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Most game systems allow players to choose from all powers and spells without restriction. If it’s in the book, any player character can have it so long as they meet the listed requirements. That doesn’t mean that you, the gamemaster, have to allow it. Anything that doesn’t fit with the mood and cosmology of the world you’re creating can be restricted. If your science fiction setting is built on a premise of telepaths but telekinesis doesn’t feel right to you, disallow it. If you see a world with only a short list of superpowers available, let players know those are all they get to choose from.

You can also limit certain types of powers and spells to be usable only by particular races or groups. Perhaps only dwarves from the highest mountains can cast spells involving lighting, or only the Russians have power armor, or the only pyrokinetics in the universe come from the planet Excelsior-III.

What makes this an exercise in worldbuilding and not just an act of gamemaster fiat is that there are reasons behind these restrictions. It may be as simple as trying to emulate a certain known setting. It may be to differentiate the elves that come from over here from the elves that come from over there. It may be to generate storylines, as rivalries and quests are established as the group that doesn’t have a spell tries to gain it, and the group who possesses that spell tries to hold onto their exclusive access.

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The flavor of any setting can be baked right in to nearly any game system through a careful tweaking of the skill system. As a gamemaster or designer, you can impress upon players not only what sorts of abilities might be important within the campaign, but what is deemed to be of value by the world’s various cultures. Many games offer lists of suggested skills for classes, archetypes, and professions, but lists can also be created for races, nations, regions, castes, and socio-economic strata. These types of lists hold up a mirror to the world, and give characters some background to build a personality, story hooks, and roleplaying hooks on.

The suggestions below are intentionally generic, and should be adapted to best suit the system of your choice as you see fit.

Athletic Skills
Think about the real world here for a moment. Sports are ingrained into cultures. Football means one thing to most of the world, and another to Americans. Consider things like ancient Greek marathon runners, Scottish caber tossers, the Pony Express riders of the American West (endurance riding could easily be considered an athletic skill set separate from normal riding). What sports might kids play at in a given culture, that adults might still engage in? How did those sports develop? What sorts of rivalries and tournaments might arise?

Craft Skills
Different peoples have different forms of arts and crafts. Some of it might be geographic, based on materials available such as gems and minerals for jewelry or marble for sculpture. Some might reflect the refinement of the society, like flower arranging or portraiture. A region or race might be known for their high degree of skill with a particular craft so much that trade of that item might be a major part of their economy.

Knowledge Skills
Consider that some cultures or races may know more about certain subjects than others, making those people sought-after expects. Woodland-dwelling elves may excel at botany, and be hired to help human farmers during droughts and other crop failure. Dwarves might be better geologiest, called upon by architects and masons to select building locations for firm foundations and check the quality of stone using in construction. Consider what will be considered useful knowledge to survive from region to region. Universities or other institutions of learning might also specialize in types of knowledge; if you want to know about the occult, you’re going to seek out someone who graduated from Miskatonic, right? Some knowledge might also be held to be proprietary, for economic or tactical reasons.

Languages
Not enough is done with languages in roleplaying games, in my opinion. The erroneous meme that Eskimos have 20 words for snow and Arabic has none is the sort of thing to consider. Vocabularies are built up around what needs to be communicated, so hobbits might have a dozen words for grades of pipe tobacco while Klingons have a more extensive array of terms for combat. A culture without a word for something will borrow a word from another language when that item or concept is introduced. Consider the number of words in English that are borrowed from other languages. Consider also regional dialects; English-speakers from different regions not only have different accents, but different words for things, different usages for words, and different spellings of words.

Performance Skills
Back to real-world examples here, Mexico has mariachis, England has Morris dancers, America has steel guitars, Japan has haiku poetry, India has Bollywood musicals. Each culture is going to have its own unique performance skills, which may or may not be appreciated by people from other cultures.

Trade Skills
The economies of societies are dependent upon citizens with the right skills. Farmers, miners, IT specialists, auto workers, whatever that society needs, the non-player characters in the area will have those skills. A player character may have been plying a trade before they became an adventurer. As with knowledge skills, trade skill show what a culture values and reflect the things they need to do to survive.

