Here’s an idea I came up with to get some quick world building done during the first session of a campaign.
When you build a piece of the world, roll +INT. Continue taking turns defining world features until everyone has had a turn, and there is at least one positive, negative, and terrain feature created.
• On a 10+, create a positive features on the map. This can be a friendly fortress, safe haven steading, or other bastion of the precarious civilization.
• On a 7-9, create a region of terrain on the map, such as a forest, desert, sea, or mountain range.
• On a 6 or less, create a negative feature on the map. This can be the stronghold of a lich king, a cursed barrow mound, a forsaken dungeon complex, etc. These sites invariably contain wealth and artifacts ripe for adventurers to plunder.
Hmm… I really like the concept, but are the characters themselves creating the world? If not, it seems odd to tie the world-at-large to a Stat block of the character.
I might steal this for my toyed with (and stolen) idea for a DW hack about people playing a DW hack.
I considered making it a straight 2d6 but I want to use it also as a way to introduce the new players to the core mechanic. But I see your point 🙂
In DW i typically prefer building only the bits of the world the characters are looking at right now. The rest of it is under ‘fog of war’, becoming defined only once it’s relevant in the fiction.
The exception would be the way Funnel World approaches village design. The collaborative aspect of developing a handful of characters, and then building a village to support why THOSE characters happen to be present was a great exercise. great lite system, and it actually taught me a new way to think about building a village around the resource(s) that caused people to settle there in the first place (and possibly/hopefully enabled them to thrive)
I guess i’d characterize Funnel World’s approach as making a few random rolls to assert a bunch of fiction up front, and then using that fiction to fill in relevant gaps on a map….. hmmm… new concept to throw around in my dizzy head.
This seems redundant, seeing how most class moves include describing parts of the world anyway.
If you really want to present the core mechanic to the new players just prepare a nice starting move for the possible adventures you would like to present. I really like the example set here: https://youtu.be/ooa-apRt2wk?t=1904
I want the players to come up with the adventure ideas, not present something to them, I want to go in with a clean slate and let us build the ideas together.