How to Conduct Research when Worldbuilding

I prefer to run my games in a quasi-historical 17th century setting.

I have read a fair amount about the 17th century in order to try and make my settings more interesting.

I have also seen a lot of products that use the 17th century as a setting or incorporate historical things into their adventure.

Some of them are good, in my opinion many of them are not. Well, most often not bad, just not good, just kind of average despite the work that went into them.

I've been doing a lot of thinking lately about how to incorporate research into an adventure, campaign, or setting.

I think most products that try to incorporate real world research aren't that great because a lot of people approach research the wrong way. I think there are two main things to consider if you want to do some research to incorporate into your setting/adventure/campaign, regardless of what that setting/campaign/adventure is. 

1. What information are you going to present?

2. How are you going to present this information?

What information are you going to present

You're first goal when deciding to do some research should be to figure out how much you want to do and what information you want to narrow in on.

One thing I always keep on returning to is this image from the book Booklife by Jeff VanderMeer. 

Booklife is a book about writing, traditional story writing. It's an interesting book, and the above picture always stuck in my mind when thinking about RPGs.

It kind of illustrates how in any given place there is almost an infinite amount of things to know about a place.

This knowledge is often collected into overlapping abstract frameworks, each framework acting like a 'slice' of understanding. They are, of course, all kind of interconnected, but things are much more manageable when examined slice by slice.

I think one of the biggest mistakes when doing some research is people research indiscriminately. They'll cast a wide net and try to incorporate as many facts about a place and time into their product as they can.

I find the best RPG books that involve research don't just present facts. They present systems: slices of in-depth knowledge that the players have to figure out, figure out how the things in the framework are connected, can be manipulated.

The best example of this I can think of is Veins of the Earth. Based on Patrick Stuart's bibliography he read a lot of stuff about caves and spelunking. He choose to really hone in on this, on what it's like to actually explore an underground cavern system. He picked one system of knowledge, geology, and incorporated it really well into his RPG product. 

I think in this manner it's best to pick 1 or 2 slices of knowledge about a time/place and really use it to highlight what makes that particular time/place interesting. 

If I were to do an ocean going campaign about exploring the south pacific I'd probably do botany and biology, all the flora and fauna the players might encounter, how they can use it, what may harm them, etc. In this case I'd probably have the tribes and peoples there encountering be a little more generic and make the campaign more about mapping and specimen gathering.

Or I could flip this and have the flora and fauna more generic, more just background, and make anthropology the slice I'm choosing to focus on. Where the Players, if they hope to survive, will have to interact with various native tribes who have unique customs and may or may not be hostile. Where they find themselves on the edge of colliding worldviews.  

Both games could be interesting, deeply so, but I think because they choose to deeply explore a narrow topic. Like an iceberg they present systems the players don't know much about, or have a general conception of, and force them to explore them.

I don't think the particular system of knowledge matters much as long as you explore it in a deep way. Fashion, crops and bugs, the trade of pottery and glassware, beekeeping, weapons and blacksmithing; they may all seem mundane on the surface but if you present the players with an interesting dynamic historically informed system to explore and manipulate, it'll become interesting as they come up with ideas, try out hypothesis, and deal with the consequences. 

I also think by honing in on just one system of knowledge if helps make the system overall more believable and the game better. To make a setting work you're going to need aspects of it that are generic, that may not be historical accurate, that are just kind of background elements. If you try to have everything too historical or incorporate too much research your game either becomes very dry, or very confusing. By choosing what to focus on and letting all else just recede the game is much more manageable and general themes can emerge. 

How are you going to present information?

Once you've figured out the 1 or 2 topics you want to research and make the game about I think the next step is figuring out how present this information.

D&D at heart is a conversation. It's how the content is conveyed in the medium of TTRPGs. This conversation most often deals with describing immediate things.

This is in contrast to something like literature. It's fine to read a book with long passages with interioralism, where you hear the characters thoughts and feelings. 

Or in contrast to film which is very visual and can present information in sweeping shots or scenes cut together where space and time don't matter much.

But it's harder to convey information about the world or story this way in D&D. D&D happens in real time. In D&D you are trapped to the viewpoint of the characters. There is no cutting away. Additionally, you are trapped to the external reality of the characters. It's generally considered bad form to tell a character what they're thinking or feeling or just tell them what NPCs are thinking or feeling.

Most information conveyed to players is going to be conveyed through their immediate reality. To this end I think when you have done some research, or when doing research you have to be continually thinking, how does this manifest physically? 

As it's the most immediate, physical manifestation, that characters will be interacting with. Knowing or getting right the name of the King at the time to me is less important than knowing who the players want to talk to if they want to talk to some representative of the king and how exactly one goes about interacting with the nobility.