Summary
How much emphasis is placed on these skills is up to you. Many of these skills might have no practical benefits for adventuring, so players might not want to take them. I recommend giving players some free background skills, based on the types of lists suggested, to flesh out roleplaying opportunities. It’s then important for you, as the gamemaster, to work in ways for players to use those skills. Not in every adventure, certainly, but somewhere over the course of the campaign. The sorts of skills named above make good icebreakers when dealing with non-player characters. Maybe an NPC only speaks that odd language one PC knows, or also writes sonnets or is a baseball fan. If nothing else, the player character might get a bonus to social interactions because their mother was aa baker like the NPC, or they share an appreciation for native pottery along with an NPC.

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After watching Marvel’s animated Doctor Strange movie, which was much better that I expected it to be and put a fresh spin on the character’s mythology, I realized it would make a good roleplaying game premise. Before I go further, realize that this article will spoiler the hell out of the movie and that you may want to watch it first and then come back.

Spoilers Follow

In this version the Ancient One has a team of mystical agents that include Mordo and Wong. The Ancient One’s temple in Tibet, and the Greenwich Village mansion we think of as Strange’s traditional base of operations, are both part of the Sanctum Sanctorium. It’s not clear whether the building really exists in different places at once, or if they’re connected by magical doors, but it doesn’t matter. At the heart of the building is a nexus leading to other dimensions. The group’s purpose is to protect the nexus from those who would abuse and misuse it, both Earthly and extra-dimensional forces. The big bad in the movie is Dormammu, who would use the nexus to conquer and lay waste to world after world.

For purposes of the game, there can be other locations or instances of the Sanctum all over the world. This gives the player characters a home base, but also easy access to anywhere on Earth as well as other interesting worlds and dimensions. A wide variety of threats and plot lines can be used, and all sorts of villains and monsters trying to enter or leave the nexus.

The group takes casualties, and that’s how Strange ends up being recruited. People with mystical talent are sought out and trained. This is a perfect setup for player characters, who come in as newbies and gain in both mystical power and rank within the organization. Senior NPCs like Wong, or even Strange himself, could be used as “cavalry” if the players get in over their head, but their absence (and the need for the player characters to undertake missions without them) can be explained away by their urgent need to be elsewhere fighting other foes.

It’s a good structure. Whether you played this as a straight Doctor Strange game, or adapted it to an existing or original setting, it has a lot of potential. I would recommend a system that allows more freeform and creative magic like FATE (where magic can be Aspects) or PDQ (with magic as Qualities).

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What if the way clerical powers work in bog-standard roleplaying games were turned completely around? We picture good priests wielding the holy symbol of their patron deity, channeling that god’s power as their appointed representative in the mortal world, and priests of evil gods doing much the same. What if “divine magic” wasn’t given by the gods, but /taken/ from them?

The forces of good and evil are obviously locked in an eternal struggle. Temples are really prisons, where angels, demons, demi-gods and other powerful, extra-planar servitors of deities are imprisoned. These creatures are held in magical shackles which siphon their power and transfer it to their warders. The holy symbols used by good-aligned priests channel the energy of their evil captives, and evil priests tap the energy of the harbingers of good. This not only serves as the source of energy, but keeps the captives weak enough to prevent a breakout. It also means each side has a reason to keep captives alive.

People would serve gods not because they sought the power their god would provide them, because it doesn’t work that way, but for largely philosophical reasons. There can be gods of various concepts – knowledge, fertility, war, and so on – but the important thing to most folks is that the enemy powers are kept locked away.

Imagine priests who have no divine powers, being martial types whose job is to protect the gods and their powerful minions from being captured and exploited by the enemy. Continue this train of thought to shamanic and animist types who honor animals spirits and elementals. Rather than calling directly upon those forces, they would protect them.

Mages differ from priests only in motivation. They’re interested only in knowledge, learning how to master the celestial mechanics, and often don’t care about the source of their power and who or what they’re enslaving.

The beauty of this concept is that the adventure possibilities are built right in. Good guys will need to capture demons for new power sources, or prevent break-out or rescue attempts. They’ll need to rescue angels from foul dungeons, or defend them from capture. It certainly gives a party a reason to be together, and even adds a certain espionage element to a game.

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Looking over three recent player characters I’ve build, I realized the I’d used three completely different approaches to creating them. This wasn’t something I did consciously, but I think it bears further examination. If I understood then what I understand now, character creation would have been a lot easier.

Note that for the purposes of this article, “character” refers to the personality and background, “mechanics” refers to the numbers on the sheet. These things are different, yet complimentary. It’s the interaction of these two elements that form the core of this idea.

