Creating a Game (Part 16) - Worldbuilding and Fleshing Things Out

Not everything in FUBAR is a threat. This game is the same.

Most things in FUBAR are just interesting elements in the world until actions taken by the characters trn them into potential benefits or penalties, allies or enemies...

I did a couple of fairly comprehensive sequences on worldbuilding here o the blog a few years back, and most of my ideas are generally the same now as they were then. The Darkhive worldbuildng sequence was fun (it begins here) and the Worldbuiding 101 sequence played with a bottom-up style of worldbuilding that is more typical of the way I develop settings (it starts here). However,  "Bustle in your Hedgerow" is less about designing a new world from scratch, and more about adding some spices to our exising world, and setting some broad boundaries to work within... boundaries inpired by the heavy folk-rock and blues or a legendary band.

Much of the worldbuilding in this type of game is inspired by the choices and actions of the players as they guide each story to its completion through their scarecrow characters. Part of this worldbuilding comes through a series of prompts that the players provide at the beginning of each session. 

The sessions of gameplay will gradually build up an environment with a range of people, locations, and objects that gradually accumulate importance and depth in the story. 

People - At the start of the first game, each player names two people who could play a part in this particular session. We don't know too much more about them at thi stage except for the fact that they are regular non-supernatural citizens of the world. Give them each a single core-trait, something that they're good at. Through the course of play we might learn a bit more about them, or they might just be a fleeting cameo in a single scene. We don't know if these named characters will be allies, enemies, obstacles on the path to success, or something else entirely. We play to find out who these people are, drawing on the elements that help the story (even if those elements don't help the Scarecrow characters in the story).

Places - The same is done for places, each player starts by indicating the farm that their scarecrow protects, then names one other location in the local area. It could be a pub, a church, an occult bookshop, a war memorial, a forgotten standing stone, a small copse of trees, a railway station, a crossroads, it could be anything. If the group is working with a map of a specific town in the real world, try to find places that physically exist on the map. Anything we know about the location in he real world, applies to the location in the story, but in a world of supernatural beings and magic, there could be far more that we don't know. The idea here is that we're applying a shorthand for the place. 

(Oh, it's proably a good point here to mention that the people described in the previous step probably shouldn't be real world folks, and especially not people who are known by members of the playing group. This is for etiquette reasons, and also because overheard conversations about the story could be misinterpreted as real world gossip... I've seen it happen).

Things - Finally, in that first session, every player offers some kind of object that will function as a macguffin. It generally has no benefits or penalties (that we know of at the start of the story), it's just something that people want, or an object that somehow drives the story in some other way.

The Narrator also adds pairs of people, places and things to the collection. Players shouldn't necessarily know what each other have written as elements to introduce into the story.

During the first session, the Narrator randomly picks a number of people equal to the number of players in the session (including themself), and does the same for places and objects. This means that not all of the elements created by the players will play a part in the session, but we'll get to those unselected elements later.

This method of setting development is a modification to the standard way setting developmnt is establshed in FUBAR. The narrator doesn't have everything on their shoulders, and the other players around the table become more invested in the narrative because they may have written elements coming into play at any time. 

The narrator works their way through each pile, where the elements near the top of each pile drawn may be encountered early in the story, and will probably be resolved before the climax arrives. Those toward the bottom of the pile are far more likely to be present in the climax. If a person is killed (or otherwise removed from the story) eliminate the card that they were written on. If they survived, the narrator adds a dot point, or a sentence describing something new that was learned during the course of the story. This also applies to any objects in the story; if they are destroyed then their card is removed, otherwise something new is added to the known history of the item. Places aren't removed, even if they are burnt down, blown up, or otherwise changed dramatically; the geographic location is still there, but notes about its current status are made on the location's card. 

Since things are random, it's distinctly possible that one or more players won't see the characters they're written (or the places/things). However, these remain in the pile for future sessions.

In the second session (and subsequent sessions), each player has the option to write a single new person, new place, and new thing. Instead of writing something new, they may select an existing person, place, or thing, then revisit this element. A player doesn't have to choose one of the elements that they wrote... if they really like the element provided by someone else, they can bring that back into the story again. As certain elements come into the story multple times, the group starts to learn more about them, and even if they only seemed a minor factor in the story during their first appearance, they might end up becoming integral parts of the long term chronicle by sheer number of appearances.