To this end based on the picture above I think you can present the general layers of knowledge in some of the following ways:

Anthropology	Folklore about monsters, common religious rituals, social attitudes and taboos, etc.
Archaeology	Material culture, historical sites, architecture, ruins, treasure, valuable objects, etc.
Biology	Medicine and healing, farm animals, monsters, etc.
Botany	Crops and farming, flora in area, seasons and growth, etc.
Geology	Landscape and travelling, weather, metals and weapons available, etc.
Historiology	How history of place is chronicled, how much is known vs how much has been lost or remains unknown, propaganda vs history, who determines what is historically important, etc.
Political Science	Political structures and how to petition the people in them, basis of political power, how many factions there are, etc.
Psychology	Common beliefs about the nature of mind/body/soul, common behaviours, etc.
Sociology	What drives people in the society, how people are organized, etiquette, crime and punishment, etc.

It can take some practice, and I don't think even the above list is super refined, but learning to really translate a system of abstract knowledge into it's most immediate physical manifestation can be hard at times but I think is key to making a good TTRPG product.

Social Currency in your campaign world

I've had an idea tumbling around in the back of my head ever since I read Patrick Stuarts post about using food as a means of granting XP instead of gold:

Optional Rule - XP for served food. I strikes me that one diegetic element which serves this softer play in a manner similar to that in which Gold serves standard Old-School play (encouraging ambition, conflict but also lateral thinking and problem solving), is food.

Sharing food with someone, being tolerated in their personal space, talking to them, being invited to share, are all major social milestones.

Kids bloody love food, as any kids series will show (I am also a fan myself). Getting special foods, and especially being *served* special foods, and sharing food and certain drinks, is almost a marker of your integration into local societies and your ability to integrate others.

If the old witch serves you Tea, that’s one point, if you can get her to bake you a cake, that’s another, or provide a feast for the Village, that’s a treasure hoard.

It's kind of percolated into the idea of having a social currency in your campaign/setting world that is different from the hard currency like gold or silver or whatever. Partially as a means to add an interesting dimension to your setting and partially because I think it fits in well with how most player/NPC interaction tends to go where it's transactional.

Or well in most of my games it tends to be transactional. If the NPC has no reason to not tell the players something I tend to just tell them whatever they want to know. As, the more information the players have the better decisions they can make and the more interesting the game is. I tend to not hide information from players.

If the NPC does have a good reason for wanting to withhold information, the players usually have to make some kind of deal with the NPC to get it. In a lot of games this tends to end up as vague favors or deals that they owe the NPC. So in this sense there is already an unintentional sense of social currency, the "favor".

However, I also find that most of the time favors aren't really followed up on and tend to be vague. I think it's much more interesting to define an explicit social currency for your setting. 

This could be something simple like food. Where, as mentioned in the False Machine post, each NPC is a simple village person who has a favorite food. Getting to know people's favorite foods and getting them for them goes a long way to getting them to open up and deal with you. Food in this way functions as a social currency and gives the setting a certain theme and aesthetic. 

But a social currency doesn't have to be food. It could be something like humiliations. Like if you're setting is a high court full of scheming lords and ladies they might want to have nothing to do with you unless you humiliate a rival lord, the more public the better.  The players then have to think up a creative way to humiliate a rival NPC and get away with it. Performing humiliations has a social value in the setting and grants it an interesting theme.

Or if you want to go a more classic route, you could use true names. Where characters or monsters or spirts have a true name. When you discover somethings true name it serves as a bit of a commodity, where you can let others know it in order to gain something you want, perhaps at the risk of betraying the persons whose true name you know.

Another one could be secrets. Where each NPC has a dark secret and if you find it out and tell other NPCs you can gain their trust. Although I find secrets a bit abstract. I think it's better to try to have something with a bit of tangibility to it.

Like maybe signet rings or letters of renown which signify official trust? Or handkerchiefs from maidens who have chosen the party as their champions? Or medals? There are a ton of things in the real world that we use to signify things socially to each other. 

Overall by having a defined social currency, maybe even a list of them if it's something like letters of renown, I think can really flavour a campaign and make it interesting. It gives the players something to look out for that they know will give them an edge in social interactions that are transactional in nature. 

I think the most important part is having the social currency recognized as being valuable by more than one NPC. It stops the players from having to do a boring favor for one NPC they want something from and then another favor for the next boring NPC to gain their trust. They can come up with their own schemes and ideas on how to get the social currency and drive the adventure that way and then 'spend' the social currency on whomever they want. 

