Cosmology
I’ll go ahead and quote my illustrator on this one:
This comic is not a reflection of the author/artist’s opinions on the great (late) Sir Terry. >_> Our dog is named after him and he remains my favorite author to this day. I was very pleased when it won the poll <3
Pictured here: A greyhound / literary reference.
Hear hear!
A word of explanation though. That last bit references out most recent Patreon poll. Our Quest Givers were asked to decide which fantasy world deserved a main-comic shout-out. The Discworld narrowly edged out Dark Souls and Bunnies & Burrows. While it’s cool seeing Chelys galactica in Handbook style, it is too bad in a way. The Great A’Tuin may be a worthy subject, but I wanted to see how Laurel planned on fitting big floppy rabbit ears under Fighter’s helmet.
Any dang way, let’s a take a moment to talk about cosmology. It’s on my mind lately since (at long last), I’m playing a Pathfinder 1e game rather than GMing one. It’s called “The Planar City Game,” and is very much in the spirit of SVigil. Our central location is a recently discovered floating island filled with planar-aligned districts. Mostly uninhabited, the place is now the subject of an interplanar land rush. Session 1 involved a skyship crash landing in the Positive District. Portals from the plane of Fire and the Abyss and Everyfreakingplace Else opened at random, and pitched battles erupted around the setting.
Not a bad set piece encounter for Session 1, but it’s the upcoming Session 2 that I’d like to talk about. That’s because my buddy behind the GM screen asked in passing what I’d like most to explore next time. What a question! When you’re in a city of portals, complete with cosmologically-labeled districts, it means you can go anywhere at all. That’s the joy and the curse of these settings. You’ve got a baked-in excuse to drop anything you can imagine on the party. However it’s a bear to prep for zig (Negative Energy District Tavern Zombie Pit Fight) when the players spontaneously decide on zag (Water District Leviathan Hunting).
What does any of this have to do with Sir Terry’s Discworld? Simply this. When asked where I wanted to go in all the multiverse, my answer was, “The empty places. If this city is recently discovered, then it has to be predominately a ghost town. I want to know what the unused buildings downtown are hiding.” You see, it’s tempting to turn every campaign in a shiny new setting into Rincewind’s trip across the Discworld. As a GM, it’s natural to want to send your players out beyond the Rim, rocketing into space for a better look at the turtle/elephant/disc that supports your cosmology. But as a player, I want to get to know my home base first. I want to hang out in Ankh-Morpork, feel the cobbles beneath my boot soles, and fall in love with a neighborhood or a couple of NPCs. Once I’ve got my bearings, that’s when I’ll put in the great work of falling in love with a world.
That of course leads us to our question of the day! How do you like to introduce your cosmology to a group? Do you go for the exposition dump up front? Give them a few “divine visions bigger than your mortal minds can contain?” Or perhaps you favor mystery, with opaque happenings explained obliquely over the course of a campaign? Whatever your style, tell us how you like to be introduce “the big stuff” in your game world down in the comments!
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I like kicking somebody into the heart of the big stuff and letting them see it up close.
For the superhero games I’m running lately, in which we’ve recently been exploring other universes, that means world-hopping, and lots of “Wait, this world’s Starling did WHAT?! But Starling is one of the nicest heroes ever, and that sounds really evil!”
What your device for explaining the multiverse to the PCs? Classic “scientist with a chalk board” stuff?
Usually something ancient can explain the gist. Dragon, demon, god, immortal hero, etc.
I think the first time the multiverse showed it’s face, one of my own heroes showed up as a NPC to do some of the explaining (she’s pretty clueless about it, but the god of lightning who watches the world through her eyes is pretty helpful, and spoke through her to the other heroes so that they’d know what was up). That didn’t happen until towards the end of that plot, though. I figure you’ve got to let them interact with stuff a bit first, so that they care when you explain it.
Off-screen, Fighter is saying his latest last words before another reroll: “It’s just a mimic, guys, it can’t be THAT tough.”
https://discworld.fandom.com/wiki/The_Luggage
Ohh, I’d love to see that. 😀
I wonder whether it’d be more fun to see him trampled or gulped down into one of the Luggage’s internal dimensions…
I wonder how The Luggage fares as an Elden Ring protagonist. Can it solo?
