"Draw maps, leave blanks."- Dungeon World, by Sage LaTorra and Adam Koebel
Just going to start this one off with a footnote.1 This quotation from Dungeon World sums up a common practice in *World games: describe aspects of the campaign world in sufficient detail to give your players something to hang onto, but also to leave sufficient emptiness and ambiguity to allow for discoveries in play.
And yet, a lot of games I adore subscribe to an even more abstract philosophy called anti-canon. There is a growing trend in games I'm fond of, especially in games written by small teams, to embrace anti-canon. A good summary of anti-canon can be found over on Wizard Thief Fighter, but the basic premise is that even drawing on the maps is too prescriptive.
Instead, GMs are given huge tables of possibly true facts about the universe, general themes and vibes for people and factions and places, but very little in the way of actual description.
I've always chafed against this, not only as a GM and homebrewer but also as a consumer of others works. Reading books like Spire: The City Must Fall or Wildsea or Ultraviolet Grasslands, I always appreciated a "table of rumors" used to describe basic truths of the setting, but also struggled to paint a picture of the setting as a whole. I admired the ambitions of anti-canon, but they ran counter to my dreams as a GM.
The adventures of a previous table can be a source of canon. What happened before - possibly with some different players or an entirely different group of players entirely - has value. Discarding that value in pursuit of table dynamism increases the fluidity of the narrative now, but at the cost of the chance to invest in the legacy of the narrative later. This doesn't work for me.
The world of Hearth was designed as a compromise between these two ideals, one of mapping with room for improvement and one of making it up as you go along with the book only serving as a source of inspiration.
The cities of the world will, in some places, be defined in no uncertain terms. Deep histories, complex relationships, factions with write-ups. Because sometimes that's what I want to make, and some groups like playing in settings like that. (And I have aspirations for Hearth beyond just a TTRPG blog.)
Other cities will be defined a little more abstractly, or not at all. There needs to be blanks with rumor tables (or no tables) to allow for that kind of exploratory play.
The space between the cities is purposefully, in canon, un-mappable. Space and time and the laws of the universe all break down a little when you wander beyond the walls of the arcologies. What you find in the wilderness at your table might be the same as in mine, but even if so, would by definition happen in a difference place and in a different way.
Anyway, that's the dream.
1 I'm loathe to start such an early blog post off with an attribution to Dungeon World, but the seminal works of our hobby are what they are, even if we've since turned our backs on some of their authors.↩
