World Builder's Guidebook

Credit: TSR Ltd.

Hello and welcome to my World Building blog!

 

Today, I will be discussing the accessary book for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: World Builder's Guidebook by Richard Baker and published by TSR Ltd in 1996.

 

One thing you should know about me is my love for tables and the chaotic nature of randomness.  And the World Builder's Guidebook is chock full of tables.

 

The first aspect of the book is the World Hook.  These hooks are like plot hooks, but instead of drawing the players into the adventure, these World Hooks set the tone and theme of the world you are creating.  There are different categories like climate, landforms, sites of interest, and cultures.  A direct quote from the book:

 

"Because the hook is so central to your entire design effort, you should make every effort to come up with an idea you feel enthusiastic about and follow it through.  However, if you find that a good idea is not presenting itself to you, or you just want to throw some dice and see what comes up, you can roll [...] for a bare-bones world hook.  If you don't like the result you get, feel free to roll again."

 

Using a random generator, my World Hook landed on Sites of Interest.  There are eight different sub-categories under Sites of Interest of which my generator landed on Ruins.  The description in the book for ruins is:

 

"An ancient culture left behind ruins with fantastic wealth, magic, and hidden danger.  Locating unknown ruins to plunder and piecing together the lost knowledge of the ancient race is the major challenge of the campaign."

 

Already, I'm getting visions of the overgrown ruins of the Aztecs, the sandy deserts of Egypt, or jungles of Angkor Wat.  And with a hook like this, there would be plenty of adventure for your players.

 

However, the World Builder's Guidebook does suggest:

 

"Optionally, roll two or three times and look for an interesting mix or juxtaposition of hooks of different themes."  [...] “Sometimes, hooks that seem to clash may spark an unusual idea."

 

So, for this example, I'm going to roll two more times on my random generator.  My results are Situation: Religious. and Climate or landform: Desert.  Wow, this combination is straight out of an ancient Egyptian scenario.

 

The description for Religious is:

 

"An unusual religious situation exists.  Perhaps priests venerate the elements instead of anthropomorphic deities (Athas, the world of the DARK SUN setting, is a good example of this), or there may be a faith or religion that is so powerful that it dominates a region or the entire world."

 

Since I'm a fan of HP Lovecraft, it's easy to see this religion or cult worshipping an Elder God, or an Old One.  They use the ancient ruins for their research and/or culminate resources for them to bring forth their dangerous deities.  On the other end of the spectrum, there is a religion that is trying to thwart this Elder God religion at all costs.

 

The description for Desert is:

 

"The world is unusually arid, with vast reaches of waterless waste.  Agriculture and civilization is concentrated in fertile belts near sources of water.  Water could be the measure of wealth."

 

This combination works well together.  An ancient culture left behind strange and unusual ruins in a desert world.  There are so many possibilities here, and many questions to answer.  Who was this ancient culture?  Did they have abandoned technologies?  Are the ruins full of these magics and unknown technologies?  Who are these fanatics that live and worship in the ruins?  Did they bring forth monsters to protect them within?  Was the world always a desert, or was there a cataclysm that made it that way?

 

So many possibilities!

 

Next time, we'll be discussing Planet Temperatures and Seasonal Variations

 

I hope you enjoyed the read, and until next time, thanks for reading.