One of the joys for a world builder is being able to create a world that inspires awe and intrigue. From beautiful landscapes and interesting NPCs, the homebrew game master or game designer can create magic with a map and lore alone.
However, something that can be overlooked in the first draft of world building is what its denizens believe on a community level. Whether it is a whole country or a small town congregation, developing an ideological worldview can help you figure out how the community would respond to outside or internal threats. This also adds a rich canvas for your players to determine their place in the world.
Lets outline some key brainstorming ideas to help you develop different ideologies through your game world.
The Basics
The term ‘ideology’ can refer to a lot of different belief systems in your game world. It can include religions, government systems, regional and national cultural practises, etc. All of theses will either work in tandem or in opposition to one another. Thus, it is here that you can get some major conflicts in your world.
The fundamental part of any ideology is finding the root of the belief system. The root will often be a response to this statement: the world works like this. These will often be simple, declarative statements that cannot be deemed untrue per say, but are more about perspective. This could include:
- The world is a dangerous place.
- The world needs to be protected.
- The world doesn’t care about anyone, especially you.
The next step is asking why the community believes this. Why do they believe the world is good/bad? What could have influenced this worldview? Brainstorm some options to get a wide variety of possible belief systems.
Diversifying Your Worldview
Something that can happen unintentionally while developing ideologies for our games are that:
- We have developed very black and white/good vs. evil ideologies.
- We have developed ideologies that look very much like the ones we live in every day.
Both of these situations can arise if you have not looked into how other real life ideologies work around our world. While there is nothing necessarily wrong about this, your world can fall into cliche and ignorance if you are not careful. That is how you fall into a lot of fantasy tropes. Take some time to learn the nuts and bolts of different groups around the world, both in the past and present.
And be especially careful when you are drawing lines of good and evil. Very rarely are things so cut and dry.
Top Down or Bottom Up?
This is not all to say that you need to figure everything out about the different factions of your world right at the beginning. Feel free to add certain groups into your world for flavour and then build their ideological framework after that. Do not be afraid to improvise something and then back it up later.
Now it’s time to hit the books, write some notes, and get to crafting!
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