Story/Blog/220224

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<h1>designing a fantasy game world: where do I even start?</h1>
february 2, 2022<br>
#design #mechanic #blessfrey<br>
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<h2>quick overview of blessfrey's game world </h2><br>
Blessfrey takes place between two worlds: the southern American town of Lucrest and the underground world of Blessfrey. Last week, I explained the concept behind Lucrest, and now I'm tackling Blessfrey. <br>
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<h2>blessfrey, the fantastical </h2><br>
Blessfrey is functionally a vast, unknown world full of exploration, combat, gathering, and plot-driving discoveries. This is where the real game takes place, though the overworld is a nice safe place for getting your bearings. It's populated by multiple uncontacted cultures, so artistically, it's a chance to do whatever I want without having to ground it firmly in real world logic. <br>
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That also makes Blessfrey a white sheet of paper. With Lucrest, I can model society and all its components after my own. In fact, the more I lean on my local surroundings, the <em>more</em> unique the setting will be. With Blessfrey, I don't have a lot to start with. <br>
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The earliest vision of the setting illutrated Blessfrey as a vast world under Lucrest. In Podunk, Alabama, you shouldn't expect more than farmland, a general store, and a church, but rural Lucrest florished under its current mayor beyond believability, stocking all the luxuries and exotic goods you would expect from a big city, albeit at a tiny scale and population. Tourism off-sets a little, but the local population doesn't support all this - the mayor propped up the entire local economy through conquering a pocket of Blessfrey and establishing it as a secret micro mercantilist colony. <br>
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Initially, Blessfrey was defined by Lucrest's needs, and the impulse doesn't go far beyond "subterranean" and "alien." It needs to have rich natural resources equal to a nation to solely support a town. It needs a full-bodied manufacturing and supply chain. (In contrast, the town will have next-to-zero above ground areas dedicated to industry.) It needs a population that can be subjugated and perform labor. It also needs a population that would seldom be seen by anyone above ground. <br>
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However, Blessfrey existed long before Lucrest. The mayor learned about it through Civil War era historical records, so it was technologically advanced 150 years old ago, while Lucrest is a small Alabama town and couldn't have been <em>founded</em> much earlier than that. The world, or at least the region beneath the town, is positioned to be culturally rich, visually intricate, and descended from a comprehensive history. Since this is a game, I don't need a worldbuilding bible to rival the real Bible, but there needs to be enough to support a cast of characters, a host of locations, story events, and a general sense of depth for the players. Where do I start? <br>
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<h3>character-driven approach </h3>
The first Blessfreian I designed was the main cast member Rune. He's a young castaway of his people living in the buffer zone between civilization and the outside world. His class is the first special class the player will encounter. The humans will have access to the expected RPG classes: melee, magic, ranged, healing, etc, but Rune and the other subterranean people will have different and apparently more powerful classes: teleporting, shape-shifting, mind reading, time manipulation, etc. He's pale, thin, very tall, with expressionless red eyes. He also has rigid keratin horns that blend into his dark hair, a little like G-Dragon from the Monster video.<br>
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He's intended to be a project for the player, like a Princess Maker ward, Geralt's adoptive son in The Witcher 2, Brother Martin in the original kingmaker concept for Oblivion, or Shandra Jerro in Neverwinter Nights 2 if you could multiclass her. You can turn him away or take him in and train him up, critically branching the game's trajectory. He'll start out undersocialized, monosyllabic, and ignorant of most of the world, and hopefully the player helps him to become human, expressive, and capable. <br>
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<center><iframe width="560" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/btDd9rOlc2k" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe><br>
<img src="/static/img/ent/G-Dragon_Monster.jpg" alt="(image: G-Dragon's hair from Big Bang's Monster music video.)" width="500" height="504.92"></center> <br>
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Rune is a member of a dominant Blessfreian race, so this gives me some ideas what the rest will look and act like and possibly even some ideas about the prevailing culture. Semi-rigid keratin horns made from hair is a trait the race can have, and every member can have a different style. Rune's are long and curve harshly to rest on his head like a halo, while GD's are short and slightly curved at the top. Individualized horns make me think of Homestuck, which isn't my favorite webcomic, but honestly most horned races offer this variety. Rune's an outcast, so there's a potential in-group/out-group culture at play here, be it resulting from legal disputes, religion, or his personal appearance. It's also possible his society would find his abandonment reprehensible, and it's due to a negligent mother or tragic accident. <br>
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<h3>environment-driven approach </h3>