The Mechanics Approach

When I created a character for the Hellfrost (Savage Worlds) game I’m in, I took my queues from the mechanics. Not entirely familiar with the setting, I looked through the book at the types of characters I was able to create. I found a Professional Edge that I liked, but as a Novice character I didn’t qualify for it, so I build a character that was trending toward those prerequisites and set a goal to get there (translation for the D&D people in the room: I found a Prestige Class/Paragon Path I liked, but I was creating a 1st level character, so I made a character that could eventually gain that Class/Path). I had no personality in mind, and after much fiddling and contemplation on how this person would gain these types of abilities I developed a character that fit around the mechanics.

The Character Approach

Soon I’m going to be joining a Swashbucklers of the 7 Skies (PDQ#) campaign. I knew the premise: fantasy pirates with flying ships sailing between floating islands! I decided I wanted to play Queequeg from Moby Dick, or at least a Queequeg-like character that fit into the setting. I made this decision before I read the book, knew the setting, or learned the mechanics. I picked up the book and started cherry-picking for bits that would support my character concept. He’d by from Sho-Ku, the island populated by people others considered primatives. Queequeg’s father was a shaman, so I made my character’s father an arch-koldun (S7S’s equivalent of an archmage). I found all of the setting elements that supported my vision first, and his personality and background came into clear focus. Only then did I go looking through the rules and character generation to find the mechanical bits that would support the character.

The Accidental Tourist

When I built Carlos Moore for the recently concluded World of Darkness campaign, I had not played a Storyteller game for over a decade and had never played the new edition of the rules. I had a personality in mind (Tony Almeda from 24) and built the mechanics of the character to support that. Unfortunately, I had some misunderstandings about the system. Things didn’t mean what I thought they meant, or what the used to mean. There was a disconnect between mechanics and character. He thought he was Tony Almeda, but he was really more like Jimmy McNulty from The Wire. While I could have been disheartened (and was, for a few minutes, no offense of the great character that is McNulty) and asked the GM if I could build a different character, I ran with it. I used the disconnect. This was a man who saw himself one way, tried to act according to the way he saw himself, but was in fact a very different type of person, with different skillsets and percieved very differently by other people. Over the course of the campaign, his story arc become about rectifying the two. That meant spending experience points to actually learn the skills he thought he had, gradually roleplaying to the cold facts of the mechanics, and roleplaying in a way that changed peoples’ perceptions of who he was. That disconnect, and working to close that gap, made him fun and interesting to play and took him in directions I wouldn’t have imagined.

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One popular way to build a world, and that one that in many ways is the least effort, is to create a story first and then develop the elements of the world needed to tell that story. It may seem like you’re just making it up as you go along, but it’s a little more involved than that.

Consider the following: You set up an adventure where the player characters have to rescue a princess from some goblins. A very simple story, the encounters are easy to put together. Now, take a look deeper at the bits of the world implied by this adventure. What is she the princess of? What haven’t the king or queen dispatched their own people (soldiers, spies, royal assassins) to deal with this? What do the goblins want with the princess (ransom, ritual sacrifice, old grudge with the king)? Why do the adventurers agree to take the job (money, loyalty, personal reasons)? Is it even a pricess of the local realm, or a foreign princess? Why is she here? What were relations like between that kingdom and this one before the kidnapping? What are they like now? Are agents of the two kingdoms working together, or against each other to get her back? What side are the player characters on, the local kingdom or the foreign one? Why would goblins want to meddle in the affairs of these two kingdoms?

When you start to flesh out details of this adventure you start to see the larger world, non-player characters you’ll need, and the places you’ll need to develop. You can also start to see adventure hooks in the consequences of this adventure, and that next adventure will in turn give you additional ideas to keep expanding the world. You only create as much as you need, possibly a little more as you begin to project out where the campaign is headed.

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There are times when a character should, by all logic and the rules and tropes of the genre and setting, just succeed without even trying. No rolls should be required, they just do it. Orcs are beneath their notice and simply die, locks fall open at the most meager touch, women (or men) swoon and fall into their arms. Die rolls and bennies should be reserved for stuff that would actually be challenging for the character.

This is where I take a page from my great unfinished masterpiece, Imagination’s Toybox, and apply it to Savage Worlds. Rather than, or in addition to, having a target number for challenges, the gamemaster can assign a rank. A Novice lock, a Seasoned mook, a Veteran serving wench. If the rank of the task is below the character’s rank, the action succeeds. This boosts the character’s (and player’s) self-esteem and keeps the game Fast, Furious, and Fun.

