucking things up. Another Goddess, under the guise of benevolence and aid, gathered up the Originators and used them as a sort of conduit for her Divine Might. With their help she dropped a small Moon on the rampaging God, driving him into the Earth where her followers bound and imprisoned him. Over the following centuries the proceeded to build over his prison in spite of his influence occasionally escaping and nearly destroying everything. This process repeated over and over until it became the Mega-City that our Fantasy Craft campaign took place in.
As part of the Godly Rampage, we decided that the Originators, as part of that whole hyper adaptability thing we said they have, fled to all different parts of the land, and to better survive, quickly developed into various typical Fantasy races: Elves, Dwarves, Pech (think Gnomes or halflings), Giants, and Humans, who ended up being Originators who gave up their cultural identity to serve the Goddess who saved them from destruction. During the second age, we also had Greenskins (Orcs, Ogres, and Goblins) show up, as a slightly more civilized subrace of the Monsters, the Beastmen split into Beasts, Fish, and Bird people, with the Bird people living on a floating mass of land in the skies.
Along with lots of other little things that happened, the Machine People on their perfect, lifeless continent, had expanded their city to the edges of the landmass, making it the largest city in existence. Somewhere in there, the Leviathan ate the island nation of the Pech and made them an endangered race. That particular player hates those sort of races (gnomes, halfings, kender, and the like) and figured he'd use his points to just fuck them over. Also, right towards the end of the Second Age, we got a race of Mimics. While not outright evil in their actions, the Mimics were decided to be a race that's only identity is stealing the identity of others.
 |
| After some second age shenanigans |
Things were moving along, but there was one distinct problem that was becoming clearer as we continued. Even with 5 players, no one had enough points to make meaningful additions unless they poured all of their focus into one portion of the map or only into one race. This was likely because the rules don't easily allow a person to gain too many points in a turn and because we had so many different Kingdoms and Cities and Races all over the place.
As we approached the Third Age, we had numerous points of interest all over the world and more material for me to work with than I had anticipated, including no less than 5 world threatening antagonists and several other really interesting places that could each serve as the focus for their own campaigns. Unfortunately, there were still large chunks of the work that were left relatively undefined and sort of featureless.
At present, we have finally stopped throwing things into the pot and have decided to move onto the Third Age after a brief intermission. When we wrapped up the previous campaign, all of the players were eager to continue in a world that had been shaped by the consequences of their actions. They wanted to play decades later, after their characters had come and gone and become a part of history. Before we can get to figuring out what the entailed, though, we still need to figure out what their characters would have done during their lives after the events of our first game, wherein they freed an imprisoned God of Chaos, overthrew and conquered a Kingdom, and took over the most powerful city in the world. Needless to say, there's a lot of things that could happen.
I'll be adding another article, hopefully in a few days, after we've updated the map further and added even more details.
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