A Vernal World

Unrelated?

Design Philosophy

Lot's of OSR bloggers talk about the feel of most RPGs in a certain way. They call it An Aesthetic of Ruin or something and use words like autumnal, entropic, and bygone. Everything in their worlds is winding down. The empires are destroyed, technology has been lost, something, something, ravages of time. It's where all their dungeons and treasure and monsters come from. It's all very elegant.

Unrelated??

I, however, favor a vernal world. My worlds are new, or at the start of a cycle. The world is growing, and is growing kind. Before there was dark times, but now there is a season where people are working to make the ground soft and the rain warm.

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I shall stop waxing poetic and tell you now how I try to run worlds striving towards the sun.

Let the players Make Things

The seeds the players sow should grow, even when unattended. When the players help an npc, that help will help the NPC in the future as well. If the players help a town, that town grows from their assistance. If they build a stronghold, that stronghold shouldn't devolve into chaos when they leave. Things should grow, not wither. These will be the great cities of summer.

Make the World Open Up

The snow melts and reveals things from another age. The flowers open to be enjoyed. It may take time, and it may take work. A prophecy might come to light, or a lost land might be found. Maybe it is smaller than that, like on a village scale. It's a season of discovery.

It may start Dark as Autumn

The end of autumn and the start of spring have the same sunlight. Make the players work for the dawn, sometimes, or maybe wait for it. Things can start hostile. Things can start hopeless. Maybe you choose to start in the middle of spring too. That's fine if you just want to see things grow already.

Here is Found Great Struggles

What is spring if not thunderous? The mythic battles of later ages will be fought now and will nourish the heroes of summer.

Closing thoughts

I lied when I said I would stop waxing poetic. Here's this: The world can grow and that can be just as interesting as the world dying. Let your players grow empires, learn, and strive sometimes. To fight a losing battle against darkness and decay in a world of evil and greed sometimes just isn't fun. To write a bit pretentiously one more time: Things run in a cycle, and when it has been autumn and winter so long, it must run to spring.

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