But what about challenges of equal rank, you ask? Sometimes those shouldn’t have to be rolled. The super-spy always gets into the mastermind’s lair and evades the mooks, and never gets into trouble until he gets nabbed by Wild Card henchmen, or the Boss Monster itself. This is true, and here’s a way to get around that without spending time making boring die rolls: offer the players Consequences. Offer them the option of blowing past all of the stuff automatically, without having to make rolls. Still describe the action, and have the players tell you exactly what they’re doing and how they’re doing it, but just skip over the rolls. The trade off is that the next Wild Card enemy they encounter gets an extra Bennie. And you can roleplay it as well. “Hah hah!”, says the villain, “I knew you would defeat my army of orcs! There were merely there to slow you down while I readied my Ultimate Blast Spell of DOOM!”, Or, “Yes, I knew you would seduce the information out of that tavern wench. That’s why I gave her incomplete information, so that she could then gather additional information on YOU!”

Obviously, this won’t work for all genres, settings, or situations, but it could be a useful house rules to speed up play and open up some opportunities to creatively roleplay through otherwise humdrum situations.

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Here are a few simple ways to make your homebrew Savage Worlds setting unique and distinctive, using only items found in the Savage Worlds Explorer’s Edition. Present these to your players prior to character creation, and you’ll have baked the flavor of your setting right into the characters from the start.

Knowledge Skills
Make a list of official or suggested Knowledge skills that reflect the culture, religion, and governments of the world. Make a list of Knowledge skills that are absolutely forbidden by the ruling institutions, and can only be gained through official channels or (possibly) illicitly. The only information available on those topics is sparse and through Common Knowledge rolls.

Enemy Hindrance
Offer up a list of enemy organizations, governments, religious orders, villains or non-player characters for the players to choose from. It immediately ties their character into the setting and your plot lines and makes this Hindrance feel more immediate and dangerous. Only provide Common Knowledge about the Enemy so they can choose, then provide the player with some additional information once they select the Enemy.

Outsider Hindrance
Define who the Outsiders in your setting are, and why. Are there races or professions that are treated with suspicion, or as lower-class citizens?
A good way to explore the darker side of your setting is to let a player character be part of the (real or percieved) problem.

Phobia Hindrance
Offer players a list of common fears based on the organizations and events of the setting. It can be a Race, and tie into the Outsider Hindrance (above), or a creature, or a prophecy that’s due to come true. It can be a common or mythical monster. What the culture fears reveals a lot, and offers many story and roleplaying hooks.

Arcane Background Edges
The origins of Arcane Powers contribute a lot to the feel of the world. Is Weird Science in your setting alien biotech, or old-fashioned clockworks? What deities, if any, provide Miracles, or are they the result of some other force? Is Magic something that comes from within the character, energy tapped from extra-planar realms, or just the ambient force of the land that characters tap into? Explore the possibilities.

Rich / Filthy Rich Edges
Wealth often carries responsibility. If nothing else, where is the money kept? In a bank? Buried in a secret location? Is is “real” money, property, collectibles? How the the character keep their money safe? How did they make it? What do they spend it on? All of these things can tie the character into the organizations and events of the world. Consider what being rich means within the setting. Are they hassled by charities or beggars? Does their lifestyle differ significantly from the other player characters?

Florentine Edge
The character fights with two weapons, but consider which weapons they use. How, and why, did this fighting style develop? Is it something common, or something rare? Is their a fighting school or other group that teaches this style, and are they open to everyone or extremely secretive? Is their some ritual or religious significance to the fighting style? Was it developed to better fight a foe’s style, or a monster’s special ability?

Trademark Weapon Edge
How did the character acquire this weapon, and how can that be tied into the setting’s history? Is their a flashback story? A rival who feels the weapon is rightfully theirs? Does it have some secondary purpose, such as an inscription that holds the answer to a riddle, or a hilt that acts as key to an ancient crypt? Is it made of special material that has significance in the setting, or does it come from another (possibly) extinct culture?

Rapid Recharge Edge
The first thing I think of is Green Lantern reciting his oath to recharge his ring. Is their some ritual, or item, or location the character must access for the rapid recharge? How does it work? Where does the energy come from? Just like Powers, this Edge could have interesting trappings that reveal something about the setting.