Just because a world is underground doesn't mean it has to be all caves or hellscapes. If I do learn on the familarity of spelunking through local caverns here, though, it gives me a foothold. There's crystals, bottomless pits, and underground waterfalls and rivers. There's solutional caves, tectonic caves, and volcanic caves. There's eyeless fish, bats, and cave swallows. People have built mines, entire cities, escape routes, secret passageways, and metros underground. Certain indigenous people groups have lived underground or tell stories of ancestors who once did. <br>
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I can also be inspired by what is <em>not</em> underground. The sun, passage of day to night, weather patterns, seasons, star patterns, migration patterns, fresh air, chlorophyll, and countless other things don't fit as logically into an isolated subterranean civilization. <br>
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Using these reference points, I can start piecing together a world. How is time measured? The concept of an hourglasses still works, but rotation-derived hours do not. What is the fashion? Perhaps roots, asbestos, or fine metallic threads dominate over animal derived fibers...unless they use their own hair. If this isn't a vast inner world but rather cavernous pockets, how is their waste managed? Do they have designated dumping tunnels or use bottomless pits? <br>
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<h3>genre-driven approach </h3>
I can refer to others who explored the concept of an inner world. <br>
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As for games, I already mentioned Torchlight, which isn't too dissimilar to Blessfrey, with a town supported by a dungeon that involves some other worldly power. Persona 3 exists between two worlds, an ordinary Japanese town and the shadow dungeon Tartarus that only appears in the school at a certain time of night. SMT IV is set in an apparently Edojidai Japanese town with a demon-filled dungeon. <br>
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As for entirely subterranean games, Arx Fatalis is an apocalyptic game where the world's population was driven underground and their war continues. <a href="https://www.gog.com/game/avernum_the_complete_saga">Avernum</a> is an prison planet game (like Gothic), but the prisoners are kicked through a portal that leads somewhere underground, a place inhabited by prisoners, hostile subterranean natives, dragons, and lots of mushroom-based life like trees and cows. I think Wizardry and Ultima Underworld games take place in an underworld, too, but I've never played them lol. There's also infinite JRPG dungeoncrawlers out there, of which I've played very few. <br>
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For books, there's endless iterations of this idea. I'll guess Divine Comedy or Journey to the Center of the Earth are the most famous, but there's a full genre of hollow earth exploration written by sci-fi authors, pseudoscientists, theosophists, followers of Eastern philosophies, and schizophrenics. I've read a few of these already, like <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/32825">William R. Bradshaw's The Goddess of Atvatabar and <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/57426">Ingersoll Lockwood's Baron Trump's Marvellous Underground Journey</a>. Poe and C. S. Lewis have incorporated this idea into their books, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket and The Silver Chair. The youth fiction series Artemis Fowl featured an magical underground world full of fairies. There's also the manga Made In Abyss and all the countless dungeoncrawl, dungeon isekai genres out there. <br>
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Subterranean worlds also appear in myth and folklore. Hades, Patala, Shamballa, Jigoku, some of the Norse 'heims. The Tuatha Dé Danann live underground, and so do dwarves, asura, and naga. The Hopi people originated from underground, and so did the Lakota, Navajo, Apache, and Zuni. It's possible Eden is underground now. <br>
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Plenty of reference material. Each has its own interpretation of a giant dungeon, which can spur questions about Blessfrey's worldbuilding. Why does the dungeon exist? How does it interacts with the surface world, and why did surface-dwellers explore it? Who lives there, and what factions are at play? What's at the bottom of the dungeon? Some of them get pretty deep, asking what the dungeon represents and how it mirrors the surface world. <br>
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<h3>altogether </h3>
Designing a fantasy world, like the subterranean world of Blessfrey, from scratch can feel like an overwhelming blank on a page. If you're already in the midst of writing your story or designing your game, the page might not be as blank as you think. I have a surface world that has active and prior interaction with this fantasy one. I have a character who lives in this world. <br>
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Also merely by placing it underground, that connects my world to a wealth of material to reference. Analyzing other worlds will begin to fill your once blank page with questions to answer. You can always skip this step and jump straight into a <a href="https://ellenbrockediting.com/worldbuilding-bible-template/">pre-made questionnaire</a>, but building off of other entries in your genre is an inspiring personal process to undergo that will tip you off to audience expectations. Whether you serve them or deconstruct them is up to you. <br>
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At the end of the day, what will really draw your players into your game are fun levels that make clever use of your game's mechanics and your characters. If all your world does is justify a crowd-pleasing level and favorite character, it's perfectly adequate. After all, an almost lore-less released game is more successful than an epic-length worldbuilding bible with less than a demo to show for it. <br>
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Good luck worldbuilding! 
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Last updated January 16, 2022
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