I started a new game this week.

Our prior GM is a freshly minted parent. He’s currently in the land of absolute sleep deprivation. Having been there not too long ago myself, I’ve offered to take over with a new game (at least for some of the time).

I’m taking the opportunity to experiment with new ways to build connections between PCs and the setting. I’ve written about at least one of those ideas before. I’m taking things a step further by starting the group even earlier in the world creation process.

We began with a collaborative setting creation session. We’ll be playing Worlds Without Number from Kevin Crawford, and I want to use WWN’s general setting concept… but I want the players to have a hand in how our particular slice of the world feels. I want them to influence what direction our Latter Earth takes.

Alongside that…

I asked people to only do barebones character creation work before the first session. That meant rolling their attributes, deciding on their class, etc., but leaving all the other narrative connective tissue that describes a character for after the setting creation session. My goal was to create a basic background that incorporated setting elements the players are all excited about, and to offer hooks to which the players could then attach their PCs.

My hope was that the players would get excited, bounce ideas off each other, feed me useful themes and inspiration, and then tie their characters into the whole fecund mess. We got most of the way there with complete success; I’d started eliciting concepts and themes prior to the session, and was able to springboard from those into fun setting creation work. Then mid-session, with our palette established, we deviated from my plan in fun and useful ways.

After the players shared ideas and got excited, we went around the table to intro each player’s basic concept for their PC. With that done, we built connections between the PCs human-knot style (the players came up with links from their PC to two other party members, without creating distinct separate rings). Everyone was also connected to our prior GM’s PC, as he would be only intermittently present and served as a useful off-screen social focal point. This means that the group has a clear concept, has good reasons to trust each other and work together, and everyone has a better understanding of both the setting’s tone and their character’s environment before they put finishing touches on their PC.

We ran out of time, however, before I could start my opinion / connection experiment. I think that’s for the best. I now have another two weeks to spin up some setting material and generate NPCs and groups that might interact in fun ways with the PCs. This will also give me time to incorporate a mechanic inspired by Spectaculars’ continuity tokens, giving players the limited ability to declare that their PC has some history with a person, place, group, or thing.

Rather than making “establishing history” an ace up the players’ sleeves, something they might want to save for just the right moment to ensure a positive connection to a powerful entity, I am giving them a flat roll to determine how positive the connection is. I don’t want the roll to be modified by any attribute; I want to encourage everyone to use this mechanic rather than making one PC clearly better at this than any other. Since I plan to use reaction rolls, the charismatic characters should still have ways to ease their passage through the world.

I’ll let you know how it goes, and maybe in the future I can share more details about how I ran the collaborative worldbuilding exercise.