Worldbuilding, with Tables and Fiction

In this article, I'll try to use the ideas I espoused in the last article, and see if it pans out the way I want it to.

This is my first take at doing some world building for a tabletop RPG setting, using my own framework.

First, I need a few entries for the "Big Ideas" table. I'm just sitting at my kitchen table asking myself what I want to see here. I want to start with 4 entries - enough to have a meaningful dice roll to see what idea I'm going to end up using in my flash fiction, but short enough that I have room to grow later and don't feel obligated to fully envision my entire setting before I even get started making useful things.

Big Ideas

1. Elementals

2. Political Power Struggles

3. Rigorous Magic

4. Fantastical Landscapes

These all make sense to me in my head, but since I'm writing this for your pleasure, I'll explain in brief:

1. Elementals are pretty self explanatory, but I like them as a core, fundamental part of the world. I was hooked on the Djinn in Golden Sun and the idea of the Elemental Bird trio in Pokemon. Stuff like that just scratches my itch, so I want them present in a big way in my setting.

2. Political Power Struggles. This is the black sheep of the original table, but every time I sit down and think about strange worlds, I think about pretender kings and hidden lineages and deposed monarchs.

3. Magic being rigorous - maybe there's a different way to say this, but I like magic that feels like science, something you can study and learn and innovate and improve, moreso than magic you're born with and suddenly can be proficient in. Meritocratic magic systems! They also give the players downtime hooks and adventure hooks and make sense of systemic advancement.

4. Fantastical landscapes are something I adore about Minecraft and especially some of the more mainstream Minecraft mods like Terralith. Shattered lands, floating islands, permanent whirlpools, vast, inhabited crevices, massive walls. These set my imagination on fire.

Stuff

Now I need a "Stuff" table. I have inverted these from my last post - I recommended doing Stuff first and Big Ideas second, but I don't have a strong feeling for the ordering, and as I sat down to write this, I intuitively felt like Big Ideas should come first, so perhaps I'll swap those around in the end.

"Stuff", here, is vague, and perhaps a different moniker will reveal itself, but it's meant to be Nouns that are of particular interest in the setting. If swords are really important to your world, carrying lineages and magic and power and respect or whatnot, Swords might go on your Stuff list. But if swords are just swords, it would be silly to put them on your Stuff list, because they won't inspire truly cool ideas.

Similarly, I wouldn't recommend putting an entry for characters, or NPCs, on this list. Since the last step of the session is to write some flash fiction, the presence of characters is baked into that step, making it redundant in this one.

So what kind of "stuff" do I feel will make for interesting fiction in this setting?

1. War

2. Magical Discovery

3. Elemental Incursions

4. Mercantile Companies

I operate in a very stream of consciousness method. I just start listing things that sound fun. Several of these obviously line up with the "Big Idea" list, because I wrote them in the same sitting. (Note: This may be an unintended consequence to doing this kind of session work, and may very well be a downside, leading to unintentional homogenization - but I think the blending of various ideas into flash fiction and the fact that you're always going to be rolling new combinations of these things will mitigate that downside.)

What are Elemental Incursions? No idea, but it sounded cool when I wrote it on the list. I'll have to actually play out some flash fiction to know what they are, and how they impact the world. I like how, in this system, I don't have to answer these questions until later. Little figments of ideas are just as valuable as fully fleshed out domains will be later.

Let's Roll!

So now, I need to roll on these tables, and I'll break out my Ironsworn Starforged Action+Theme table to see if I can roll a decent oracle result on that.

Big Idea: Elementals

Stuff: Magical Discovery

Action+Theme: "Explore Price"

There's an additional step in my original description. Create a table for the "stuff" entry. In this case, I would create a "Magical Discoveries" table and roll on that, and add that to my recipe. This is a tricky step - what kinds of things go on a Magical Discoveries table? Alas, this is where the world building magic happens, so let's make that table and roll on it.

Magical Discoveries

1. The Inversion Sigil

2. Elemental Mixing by Subtraction

3. The Tenth and Eleventh Words of the Lingua Arcana

4. Arcane Energies Present at the Birth of Wondrous Creatures

Again, pure stream of consciousness. Notice how specific these are. These tables are allowed to be more specific since I don't have to do further derivations from these tables. And what's more, being more specific in these tables feeds right into the prompt for your flash fiction, giving you something concrete to build on, and each entry is a spark for further ideas.

