Watching a lot of anime, playing a lot of videogames, and reading a lot of western fantasy novels made me realize something. There’s a good reason why so many campaign settings for games feel off. It’s the adventurers. Let’s dive into it!

Background

One of the core conceits of tabletop RPGs are adventurers. Otherwise unemployed individuals with amazing talents, magic, powers or training that set them above the ruck and file of society. The thing is though is that their presence is never really accounted for in a lot of tabletop RPG campaign settings. Or if they are, it gets weird. But why is that? I think it’s because even though we’re creating fantasy worlds, we root them in our real world experiences, and “adventurers” aren’t part of our day to day. Where this shows in campaign settings is in the “how” of how the larger world works, which is based on the assumptions by the designer of how prevalent adventurers are, some I break down into Chosen Ones, Rare, Uncommon, and Common, and how they account or don’t for their existence.

World Building

When word building for a fantasy campaign setting with adventurers, there’s some things to consider that often don’t get too much attention. Why don’t they? Because honestly, especially in western literature’s canon, the world is a mildly altered one based on a pseudo-historical middle age period with no appreciation for how the introduction of magic, monsters, or anything else into the world. There’s a whole other article coming on that and how a dungeons can be resources, but the point here is that there’s some considerations world builders need to think about concerning the introduction of adventurers to the world.

Magic Economy

The more common magic, adventurers, and monsters are, the more need there is for magic items and the ingredients to do magic. This reality is very often not even considered by creators because it’s very normalized to not include this. This is potion shops, item shops, merchants, towns based around resource extraction… it’s a serious world changer. Now, this isn’t to say that the players (or anyone) should be able to buy any item or ingredient from any random shop. But it is important to recognize that needs drive economies. Added levels of world building to this are government controls and restrictions on access, black markets, how the lack of item or ingredient access could indicate anything from international spats to a need to clear the routes of bandits, and all that stuff too.

Class Knowledge

This is a bit of a sliding scale, based on how common adventurers are in a given campaign setting and how obscure their classes are. The idea here is that the more common adventurers are (particularly in a game using class/level based power development), people will become more familiar with the actual abilities of any given class. Not only that, but in worlds where classed adventurers are commonplace, there may even be an awareness of “levels” and the specific powers and abilities they unlock. This is likely to even be used as a litmus test for membership in adventurer guilds or to take certain jobs.

World Engagement

The more adventurers there are, the more they’re going to be integrated into the world. Politicians, militaries, revolutionaries, religions, guilds… everyone has an interest in adventurers and the powers they have. Well, more specifically in their powers and how they can be used to advantage their own ends. And there’s also a higher likelihood of organization among adventurers either along class lines or as mixed guilds. Why? To be honest, protection. A lone adventurer is unlikely to be able to resist the influences or coercions of larger powers. But a guild? Much better chances.

Monster Ratio

Monsters and adventurers need to be a balanced equation. Why? Because if there’s not enough adventurers to balance out the threat posed by monsters to the common people of the world, then the world is going to get very dark and very horrible very quickly. That’s an “end of the world” scenario where non-monsters aren’t long for the world and that’s probably why Chosen Ones have appeared. The challenge here is balancing the way NPCs live and work with how often adventurers are able to come fight stuff that’s outside of their scope to deal with, while also looking at how political power structures deal with things without losing legitimacy. There’s also a question of monster ecologies, but that’s a separate article.

Adventurers

The presence of adventurers should change your world building, with the very specific exception of the immediate aftermath of the arrival of fantasy creatures and adventurers into a setting where they previously didn’t exist. In that one instance, keep on keeping on, but otherwise, the prevalence of adventurers should change things.

Chosen Ones

This scenario is where “adventurers” in the sense of class having characters (player and NPC) is the most restricted. Now, this shouldn’t be confused with having “chosen ones” in any other setting, I’m just using the term here to denote that in this instance, they’re all there is. And they’re also probably “chosen ones” in the conventional sense. This is some low fantasy action where exceptional people are rare, magic is rare, and all the usual complaints about fantasy settings (commoners fearing magic, no magic item or ingredient economy etc…) are explained by the simple fact that the players and the key NPCs that help or fight them are really all there is.

Magic Economy

With Chosen Ones, there is not likely to be a magic economy of any note. Likewise, true magic items and so on will probably be rare. Alchemy might fill a lot of the gaps at lower levels, but magic items are the object of myth or legend, and ingredients will probably have to be gathered the old fashioned way.

Class Knowledge

Slim to none for anyone, including the Chosen Ones. Classes and class abilities or even powers in general if you’re using a generic system are basically unheard of outside of obscure legends. Everyone on the planet is on voyage of discovery with the player characters and their similarly powered antagonists.

World Engagement

The Chosen Ones are wild cards and everyone wants to either control them or kill them. Every political power that learns about them is going to try to confirm what they’ve heard and then determine if they pose a threat or not. It’s likely in this scenario that there’s some overarching plot that’s caused the player characters and their nemesis(es?) to become a thing, so there’s a lot of curiosity and likely to be a lot of pressure.

Monster Ratio

There either aren’t going to be a lot of monsters in this world, or there’s going to be an overwhelming abundance of them. No happy medium. Why? Because otherwise the Chosen Ones don’t make sense. Few monsters means that it’s mythology level stuff, things that regular people with regular tools and technology can’t handle. An overwhelming abundance means that there’s so many that regular people and their technology can only barely keep them at bay and it’s a losing battle. Otherwise, there’s not much reason for Chosen Ones to exist.

Next Week…

This isn’t a final thoughts, because this is a two-parter! So, this whole process really got me thinking on the world building front, and wow. It’s impacting my conceptualization of world building, and will directly impact the next games I run. Next week I’ll be finishing this by looking at the other levels of adventurer saturation, and some actual final thoughts. See you then!