There’s a dirty little secret of mine. You might share this same little secret, I have a feeling there’s a lot of us.

It’s an addiction to backstory.

Particularly to the backstory of a good Roleplaying Game. So why the secret? Well, I don’t play them. I just really, really, enjoy reading through the information that is the skeleton of the world.

The tables and charts get studied. The lists of skills, costs of items, descriptions, are all browsed like it’s a catalog. But when I get to some history, oh boy, that’s the juicy stuff. It’s like a non-fiction data dump for a fictional world.

Show me a beautifully detailed map… I own an original copy of a map from the Silmarillion. It’s a pleasure just to browse that map.

I love it. I’ll spend fifteen minutes studying the borders of some dead (fictional) empire and wonder what those battlefields were all about. RPG’s drip story, ooze it from the pages.

The reason is simple, they are to help the player immerse themselves in a world. You take the role of, well, whatever you’d like. Warrior. Wizard. Mech jockey. And if you want to go to some far off land (planet) then you can! A well designed RPG will let you go just about anywhere and at least have a paragraph describing it.

An RPG is a game encapsulated in a world. While most fiction is a world encapsulated in a story. With a novel you, the reader, don’t stray from the narrative. A far off place may be mentioned, but sometimes that’s all the thought that goes into it.

In PC games it’s a bit different as you’re bounded by the constructs of the game. Maybe you can’t go to that island because it, well, isn’t coded yet. World of Warcraft is a good example of this. There’s stuff on a map, or lore, but you can’t play there. At least not yet. Or the Fallout series, but at a certain point the scale kicks in.

Sure you can model post-apocalyptic Kansas, but not everything is fun and cool. Just like fiction needs to be concentrated nuggets of story, so does a good PC game. The same with an RPG. They tell you all the interesting stuff.

My three favorites for this back story are :

Rifts is knocked for a really abstract play mechanism. And for the artwork. Some of it is comically bad. But when it comes to story, oh boy, do they got it. Sourcebooks for the entire world. Two just for Russia. Hell even Quebec gets one (Canada too).

Not only do they have this, but an immensely rich history leading all the way back to when the world ended. Or most of it at least. From there they’ve got a pretty distinct timeline and all of that leads up to present game-day.

Battletech covers another massive scale. It’s a scifi world where noble houses fight tooth and nail using ancient technology. (Battlemechs) Mercenary units were everywhere. Eventually the Clans broke in (super human soldiers on a crusade to take back control). All of this melded into some really cool story arcs.

This world was an amalgamation of authors, short stories, and even a few different owners. Some of the fiction was of questionable quality. But it advanced an overall plot. If they had a motto it would probably be “press on regardless.”

Pathfinder is the newest of these three. They have a single, very dens,e Campaign world book along with a map that is really a beauty. Every kingdom and zone gets a crisp write up along with little tidbits and details that make it seem like a real place.

One example is a forested kingdom. Not only does it detail the boundaries, the neighbors, and those who live there but also some history and gossip. It went from being a place on a map, to a page in a history book, finishing at a fleshed out location that you can picture. It feels real.

That’s the big thing of it all. The place has to feel real even if it doesn’t exist. Just like a good story. You have to be able to look at it and think that yes, this could be a place.

Do you have a favorite fictional world?

Quick edit : Do you use Roll20? How well does it work? Maybe I should give this RPG thing a try…

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