Rolling on this table, we can add "Elemental Mixing by Subtraction" to our list of ingredients.

The Action+Theme oracle is the step that requires interpretation. As stated before, I rolled two d100s, one on each of the Ironsworn Starforged's Action and Theme tables. Explore Price is like the fundamental, mother sauce of this recipe, the roux upon which the rest of this meal will be laid.

The next step is Flash Fiction. This step can be as short or as long, as terse or involved as you like. It can take virtually any form you like. I can imagine myself doing a quick sketch, or a painting, to explore these ideas. I can imagine many different types of narrative frames if you intend on doing writing - journal entries, short stories, audio logs, research papers, advertisements, descriptions of crimes, translations... the possibilities here are endless.

I'm going to write a quick bit of Flash Fiction here. To reiterate our prompt:

Big Idea: Elementals

Stuff: Magical Discovery, "Elemental Mixing by Subtraction"

Action+Theme: "Explore Price"

Joao looked haggard. The student displayed the kind of sapped, desiccated tired that was almost painful to look at, much less experience. The rims of her eyes were the same scarlet as the veins that ran through them. She had not slept for days, on the ill-reached theory that if she stopped here, she'd lose the momentum that had powered her so far, so near to the conclusion of her work. And worse, she wouldn't be able to pick up the work again after what would certainly be a long hibernation. The elemental ice might keep, if enclosed in a nickel flask, but there was simply no way to keep the smoldering ashes from cooling, and the cube of pyros was the last of her supply.

It would be one thing if a cube of pyros was replaceable, but the grant that the Triarch had given her was as exhausted as she was, and pyros was the most expensive part of this work. Bleary-eyed, Joao returned to her notes.

*The conjuring of... what was it again?... returning some energy to... a lower plane? a higher one?... And she had paid for so much catalyst powder. That must have gone somewhere. Did she use it already? She must have. The pyros was still burning, wasn't it? So she must have.*

*Gods. Maybe just a little bit of sleep. Just a bit.*

Joao awoke to the sound of lantern beetles vibrating against the windows, and shot up right. How long had it been since she had fallen asleep? The pyros was a cold pile of ash in its glass dish, and the elemental ice had melted, overflowing the low rim of its own glassware, hopelessly mundane water now soaking the sleeve of her alchemical coat and the linen shirt beneath.

"Oh, gods no, no no no..." Joao scrambled, still scraping the lingering sleep from her eyes, desperately tilting the glass bowl toward her in hopes of finding even a small sliver of ice, but in vain. It had all melted, and the pyros was not more than ash now, their elemental energy uselessly dissipated back into the plane to rejoin their respective prime essences. The experiment was ruined.

Tears welled in the student's irritated eyes. She looked through the last few pages of notes she had taken. Theories and proofs regarding the movement of elemental energies directly, without conversion, using only catalyst and proximity... all of it worthless without a demonstrable result. She was so certain that this would work but without more funding, she couldn't deliver it. Maybe she could show this to the Triarch's principal alchemist and get more funding... but no, they had been clear that this work only merited minimal funding, and only because Joao's mentor had been so well respected by the Triarch themselves.

And there was no other way to get her hands on more cubic pyros.

Unless...

That's all. That's the flash fiction, and I wrote it very stream of consciousness as I always do, letting whatever interesting ideas came to my mind flow through and onto the page, knowing that I am writing the world I want to see played out. There's some cool stuff in here - what is the Triarch? The interplay of elements is rich for adventure. There's hooks hanging off of this as well - if the party encounters Joao, they certainly have a quest waiting for them related to these elemental materials.

If I were so inclined, and maybe I will be after I get home from vacation, I could convert some of these ideas into a more structured, wiki-like notes in my Obsidian project. Storing there the NPCs, concepts, worlds, politics, and tables that I write here is an easy bit of cleanup after doing all of this more challenging creative work.

That's the end of one session of my little world building framework, or game, or whatever you'd like to call it. I'd love to hear your thoughts on the process, thoughts on what certain things should be named, what I could add or take away to make the process more effective or easier to get into. My next article will be an attempt to summarize my results into an easy to use, easy to read framework.