Friday, 8 November 2024

Small Worldism: A Method for Campaign Setting Inspiration

One of the best ways to come up with a campaign setting is to get down to ground level and imagine the miniature landscape in one's immediate vicinity scaled up to 100 or 1000 times its actual size. Let's call this method, 'Small Worldism'.

Earlier this week I visited Iwaisaki, an cape of unusual rock formations off the coast near my wife's hometown. In an earlier life, she and I spent hours swimming in its stunningly clear waters, occasionally stepping back onto dry land to lazily drink beer and sunbathe. Now, with two young kids in tow, we mostly spent our time there chasing them around making sure they didn't slip or hurt themselves. But I did manage to take some low level photos to illustrate what I mean. 

First, then, the overview. What we see here is clearly a vast lagoon, perhaps dozens of miles across, and surrounded by mighty rocky cliffs. At the base of these cliffs are many sea caves within which can be found entire city-states - their inhabitants trade and war with each other with armadas of vessels that continually traverse its vast expanse. (There also, naturally, here and there lurk pirates, too.) Higher up these cliffs lurk monsters, dragons, harpies, and the like. In the depths of the lagoon are crab-men, sahuagin, aquatic elves, tritons - the whole marine shebang. And on top of the cliffs are huge expanses of arid, barren badlands populated by savage tribes, outcasts and outlaws, and dotted with - natch - lost civilisations and ruins. 






Here, up close, are the sea cliffs - can't you just imagine tiny sailing ships swarming around the water beneath these towering, mile-high monoliths? Can't you just imagine dragons, manticores, hydras, harpies,  lairing in caves and cracks in their huge and variegated faces? Can't you imagine tribes of troglodytes or spider-goblins lurking there too? 








In case further evidence was needed, just take a look at some of the caves on offer and imagine what might be found inside if they were a dozen, or a hundred, yards wide:





Beyond the cliffs themselves is a huge arid wasteland of great ravines and ridges, populated by aforementioned savages - not to mention basilisk lizards, giant antlions, probably also dinosaurs, paranoid isolationist cults, liches, mummies, and formians:






Up close you can see what the terrain would be like - riven with huge crevasses and ravines, constantly subject to landslides and collapses, and terribly dangerous to traverse:










Throw in some other risks and interesting flavour ideas and you have the icing on the cake. Maybe the region is swept periodically by tidal waves and storms which cause all the inhabitants to search for shelter for weeks on end. Maybe everybody is dependent on rainwater to survive, since the entire area lacks rivers or other sources of freshwater. Maybe the depths of the lagoon harbour not just aquatic humanoids but also kraken, or leviathans, or undersea gods. Maybe there is a huge whirlpool at the centre. Maybe to make their boats the people of the sea caves are dependent on a precarious trade in wood with whoever inhabits the forested region inland... 

And so the thoughts go on. I daresay you could have as much fun in your back garden, though undoubtedly wild or rural areas are going to provide the most inspirational ammunition. 


25 comments:

  1. You are on to something here. I remember the magical worlds I would find even in a puddle when I was a child in the Colorado Rocky Mountains.

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    1. Same here. I used to imagine rock pools at the local beach were like oceans.

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  2. Sounds like an immediate setting right there! I can confirm if you read this post with a sort of David Attenborough voice setting on your interior monologue soundtrack, it is splendid and fantastic.

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    1. Ha, well, I noticed a lot of infelicities of language in there - not my best proof-read of posts….

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  3. This is essentially what I've done with my Hitherland setting: a vast, miles-wide city overrun by magical forest. The buildings might not be out of scale with where I'm from but the scale of the city itself is exaggerated. Throw in a chaotic god-lich-thing causing it's collapse and you've got a good setting for adventure!

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    1. Chaotic god-lich-things are always helpful.

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  4. And the ruined caldera of the giant volcano that casted the lava that formed this immense coast is, naturally, now completely submerged a long way from the shore, but neither quite dead nor uninhabited.The tales of half collapsed, inundated lava tunnels going down, down into the dark below to where the forerunners of the present exiled sub-dwellers still live, the very rock of their termite hill like colony inlaid with orichalcum and gold, are just greatly exaggerated sailor's tales, for sure. But fishermen do still give away to the sea the first fish caught in the last month of the season as a superstitious tribute to the irate precursors of those below they shun to name, and have no doubts to where mariners that are lost overboard at sea do turn up. No, those are not lost. Any child will point the spot in the horizon where the volcano supposedly once stood millenia ago and explain that the shipwrecked invariably sink their way there. But all hope of return for these castaways is lost, forver to toil in sunken courts older than any of man's ancestors.

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  5. I remember doing the same thing as a kid while hiking, imagining how amazing a larger version of a mossy forest would be as a D&D world.

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    1. Yeah, I think it comes from having spent lots of time playing with toy soldiers in the garden as a kid…

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  6. Man, I love how you have that active imagination. Is the mark of the ones that refused to lost (or even recovered) their innocence. Really, a great sign.

    I love some of the ideas that you mentioned... Really cool...

    PS: I hope you had a great vacation!

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  7. A beautiful post; one that is genuinely inspirational. .

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  8. Interesting location! What it makes me think of is a world where Water won over Earth. Earth elementals retreated from the shorelines, taking their ability to support vegetation either very inland or off world entirely. In their place Water and Air elementals are supporting a different sort of life, one that needs salt water in place of fresh and salty air to be hale.

    Or it could be a location where Water and Earth use for diplomacy as they have both worked to keep most other creatures at bay. On the edges they are willing to trade with mortals but deep in those lands, the living won't be for long if they are discovered. It also happens to be a former, very wealthy kingdom and so there are ruins still to be found and raided, usually filled with undead.

    Or it is a new world and the elements are still working on creating or evolving terrestrial life. All the character species are marine but some individuals have taking to something like Oathbound's prestige races to explore the land and sky. It could be fairly boring or it could be filled with aberrant or elemental life.

    I usually don't care much for sandy deserts and other mostly dead places, but this shoreline has potential.

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    1. Nice ideas! Kind of reminds me of that old Weiss & Hickman series about the different elemental worlds….

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  9. Hm. Feels like a good idea. Had some thoughts in a similar vein before though they didn't turn into something more concrete...
    Of course, in this specific case, isles, etc. should have at least some vegetation added: people and animals don't live on bare rocks nor tides which keep the rocks barren on the present scale reach hundreds of meters high...
    Mike

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  10. Just reflecting - this is easy to do with barren landscapes that are fractally expansible in their horizontal and vertical dimensions - not so easy to handle plant cover as part of terrain, because grasses, weeds, bushes, and trees do fundamentally different things at their scale.

    How long is a shoreline, indeed!

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    1. Yes, but giant grass/plants etc = cool.

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    2. Also, there are things like mosses which resemble rain forests. And the bases of plants with thin tubular stems, can suddenly resemble trees. You've just got to grub around a bit.

      I

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    3. Yes, absolutely get you ono the moss-as-rainforests point.

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  11. (Sorry for the Anonymous. That insightful comment was me)

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  12. A picture I took with exactly this in mind:

    https://imgur.com/0EROdps

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