A Small World Campaign
Late last year I suggested a way of making a ttrpg setting with your players:
Days of Wonder's board game Small World already has a number of standard high fantasy staples: halflings, elves, orcs, dragons, giants, and fortresses. If I planned to begin a new campaign anytime soon, I'd like to start by playing (and recording) a game of Small World with the group as Session -1; I'd then interpret the game as the history of the campaign's immediate environs. I think this would be a fun exercise for me, but I also think that it would give the players a sense of investment in the setting.
Over the Christmas holidays I played a game of Small World with my brother and mother, and I think the result had real potential as the basis of a campaign setting. Of course, I came up with the idea in the first place because I knew Small World tends to end with interesting board states that suggest a story, so this isn't surprising. Still, I would like to go over how the game turned out and consider it as a setting for a high fantasy campaign.1
First I should summarize the game. I opened with Spirit Ratmen in the southwest of the board, and my mother followed with Forest Humans in the northwest. Then my brother came in with Dragon-Master Halflings, assaulting my ratmen's eastern flank and cutting them off from eastern expansion with their Holes-in-the-Ground. This meant I'd have to move north against the humans in order to expand. After a few rounds of the humans expanding east, the ratmen expanding north, and the halflings doing both, I took my ratmen into decline, and the halflings soon followed. As my new empire I picked Alchemist Tritons, entering from the southeast and moving aggressively to secure territories around the lake, and my brother also came in from the southeast with Mounted Skeletons. These skeletons eventually forced my mother to put her humans, who had secured most of the northern edge of the board, into decline, and I soon did the same with the tritons. My mother entered the south of the board with Bivouacking Amazons and I entered the northeast with Swamp Orcs. The amazons and orcs cut through the skeletons for a little while until the amazons attacked and took orc territory. My brother put his skeletons into decline (thereby losing the last few halflings in the western and southern mountains) and, on the final turn of the game, entered in the northeast with Pillaging Sorcerers, carving and converting a line almost due south, through orcs and amazons, until failing a reinforcement roll against an amazon province in the far south of the board.
At the end of the game, there were two in-decline human territories in the northwestern corner's fields and forests, with one last province of spirit ratmen in the mountains to the east of them. A few mountain provinces were left empty south of the humans, but otherwise most of the western and southern board was held by an amazon empire. Two mountain territories on the northeastern shores of the lake were what remained of the tritons. The orcs were still active but had been whittled down to two swamp territories on either side of a long column of sorcerers that stretched from the northern border down very nearly to the southern border. Four far-flung skeleton territories dotted the board, and no Lost Tribes remained.
Discussing it afterwards, my brother and I agreed that the two human territories in the extreme corner of the board would make for a good starting area for any theoretical campaign. On the exact opposite side of the board the highly aggressive sorcerers were finally halted in their southern expansion; I think they had a lot of potential as villains. In general, a three-way amazons-versus-sorcerers-versus-orcs conflict on the far side of the region looked good for the mid game and later. The pockets of undead were very appropriate for a high fantasy game, as areas that are challenging to traverse for low- to mid-level adventurers. The tritons ending up in mountainous lakeside regions also felt right, as they could live in various half-flooded grottoes. Really, my only reservation was that the amazons occupied a very large portion of the board; I would worry that having such a continuous stretch of territory held by one empire was in a sense wasted potential – though I have some ideas for how to vary it a bit.
I made this image with Hextml.
I'm not going to run a campaign based on this board, but if I were going to, I'd want to interpret the whole game as an approximately millennium-long period. (Each turn would be ~33 years.) I haven't given this interpretation a lot of thought since then, but I've given it a little, and here's what I've established:
Because no one chose elf or dwarf empires during the game, I'd say that elves and dwarves made up the lost tribes, perhaps along with goblins or gnomes. Although these peoples were once self-governing, they aren't any longer, and have either been assimilated into the empires that occupy their historic territory or still live in minor enclaves subject to imperial rule. This might mean that truly ancient ruins in the area would be dwarven or elven, depending on the province.
