Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination and life to everything

Here’s a little world building game that may get the old creative juices flowing. The BACKGROUND to this is below but skip to “WORLDBUILDING GAME” below if you want to get straight to it.

BACKGROUND Myself and a couple of friends are working on a “multiverse” RPG/collaborative world building project. Key influences are some of our favourites rpgs - Continuum/Narcissist, Kult, Mage, Nobilis, The Strange and Everway as well as movies/tv (Doctor Strange, Inception, The Matrix, Doctor Who) and comics (The Invisibles, Planetary, Luther Arkwright, Black Science).

The overall feel is “Weird Science Fantasy”, a blend of magic and science that we refer to as “Mystical Mechanical.” Imagine if China Miéville and Grant Morrison had been given the keys to Doctor Who and asked Yoshitaka Amano and Jack Kirby to collaborate on the concept art!

WORLD BUILDING GAME We have been working up some setting worlds/scenarios. We want to make these quite unusual and memorable - not the “Romans in space” or “if Nazi’s won the WWII” or Tolkeinesque/Gibsonesque clones.

I came up with a little game which we play to create original settings. (Can be played solo or even better with friends).

1. Think of a music album with an evocative title or feel to it - it helps if it’s one you know well
2. Use that to riff off/create ideas for a setting using the album titles, musical flavour, song titles, lyrics or general feel of the album
3. Encapsulate that setting in no more than five sentences
4. Present you ideas to your co-players (competitors)
5. Award points or vote on a winner - special points for those who can weave song titles, lyrics and potentially any characters into setting.
6. Combine/evolve ideas from competitors (or their settings) to add further flavour to the winner.

These create some truly interesting and memorable settings for a small campaign or one off adventure but could be used for wider and more focused world building with further work.

A recent example:

Let England Shake (PJ Harvey) The English Civil War has been ongoing for more than two hundred years in a perpetually snow covered and ice rimed countryside. Through the waft of gunpowder smoke, Puritanical Iron Giant automotitans stride, battling Royalist folk horror Kaiju like Black Phillips the giant six-eyed tentacled goat man, crushing ancient stone churches and thatched roof villages underfoot The iron masked Lord Protector mentally controls his Iron Giants from his Iron Throne in the gothic spired theo-political palace maze of Westminister. Royalists hold out in their ramshackle ruined country houses and their stronghold in Oxford. The country is in ruins, people are starving and an uprising is coming led by the Resurrectionists, a faction whose origins are in the underworld.

We have also developed an entire set of interlinked worlds (we refer to them in world as Rivens) called the “Path of The Nine” which are based upon the nine Nine Inch Nails studio albums.

Just a bit of fun but I hope this helps. What ideas can you come up with using this method? What other techniques have you found useful for building RPG settings or scenarios?

Submitted November 23, 2018 at 01:28PM by Tenebrae72 https://ift.tt/2POqcAh