The game that would become Karandrin started with many simple desires from its inexperienced creator. I wanted my own unique setting to play in, certainly. I wanted my players to have complete control over what adventures they took and have the option to abandon them for any reason they saw fit (See “Evolving toward the Sandbox” for more.) I needed to run in-world time as it passed day to day so that my players could have opportunities to build the contacts needed to find adventures as well as whatever resources the characters needed. Unbeknownst to me at the time, I was building an organic world that made sense within its own context, that flowed logically from its own premises. Slowly, the setting itself (for the longest time unnamed) needed to be a natural, palpable world that pushed back when a character put their hand out to feel their environment.
Examples of this organic nature to the setting abound in the stream, but a few examples are worth mentioning where they differ from many other fantasy settings. For instance, walking into a village fully armed—even with weapons peaceably sheathed or hung from belts—is alarming to typical denizens. Obviously, the more isolated the community the more alarming such behavior becomes. The high-quality (and quantity) of weapons you see in much of fantasy is the equivalent of present-day’s assault weapons and are treated as such by the inhabitants of Karandrin. Other than dagger, spear, and bow—the tools of a hunter—most other weapons are for war and violence, and it seemed logical to me that the simple inhabitants of most towns will not abide a weapon’s brazen display.
Another example is the common folk’s acceptance of magic. If magic is relatively rare in a setting and the setting’s populace is relatively uneducated, then their blithe acceptance of supernatural effects seemed to me to be completely ridiculous. Again, I decided that the common folk would react with fear and suspicion to any sort of magical spectacle, excepting those from trusted sources such as the local cleric, shaman, or what have you. The supernatural is the unnatural and even the educated typically avoid the unexplained. In a world where even the basic course of a disease is described in terms of spiritual imbalance, curses, or the will of the gods, seeing fire leaping from a PC’s hands is going to cause alarm.
Not that this fear can’t used to a player’s advantage. The more tactically minded player might try to push their point by a magical display and get the villagers’ compliance for a given purpose. Likewise, a careful display of benevolent magic can make a PC appear to be a source of good (whatever their real motives). In both cases, however, the world will feel more real, more alive, and in a sense more predictable because NPCs are acting according to cultural norms and not the convenience of a game system.
A final example—at least for this article—concerns in-game language choices. While a player’s character class or profession may very well be Thief, the character would never refer to themselves that way. The same is true for so many of the professions within a fantasy setting. A Fighter, Warrior, or what have you would not use those terms but maybe just shrug. In the context of fantasy role-playing, most characters would refer to themselves as adventurers as no technical terms for their skillsets actually exist within the world. Instead, when adventurer isn’t relevant as a term, most spell-casters would know a technical term for their specialty but would accept being referred to as wizard, sorcerer, warlock, or similar terms. Those practicing faith-based magic would probably accept the term priest, cleric, etc.
In fact, the religious-based magic-users provide an interesting exception to my argument and are therefore an exception in Karandrin. Technical terms for professions arise out of a tradition of long use or out of terminology developed in formalized training. Religions throughout the world have been one of the earliest adopters of formalized training and so an RPGs Cleric class might in fact be referred to by cleric. Similarly, Paladin-classed characters, formally adopted by ceremony and training into the role, might be referred to as paladins. Druids are admittedly a trickier case. Druid might be a term adopted in rejection to the use of cleric so as to differentiate mainstream religion from the druid’s less-accepted faith. Certainly, the transformation into a druid would require formalized training and ceremony and so some term should arise, though I guess it’s conceivable that term could be cleric, follower, or some other.
All of these lines of thought, I realize, are not wholly original but are nonetheless necessary to explain why some things happen and why others don’t. Not undertaking these questions leaves a fantasy setting (and really any fictional setting) vulnerable to my least favorite feeling when experiencing any form of creative fiction: contrivance. Why do characters refer to their professions so mechanically? Why are the townsfolk okay with flying adventurers landing in the town square? If the reason is because the gamemaster says so, my suspension of disbelief is dashed.
No doubt, I’ll touch on other expressions of organic worldbuilding as it’s one of my favorite elements of fiction, but I’ll leave those for later. We’ll talk more and this topic and others in future works.
© 2022 by Kevin Manus-Pennings
Karandrin 