Worldbuilding Wednesday: Wreck and Ruin.

Sometimes it’s fun to switch things up a little.

Let’s talk about some ways to wreck a hex. It’s very procedural to generate terrain, encounter, landmark, feature on one hex every day. I tend to get a little tired of seeing the same old thing and someday I’m going to build my own charts to determine hexes. So, in order to change up the mood and the theme, sometimes I go in and wreck the hex.

There are many disasters that can befall a fantasy TTRPG map. Leaving purely natural disasters aside, I want to talk about some of the more earth shaking things that could have gone on before. I like zombies, kaiju, killer Planetary Control Robots (bonus points if you get that reference,) and Contaminoids because they’re not commonly found on just any old fantasy map.

Four huge ways things can go wrong.

First there’s plain old biological disasters. Second there’s technological nightmares, which most fantasy gamers wouldn’t think to include. Then there’s the “alien” factor. So far all of the problems have been caused or contributed to by the locals. Last, there’s what can only be called “acts of gods.” Why should mortals get to have all the fun.

Biological oopsie-daisy.

1. Biology has multiple meanings. It doesn’t have to take the form of a disease or chemical leak. What if a society of psychics were infected by a sort of image or thought that causes their physical bodies to switch off? Everyone’s favorite plague, the zombie virus falls into this as well. Have you ever seen Planet of the Apes? That’s a sort of biological disaster, too.

Aside from germy buggaboos, there are hybrid mutations and mutagens either magical or scientifically hatched. The infamous “owl-beast” of Dungeons & Dragons fame is one such example. (Of course we can’t use the real name. Do you wanna get sued? Me neither.) Mutants can be anything from Toxic Avenger Troma tomato weirdness to X-Men hey-this-ain’t-so-bad-mutations. Metamorphosis Gamma, baby!

Kaiju are technically a biological terror. Godzilla was created as a result of atomic power and nuclear testing. Any number of given kaiju films explain the monsters through biological phenomena rather than magic or some other woo reasons. When these guys clear a hex, they don’t leave much except an easily followed trail of destruction.

Technology is awesome, until it isn’t.

2. Technology might be the damnation of all of us in any world. This is not something that frequently comes up in a medieval fantasy TTRPG. Unless you’re me. (LOL!) There are a number of technological catastrophes that could turn a regular functional modern tech level society back into the Dark Ages.

The most obvious catastrophe that plagues mankind even on 2025 Earth is a nuclear disaster. It could also be any power source or free energy experiment gone sideways. Fusion, fission, quantum particle collision, or whatever science fiction sounding thing the GM or world designer wants to come up with is fair game here. There’s also the fantasy version of this catastrophe.

Magic is a form of technology in most fantasy TTRPGs. Teleportation, long distance communication, personal flight/levitation, destruction of epic magnitudes like disintegration rays, and so much more can be accomplished with magic. I was in a D&D campaign where a town had suffered the wrath of multiple magical meteor blasts that made a regular Fireball seem more like a firecracker. That’s when we knew the rival mage kingdom was getting desperate.

Not everything has to go beep-boop, either. Yes, AI driven fusion powered robots would definitely make things interesting if you don’t mind your PCs packing firearms and rocket launchers or worse yet, lasers. Golems, portals, summoning rituals gone wrong, and elemental plane shifts also qualify as magical disasters. I’ve used all the above and then some. There are also some magic sources that are born to cause problems such as psionics and necromancy. Zombie apocalypse part two coming right up.

It’s aliens! Or demons! Or both…

3. Aliens. Let’s be clear for a second, I’m not talking about “abductions” or anything else resembling real world ET accounts. I mean anything from outside the campaign world that isn’t from around there. Eldritch horrors, xenomorphs from outer space, Independence Day style invaders, and creepy things that wandered through a recently opened portal (Demons, it’s demons.) all count under this category, too.

Kaiju are a bit of an overlap in this category. Pacific Rim gives us an example of giant alien kaiju running amok after coming through a portal. This is just one of many overlaps in this category. Many zombie apocalypse movies start with some weird radioactive meteor or brain parasite that turns ordinary people into brain eating monsters. Imagine one of those things landing in a halfling village. LOL! (*Oh wait, I did that once.)

I also want to mention one of my all-time favorite anime tropes here. Most series call them “bioroids” or “contaminoids.” They’re these completely inhuman monsters from deep space bent on terraforming the planet to suit their own physiology through usually natural means. They next, make more little alien bug creatures, emit methane and other gasses toxic to regular creatures, and then adapt and evolve by taking ordinary creatures and blowing them up into giant one-eyed Biblically correct angels only with tentacles and an armored carapace. (Too much? Watch Chrome Shelled Regios, and you’ll understand where I got the idea. There are tons of anime like this.)

We’re talking about creating a world where suddenly all of the “normal” animals are now suddenly in the minority because they’ve been assimilated or used as fuel by the evolving alien contamination. There are also bipedal aliens who either warp the local creatures to do their bidding or take on the form of everything they encounter, including sentient kin.

The well-known Mind Fl****s of D&D lore are a perfect example of this. (We can’t call them that, obviously.) They can overwhelm and consume a population native to a world via mind control or outright destruction (see Technology above.)

Eldritch horrors bridge the gap between aliens and acts of gods. Some cause natural disasters just by waking up while others are just eyeballs who mostly float and observe. Okay and manipulate minds to perform outrageously horrible experiments on the locals just to see how they react, but that’s beside the point. Something from out there has come to the campaign world and wiped out entire swathes of land or entire populations by doing so.

Divine wrath.

4. Gods and Acts of Gods.

A lot of worldbuilding advice starts with the creation of the gods and some sort of world creation myth. (Remembering not to use any sort of real world religions. It’s one of the few taboos out there that I still cling to when it comes to TTRPGs.) Most games have a pool of divine beings ruling over the campaign world who occasionally like to meddle in the affairs of their followers.

I’m fortunate that I run and design around Dragonbane RPG right now where that sort of thing has been avoided entirely. I’m leaning heavily into two of Dragonbane’s magic traditions instead. We know the Elemental and Paraelemental Planes exist. We know the spirit world lays over the top of the physical world. Sometimes an elemental or a spirit will get a big ego and start attracting followers, but so far no beings have stepped forward and claimed to be gods. And that’s how it’s gonna stay.

My lack of a pantheon does not preclude all sorts of demons, eldritch horrors, djinn, and other really nasty otherworldly powers from having a presence and drawing cult followers to them Sometimes these beings try to cross over to the physical world to devastating effect. Or they are discovered by scientists or mages and accidentally released into the physical world.

I also like to grab chunks of other worlds that I like to drop into my own. Some otherworldly being just basically grabs a mass of land from another prime material plane and dumps it onto the one I’m building. And that’s how a city very similar to Kelethin from EverQuest ended up in my game world.

There are times when beings from other worlds might lash out and destroy entire chunks of civilizations. Entire cities magically torn from their moorings and left scattered like a handful of dice all over the landscape. Or populations of multiple hexes (kinda gamey, I know) walking around with one eyed octopi over their heads like nothing is wrong. Your characters just need to join them.

Next time we’ll talk about making the world a brighter place. There are some settlements and vestiges of prior civilizations the characters can go to for rest and rejuvenation. I can’t be dark and gloomy all the time. Too many worlds built like that already.

Thank you for being here with me today. I appreciate you. Keep it real, but please strive for positivity, too. Please embrace the things that bring you the most joy in your life.