Monday, June 6, 2016

Savage Worlds: World of Warcraft, part 1

So, let's convert World of Warcraft to a Savage Worlds game. This is a tough challenge, because the players that would be interested in this type of a game will be conditioned by the rules, builds, classes, DPS rankings, gear, treasure, drops, and mechanics of the MMO. We will get to that later, but let's start this by gathering up our source material first. Our go-to book will be this:

As a background resource, this one looks like it will do the job. Of course, you are going to have a lot of players more familiar with the world and lore in various places, but this book will serve as your "tentpole" reference book for the world and its places. You can go two ways from here, what's in the game is lore, or what's in the book is lore. If you go with the game, you will be tying yourself to the MMO very tightly, and your game may suffer as a result with constant comparisons of "that is not in the game" or "the game does it differently."

If you start at the book, you may be a little better off, because you can start here and make up the rest. I am not a big fan of tying things too closely to the game, because the MMO is still just a videogame, and the scale of the in-game map is all off compared to a real world. If you stuck to the game, most of the continents would measure eighty square miles, or an area of land about nine miles by nine miles - something that could fit into an average town or city on real-world Earth easily. A real World of Warcraft is going to be much larger, the map will "fractal out" and have many more interesting locations, and you will have many more places to explore and adventure.

The cities will become larger, easily filling the same size as the entire MMO world - just for one city. Think of that. Stormwind will be a massive city, surrounding area with smaller holds and fiefdoms, and garrisons and holds far beyond that. You will need to think big for each of the faction's capitals, and expand the land considerably. You can still keep the same "directionality" to your maps, Stormwind would spill out southwards from the mountains, and touch the coast to the north, but things will get much larger, and much more spread out.

In addition to bigger, you are going to go much smaller. There will be thousands of square miles of new places to explore, along with many new areas of unexplored wilderness and savage, wild lands stuck in supposedly "settled" lands. You can invent towns, villages, and forts as you wish, keeping the in-game places as the tentpoles, but having the freedom to fill in thousands of miles of new places, both big and small, to fill out your world. Unexplored areas will be your biggest addition, even in a seemingly "simple" place like Elwynn Forest you are going to have thousands of square miles of unexplored wilderness, places to go, and lost ruins to explore.

What will make your game different is the scale and unexplored places angle to your creation. You will literally be trying to create a world from this material, and fill in the blanks that a videogame adaptation of a "real" place cannot cover. Be prepared to make a lot of maps as your world grows and fills in places from the imagination of you and your players. Use the game locations as tentpoles, and you are free to fill in the rest - as long as it doesn't overshadow what players are used to, it won't matter. You don't want to create a kingdom larger and more powerful than Stormwind, but there is more than enough room for imagined places less important and smaller that could be just as interesting and memorable.

Could there be two smaller kingdoms within Stormwind's sphere of influence that constantly compete and fight? I am sure there could be room for that, and you could base an entire area around that mini-story within the Warcraft world, and inside of Stormwind's lands. If you side one with the Defias Bandits, and the other with a dark warlock faction, you could tie these new places back to existing factions and make them seem more "at home" in the world. Now you have a story framework, some new locations and characters, and a place other than Stormwind to adventure in.

It's like if a game maker crated a "Colonial USA" MMO, and put "Colonial Boston" right down the road and coast from "Colonial New York" - and skipped everything in-between because "it wasn't important" or "it would make the world too big." There's no Connecticut, Rhode Island, Hudson River, or southern Massachusetts - just a road with maybe a couple farms and hills, and a river or two. Out at sea, even more is removed, with no Long Island, Nantucket, Boston Harbor, or Cape Cod. While all the architecture and trappings of the land look great and feel like the time, a lot is missing from the real world that should be there for an authentic experience.
Your job will be creating that "authentic experience" for this world.

Remind your players "the real world is much larger" and your game will focus will be exploring these places - old and new. You will likely be putting down new towns and adventure locations everywhere in the world, like new swamp towns and ruins in the Wetlands, and you will use that similar "world building" process everywhere you go. It will be hard to NOT fall back on the MMO, so when you travel to a new area, you may want to pause and fill in a couple new places and get your scale right. You don't want to create a wonderful new and massive Stormwind area, travel to Darnassus, and have that new location be the same, small, MMO scale because you didn't have the time to think about this new part of the world.
You can base these places on lore, which the above book provides generously should you decide to go there. I personally would save this sort of lore for later, but the Dark Horse book is good because it gives your game a sense of history and background drama. It also prepares you for the "current" lore a bit better than an MMO resource, and sets your mind up better with a sense of place and history.

Again, you are not playing a "World of Warcraft MMO simulator" you are playing a Savage Worlds game based upon this as source material. We will get to items, gear, classes, and suggestions on how to run all this within the rules framework next time, because I wanted to focus on how I would setup the world and the sense of scale this time.

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