The Luggage could solo in Call of Cthulhu!
On one hand, I’m thrilled that a Rincewind cameo makes an appearance. On the other, I’m surprised the cameo lacks his most notable feature – having a hat that says “Wizzard”.
Like the Luggage, it’s a trait that exists between dimensions/settings/comedic narrative depictions.
That’s just the standard Unseen Academy uniform. Wizard wears it with… well… I can’t say “pride” is the right word, but she wears it anyway.
She’s certainly a pride representative if anything. And I’d have thought they’d named it the Invisible Institute.
How to explain Warp and Realm of Chaos to newbie. As you play you start describing it’s base nature as the source of ALL magic and in case of fantasy how it acts like a wind, at one point making magic stronger in one location and at another moment weaker.
Then you go in how it is efectively manifestation of hell, used to be nice afterlife for souls but then got F’d up by a massive influx of new souls wich led to it twisting and corrupting itself to the point concepts started taking shape, concepts like change, stagnation, pleasure, honour. though with base emotions these consepts were feeding they also took new aspects thta over time twisted them into other forms giving us the gods of chaos. Every time you get angry you empower Kgorne, every time you act honorably you empower khorne. When you take pleaaure from work done well you empower Slaneesh as well as when enjoying execces of life like gluttony.
Oh and they will consume your soul when you die unless another being intervienes, like Morr or the Emperor or that stone in your chest. What if they win? well that is the end of everything even themselves once there is nothing left to feed them.
So it’s a straight-up out of game explanation. “Basically, your character would know that etc. etc.?”
Game wise? only to handful would know if any. That was just the prep talk so new people wont go “WTF is warp/winds of magic” every 15 minutes. Only war you can skip it, unless somes playing psyker, others not really, that will come up or is “mandatory knowledge”. But that is what skill rolls are for, what does your guy really know, I have to roll them to see if I have to keep my mouth shut or not of any given subject, aplies to the other lorewise guys too.
That does make it tough metagame wise. Imagine the lore wonk of the group playing an unlettered grunt.
“Oh, cool! If this guy has black and white iconography we might be dealing with Malal. He’s named Malice now due to copyright stuff, but… I mean… Die Chaos filth I guess?”
Yeah when playing Dark Hersy our game master reminded me to roll if my guy knows it (who was a army grunt), but did allow me to say my peace when the more scholarly guy made their knowledge roll.
In the Fantasy game I currently run there’s two players who are familiar with Warhammer and only one other is a lore nerd, currently he plays a Bretonnian grail pilgrim and was about to say something about skaven but went shut because he’s not supposed to know they exist, to wich I remind that aplies only to empire every one else is aware.
Wizard was flush and surprised as her Eleven hears heard the flutter of lore and literary genius unmatched by any scholar she had met in her centuries of life. In her entranced daze, she for but a moment* contemplating ‘switching back’ just to accommodate the preferences of the wizardly gentleman before her, adorned in the athletic garb she too was deigned to equip as part of this silly athletic competition. She shakily took out her note-book and quill, full of a collection of all the plot-relevant details, campaign notes and most importantly, character names, and asked with shaky fingers a question she thought she’d never have before believed she’d have said:
“I’m sorry… I didn’t quite catch all of that… Could you tell me your full title again, professor Macarona?”
*and luckily only a moment, as Thief was nearby, and as a newly engaged individual, was in possession of the unique ability shared by all those engaged in holy matrimony: to be able to spot all wrongs committed by their partner; this along with a proficiency with household cooking implements and an ability to incite terror with but a word.
Show’s over people! That’s +5,280 XP to Zarhon! And actually…
DING!
Whatcha gonna do for your next PC class level?
Probably harass a writer. Or become their ghostwriter.
It took me a while (upon seeing Cleric’s garb) to realize Wizard was cosplaying as Rincewind, and not a legal-friendly version of Rincewind himself – as indicated by what is clearly Wizard’s ear and hair, and not Rincewind’s long nose and moustache.
