Lessons Learned:
- Despite entire fandom constantly talking about the Chaos Gods and threat Chaos poses, most of the Imperial Guard aren’t supposed to know anything about it, less alone the specific names.
- Despite their enemeis in Sabbath participating commonly in diablerie and fandom making big deal out of what an unforgivable crime it is, it is not something an average Vampire of Carmarilla knows about in any way.
With the Dragon Age series, a map of Ferelden was created for use in the first game, and became the map of the region for a long time after. The TTRPG used the same map, and even had a printout in the box set for it. Many players, and even some GMs, base their understanding of the setting on this map.
This map includes:
- The Circle Tower. There are two circle towers in Ferelden, and many more further afield. Only one is marked.
- Lake Calenhad Docks. Lake Calenhad is massive. There should be many docks.
- Ostagar. This is an abandoned fortress only notable for a battle that took place there.
- Lothering. It’s an unremarkable and short-lived village you briefly visit.
- The Dalish Camp. The Dalish are nomads. How the hell is that on a map?!
All that stuff appears in Dragon Age Origins, so it’s a good map of what a player might experience playing the video game. As a setting guide, it’s awful.
I love these points. It’s one of the things I run into a lot because I love doing maps for larps. Players all have places mentioned in back stories, or that were visited in past events, and they almost never show up on maps.
Yes, the quaint little village where you killed 200 werewolves was extremely memorable, but if we add every 250-peasant hamlet to the map, it will be solid black.
Yes, it matters a lot to you where your barony is, but just the borders of all the baronies alone will turn the map into a giant blur. And also, I’m not going to name 800 baronies.
So we have a regular worldmap, and a “storyline map” that doesn’t exist in the world, only on the wiki. Many towns are notable because “players were here once”
That is such a better way to do it. One map for plot, one map for setting.
It gets even worse when your players tend to stick to one general area, cause then all the places they want to see on the map get bunched up. No, there aren’t 5 times as many settlements in Ferelden compared to the rest of Thedas. We’ve just spent 2 games there and that’s what all the books, comics and adventure modules focus on. I promise you it’s more spread out than that.
Consider shrinking your scale. There’s an impulse to draw entire worlds or continents, but then you feel obliged to operate at that scale. The “Known world” of my players for the last 3 campaigns is roughly the size of Florida, and they don’t even see all of it, not by a long shot. In those 4 campaigns, they:
- Traveled from the capital to the border and back again
- Settled a valley on the border
- Sailed up and down the coast And that represents 12 years of gaming! It’s only the campaign I’m prepping now where they are going to explore the other side of the mountains…another chunk of land roughly the size of Florida :P
Oh yes, regular folks in the Imperium are absolutely forbidden from knowing anything about or even talking about chaos at all. The guard may even be sent to fight chaos directly without being told what they’re fighting or why, just that they are fighting heretics. And if they ask for more information they will be made an example of so nobody else thinks it’s a good idea.
The Imperium is not a nice place to be, mostly
And if they beat chaos, they still have a pretty good chance of getting shot for knowing things they shouldn’t.
The imperium has access to mind wipe technology, and has used it for those that survive incidents with chaos or xenos that are considered classified. They can’t really afford to simply kill everyone exposed to these things.
It’s always difficult finding the balance between in character and out of character knowledge. I recently had to explain to my players that their characters definitely knew about a major historical event in the setting, because while it happened 10,000 years ago it’s important to the origin of several gods, so is a widely known story.
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