The humans have held their lands for over nine hundred years at the start of the game. Since they started out as forest humans, it might be interesting to work out how that affects their culture, even in their farmland territories. Is their religion heavily druidic? Excepting forts and castles, do they build more out of wood than out of stone, importing lumber over great distances if none is locally available? And what has changed, so that they aren't quite forest humans any more? Whatever the case, they would have left structures all through the north of the map, even as their current holdings are small. (To reflect they are in decline, I might make the provinces two separate principalities, or even duchies.)
The ratfolk have been reduced to a single mountainous territory. As spirit ratfolk, they might be ghostly or otherwise ethereal. This is a strange image, but it might be interesting, especially as neighbours to the starting human territories. The ratfolk once fought many conflicts against humans, but have not done so for a long time; maybe they are depicted as scary and dangerous at the very beginning of the game, but they turn out to be peaceful once the players meet them? Of course, like the lost tribes, ratfolk might have been assimilated into other empires in those territories where they once ruled.
I've long been intrigued by the idea of an expansionist halfling republic, and that image is only improved by a terrible dragon that helps them claim new territories. However, in this setting the halfling empire is now extinguished and their dragon long dead. That doesn't mean the halflings are no longer felt in the world. First, as before, their descendents still live as subjects of various empires (see especially the amazons below). Second, any fortifications that predate the halfling empire (ratmen, human, and lost tribes) and were captured by the dragon might bear scars of fire. Finally, those halfling holes have potential: I imagine them as something akin to the tunnels used by the Viet Cong during the Tet Offensive, and many of them might still be there in amazon country and in the ungoverned mountains, forgotten and trapped and half-collapsed, with some loot still in their storehouses. More than loot, maybe: in those tunnels might be dragon eggs and the means to hatch them.
There are four empty mountain territories. Three of them were once halfling-controlled, until the halfling empire vanished. What happened in these mountains? Are they still inhabited by independent, even semi-anarchic halfling communities (rather like the Shire)? Or are the halflings, and the peoples who preceded them, simply gone? If the last, what happened to them? One of the halfling provinces with a hole-in-the-ground is now empty mountain territory, so I can imagine that in that remote country a maturing dragon, or a brood of young dragons, overwhelmed the halflings who wished to rekindle their empire, eating or enslaving them. However, the fourth empty mountain province, far in the east, was never occupied by any tribe or empire. Why not? Perhaps it contains little of value -- though I can also see it as a place to put aberrations, fey, giants, or any other formidable threat that never emerged in the Small World game.
The tritons were alchemists once. I think, therefore, that the tritons deal in potions, but have lost much of that art. They likely sell a greater variety of interesting potions than you can find in any other settlement in the region, but they no longer know how to brew the really powerful ones. Those can only be found stashed or misplaced in former triton territories, and even then not all of them. Living people who conquered tritons would have consumed their potions long ago; however, the skeletons have no use for potions, so adventurers can still find caches of powerful potions hidden in any lands that the tritons lost to the undead, regardless of who holds them now. I imagine the remaining tritons would be a neutral, isolationist faction; adventurers could bargain for entry into their lands and eventually win their friendship, with enough effort and tact.
Those skeletons were mounted. What does that mean? Mechanically, it means they had an easier time invading hills and fields. But narratively, I think it must mean that some number of the skeletons rode mounts into battle, a bit like Black Riders. I suppose I could go with sentient skeletons, but for free-willed undead I prefer ghouls; the skeletons, I think, are mostly mindless, though not quite so mindless that they cannot ride dead horses. This means that their empire must have been run by necromancers, who themselves may have been either living or undead. Maybe there was a whole chain of command, with the necromancers making undead riders who could in turn raise skeletons. Then the empire went into decline when all the necromancers were killed, either to assassins or to in-fighting; after this, there was no one to replace the riders that fell, and now few of those riders remain. In the present, the humans living in the northwest may not remember the necromancers, and will speak to the players only of a skeleton empire. Some of the undead in a region would be the remains of the people who had once lived in that region, but other skeletons would have invaded from adjacent regions in the necromancers' empire, meaning that territories acquired late in the empire's expansion would have a greater variety of skeletons. Regardless, though the undead are no longer organized enough to invade other lands, they still attack on sight.