Walking in Eskarina Smith’s footsteps. So proud. <3
I like to have a bit of ‘common knowledge’. For example: in my setting, it is a common belief that beyond the material world, there are the Three Heavens where the gods and their servants live, and the Underworld, where fiends and the undead exist. People may disagree which of the gods are strongest or do which job, but most people think they live in eternal splendor in the Three Heavens.
Planet Ird, the world of my setting, is vast and ancient. There have been great empires in the past and there are growing kingdoms now, but there have also been terrible wars in the past. A lot of the world has reverted to wilderness, and ordinary people on continent A know little to nothing of continent B and vice versa. Still, people generally know about the local state of affairs, in part because of ambitious merchants blazing trade routes, and politicians and warriors trying to expand their influence.
It is possible to discover things by going out into the world and seeing them. Build a ship capable of crossing the wide sea and find the legendary Miland Continent. Explore the ruins of the Great Necropolis and discover secrets of civilizations that went before and gave rise to your own. Explore the vast jungles of the Feywild, or the 1001 Deserts. Found or study at schools for scientific development.
You can also join any of a number of societies that preserve knowledge of past and present, be it for purposes benign or malicious. And sometimes, secrets are revealed because someone needs a volunteer, or a hero, or a patsy, or prey.
Great cities hover in the dark gulfs of the Underworld, where quick-witted merchants can trade with fiends. The Lower Heavens are a war-scarred landscape of trenches and fortresses in need of soldiers, both to stop incursions by Great Old Ones and to dissuade too much interference from the Higher Heavens. Several Mage Guilds have discovered ways to travel to other dimensions. In secret locations, ships sent by starfaring civilizations touch down to trade and sometimes recruit.
Adventure and discovery are virtually limitless, and common knowledge is limited. But it’s a point to start from and build upon, and should be available.
This seems like a healthy level of knowledge to prep in one’s own setting. I’ve always quite like the Pathfinder take for this:
That’s a weirdly helpful way to rephrase and reconsider in terms of mechanics.
A fun homage. ^_^
I honestly consider Rincewind to be one of the greatest Wiz(z)ards in fiction.
And Sir Terry Pratchett is one of my favourite authors and people of all time. I still feel a dull ache whenever I think on the fact I won’t see any new books by him. But I am grateful for what I have read by his hand, especially Discworld.
No more Sir Terry prose, but perhaps more Discworld:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jun/12/terry-pratchett-daughter-fans-shepherds-crown-last-discworld-novel#:~:text=The%20author%2C%20videogame%20and%20comics,she%20ruled%20out%20the%20possibility.
Always tough to know how to feel about these. For example, I remember being excited about the 11th Amber book as a kid…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chronicles_of_Amber#Dawn_of_Amber_series
…Until I read it. :/
Hmmn. If it’s Rhianna Pratchett, I’ll jump at spinoffs, adaptations and/or tie-ins. Anyone else… I dunno, man.
I never read any of those Amber sequels. I’ll stick with what’s in Seven Tales in Amber and my imagination. ^_^
QOTD: Exposition up front. There’s a certain amount of common knowledge I’d expect the commoners to have in a setting, such as when figuring out their occupation, so I figure I should start them there, since PCs are usually at least low-levels knights in terms of power they start with (translated to medieval power structures at least).
Though if I try my players again on the World of Darkness, that will change… given the sudden introduction to the supernatural as opposed to it being natural.
GNU PTerry.
I seem to recall a section in Werewolf: The Apocalypse about running a “pups” game. The premise is newly turned wolves who go through the “here’s how the world works” stuff as a core part of the campaign.
I’m a great fan of the Malazan novels by Steven Erikson and Ian Esslemont, which are also somewhat loose about consistency across the course of 20+ book and 2 authors. But it kind of works, because while some of it is certainly due to the authors making mistakes, it’s easy to attribute it to unreliable narrators within the story… given that they’re a) written from a lot of different points of view, and b) much of the setting is informed by some of the greatest liars and manipulators in the cosmos.