Professional Edges
The options available to players should reflect the possibilities of the world. Savage Worlds doesn’t pigeonhole characters into classes or templates, but professional edges will reflect what’s common and useful in the world. Setting aside the required abilities, what sort of training and certification is required to get this Edge? Where did they learn it? Does it carry any obligations? Is there some sort of credential – an ID badge, a sigil, a tattoo – that identifies the character as part of this profession?

Power Trappings
Make a list of suggested powers and suggested trappings that reflect the flavor of the game. These can be different for each Arcane Background, for different cultures and climates, and different parts of the world, different schools of magic. How a character uses Bolt could identify things about them. Think about not only special effects, but verbal and material components that may or may not be required but add flair, and how and why those components are used. Necessity? Tradition? Custom?

All of these things are simple food for thought for Savage Worlds settings, and can easily be adapted to the system of your choice. All you’re really doing is shemping the system by adding flair to the fluff.

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Fellow RPG Blogger Jeff Uurtamo, better known as “bonemaster” of The Bone Scroll, is the subject of my interview this week at Examiner.com. The site’s motto is, “It’s you’re RPG, do what you think is best”, a philosophy that encourages people to hack rules and modify games to suit the needs of the gamemaster and the players. So long as everyone is having fun, what’s the harm?

Read the full interview at Examiner.com

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A thread at the Dire Cafe asks, what aspects of a new RPG make you immediately want to play it? To me, this sounded like a call for buyers’ magna cartas. What do you like in a game, what do you dislike in a game, and how do those things influence your decisions to pick up a game? My answer was rather long, so I figured with was worth repeating and brought it here to foster further discussion.

Likes

Name recognition.
This could be the name of the author I like, or a system I like. For example, when I heard that Ken Hite was writing a Savage Worlds book, I about had a seizure. And now John Wick is going to write a Savage Worlds game (on a dare, basically) because Hite is. Familiarity really helps when deciding where to spend my limited cash, because it gives me some guarantee of quality.

Setting.
If I see something that looks like it will be out of the ordinary, immediately makes my inner GM think of campaigns I could run in the setting, and inspires my inner player to come up with characters I’d be excited to play, it doesn’t really matter what the setting is. What do the player characters get to do, and who are the bad guys. All this takes is a good elevator speech to make me look closer.

Who’s running it.
I had no interest in World of Darkness until my friend Jason Corley asked me to join his campaign. I gave the game a try because he’s an excellent GM and I’ll play just about anything he’s running.

Who’s pitching it.
I listen to reviews. There are certain friends, RPG bloggers and podcasters whose tastes parallel mine, and if they say the game brings the awesome it will go on my list to investigate.

Dislikes

No rules summary.
I want to stand in the store and be able to understand how the game plays just by flipping through the book. The game can be crunchy, so long as I can easily see a description of the core mechanic. Not a 6-page example of play with lots of dialogue comparing what the player says and what happens, just a statement (i.e. Roll a d20, add modifiers, and hit a target number to succeed).

No clear Table of Contents or a poor index.
This is kicking the tires on the showroom floor for me. If the positive has done its job and put ideas in my head on what I could run with this, or what i could play, I’m going to be asking questions. “Hey, can you do THIS with this game?”. And I’m going to go to the ToC or Index looking to find that. Because if I can’t find the simple answer to my question browsing in the bookstore, what’s going to happen when I hit a snag at the game table?

No character sheet.
When skimming a book I will flip to a character sheet for a shorthand look at what sorts of abilities a character gets, what attributes and so on. It will also tell me how crunchy or freeform the game is. Are all the skills listed because the skill list is short, or are there blank lines indicating more or freeform skills. Are there a lot of little boxes and lines indicating a lot of detail, or large boxes and a lot of white space indicating a more open and rules-lite game. I’ll probably go to a website and download a PDF character sheet rather than copying one out of the book, but requiring me to do that irks me because it prevents me from doing this type of skim-analysis.

Inconsistent art.
This is a pet peeve, really. I hate picking up games that obviously blew their entire graphic design budget on the cover, while the interior looks like refrigerator art done by 3rd graders. Or, half the art looks professional, and the other half looks like it was done by your buddy who wants to be a comic book artist when he grows up. If I’m skimming the product and the art is inconsistent, then what’s the writing and gameplay going to be like. That smacks more of amateurish than a game that he’s mediocre art throughout, because all consistently mediocre art tells me is that the publisher had no budget for art or felt obligated to let his nephew do it so his sister would get off his back. Inconsistent art tells me the publisher doesn’t know how to plan or manage a budget.

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