Savage Worlds: World of Warcraft, part 3

 

I am being vexed in my Savage Worlds: World of Warcraft project by the maps. The maps of the MMO are not realistic at all, since they only cover about a 9 mile by 9 mile area. Both continents. You could see across those if you were high up enough. Here's a cool version of Google maps for the game's world, and it is cool.

So then I wanted to scale the maps and expand them, say by a factor of 100, so we have a 900 mile by 900 mile area, which honestly for a continent is still small (the size of the Western US; from California to the east side of New Mexico, and all the way up to Canada). That size could work, maybe, if the planet was smaller than Earth. Still, it's small if you want Booty Bay to be down by the Equator and the north side of the continent to touch the Arctic Circle. So maybe I need to scale by a factor of 200.

But we have another problem, once I scale this up by a factor of 100 or 200, there is a lot of room to fill. A lot of room. So much so that Elwynn and Stormwind are going to be hundreds of miles apart, when we want them within 10 or 20 miles. Add to that, just having one city and a small town isn't going to cut it for a powerful medieval kingdom, so there HAS to be something else here except Westfall and Redridge.

I know, there needs to be more cities and an expanded map...

...and the lore breaks here.

It was broken when I scaled the map, but it is really broken now. It is the Kingdom of Stormwind, right? Kingdom means "more than a city plus one small village with three buildings" in my book. Even the movie...looks like it takes some liberties.

Maybe I scale by a factor of 20 and give up trying to fill in new locations. Videogames are poor places to base worlds on, for one, because the distances are not realistic and they tend to be simplified "best of" mash ups, like GTA5's version of Los Angeles, Los Santos. Well, actually, GTA5 is huge and well laid out, honestly, and they are really sharp about how they lay things out to make each area appear bigger than it actually is.

Even the Chronicle volume 1 maps have no scale printed on them (my book is still in the mail, so I go by the preview), so this is a tough one. The world looks larger than it is. When I scale it up, I will need to fill things in. Now, if filling things in isn't a problem for me, I will go right ahead and do so.

But will my players agree? If I make two kingdoms of Hawkshire and Silverwind within the "Stormwind sphere" and have them fight over something, that will break lore. Those places don't exist, but if Stormwind was a "real" place and a "real" Kingdom, they should. Just like medieval England is not just London and some land around it. And maybe one or two villages.

If my players are cool with expanding the universe, this will work. If they are strict lore followers, this will not fly at all. Then again, do I even want to play in a universe where everything is so tied to the lore? The lore is cool but very strong, and I feel if using it makes life more difficult, then...why?

Some projects are easy, this one is not. If the big attraction here is WoW, then breaking lore is going to mess things up. But keeping the lore as-is introduces a sort of "videogame sized" world into a reality where it doesn't make much sense. I want there to be more room, more places, and the freedom to expand upon the world other than "game standard" places. If I am going to go and play only in game locations with game-standard content I might as well just play the MMO.

I wonder how the old d20 version of this RPG handled this, I never got into that because most of it is non-cannon now and the books are of lesser value to me.

So I am stuck. I don't want to do a lot of fill-in work (that players won't accept) and I don't want to break lore too much, so I am feeling the "go with what's in game" burn. And instantly my interest is lessened, and this is possibly another casualty of conversion-itis. It's a problem of converting a videogame to a pen-and-paper game - what lore we have is based on the game and that is hard to escape. WoW maybe will just be something that will be difficult to be anything more than just a videogame.

Is the lore even there for a larger, more realistic world?

Maybe Golarion is a better fit for this project. Maybe I can adopt the WoW feeling and make it work in that universe. Some things just may convert easier than others because they are based on something closer to reality. Still, I want this conversion to work. It's a tough thing.

I need to think more about this.