CWBP 2 Template Thread - Rulers, Countries & Civilizations

[Ghostman]

You're saying we need to know what the land looks like. I'm offering two suggestions for two segments right here. I need to understand what part of that you're having a hard time understanding in order to understand where you're coming from. You want to fill in the entire geography first, and then put the people in it, as opposed to filling in partial pieces of the geography a little at a time, and already having an idea of what the people look like?

Yes. Personally, I can't fathom how I should reasonably come up with something like an entire civilization when I don't have any grasp on the physical world wherein this civilization is to be placed - because, this being a cooperative project, none of us gets to dictate in advance what kind of landscape we'll end up with.

Civilizations do not arise in a vacuum, they are shaped profoundly by the environment they live in. If I were to try and create such a setting element in a vacuum, it could very well turn out to be incompatible with the eventual collectively determined geography.

Don't you think that's a nonsensical disagreement for something that is accomplishing the exact same goal? I never said these civs were set in stone or that we had to use them. I'm offering suggestions for what parts of the world could look like, and what the people that inhabit the area might be like.

And that seems to be resulting in a tizzy that I don't understand. If the goal was to drive in a circle, and half the car said let's go left, the other half said let's go right, does it really matter how you get there? No, because you're driving in a circle. The assertion that this thread is a bad idea is non-productive. Nobody is forcing these civs to be used. But nobody else is coming up with any ideas, so I put a few out there.

It seems like a good amount of potentially wasted effort if the things in this thread are to be so readily discarded. Not that I have anything against anyone else taking their time to write this stuff, but I myself am definitely going to wait until we're settled on a big picture of the world (including decisions on technology, magic and such) before I'll even start thinking about it's inhabitants.

[12rounds]

...but I myself am definitely going to wait until we're settled on a big picture of the world (including decisions on technology, magic and such) before I'll even start thinking about it's inhabitants.

Herein lies a big problem.

I wan't to get involved with the premise that I can use the end result setting for gaming purposes. Whereas someone else might consider the CWBP primarily as a mapping exercise and consider the world "finished" when there's enough maps to pave a way to the local grocery store. If the people more interested in the gaming aspect of the end result need to wait until enough of the groundwork (ie. mapping) is finished, agreed upon and finalized, there will be no one left to create the inhabitants, political systems, micro-climates, history, cultures and fauna&flora because I don't think the same people that create maps are necessarily the same people that want/could/should create other aspects of the project.

The templates proposed are easily adapted to accommodate whatever the mapping project's output is going to be.