Creating the Rules

Gamifying Worldbuilding

At this point, we have a world map, a new avian species (the Eekraw) that has just developed sentience, a base language, and a starting mountainous biome that the species lives in. From here, the Eekraw are going to spread across the world.

In order to keep myself from going crazy, I need to have some sort of ‘rules of the game’ for the spread and development of the Eekraw. Without any constraints, I would just be deciding - okay, the species does this next, then this, and things would get uninteresting and trite very quickly. I should know, because when I was doing a test run of this process a few months ago, that’s what happened, and that was the primary reason that I abandoned it.

In a grand scheme, I can do this one of two ways (actually, there are dozens of different ways I could do this, but I’m going to stick with one of the two). First, I can develop the Eekraw starting from the location they started in, moving outwards bit by bit, and simulating each part of the process as they do. In other words, maybe some of them move into the jungle to the southwest, and then I do a process of the development of the language, the culture, etc. The way this method would work, I would set up ‘turns’ of around five hundred years or so, and each turn I would expand the species outwards, do a run of language development, decide if they develop any new tools or culture, and then continue.

The alternate method would be to expand the entire species across the globe immediately, picking maybe five or ten primary locations/biomes, and then start simulating culture and civilization with a starting point of a globe populated by the Eekraw. The first method would still get to this point eventually, but I would be skipping over that initial development, and going straight to culture and civilization.

The advantages of the first method are that it would allow much more development of language and the biomes of the world over time. This would possibly make different areas of the globe more distinct in interesting ways. However, it would also be possibly tedious, involving multiple rounds of doing the same thing over and over again, before the Eekraw have even developed agriculture, culture or any technology.

The advantage of the second method are that it would skip over a bunch of potentially very tedious steps. The disadvantage is the inverse of the first method’s advantage - it could result in less distinctiveness and interesting features than if I do everything over time.

Before I can decide which way to do things, I guess I’ll figure out how much more complex the first method would actually be. I created two world maps, below - a land-mass map and one with climates. I decided I can mark any one climate on the same continent/island as being essentially one location for the purposes of this project, or at least the initial stages.

The climate map is decided according to the below table, based on average temperature and rainfall.

Here are the descriptions directly from the Fractal Terrains 3 manual:

Boreal: Cold forests, usually of spruce and fir. Standing surface water is common in such regions, and bogs form in areas of saturation.

Chaparral: Low, scrubby brush and grassland. Similar to the hilly regions of California, and certain areas of Australia.

Desert: Regions which see very little annual precipitation. It is low rainfall, not temperature, that defines desert - desert areas on Earth are as diverse as the frozen wastes of Antarctica to the sandy expanses of the Sahara.

Grassland: Similar to the North American Great Plains - expanses of grassland with little in the way of large vegetation except along river courses etc. Annual rainfall is not high enough to support forests and so forth.

Hills & Mountains: Regions of altitude variance; self-explanatory.

Ice: Ice caps and so forth. Similar to the regional ice coverage of the Arctic and Antarctic

Savannah: Tropical grassland, like that found within the African plains.

Temperate Forest: Forestland of a type commonly found across North America and Europe. They may be deciduous, evergreen, or of mixed composition.

Tropical Deciduous Forest: Like the coastal forests of South America, marked by large annual rainfalls interspersed with dry seasons, at a relatively constant temperature.

Tropical Evergreen Forest: Similar to the rain forests of equatorial Africa and the Amazon basin. Consistently high rainfall levels and little temperature fluctuation.

Tundra: Treeless areas with scattered, low-lying vegetation. Tundra freezes hard during winter and is subject to permafrost for much of the rest of the year.

Looking at the world map, there looks like nine major continents, and around 30 primary separated biomes, with a few additional smaller or marginal ones.

In the end, I’ve decided to go with a modified option one. Essentially, each ‘turn’ I’m going to have the Eekraw expand at least into the nearest biomes, and run a ‘turn’ of language development on a few regions

For each ‘turn’ I will do the following things:

Roll a die to decide which region to ‘activate.’ If there are three regions filled, I’ll roll 1d3, if there are fifteen, I’ll roll 1d15 (obviously that’s not a real die, but I’ll be rolling on the computer anyway).

The activated region will expand to the one or two (1d2) nearest regions, if they are unpopulated. If there are more than that many, I’ll roll for it. If only one unpopulated region is nearby, they’ll expand to that one. If no regions are unpopulated, then they won’t expand. (The first time it comes up, I may decide to implement a migration/language collision mechanic)

I will generate a biome for the regions that have been expanded into.

The Eekraw in the expanded regions may have minor genetic changes (different color feathers, perhaps?)

Then the activated region and the regions it has expanded to will all go through one turn of language development. That process will be similar to the language development I did in the previous post. For the newly expanded regions, there will also be new animals and sights which will need words to describe them.

Finally, I will roll another die with the new number of regions. Whichever region is activated may have a new technology or cultural or societal innovation occur. Those will start off minor - things like some small amount of specialization or developing fire, not agriculture or iron-working. That region will also undergo a round of language development.

I may have to implement a technology spread mechanic of some sort as well, but I’ll come up with that when I come to it.

This is a very rough idea of mechanics, I’m sure I’ll find them inadequate in a number of ways, and I’ll change them as necessary when they do. The advantage of this method is that it keeps the multiple changes and preserving distinctiveness of different tribes of Eekraw, but also keeps the complexity down. Rather than doing a development step for every single region every single turn, I’ll roll for which ones I do, turning an operation of exponentially expanding complexity to one whose complexity does not increase (though, of course, as more regions are populated, the process is less 'thorough’ - that is, a lower percentage of the total species undergoes development. That may or may not be an issue, we’ll see).