This is RPG-ology #95: Expanding, for October 2025.
Our thanks to Regis Pannier and the team at the Places to Go, People to Be French edition for locating a copy of this and a number of other lost Game Ideas Unlimited articles. This was originally Game Ideas Unlimited: Expanding, and is reposted here with minor editing [bracketed].
There are many ways to create a world or a scenario; I’m sure I don’t know them all. But I know some of them, and some have stood me in good stead when I needed to create something.
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A few years ago, shortly after the flurry of creative activity that brought about the publication of Multiverser and The First Book of Worlds, I realized one day that I had not thought of a new world idea for quite some time. Most of the ideas which eventually made it into The Second Book of Worlds had been devised while work was proceeding on those first books, and merely needed to be put to paper and honed. I tended to run my players in worlds I knew, worlds that had been published or were being prepared for publication, movies and books and games with which I was familiar–I had not thought of a new world for quite some time. And the fear which all creative people face periodically gripped me: what if I had completely used up all of my ideas?
As you can tell from the title of this series [Game Ideas Unlimited], I have come to grips with that fear. I have come to recognize that I have not, and will never, run out of ideas as long as I am still able to think. But my assurances to you that I will never run out of ideas don’t help you much, save to suggest that you can expect to see something new from me fairly regularly. What you need is a way to come up with new ideas yourself. And as I was driving along with this fear upon me, I started trying to come up with a new idea. I looked at some of the other ideas I had used, and tried to find some aspect that would inspire me.
I suppose the two worlds which came to mind then were The Playground and The Industrial Complex. Neither was complete; yet both were in the works, and showed the use of a simple technique that might help me. In The Playground, I had been looking at those gerbil-trail toys which have taken over fast food restaurant kiddie areas and even appeared at amusement parks. Kids crawl through tunnels, climb on ropes, bounce on mats, hide in pools of plastic balls, slip down slides, all in these enclosed jungle gyms. I’m admittedly a bit jealous of this–there was nothing at all like this when I was a kid. The nearest we came was monkey bars, where the ultimate conquest was to stand on the top bars without losing your balance. I’d like someone to build one of these for people my size. But it also seemed the perfect place for an adventure–a sort of high-tech dungeon crawl. I took the core idea, and found a way to make the entire world revolve around such an overgrown play yard. I dropped dangers into it in a way that made sense under the backstory. And voila, I had a world.
Similarly, with The Industrial Complex, I had looked at the chemical plants near home and wondered what would happen if I pushed the envelope, built the entire world around this aspect. In this case, it took a different direction. It was necessary to have food production, even in a world in which industry had grown out of all proportion. But following the first premise, I had industry modernized into fully robiticized production facilities, then moved underground to clear the surface for agricultural production; mankind also moved underground, and was relieved of any necessity actually to do anything, and ultimately actually to know anything. Thus I got my strange post-apocalyptic feeling in a world with no apocalypse. They had quietly and peacefully degenerated to become primitive warring tribes fighting over the access points to limitless resources. It had begun by taking one piece and blowing it into an entire world.
In different ways this same idea is reflected in some other worlds I’ve done–not all, certainly, but many. Bah Ke’gehn has taken the mythology of hell and built a world which in many ways seems to be that and yet is entirely different in every way that matters. The Mary Piper has the entire world revolving around the shipping trade, and particularly of one ship. Post-Sympathetic Man builds on a philosophical idea. In a sense, even the time travel story, The Perpetual Barbecue, has taken one piece of life–a picnic in a park–and exalted it to become the whole of life within that world.
That day, as I drove, I wondered whether I had used up all the ideas that I could possibly ever expand into worlds. What else might I find or see that I could explore? Looking around all I saw was fields, farms growing food–and what could I do with that? I could make a world in which agriculture was still the most evident activity. There would have to be periodic villages in which blacksmiths and tailors and leatherworkers plied their crafts; there would have to be distant mines and manufacturers dealing in the iron and other materials which would filter down into the smiths and other tradesmen. There would have to be traders, minstrels, religious leaders, and many other kinds of activities within the context of this world. But ultimately, it would be farms. I would call it Farmland.
I saw my problem right away. This might not be an idyllic paradise–after all, the outhouse is not so comfortable as indoor plumbing, and a wood stove is a lot more work to keep you warm than a gas furnace–but neither was it an especially dangerous place to be. A player character could stay here for years and never have anything more exciting happen than, for example, the village blacksmith offers him an apprenticeship and the hand of his daughter. I needed something that would make it exciting and dangerous at some point, or it would be dull and safe. I came up with something; and then I came up with something else. First, I realized that my player characters are versers–they come from many other worlds, and bring with them many strange abilities and devices. It would be a very small misunderstanding for someone to think that something they did, such as listen to a CD player, was witchcraft. And so I could run my peaceful scenario into a witch hunt, in which the character had little chance of proving his innocence no matter what he did. But there was another possibility. What if there are aliens out there with high technology, looking for primitive races to enslave? Finding earth, they begin with survey missions in preparation for invasion–nothing big expected, since after all these are low-tech primitives compared to the aliens. To the people of this world, the sudden appearance of spaceships could only mean demons signaling the end of all things. To the player character, flying saucers may not be seen every day, but he knows what they are. He can be given the challenge of helping this world defend itself against an alien invasion.
I present all this to you because it has helped me. I’ve created many worlds since then. Not all have originated from this principle of expanding a single aspect of life into the dominant part of reality; but many of them have. It is a way of stimulating ideas; once you have ideas, you can start putting them together into something worthwhile.
[Next week, something different.]
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Next article: Stars.