As to your question, somewhere inbetween. Assuming that the characters are starting out as relative nobodies, I’d be looking to give just the basics — the things that those characters would be aware of, and which are interesting or important enough to bring to their attention prior to the start of the campaign. Anything else can be introduced when it looks like becoming relevant.
I always wondered how obscure the Malazan stuff was in-game. Did the GMs/Authors just grin slyly and say “you’ll have to keep playing to find out” whenever a PC asked a “my character would know this” type question?
I suspect it was quite loose, a lot of stuff made up on the spot, and not always consistent. It feels to me like a lot of it was cleaned up *after* Gardens of the Moon was released… like after that book proved a success, Erikson and Esslemont spent a bunch of time revising their campaign notes into something they could both write from.
I want to pet the dog. That is all I have to say today.
I will personally convey your good wishes and pets to Pratchett.
Strange coincidence. I was wearing my “The Turtle Moves” T-shirt when I read this.
Linke to the shirt. I might need to own one.
I love a good mystery cosmology. Here’s mine:
Most of my campaigns are set within one of twenty-six worlds, of which my players are currently familiar with four. These worlds are inside-out: hollow spheres with a sun in the centre, at least one orbiting moon providing day/night cycles as it eclipses the sun, and reversed gravity pinning everyone to the surface. Humans were stolen away from Earth and mysteriously transported to these worlds an arbitrarily long time ago, and have since mutated into various fantasy races.
So there’s several mysteries at play here. What are these worlds? What’s outside of them? How did humans get here, and can they ever leave? But I don’t START a campaign asking these questions. I start a campaign in some small town where the characters have roots and run an ordinary-ass adventure with a local-scale threat. Because while the players will be asking the big questions right away, the characters, who’ve lived in this absurd world all their lives, don’t.
Moreover, if I may echo your above sentiments, I want my players to feel grounded in this world. I want them to fall in love with it, to feel that they have a place in it, a home. And then when their levels rise and the campaign-spanning question of “How do we return to Earth?” finally arises in-universe, the answer becomes a lot more complicated.
Ooh! I love world-building (who doesn’t?). Most of the time, though, I keep the details scaled to the level of the PCs. If we’re starting at level 1, you know your village and the next town over, mountains are north, ocean is south, capitol is to the east, and here’s how the monetary system works.
That way, if I or another DM wants to drop in an adventure, we can keep things flexible enough to grandfather it into the vague map. Degrees of knowledge and importance grow with character levels like the reputation from a Perform check: local, regional, national, global/extra-planar. By the time our PCs are beginning to influence the geopolitical landscape, my players are usually ready to go try their appendages at being cowboys, spacemen, pirates, or something else.
In 99% of my campaigns, the only effect you’d see from cutting off the campaign world from any outer planes is that summoning spells wouldn’t work. Planar adventures can be neat—Planescape Torment is by far the best adaptation of D&D into video game format, for instance—but they require a lot of work getting invested into an alien world that most of my group just isn’t interested in. And it’s not like the mortal realm is short on plotlines.
+5,280 for going the extra mile? If I had any fiction-writing skill, I’d try my hand at it. That’s at least a level for me!
What are you trying to level into?
Once i made a scale for superhero games. Street->City->Country->World->Universe. Street is the level of the streets, think Daredevil, The Defenders and such. City refers to bigger yet not so bigger threats, think Batman, Spider-man. Country gets you to more stakes, may can be loose and the enemies are more numerous and powerful, think Superman, Green Lantern. World is Watchmen. Finally Universe is things like Justice League and Avengers. Each level get higher stakes, on what is on peril and what is to defend. Bigger enemies, Kingpin on street and Injustice League on World. It also allows a nice progression. Heroes start defending their neighbourhoods, then the city, now their country needs them and then learn even “enemy” nations are being manipulated by the same guys that got plans of universal conquest. Fantasy got that in many cases needs the epic feeling. Either a journey or a scope of epic proportions. So Street is kinda out so while superheroes can keep at that level archmages would burn down the house. Village->Capital->Kingdom->Plane->Multiverse could follow a similar progress. Going from scale to scale is a nice progression. Hinting greater things, but not forgetting the past ones. Yeah, your hero may be a national symbol of hope, still it’s good to go back to neighbourhood to solve a murder. Specially if it involves a man falling from his balcony with a bathrobe and a smiling pin now stained with blood. One of the best, yet more difficult things is keeping the world big and alive 🙂
It depends on what it is. Some, such as the fact that Tieflings in one of my settings were created through specific rituals, was reveal in the race section of my campaign introduction. And was known to learned people in the campaign, either with rolls or with roleplaying moments.
