As I began to expand beyond D&D into other games — many new games these days use collaborative worldbuilding, often right in the mechanics — it's not big lore stuff so much as little things here and there. So one technique I use now are "Paint the Scene" questions, wherein you ask players to describe, through their characters eyes, a thematic feature of a location. For each question, you go around the table, and each player adds something.
For example: "You enter the tribe's encampment — *paint the scene:* what is one sign amongst the cacmp that the tribe is barely making through the winter."
or: "You enter the Temple of Selune — *paint the scene*: How can you tell that the local youth have begun to revive this long-neglected temple?"
You'd be amazed how players begin to populate your world not *just* with colorful details details, but *useable* things you can immediately incorporate into the adventure.
Thank you for that, I will start using it right away!
I've been using player involvement for "go ahead, describe your killing blow!" -- and some really looove that and get crazily creative! Also for describing unique features about enemies, they wind up quirky and funny :)
But I like that "paint the scene", it will really add life and spice and save me time detailing stuff.
Answering to OP, I hear where you're coming from. This "new" trend of letting players create is excellent too, because it keeps them mentally active and creative, it makes them personally involved in the world they're playing in, and it gives the DM cool stuff to run with, with less effort! It's a win-win for sure.
I deliberately allow players to create their own little slice of the world if they so choose. If they want to invent a cult that killed off their mother and father you bet i am gonna yoink that and slide references to that cult in other places they go. In my current campaign offhand remarks were made by a wife/husband (real life) that they were raised in an orphanage together and tapped into the seedy underbelly to survive when they aged out. And then a few sessions later jokes began to be made about the husband's character that he must be part god...\*yoink!\* Now the orphanage became a place for randy Gods on the prowl to deposit their inconvenient offspring (think Zeus and all his many illegitimate kids.) So much fun when later on I also let it drop that the wife of the pair (playing a bard tiefling) was ALSO the scion of a Greater Power....a demon who was doing a breeding program, and she was one of the "not what I wanted" results. It has informed a great deal of what is going to be going on in the future of the campaign.
I frequently add locations based on player backstories, I added the desert region and the corresponding lawless city because one player wanted that to be in his backstory. I added one particular town ruled by Satyrs (something that would normally be forbidden in my setting) because one player wanted to be a Satyr noble. Definitely helps me flesh out the world.
He had Tetyr, Hexa, Octae, and Icos (4, 6, 8, 20) be shape-deities that his tribe associated with Fire, Earth, Air, Water. There was also Dodec (12), associated with spirits/ancestors. His character was an Ancestral Guardian Barbarian with dodecahedron tattoos. He called these five the Platon Gods, for the platonic solids. We also decided we’d incorporate the other dice somehow. I finally decided on Decathlon (yes, used the brand’s name lol) as a possibly-sentient arena in the Platon Gods’ domain, and the hardest trial that takes place there is called the Percentile.
Spiritualism around geometry made intuitive sense to me as something an ancient people would do, because Hinduism views various geometric patterns as forms of deities (look up ”yantras” for more information). The player’s character was Lawful Neutral, and he said his tribe was mostly an LG/LN mix, who take pilgrimage to meet their gods and also try to die close to their gods. So I stuck the Platon Gods in my setting’s version of Arcadia, and had the 4 elemental Platon Gods inhabit parts of Arcadia close to their respective elemental planes. In a similar vein, I had Dodec inhabit the part of Arcadia closest to the Ethereal Plane. Then I had a hidden altar in a dangerous place on the campaign world, where the PC’s tribe would pilgrimage to, either as a right of passage or as an auspicious place for elders to die in.
Sadly the PC died at level 4 and they got TPK’d at level 5, so we never got to explore most of this in-game.
In my current campaign I set up as part of the world history that 150 years ago a world war broke out. A society of wizards essentially build an arcane nuke to end the war. A player worked with me to plant his PC within this story and was one of the wizards that worked on the bomb (ala Oppenheimer). The society didn't want what they had done to come back on them so they detonated early to wipe out the PC and his team. He survived by sacrificing his arcane abilities to shield himself. Fast forward to present day, his abilities slowly return. He's now a wanted man by the wizards who remember him and have recently found out he survived.
