Creating the World of Corde

I first started playing Dungeons and Dragons in the 9th grade. I was (finally) able to convince my wife to start playing after we got engaged. We have played several different RPG campaigns with our friends over the years. In short, D&D is something that means a lot to us, and it’s something we would like to share with our children.

We watched several panels at PAX Online this year, including the Psychology of Final Fantasy. After watching an amazing panel from PAX Online about Collaborative World Building for RPG games, I began researching the group that put the panel on.  This group is called Game to Grow, and they specialized in using Roleplaying Games as a means of therapy and education.  I have always been interested in using role-playing games for education, and my wife for uses in therapy settings, so this caught our attention.  I decided to use this process I learned from Game to Grow to run a D&D campaign, our first family D&D campaign.

We have roleplayed with my daughter (7)  and son (4) prior to this when we tried the My Little Pony Tabletop.  It was great fun; however, my wife and I have been missing playing D&D and have been “chomping at the bit” to get into this world.  We decided if we toned down some elements, D&D would be perfect for our daughter (especially since she is currently reading The Hobbit with my wife.)

Our first step was to create the world with physical elements.  I sketched a large continent on a piece of paper, and we sat down as a family.  We began to take turns adding one physical feature to this blank canvas of a world.  I went first:

I added a lake.  Cordelia went second and added trees around the lake.  Miranda drew a volcano.  I added a group of 5 islands, Cordelia added a river in the top left corner, Miranda added a lake of lava. A single, lone, tall mountain; mountains in the top left; a huge forest around the small woods. Lots of hills; more rolling hills; mountain range hiding the volcano.  A river splitting the continent into 2; another mountain range; an island.  We kept this going for a bit until the map was fleshed out.  We started to include terrain like deserts and plains as well.

Our next step was to figure out places that have magical properties (this is Dungeons and Dragons afterall).  We each picked one place to make “magical”: the volcano, the lake in the forest, and the lone tall mountain.  Following that, we set one place that could be a “dungeon” or other place of significance.  Cordelia made an ancient ruin in the desert, Miranda made a tower with a crystal between the plains and the tundra, and I chose the abandoned mines in the hills.

It was time to place the cities.  We went around, starting with Miranda, and placed where we thought cities/villages/towns would spring up.  Miranda made nomad settlements up in her Volcano region, I chose a major city to be at the fork of the river (one section in the Tundra, one in the forest area, and one in the swamp), and Cordelia placed her major city in the northern part of the desert.  We added a few more cities to flesh out the world, like at the bottom of the lone mountain, at the northern section of the river, and at the tip of a peninsula.

The final step to building the world was naming a few places.  We did not name all the places (to further flesh out later) but we chose a few of the major places.  Again, I took this from the Game to Grow panel I watched.  We built each name, taking turns letter by letter, and at any point we could say “stop” to complete the name.  We named the capital of the land (Dalvok), some mountains, the volcano, and the river this way.

We really enjoyed building this world this way.  I feel it gave ownership to each player, especially my daughter and son, who helped a bit with the names.  We were able to see this world spring up from our own creativity, and I believe it will help Cordelia play in this world she helped design.