Exploring New Worlds Blog Carnival Entry

Exploring New Worlds

By:Jesse C Cohoon

This month’s RPGBA Blog Carnival is hosted by Nils Jeppe at Enderra.com. The theme for this month is A New Year, A New World. Nils describes the theme as follows:

This month’s RPG Blog Carnival is about new worlds, about their discovery and about the women, men, and other sentient humanoids who explore and colonize them.

Share your new lands with us, if you can do so without spoiling them for your party. Show off your maps and designs. How do you approach setting up your worlds? Share your favorite world-building tips!

New Worlds 

There are a variety of making new worlds while still keeping the exact same world that you have at present. Consider the following:

• There has been a some sort of apocalypse
• An asteroid crashes into the planet and destroys buildings, bridges, and possibly roads,
• A volcanic eruption has wiped out an area or has sprung up in the form of a new island. Despite the fact that the lava has cooled it's still dangerous with hot pockets that haven't cooled all the way, lava tubes, and steam escaping from the ground
• A disease wipes out many people and those quarantined inside must now venture out.
• The effects of a war has decimated a city (or sometimes the entire countryside) and the maps may no longer be accurate
• Earthquakes have changed the landscape, making giant chasms in some areas, allowing water to flood others, and changing how valleys and mountains look. 
• Aliens come from outer space and decimate the planet. 
• There has been some sort of large scale change 
• The socioeconomic conditions, politics, or religious atmosphere of an area changed while the PCs were away and they now must navigate in this strange new political landscape
• Monsters have taken over an area, changing the area in ways that your players might not expect, cutting down a forest, casting terraforming spells that changes the climate Natural climate change can also work much the same way.   
• The extinction of a natural predator or introduction of a new one causes the swelling of a species or dwindling food supplies for others.    
• A matter of scale: Consider how much adventure a character could have at the size of an insect in a room... and even smaller at the microscopic scale  
• A matter of direction: a classic challenge that some video games have is to turn the entire game upside down. This can be done with spells such as "reverse gravity"
• A matter of location. Maybe the maps that the players have are old, and so don't show certain features. Maybe there are no maps because no one thought of mapping them before - like under the oceans. Maybe they're  not mapped because they're secret, such as the secret passages to the Thief's guild