For metaphysical stuff I sometimes like to keep the players somewhat in the dark of it. They might know rough outlines or theories, but not anything concrete. If they presume something that isn´t true in the world, I will correct it. Such as a setting I am currently running where there aren´t any demons (Had to tell that to a player who wanted to take a spell that summoned them) or at least they haven´t been seen for long enough to be viewed as a myth. The reason for which is that an overzealous angel decided to take her job of “Hey, go watch the entrance to the Abyss” way too seriously have been spawn killing there for the last many millennia. Which is part of the discoveries I am looking forward to the players making. Especially the boss encounter with her.
There is also some minor stuff that should be well known, but that I generally keep a bit secret because I want it to be a grand and majestic reveal. Such as the fact that the Rock Gnomes in the same world as the Crafted Tieflings live in multilayered cities on the back of giant floating Goldfish, that float from mountain top to mountain top where they meet with the grand monasteries of the Forest Gnomes.
I personally do the big info dump, with major secrets being a part of campaign plot points (Preferably with some rough foreshadowing). I had my notes on a physical piece of media and payed the price for it though with my backups being way outdated.
God I loved the Moist Von Lipvick stories and The watch. I loved unseen academicals but I’m not loving the rincewind part of the wizard series as much. It saddens me to think one day I will run out of discworld books.
There’s a reason I haven’t read ’em all yet.
Hmm. It’s kind of depended on the settings I’ve run.
I usually prepare some forum post or google document or the like of at least a pretty basic rundown of what anyone in the setting would know (that isn’t just bog standard stuff you assume anyone playing the game already assumes to be true unless said otherwise).
In some cases this is basically just my own setting notes and the PCs basically know pretty much all the major details of the cosmology or at least the cosmology that’s probably largely accurate as far as the experts within the setting can declare.
In other cases it’s been “here are the gods and the basic cosmological details” and I keep the rest close to the vest. Though in those games it’s largely been because I think it’d be cool to reveal those details eventually if it ever became relevant in game and there’s no reason most people, even clerics, would be aware of such things.
For two examples…
I made a Final Fantasy setting (and classes) for 5e and I just designed a whole cosmology in the setting document and just…. linked the players to it. So they could see the cosmology, geography, races, etc. info just all there from the start.
There was probably some info I hadn’t shared, but only because I hadn’t written it down or come up with it yet because the setting wasn’t fully finished and I figured I’d come up with fine detail stuff for regions/etc. when I actually got around to running games where I’d need that more fine detail stuff.
I have another setting for 4e/5e that’s based largely on 4e’s setting. I designed different continents/countries for particular types of games to take place on…. and even different worlds for a few potential games.
The fact that these places are all part of the same setting isn’t something I ever told my players… in fact they didn’t know the other ones existed outside of my having presented a few groups a handful of different options of what game they wanted to play. But even still, nothing about that offer made it clear that all of those options were technically places you could travel to from another one of them.
And I had other little details about the cosmology stuff, like the fact that Lolth is essentially a spy on the (currently dormant) Primordials… and the only other gods in on this plan are Ioun and Vecna.
(For anyone curious on how *that* worked, I tend not to use alignments in my games so gods weren’t divided into good/bad, etc. groups and instead every god just had their own particular relationships with every other god. Which had some funny results like Melora goddess of Nature being pseudo-enemies with every god whose domain included a particular season since… they were essentially beefing over turf. =P )
And that info isn’t shared with the players because…. why/how the heck would they know that? Also extremely unlikely to ever be relevant to any game that didn’t wind up at extremely high levels, which wasn’t really the plan for *any* of those potential games.
