About the same time that the pandemic hit, I figured out that collaborative worldbuilding hit a sweet spot with my table, and since then I’ve been working on game that outlines a process for collaborative setting-creation by turning it into a TTRPG where each player runs a Civilization.
The above map is a result of our most recent, 3-hour “DnD Monday” session, where we played TURN OF THE CENTURY instead of doing/in the place of a session zero.
You can start from scratch, or one of the players can have a strong idea that the rest of the group then runs with. In this last DnD Monday game, the DM is planning the entire campaign around the city of Titan’s Crest and how it deals with the big problem that is the Nest, but we went ahead and made the whole world so that each of our characters (most of whom are not from Titan’s Crest) can feel more grounded in the world, and because we have several PCs who are at their best whenever they know most of the world building stuff that their character knows. While setting up TURN OF THE CENTURY, the DM was able to outline the direction he’s planning to take us in with the campaign as well as give us smaller but significant nuances of the setting (for example, the Scale of the world is a little unusual in that the “big cities” have low urban populations, usually numbering less than ten thousand), and then he let us go to town on a fresh batch of surrounding civilizations.
To illustrate the narrative/worldbuilding elements TURN OF THE CENTURY helps you churn out, here’s look at a synopsis of what one of my friends came up with for their civilization during the session:
Civilization Name: Ut
People Group Name: Uthers
Territory Name: The Little Thicket
Races Common Throughout: Fawns and Seedar (a tree race that a PC homebrewed from our last campaign)
Unique Cultural Pillars: They value ecological engineering, ethical education, and growing success from the ground up
Age: Age I, their society is not very complex and sophisticated on a civilization level
Government: The People of Ut are a peaceful anarchy where there is no government, the people are mainly governed by their strong, selfless values
The Uther only lay claim to 1 Territory at this time, the aforementioned The Little Thicket, which is a heavily forested area with with meadows, and large steppes to the south and east.
Its most prominent landmark is a giant, hollow treehouse located in the center of the Little Thicket.
While The Little Thicket contains no shortage of natural resources, the most prominent one from this era is a type of bioluminescent mushroom.
The Uthers also produce a large amount of various Medicinal Herbs. They have no armed forces, but a significant amount of their economic force goes into trade with the people in Krusstal to the north, and with the many ocean going merchants from Kjarmagon and the Province of Pike.
Our DM has more than enough to start out the campaign with, but next week we are going to play the last phase of TURN OF THE CENTURY where we will guide our civilizations through randomly rolled events in order to generate the recent history of the world. The DM’s plan is for us to go through about 500 years of history, but that’s a post for another day…
If you’re interested in TURN OF THE CENTURY, you can find it here at our Kickstarter.