Amazons are an odd one for contemporary high fantasy games and, like I mentioned before, they take up a very large portion of the map. I think the humans and ratfolk in the northwest eye them warily, wondering if the amazons might try to conquer them as they conquered so many others. Perhaps it would be unclear to adventurers how friendly the amazons would be – especially to any male adventurers. I'd want to play them as potential allies or potential enemies, depending on the players' actions. There is a risk that so much amazon territory could be homogenous, but I have part of an idea for that: the amazons are not necessarily all human. Maybe there is a ruling class of human amazons, but the majority of any region is whatever peoples were assimilated. Formerly halfling regions would still be majority halfling, though now with the amazon's gender norms and martial ethos. The soldiers would be a mix of all kinds of women, even if the officers were all ethnic amazons. Each region would bear other marks of its history as well, in ratfolk warrens, halfling tunnels, ancient elf barrows, and so on. In the campaign's present moment, the amazons would still be fighting the skeletons on their borders, but the sorcerers would be their most urgent enemy.
"Swamp orcs" is not the most original combination, but that's acceptable if the orcs are otherwise compelling. What I like about them is that they have a bit of an interesting story. In the first round or two, they fought only skeletons; perhaps we can say they were martial heroes battling the undead hordes. Then they were attacked by the amazons who had also been fighting skeletons lately; I think the orcs saw that as a betrayal, and started dividing their attention between skeletons and amazons. Then the sorcerers took much of their territory and cleft their land in two. I think now the orcs are embattled and paranoid; although adventurers could eventually win their respect and friendship, it would take a very long time, as the orcs have become slow to trust. (If the adventurers have befriended the amazons, it may be even harder for them to befriend the orcs.) The eastern and western swamps are also cut off from each other; while the orcs in one territory are still nominally loyal to their leader in the other territory, they are mostly unable to communicate and coordinate, so the orcs are one faction in name only.
The sorcerers can convert a limited number of enemy regions per turn, but in the first and only turn they converted two territories: one from the orcs and one from the amazons. The name and mechanics suggest to me that they are a kind of cult, infiltrating the leadership of an enemy region until they can bring that whole region under their sway.2 That would mean some of the cult's members are orcs and amazons – and considering what I already said about amazons, this could be a fairly cosmopolitan bunch. While in reality the sorcerers did not conquer any skeleton-controlled territories because my brother got points for both empires, narrative explanations are still easy enough to imagine: the sorcerer cult cares less about land than it cares about people, to convert or perhaps to sacrifice. Skeletons aren't good for either. But that doesn't mean they have no interest in territorial expansion. The way the sorcerers cut a straight path south suggests that they want something in particular. What is it? A GM could give them a suitably calamitous goal, something suitable as a threat for the end of a campaign. If they are keeping all the territory they conquered, then they might be keeping supply lines open: is there an empire off the map, then, with whom they have some relationship? In that case, the adventurers could start thwarting the cult's plans by interrupting that supply line.
Altogether I think this setting has potential; in theory, I think the players should have some fun anticipating how I as the GM had translated the Small World game into a ttrpg setting. And lest you think I cheated a bit here, trying to make a better-than-usual example, I can assure you that each player made decisions consistent with their usual choices in Small World: my mother usually delays going into decline for as long as she can and always takes the Amazons at the earliest opportunity, while my brother usually takes either Skeletons or Sorcerers if they are available. Of course taking Spirit Ratmen is the kind of thing I'd do for a campaign setting, in order to increase the number of empires on the board at the end of the game, but I think my family could attest that taking Spirit Ratmen is also something I'd do anyway: I often try to leverage special in-decline mechanics like the Spirit and Stout modifiers or the Ghoul and Dwarf races.
A word of warning, however: I did start the process of converting the turns into a timeline and the board into a map, and I have found it is a lot of work. I'm unlikely to continue much further, considering I don't actually plan to run a game with it. I am willing to do this much work for a real campaign, but if you find any of this appealing and want to try it yourself, you should be aware that it takes some time. Nonetheless, I hope you do find it appealing; maybe someday someone you will try this method for setting creation.
Does anyone else intensely dislike the term "elf game"? It sounds dismissive to me.↩
As I edit this, I realize the intended fiction here might instead be mind-control rather than conversion. Still, if I were running a campaign based on Small World, I would probably stick with the sorcerer cult idea.↩