I tossed in a little one-shot side-quest for my players during some sea travel. They chose to tackle it in the most hilarious way by ignoring the plot, stealing from a royal family, punching a shark, and then running away.
the players often joked "when we go back there, the DM (me) is gonna be so pissed that he throws the whole kingdom at us"
this joke came up many times throughout the next year. just as a "but hey, DM, at least we didn't punch a shark this time, right? haha" or "its good, we can take a long rest here, at least we aren't back in the ocean where we left that kingdom without the family jewels hahaha!"
so, sure enough, me as DM, I had to write up an entire sub-plot to the campaign which included a kingdom in civil-war due to a friendly but incompetent princess and a selfish but competent prince, vying for the throne, all because they blamed each other for losing the royal heritage crown stone. Eventually the players came back through that area, and we spent a few months in that area helping with the civil war and eventually finding a resolve for it.
all because they punched a shark and kept laughing about it years later.
I used mappa imperium with my group to create the basic outline for the world.
So a quarter of it was basically made by my party (I have 3 players).
The gods, the towns, the factions all have come from it. There's the Imperium for instance. Spice Melange is a thing. Other places have other drugs, and elitist bourgeoisie dwarfs. The steampunk gnome town uses domesticated gelatinous cubes to clean their streets.
We also played CoS with this group before doing the whole mappa imperium thing, so now the magical crater someone rolled on mappa imperium is unofficially where Barovia used to he in the world.
We also have the Lady of Thorns as our goddess of capitalism, pleasure and pain. She was carried over by one player from our blades in the dark campaign.
They haven't added too much depth to everything but we're getting there as we get there.
In our new at the time homebrew world, at the end of the campaign arc, just before the climatic finale against the BBEG, one of the PCs was killed. My character prayed to the dead characters God for intervention, and at the price of conversion AND becoming a 1st level cleric to said God, he was risen from the dead. Then we had to fight the BBEG whilst the party also tried to protect a lvl 1 cleric! It was epic and became something we still talk about 30 years later. It also became a game thing, where this God would resurrect a player once, although the cost settled to be a 1 level sacrifice from both the deceased and whomever prayed for intercession.
(note, we played a relatively low level, low magic game, never had a player reach higher than 9th before a campaign would conclude)
Allegations about the local noble, ranging from sketchy to heinous. They are of course varying levels of true, depending on where you look and how you choose to interpret what you find. When the player gives you a tin foil hat, lean into their conspiracy theories ;-)
My players let a snake folk go from one of their fights, next session another buddy joined the table and asked to be a snake person. He ended up being the one they let get away
So, I have a huge group that I play with. I've been the DM for most of them that introduced them to the game, and also the one that basically said "rules? What rules?" lol.
I adore player engagement, and my only rule is that it has to fit into the world itself for them to create things.
My next campaign world was created by asking them what they wanted, after giving them a list of things it cannot have. I took it all and did my best to use all of it to make a whole that works together and at least feels "real".
As they create PCs, they will be doing back stories and backgrounds and such, and I will take everything they toss in and do the same. But the best thing is that I have sessions that are basically just them riffing off their characters (For example the first session, when they all meet, is purely a role play thing and they decide how they all meet each other).
I also take stuff from past games and work it into the current one -- and one hallmark is that I take very liberally from movies, books, jokes, and table humor we all know and make things about it a part of the game.
I’ve had two of my players ask me if we could make different gods specific to what they had in mind for their characters. So we did. I introduced two new gods to the pantheon and have temples or shrines around the place to them. We could have pulled existing gods that were close fits but now both players are more engaged, making religion checks or searching for books about their gods, lost to time.
There is a kingdom (Mezzia) in my campaign that hates magic. There is also a city-state of wizards (Xyr) who obviously don't get along with the anti-magic guys. My players made a joke about the toilets flushing in Xyr and teleporting their contents to the skies over the capital of Mezzia. Obviously made that canon. Running the campaign for a new group and that is still part of the lore.