I always start with a bit of common knowledge, a bit of conflicting knowledge, and a lot of mystery. Then if the PCs dig, I reward them with more conflicting knowledges and let them try to sort out what is true, what is false, and what is wrong but still works right.
A big question with no good answers in my mind. I personally like every variation of introducing the greater world and the even greater still cosmology surrounding said world.
Expo dumps can be great if all of it matters (or will matter) right out of the gate, but also sometimes it is nice to feel like just a lone entity in a world that feels too big, but personal stakes are more important.
If I had to pick my preference, I think I just want to know what my character thinks of the world around them. Where they specifically fit. Their personal backstory informing how much or how little they “need” to know about the greater everything as they move on into adventure.
Then how much they end up exploring of all that is, depends on their goals and the journey they take with whatever companions they find along the way.
No matter how much is known in a single campaign, I think I also prefer plenty to be left unsaid. Have been a part of a group where the DM was constantly info dumping at every chance he got, I found that most of what was being told to me didn’t matter to my character, nor even the group as a whole. Obviously, he spent a lot of time crafting things and wanted people to know what he had crafted, but sometimes there are things better left unsaid.
Give the players what each needs, and what the group as a whole uncovers, but if they fail a “key” history check, let them fail and keep that info under wraps until they discover it on their own… even if they never do.
Keeping the mystery and letting the players discover only what they need to know or what they discover for themselves makes the world feel a bit more “real” as you play. Of course, HAVE all that lore ready just in case, but only dish it out as it comes up.
I am a big fan of Sir Terry. I have his autograph, twice over. I have a signed copy of Good Omens and an autographed coat of arms of the city of Ankh-Morpork. It is a ceramic shield with the hippos embossed on it. Hangs on the wall with the rest of my autograph collection.
Love the ‘wizzard’ garb on Wizard though it also looks to me like Cleric may be packing some dwarf bread too.
Cheers to a fellow fan! The Discworld Map is framed and hanging alongside Narnia and Middle Earth in our house. Our ambitions for a full fantasy cartography room are still brewing. 😀
Oof…. I must admit that DIscworld is just one of those settings I never really “”got””. So I guess I can’t say that I like it. Though how much of that is due to the utter morons on some sites wanking Discworld to be strongest in all fiction is debatable. tl’dr battleboarding is bad for you, kids.
I like to have my cosmology explained in “extra resources”, written as if from the perspective of scholars in-universe, that the players can choose to read, or not, at their leisure, and refer to based on what they might know in character. A few key details I will explain by micro-lore-dump in game when it becomes relevant or if a player asks.
Lore beyond what it known in-universe I prefer to hint at obliquely, if at all.
Cosmological inconsistency is built in to my settings though. In “Orbis”, everyone knows that the world exists at the place where the three elemental planes (air, earth, water) combine, and that the sun and moon are lanterns carried along by the Air goddess’ child sister. It is common knowledge that the world is also just a ball of rock+ orbiting the sun which is just a ball of burning gas. Both of these things are true at once, since 1) the gods undeniably exist exactly as interpreted in myth and 2) myth is unequivocal that Orbis existed before the gods were born from the supsrsition of sentient beings.
I never considered it before, but -remembering the celestial soccer match of Pyramids! – perhaps I have been drawing a bit from Pratchett myself? Or perhaps, as the son of a real-world cosmologist, I just like to play merry hell with logical physics. ;p
For me, at least, as my setting mostly revolves around multiversal explorers, I like to spell out the big picture first with the cosmic setting and factions and headquarters and such before focusing in on the PCs eating noodles at a street booth in some post-apocalyptic city deep in the Infinite Worlds section of the Quantaverse.
Essentially, I like to write up the big stuff before focusing in on personal stuff– since really, they’re both equally important.
Also, [insert rant on how the multiverse as a concept is often done extremely poorly, ie Marvel/DC have massively screwed it up and wound up devaluing the
worth of the setting tremendously, though how much of that is just the terrible setting bloat is unclear, and how ironically the best interpretations of it in media come from the Disney Cartoon Connected multiverse and GURPS Infinite Worlds, though the latter is a bit wonky in places].