The Death Cookie

Welcome back to World Building 101. It’s been a while, but now that the holiday season is behind us, I’m going to try to get back to a more-or-less regular monthly schedule (at least until convention season starts). In the last exciting episode, I created a map of the world and started thinking about where the different cultures I’d already established would be found. This time around, I’m going to take a step back and look at some of the “big picture” concepts that need to be worked out.

Last month, I started thinking about the major cultural groups in the world and how they interact with one another. As a side-effect of this process, I also started to get a general idea of what the world looks like. The Empire stretches to a major coastline, which is probably far away from the imperial capital (which is probably in the middle of the main continent of the game world). There are at least three major island nations off this coast, one of them very mountainous. Of course, so far I only know about the Empire and the people that it hasn’t taken control of yet. To give the world some depth, I’ll also need to know something about the cultures that have already been subjugated. I decide that a map will make this easier, since it will suggest some natural boundaries between different groups of people.