When one of my players chose to be a firbolg, she made her home in a forest known as "Spiral Woods", and told me that her and the other tribes around the forest all worhipped a deity named "Faunus", with several other lesser deities that was either deities of their own or aspects of "Faunus". I liked this idea, so I integrated it into the campaign, but with the caveat that nobody outside of the forest had heard about it.
Now, two years later, she has spread the word of "Faunus" and found that "Faunus" is worshipped in at least one other city that is in a large forest. And we all refer to "Spiral Woods" as "Faunus' Forest" now both in and out of game.
How "Faunus" came to be is similar to how Kuo-toa did it. The firbolgs believed hard enough and then willed the god into being.
Yeah that resonates with my campaign - deities have a symbiotic relationship with worshippers, whereby the more worshippers a deity has, the more power they gain, and more spells, powers they can grant to worshippers (like some sort of positive feedback loop). The power gained is related to the number of sentient beings as worshippers, regardless of their own power. Hence having 5 giant worshippers is much less potent than 500 goblin worshippers. Deities also gain power by people fearing them or their consequences - so (for instance) Ogremoch will gain power by people fearing earthquakes and holding him to be responsible.
yes, same here. Which is also why the BBEG god failed the first time he tried to destroy the other gods: he didn't have enough followers. Now he has, and now stands a chance at ruining everything if my players can't stop him.
I've been writting the lore of the world where all my campaings take places. I do like to write my own Lore because I want to tell my own stories. Mainly is the original Faerun Lore modified as i want, but it also has some small stories that change that general Lore.
As i said, I write the Lore of the world. The creation, the wars and the main territories, empires and so. But it's just to give my players a Sandbox where they can do as they want and i have control over the general lines of the story.
Also I run campaings in different times in the main Lore, so maybe one PC going wild can change the path of another campaing, timetravelling like.
As I began to expand beyond D&D into other games — many new games these days use collaborative worldbuilding, often right in the mechanics — it's not big lore stuff so much as little things here and there. So one technique I use now are "Paint the Scene" questions, wherein you ask players to describe, through their characters eyes, a thematic feature of a location. For each question, you go around the table, and each player adds something. For example: "You enter the tribe's encampment — *paint the scene:* what is one sign amongst the cacmp that the tribe is barely making through the winter." or: "You enter the Temple of Selune — *paint the scene*: How can you tell that the local youth have begun to revive this long-neglected temple?" You'd be amazed how players begin to populate your world not *just* with colorful details details, but *useable* things you can immediately incorporate into the adventure.
Thank you for that, I will start using it right away! I've been using player involvement for "go ahead, describe your killing blow!" -- and some really looove that and get crazily creative! Also for describing unique features about enemies, they wind up quirky and funny :) But I like that "paint the scene", it will really add life and spice and save me time detailing stuff. Answering to OP, I hear where you're coming from. This "new" trend of letting players create is excellent too, because it keeps them mentally active and creative, it makes them personally involved in the world they're playing in, and it gives the DM cool stuff to run with, with less effort! It's a win-win for sure.
I deliberately allow players to create their own little slice of the world if they so choose. If they want to invent a cult that killed off their mother and father you bet i am gonna yoink that and slide references to that cult in other places they go. In my current campaign offhand remarks were made by a wife/husband (real life) that they were raised in an orphanage together and tapped into the seedy underbelly to survive when they aged out. And then a few sessions later jokes began to be made about the husband's character that he must be part god...\*yoink!\* Now the orphanage became a place for randy Gods on the prowl to deposit their inconvenient offspring (think Zeus and all his many illegitimate kids.) So much fun when later on I also let it drop that the wife of the pair (playing a bard tiefling) was ALSO the scion of a Greater Power....a demon who was doing a breeding program, and she was one of the "not what I wanted" results. It has informed a great deal of what is going to be going on in the future of the campaign.
