A Bigger Picture

Over the course of the last year (wow!), I have spent a decent bit of spare time building out a world for our D&D games. Both the games themselves and the world creation process have been a lot of fun. After coming up with an original "background idea" for the part of the world we would be playing in, I have alternated between detailing the local area that the characters are adventuring in, and spending time roughing out the region (or super-region, depending on how you would describe a piece of a continent). One thing I hadn't ever really given much thought to was how this piece of this continent fit into the larger world as a whole, and thus why things were the way they were.

The extremely short version of the background of the world as the players (and I) have known it is this:

In the Elder Days, there were kingdoms of men in the North and in the South of the land. 700 years ago, war broke out in the North and escalated to the point where civilization completely broke down, and magical creatures and evil beasts overran the North, turning it into a dangerous wilderness (500 years ago). The might of the nations of the South contained the onslaught in the North, and the southern realms continued on. Over the last 200-300 years, the scattered remnants of the northern peoples, supplemented by explorers and settlers from the South, have founded new nations along the coasts, and are exploring and settling inland. The far North (and the heart of the Northern Elder Realms) is still a very wild place.

This was certainly enough of a background story to get us started (and frankly would probably work the for entire duration of a campaign or two or three). It created a sense of what I wanted the campaign to be - civilization's struggles on the edge of a mysterious and dangerous wilderness, with lots of ruined towns and old sites to visit and explore. Ancient maps could be found, but would not be commonly available. Legends and stories of the Elder Days would provide for limitless adventure hooks. The effects of world shattering magic could continue to ripple through the land, allowing for all sorts of weirdness. All in all, this background has worked just fine.

Inevitably though, roughing out sketches of the southern lands and other peripheral areas, and staring at open spaces on the edges of all the maps leads to many questions. What else is out there? Where did the  people come from? Is there anything beyond the oceans? What does the rest of this continent look like? Who else lives here? What, if anything, lies on the other side of the Southern lands? If there are other lands and continents out there, who lives in them, and are my "core" people in contact with them, and if not why not? And so on.

In general I have avoided delving into any of these questions for fear that (knowing myself) I will disappear down a rathole of detailed maps and write ups and will spend time creating something that we will almost certainly never use. But that doesn't make the curiosity and the desire to have a better bigger picture go away. So in just a couple of hours over the last few days and evenings, I have taken a few sheets of paper gridded to the scale of my existing Hexographer map sections, and sketched, working out from what is already in place. I have stuck to my promise so far of doing nothing more detailed than jotting a sentence here or there about what an area might contain. The yellow sticky notes on the picture of my sketching serve the same purpose; simple thoughts and ideas that may change.

Sketching the bigger world

As of now, I have a simple sketch of a much larger area, and the beginnings of an idea on how these fit together. Each small grid square on the sketch map is an area 480 miles wide and 360 miles high. The lens cap covers an area of maybe 700 miles in diameter, and is the area that the current campaign is centered in. These 6 sheets of paper in total are about 3,000 miles north to south and almost 6,000 miles east to west. I like it. There is enough in the far north to have arctic climates, and enough in the south to have tropical. If nothing else, the creation/imagination process is fun, and even this vague idea of what else is out there in the wider world will help color the myths and legends that do impact the characters in our campaign.

A bigger picture MIGHT be something like this:

Many years ago (1500? 2000? 2500?) human settlers first came to Myara from Old Lands far to the east across the ocean. [Were they fleeing something or were they explorers?] They settled parts of the eastern central coast of this new land, and built a civilization. [Centered in two main areas, North and South? If so, why/how were they different?] Connection to the Old Lands was lost long ago. [When, how, why?] Even the existence of the Old Lands has faded into myth. [Are they even still there? and what does that look like?] Far to the NE with limited contact with Myara is a land of seafaring barbarians. There are a few scattered nomadic remnants of the Elder peoples in the arctic areas of the far north. To the south across a narrow sea could be a marshy jungle filled land, perhaps with a well-developed lizardman civilization. Stretching west of our core lands, into a very large land mass, could be a vast expanse of grasslands with a nomadic warlike people. There could be a large and well-organized hobgoblin kingdom preventing encroachment of human civilization in that direction. And so on.

Or maybe it's something different entirely...