The real world is an extremely rich and complex place. Just glancing about yourself in a typical city, one can be overwhelmed by the amount of depth and complexity is inherent in the things we see every day.

Take your typical automobile. You see them all the time: driving here and there, you probably own one or two, but very few people take into account the sheer number of people who go into its construction.

Leave aside, for the moment, the engineers who designed the car. Take the paint job, instead. Some group of people, probably including focus groups and statistics experts, decided that a particular shade of aquamarine would sell. Somebody was responsible for the machine that actually applied the paint. Some other company hires people who develop paint colors, swatch books of these colors to send away to car companies, chemical engineers who develop new fixatives and compounds for long-lasting paint, people at universities developing new theories on these compounds and fixatives that the people at the paint labs use the results of....

It's elephants all the way down.

Yeah, yeah. So the world's a complicated place. Nobody ever said it wasn't. So what's the point?

The point is that roleplaying worlds cannot possibly be this way. No single person can possibly make up a world as complex as the real one. It's too big. Thus, the challenge of a game master is to develop it as needed, ad libbing material on the fly to fill in the gaps.

Great in theory, but it's a hard skill. Coming up with that much material on the fly is very difficult. Some people have an inherent skill for this: they are the truly great game masters. But what about the rest of us?

Well, one choice, and the default one at that, is to have lame, flat game worlds. Worlds where every innkeeper is burly and cynical. Where every non-player character has the same personality. Where houses are all identical, even when the characters travel across half the planet. It's just too hard to come up with that much unique content, and many (possibly most) game masters take the easy way out. I know I do.

I don't claim to have the answer. It's just a problem that's been bothering me for a long time, and the Crystal Obelisk is yet another attempt to take a bite out of it.

Crystal Obelisk is intended to be a series of articles fitting a common framework: making game worlds richer and more alive. It will describe tons of content by the time I'm done, if all works as planned.

My hope behind Crystal Obelisk is twofold: first, I hope it serves as a resorce for game masters who wish to make their worlds more detailed and alive. My second goal is more selfish: I hope that in writing these articles, I will implant in my brain the seeds of this stuff, so that when I referee 'on the fly', this material will come oozing out. It's also a good way to learn history. <grin>

Anyway, take care and good luck. I hope this material is of some use: if it works well, or if it doesn't, . I'd like to hear about your experiences. I can use them to make Crystal Obelisk that much better.