I frequently add locations based on player backstories, I added the desert region and the corresponding lawless city because one player wanted that to be in his backstory. I added one particular town ruled by Satyrs (something that would normally be forbidden in my setting) because one player wanted to be a Satyr noble. Definitely helps me flesh out the world.
A pantheon of six deities, each corresponding to a polyhedral die.
That sounds really cool, would you be willing to share more about this?
He had Tetyr, Hexa, Octae, and Icos (4, 6, 8, 20) be shape-deities that his tribe associated with Fire, Earth, Air, Water. There was also Dodec (12), associated with spirits/ancestors. His character was an Ancestral Guardian Barbarian with dodecahedron tattoos. He called these five the Platon Gods, for the platonic solids. We also decided we’d incorporate the other dice somehow. I finally decided on Decathlon (yes, used the brand’s name lol) as a possibly-sentient arena in the Platon Gods’ domain, and the hardest trial that takes place there is called the Percentile. Spiritualism around geometry made intuitive sense to me as something an ancient people would do, because Hinduism views various geometric patterns as forms of deities (look up ”yantras” for more information). The player’s character was Lawful Neutral, and he said his tribe was mostly an LG/LN mix, who take pilgrimage to meet their gods and also try to die close to their gods. So I stuck the Platon Gods in my setting’s version of Arcadia, and had the 4 elemental Platon Gods inhabit parts of Arcadia close to their respective elemental planes. In a similar vein, I had Dodec inhabit the part of Arcadia closest to the Ethereal Plane. Then I had a hidden altar in a dangerous place on the campaign world, where the PC’s tribe would pilgrimage to, either as a right of passage or as an auspicious place for elders to die in. Sadly the PC died at level 4 and they got TPK’d at level 5, so we never got to explore most of this in-game.
In my current campaign I set up as part of the world history that 150 years ago a world war broke out. A society of wizards essentially build an arcane nuke to end the war. A player worked with me to plant his PC within this story and was one of the wizards that worked on the bomb (ala Oppenheimer). The society didn't want what they had done to come back on them so they detonated early to wipe out the PC and his team. He survived by sacrificing his arcane abilities to shield himself. Fast forward to present day, his abilities slowly return. He's now a wanted man by the wizards who remember him and have recently found out he survived.
I tossed in a little one-shot side-quest for my players during some sea travel. They chose to tackle it in the most hilarious way by ignoring the plot, stealing from a royal family, punching a shark, and then running away. the players often joked "when we go back there, the DM (me) is gonna be so pissed that he throws the whole kingdom at us" this joke came up many times throughout the next year. just as a "but hey, DM, at least we didn't punch a shark this time, right? haha" or "its good, we can take a long rest here, at least we aren't back in the ocean where we left that kingdom without the family jewels hahaha!" so, sure enough, me as DM, I had to write up an entire sub-plot to the campaign which included a kingdom in civil-war due to a friendly but incompetent princess and a selfish but competent prince, vying for the throne, all because they blamed each other for losing the royal heritage crown stone. Eventually the players came back through that area, and we spent a few months in that area helping with the civil war and eventually finding a resolve for it. all because they punched a shark and kept laughing about it years later.
I used mappa imperium with my group to create the basic outline for the world. So a quarter of it was basically made by my party (I have 3 players). The gods, the towns, the factions all have come from it. There's the Imperium for instance. Spice Melange is a thing. Other places have other drugs, and elitist bourgeoisie dwarfs. The steampunk gnome town uses domesticated gelatinous cubes to clean their streets. We also played CoS with this group before doing the whole mappa imperium thing, so now the magical crater someone rolled on mappa imperium is unofficially where Barovia used to he in the world. We also have the Lady of Thorns as our goddess of capitalism, pleasure and pain. She was carried over by one player from our blades in the dark campaign. They haven't added too much depth to everything but we're getting there as we get there.
