LBAW Mintaka 3: Questions and Flourishes

I think we’re done. I’m pretty satisfied with Mintaka at this point, and because I’ve required myself to post the result, we have said result ready and in place, which means it’s finished. Is it good enough? I hope so. It’s more than I usually post, and it has its own page! So I have certainly achieved my goals.

Just because it’s done doesn’t mean we have to stop, though. With many worlds, I think I would stop here, though I do struggle to contain myself in 500 to 1000 words, because if I’m going to talk about a world more than just a brief summary, I find I can go at great length. Still, forcing a limit on myself means you get more detail, and I get more done.

I will note this entire process, if I condensed it, took about a day, which means I could afford to stop and write a couple of these a week, if I wanted.

If we wanted more, what would it look like? Well, today’s post will discuss what optional expansion might look like, and I’ll discuss some questions and feedback. Finally, we’ll finish off by completing a quick and small expansion or two.

This touches on something I’ve really wanted to do for awhile: I want to have small, easily expanded chunks of setting, something I can whip up ideally in a day, or at least a week. A sorcery school or a martial art, if pressed, can be done in a week, and a template in a day. It’s not that I need a setting done in a day or a week, but if a piece of the setting can be done in a day, then I can easily, piecemeal, continuously expand the setting.

LBAW Mintaka 2: A Minimal Template

So, we have an absolute minimum sort of system description with Mintaka. It’s out. It exists. We’ve achieved our goal. Can we cycle again and improve it? Sure, but the question is, what should we improve? What do we need? What should a “standard world write-up” have?

Well, let’s look at our resources. GURPS Space is the golden standard, but I have some quibbles with it. We have examples in the forms of various GURPS Space entries, such as GURPS Space Atlas. Outside of GURPS, if you don’t mind how much of an RPG hipster I am, I’ve dug through Ashen Stars from Gumshoe, Worlds without Number, Dark Heresy, Fading Suns. and I have some OSR material, especially a game called Ultraviolet Grasslands, and a really small indie work called Mu Rahnnamag. We’ll see if we can put something together from all of these.

I do not have Traveller. This is a shocking scandal, I understand. I have nothing against Traveller; it was my introduction to RPGs, and I even bought a copy of Traveller: a New Era and worked my way through Fire, Fusion and Steel. I just happen to lack the PDFs for it, so I haven’t referenced it. This is not meant as a criticism of Traveller, it just reflects my situation.

By the end, we should have a collection of “standard concerns” that we can focus on, our basic “must have” template for world design.

Lets Try to Build A World Again

Futuristic Cityscape Illuminated, Stockcake

With the release of ghosts, a discussion of the worlds associated with the ghosts came up, as well as the fact that not a lot of world detail has made it to the wiki. Why is there so little written about the worlds on the wiki? It’s not because the detail isn’t there, I have lots of notes, but even those notes are scattered and unclear. Why? What stops me from organizing my notes and releasing them? I’ve tried it with worldbuilding before, several times and failed. Why? What am I missing?

If I look at other projects, I’m pretty reliable and regular with them. A new template or relic is typically a matter of a day, perhaps a few days. A martial art takes between a week and a month. Spell schools take about a month, and the longest, most difficult part is usually the things around the school, or the broader structure of the style and making sure I have good niche protection. Monsters dont’ take too long either. I’ve been relatively successful with all of these things. So why can’t I get world-writing done? This is a major issue too, as it was one of the core things I wanted to do “this iteration,” as much as iterations still are a thing.

It occurred to me that November is Nanowrimo, which is always a good time to tackle big projects, so I thought I could refocus again and take another whack at this problem and see if I could find a way to resolve it, and I think I have some ideas.