Creators - a world-building micro RPG

Had a burst of inspiration and wrote this little game.  Inspired by Microscope and listening to mythology podcasts.

Creators is a micro game that can be played on its own, or used to create the setting for a subsequent RPG campaign. Each player takes on the role of a deity trying to create this world to suit their own preferences; the push and pull between all of these deities results in the world you actually end up with.

Start by outlining what sort of world you, as a group, are trying to create. This can be as broad as “kitchen sink fantasy” or “surrealist Bronze Age,” or you can list a few somewhat more specific elements that you want to make sure to either include or exclude, such as “anachronistic technology,” “humans only,” or “no slavery.” You should probably also agree at the start on whether you will focus your game on one particular area or on the entire planet (or whatever form your world will take).

Next, it’s time to define the deities. To start, take three index cards, and on each one write a different priority. These are the things that you (or other players) want the completed world to have, such as “sprawling caverns,” “fertile farmland,” “dwarves are the dominant species,” “unending war,” or “wizards thinking everyone else are just pawns in their games.” If something is your priority, you want as much of it in the world as possible. If you chose “fertile farmland” then it’s not enough to just have one good flood plain, you want land that could feed a whole empire without the farmers breaking a sweat.

Once you have written down three priorities, choose one to keep for yourself, and put the other two in the middle of the table. Keep all of the cards face down. When everybody has put their two extras in the middle of the table, shuffle them up, and then each player takes two cards. Check the ones you got, but keep them face down other than that.

After your priorities are set, write down three keywords for yourself, which define what you are able to do in the game (short phrases are okay as long as everyone agrees that they make sense that way). These keywords can be concepts, actions, places, species, whatever you want. They can be directly related to your priorities but they don’t have to be. Write them all down on one index card, which stays face up.

To put the finishing touches on your deity you’ll need a name and an aspect, a specific trait or feature such as “booming voice” or “falcon head” which is always present when you manifest in the world. No two deities can have the same aspect; they can be similar, but there must still be a clear way to distinguish them if the mortals are paying attention.

Playing the game - Creators is played in rounds, with each deity creating one element of the world per round. Choose someone to go first in the first round, by whatever method you like. Take turns in whatever order seems sensible to you. When everyone has taken a turn, rotate who goes first and start the next round.

On your turn, create one element that exists in your world. This could be pretty much anything - a terrain feature, a species, a settlement, a law of physics or metaphysics, you name it. There is essentially no limit to size, as long as it makes sense within the world - for example, a “terrain feature” could be a single tree or a whole continent-spanning forest. The element you create could even be an event, like “rebels blow up the prison and everyone escapes” or “a volcano wipes out all the nearby cities.” However, there are two rules that your creation must follow:

1. it must be plausibly related to at least one of your keywords (and if the group votes that it’s too much of a stretch, then you’ll need to come up with a compromise)
2. it cannot completely negate or undo something that another player created (for instance, the volcano example above would be allowed if a previous player had created “an empire occupying this section of the map” and those cities were part of the empire, but it would not be allowed if their whole action had just been to create one city which you’ve now erased).

The first round of the game should focus on physical features of the world so that there is somewhere to put everything that you will create in subsequent rounds.

It is not required that you draw a map as you play but it will probably be helpful, especially if you plan on keeping this world as a future game setting.

One other important thing to note when playing Creators is that your creations are not necessarily going in chronological order. Rather, you are creating the world as it exists in its present day. “History” can be created by adding elements such as fossils, ruins, or ancient documents. If someone places an empire in the world you do not then play through the collapse of that empire, but you could add in the ruins of the previous empire it was built on top of.

(it is up to your group to decide what this means within the game setting - did everything happen in normal time and you’re just playing a game to fill in the details, or did the world literally just come into being yesterday but everyone has a lifetime’s worth of false memories implanted in them?)

As the game goes on, things will be come into being that align with your priorities. If it feels like one of your priorities has been satisfied (the farmers of the southern peninsula are successfully feeding the whole empire, or dwarves are still more numerous than all of the other sapient species that have been created) then flip that card face up. Another player may veto this if they think your priority has not been firmly satisfied, and the whole group will vote. For situations where this seems ambiguous (“you’ve got good farmland in this one region, but is that really enough?”) it is recommended to resolve in favor of the priority being satisfied, except during the first three rounds of the game.

If a player has satisfied all three of their priorities, the game ends at the end of that round. That player is the winner, and the dominant belief system in the world will consider their deity to be the primary Creator of the World. If any other players manage to satisfy all of their priorities before the end of the round, then the mythology holds them as equal, or perhaps as the heads of competing pantheons.