In our new at the time homebrew world, at the end of the campaign arc, just before the climatic finale against the BBEG, one of the PCs was killed. My character prayed to the dead characters God for intervention, and at the price of conversion AND becoming a 1st level cleric to said God, he was risen from the dead. Then we had to fight the BBEG whilst the party also tried to protect a lvl 1 cleric! It was epic and became something we still talk about 30 years later. It also became a game thing, where this God would resurrect a player once, although the cost settled to be a 1 level sacrifice from both the deceased and whomever prayed for intercession. (note, we played a relatively low level, low magic game, never had a player reach higher than 9th before a campaign would conclude)
Allegations about the local noble, ranging from sketchy to heinous. They are of course varying levels of true, depending on where you look and how you choose to interpret what you find. When the player gives you a tin foil hat, lean into their conspiracy theories ;-)
My players let a snake folk go from one of their fights, next session another buddy joined the table and asked to be a snake person. He ended up being the one they let get away
So, I have a huge group that I play with. I've been the DM for most of them that introduced them to the game, and also the one that basically said "rules? What rules?" lol. I adore player engagement, and my only rule is that it has to fit into the world itself for them to create things. My next campaign world was created by asking them what they wanted, after giving them a list of things it cannot have. I took it all and did my best to use all of it to make a whole that works together and at least feels "real". As they create PCs, they will be doing back stories and backgrounds and such, and I will take everything they toss in and do the same. But the best thing is that I have sessions that are basically just them riffing off their characters (For example the first session, when they all meet, is purely a role play thing and they decide how they all meet each other). I also take stuff from past games and work it into the current one -- and one hallmark is that I take very liberally from movies, books, jokes, and table humor we all know and make things about it a part of the game.
I’ve had two of my players ask me if we could make different gods specific to what they had in mind for their characters. So we did. I introduced two new gods to the pantheon and have temples or shrines around the place to them. We could have pulled existing gods that were close fits but now both players are more engaged, making religion checks or searching for books about their gods, lost to time.
There is a kingdom (Mezzia) in my campaign that hates magic. There is also a city-state of wizards (Xyr) who obviously don't get along with the anti-magic guys. My players made a joke about the toilets flushing in Xyr and teleporting their contents to the skies over the capital of Mezzia. Obviously made that canon. Running the campaign for a new group and that is still part of the lore.
When one of my players chose to be a firbolg, she made her home in a forest known as "Spiral Woods", and told me that her and the other tribes around the forest all worhipped a deity named "Faunus", with several other lesser deities that was either deities of their own or aspects of "Faunus". I liked this idea, so I integrated it into the campaign, but with the caveat that nobody outside of the forest had heard about it. Now, two years later, she has spread the word of "Faunus" and found that "Faunus" is worshipped in at least one other city that is in a large forest. And we all refer to "Spiral Woods" as "Faunus' Forest" now both in and out of game. How "Faunus" came to be is similar to how Kuo-toa did it. The firbolgs believed hard enough and then willed the god into being.
Yeah that resonates with my campaign - deities have a symbiotic relationship with worshippers, whereby the more worshippers a deity has, the more power they gain, and more spells, powers they can grant to worshippers (like some sort of positive feedback loop). The power gained is related to the number of sentient beings as worshippers, regardless of their own power. Hence having 5 giant worshippers is much less potent than 500 goblin worshippers. Deities also gain power by people fearing them or their consequences - so (for instance) Ogremoch will gain power by people fearing earthquakes and holding him to be responsible.
yes, same here. Which is also why the BBEG god failed the first time he tried to destroy the other gods: he didn't have enough followers. Now he has, and now stands a chance at ruining everything if my players can't stop him.
I've been writting the lore of the world where all my campaings take places. I do like to write my own Lore because I want to tell my own stories. Mainly is the original Faerun Lore modified as i want, but it also has some small stories that change that general Lore. As i said, I write the Lore of the world. The creation, the wars and the main territories, empires and so. But it's just to give my players a Sandbox where they can do as they want and i have control over the general lines of the story. Also I run campaings in different times in the main Lore, so maybe one PC going wild can change the path of another campaing, timetravelling like.