Slowly the World Unfolds.

One of the more interesting things about starting a new campaign world is seeing how the world is revealed by the player character's actions. Gorbaldin, being a very new world, has very little that I wrote up about it before the current campaign started. I had a few pages on the Gods, a single map, about a paragraph on each country and a page or two for each of the major races. Not a lot, particularly compared to my older world, Meaghana, which has hundreds of pages written about it, and its own Wiki.

Shortly before the campaign started, I also wrote some information about Danelaw, the town the first adventure would take place in. This consisted of little more than a list of names and locations. However since the players have made this town their defacto headquarters, the people and places of it have been fleshed out, in a way that I would not have without their actions.

Everywhere the players go adds more detail to the world. With each interaction that occurs in the campaign the world becomes a little more real. And this is, ideally, how it should be. In a good campaign, there should be a sense of discovery. This holds true for both the players and the Dm. This is the weakness that I feel that my older world has. I have been running on Meaghana for about 12 years now, and there are times when I feel that there is nothing new to discover there. While this is not entirely true, it is true that to maintain that level of discovery in an older world you do have to dig deeper and expend more energy to do so; energy that is in short supply with my current work and family obligations.

With Gorbaldin being a newer world, that sense of discovery is in full force, particularly regarding the characters and what they will make of themselves. On Meaghana, the first group of player characters went on to become a new generation of Gods, and as such had a major impact throughout the world. The Champions of Light (the current party that I am running on Gorbaldin) seem to have aspirations, and have been successful in making a small impact as the game goes, but it will be interesting to see where the game takes them, and in turn where they take the game.