|
So I'm writing this as I try to find ways to kill time for the next hour and 45 minutes until I can log into Guild Wars. No, wait, make that hour and 44 minutes. Not that I'm keeping count or anything. Be sure to check out my Guild Wars review this month that's assuming, of course, that I stop playing long enough to write anything!
As I predicted last month, I actually spent some time this month doing world development. However, it unfortunately was not for my books... I had to work on stuff for that D&D game. I wasn't planning on doing anything for it, but what I plan and what really happens are two very different things.
It was amusing looking through my old columns today in search of something and seeing when I was excited about the prospect of this project. That was before severe limitations got put in, and the GM said he didn't want to deal with special races, classes, monsters, etc. So a lot of the ideas which I had been working on no longer fit in, and I had to set that world aside to be used for something else.
I'm discovering that it's a little hard to make a world or even continent when limits are put into place. So many cool ideas have to be discarded because they don't fit into the D&D 3.5 rules. It forces me to instead focus on cultures and weird random laws just to make my area stand out. I've actually been bored almost to the point of tears occasionally while working on this project; it's NOT what I wanted to be doing this month, and I have a lot of other projects I'd rather be working on.
And yet I've still managed to write 8 pages and only barely made it to the second country on the continent. Thank God for being long-winded!
One hour and 34 minutes, by the way. Just in case you were wondering.
Even though I'm frustrated with the limitations, it is kind of fun working on this. When my husband came home and asked me nicely to make something for the D&D game, I had zero ideas in mind. I was thinking about UO instead. An hour later, I had a basic idea of a chain of tropical islands. Later that night, I sat down and started randomly drawing the map. After dividing the main island in half with a river, I decided it would be cool to have two main countries that controlled most of the islands. And it kind of snowballed from there.
I'm trying to find a way to make this relevant or interesting, but I seem to be failing. I guess I could say that necessity is the mother of invention. Most of what I'm doing is totally ad-libbed. I was chatting with a friend while working on the world, and he mentioned something about clothes. So then I started writing about common fashions in the area, significance of color, and silly things like that.
Yes, fashion. It can be fun to think about clothing and color in roleplaying games. If you don't think color is important, I suggest that you watch Hero or even House of Flying Daggers and drink in the richly artistic use of color. Think of how in olden times, certain color dyes were so costly that only the rich could afford them. For that matter, think about wedding dresses.
The amusing thing is that so many people think that white wedding dresses symbolize purity, and that one shouldn't wear white if one has already been married. But just a few minutes of research will show that the Victorians started the trend of wearing white for weddings as a sign of extravagance. White was (and still is) a terribly impractical color to wear because of how easily it stains. Having a white dress made especially for your wedding showed how wealthy you were - obviously you would NEVER be able to wear that dress again.
These days, of course, we've extended the tradition to not only include white dresses with extravagant beading and flowing trains that we could NEVER wear again, we give our bridesmaids poofy pink taffeta dresses that they'd never WANT to wear again! *grins*
But I digress.
Although it's easy to fall back on saying "It's a fantasy game, everyone wears medieval European garb," it's a lot more fun to give it more thought than that. Consider the climate. Consider what materials are available to them. Religion and morals can even have an influence on fashions. Give thought to wear the dyes come from, and the significance of color. Perhaps everyone dresses in the chief deities favored color, or perhaps only priests are allowed to wear that color. Perhaps the king hates the color pink and forbids anyone from wear it. And no, calling it "light-ish red" won't stop the city guards from throwing you in jail.
And remember, fashion doesn't have to be practical. Elizabethan garb is good proof of that. For that matter, modern high heels and mini-skirts are proof of that. While adventurers will want sturdy clothing that they can fight in, and peasants need clothing they can work in, the upper classes are often slaves to the whims of fashion, no matter how ridiculous they are.
Fashion isn't just limited to clothing, either. Feel free to throw in other trends among the upper class... yappy little dogs, beauty marks, personal bards to sing of your every exploit. You can even work this into campaigns. Perhaps a well-to-do noble could hire the characters to rescue his kidnaped dog. Note that I didn't say it would be a serious addition to the campaign!
Hair and jewelry should also be taken into consideration. Even back then, people dyed their hair, and there were lots of wigs, hair pins, and tons and tons of jewelry. If the nobles are suddenly obsessed with wearing emeralds, characters can go digging around in deep dungeons for lost caches of gems. Or perhaps a new king is to be crowned, and there's a search on for the finest gems for the crown.
Or maybe the party's barbarian has always secretly dreamed of being a runway model. I'm just saying, fashion can have a lot of impact on a campaign.
Tune in next month for further fun with world development. Until then . . . there's only 1 hour and 9 minutes left!
|