Hey everyone!

Hey everyone! As promised, each day this week I’ll be talking a little bit about something that Tom and I are excited about in The Sword, The Crown, and the Unspeakable Power (SCUP). Today, I’m going to talk a little bit about our Mythology Creation system. Also: feel free to share this post if you know folks you think might be interested.

A fantasy world is nothing without a good mythos to it, right? So Tom and I wanted to make sure that the players at the table had some collective buy-in to a cool, evocative mythology that would serve as the backbone to their world. When you sit down to play SCUP, one of the first things you do is, as a play-group, build a mythos for your setting to give it some flavor. To do this, you go through the following steps: 

First, you select several names for the key characters in your mythology from a long list of different kinds of fantasy names.

After that, you select several plot elements from a list. Examples are “Balance is restored when a brave leader vanquishes an enemy” and “Two lovers cannot be together without first confronting an obstacle.” 

When you have selected your plot elements, you reach the most fun part, picking some bits of evocative imagery to drive your imagination. Examples include things like “A cracked and charred battlefield, where tattered flags fly over a sea of corpses,” “A woman, clad in the stars themselves, riding a great winged beast, her eyes fierce as fire and her hair dark as onyx,” and “A thief, standing upon the gallows, is revealed to be the long-lost, beloved princess, thought dead by her usurper uncle.”

Once you have your names, plot points, and evocative imagery, your group has a discussion about how to weave all these elements together. Perhaps you selected the name “Viv” and decide that Viv is the thief on the gallows in the final example in the previous paragraph. Perhaps her lover, who you give them name Taya, cannot be with her until Viv has reclaimed her rightful place on the throne from her usurper uncle, who you call Pembrooke. Perhaps Taya is the woman clad in the stars themselves: a powerful sorceress fated long ago to marry whomever sits on the throne at the next blood moon. Does Viv succeed in reclaiming the throne from her uncle so that she and Taya can. at long last, be together? Or does your story end in tragedy, with Viv hanged and Taya forever pining for her as she rides her great beast through the night sky?

Once you have written your mythology, you ask yourself what this tells you about your world. What sorts of virtues are celebrated? Honor? Love? Loyalty? What does this tell us about magic and the supernatural? Is magic common and benign, or obscure and feared? What does this tell us about geography, or social status? Through creating the mythology of your world with this exercise, you color in the various corners of your setting. What does it feel like, what do people believe, what are its aesthetics, and what is its history? This gives all the players a foundation with which to build their characters and the various systems of your shared world. We’ve had a lot of fun in play tests with world creation, and had people come up with some truly awesome mythologies. 

Tomorrow we’ll talk a little bit more about what’s going on in world creation for SCUP.