17th Century Character Starter

So I've decided to start a new campaign. I like to run my campaigns in a quasi-historical earth set in the 17th century. Kind of low magic, gritty at times, a sense of pitiful or pathetic characters who are trying to get by, rather than heroes.

It includes things like:

• Random nationality chart including sample names.
• Comprehensive system to handle languages.
• A way to generate the base 6 stats that creates an interesting backstory at the same time (based off of 5 Torches Deep Origins).
• Some starting equipment packages by class.
• A list of 117 interesting starting items to roll on in addition to basic starting equipment. This list was largely taken from (http://udan-adan.blogspot.com/2018/02/when-all-you-have-is-hammer-item-based.html). The items in it are non-magical items meant to help in out of the box problem solving.

You can view it all here:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/14YD565KW862IdoNdNEaQoc8SF9UwkkwF/view

I've put everything in the PDF as it is way easier to display that way rather than copy-pasting it all into my blog which tends to format all the tables wrong anyways. But you can view a sampling of some of the tables the PDF contains:

Nationality

(Continued from above)
7	Holy Roman Empire	Austrian or Prussian or Bavarian	German	Adam, Benke, Eggerd, Ewald, Hans, Heinz, Hermann, Jakob, Johann, Kurt, Lutke, Mathias, Michael, Thomas, Volrad, Wulff	Angnes, Beatrix, Clare, Dorothea, Elsebeth, Engel, Fye, Katherina, Margarete, Gretel, Martha, Ursula, Walpurg	Asch, Bärendorf, Blumberg, Dietrich, Dürnbach, Faust, Frankenhamer, Gottschau, Hart, Kelheim, Leipzig, Martin, Raun, Schlaggenwald, Stein, Wildstein
8	The Mugal Empire	Indian	Persian or Hindi	Aamir, Abhay, Adnan, Ajit, Ashwin, Asim, Beibek, Chandan, Darshan, Deepak, Farrukh, Gohar, Haroon, Jagdish, Kavi, Mandeep, Nadeem, Naveen, Pardeep, Raja, Sandip, Sujay, Vasu, Vivek	Aarthi, Anisha, Chandra, Diksha, Gita, Hira, Indrani, Jayanti, Kala, Kasi, Leela, Mitra, Nilima, Rina, Sadia, Shanta, Sona, Tara, Zarina	Atwal, Babu, Balay, Chatterjee, Johal, Kapoor, Kumar, Madan, Raval, Saraf, Shetty, Walia
9	Principality of Transylvania	Transylvanian	Romanian or Hungarian	Anton, Apostol, Cezar, Cosmin, Costache, Dacian, Darius, Dorin, Fane, Filip, Florin, Grigore, Ivan, Leonard, Mihai, Sebastian, Stan, Valerian, Vlad	Adriana, Amalia, Anca, Bogdana, Cecilia, Corina, Emanuela, Lavinia, Magda, Monica, Rodica, Sofia, Violeta	Adam, Alexandrescu, Barbu, Cojocaru, David, Fischer, Gheata, Grosu, Hofer, Ion, Lupu, Matei, Muller, Popa, Zamfir
10	Maritime Republic of Venice, or Genoa, or Ragusa	Venetian, Genoan, or Ragusan.	Italian or Croatian	Achille, Alberto, Amore, Battista, Bernardo, Carlo, Cleto, Dino, Enzo, Fabio, Franco, Giacomo, Giovanni, Giuseppe, Leone, Nero, Omar, Peppi, Roberto, Teo	Agata, Ambra, Ave, Celeste, Concetta, Diana, Dina, Elvira, Felicita, Flora, Gisella, Leonara, Lisa, Luna, Orietta, Rina, Rosanna, Silvia, Teresa, Vita	Accardi, Ajello, Barone, Bianco, Bruno, Costa, De Luca, DeVille, Fabbri, Fontana, Guiluliani, Longo, Marino, Pepe, Sartori, Vinci
11	Kingdom of France	French	French	Adrian, Baptiste, Benoit, Claude, François, Frédéric, Guillaume, Hubert, Jacques, Jean, Martin, Pierre, Philippe, Simon, Valentin	Aimée, Ambroise, Béatrix, Catherine, Colette, Dauphine, Éloise, Hélène, Jacqueline, Judith, Louise, Madeleine, Olive, Rachel, Rose, Robine, Yolande,	Bascon, Bertrand, Boucher, Chevalier, d'Aigneville, de Bessay, de Champanges, de Fumechon, de Lagny-sur-Marne, Dumont, Dupré, Gasteau, Martin, Pichon, Rousselle, Thiboust
12	Ottoman Empire	Ottoman	Greek or Arabic or Turkish or Persian	Abd al-Aziz, Abdul, Alekos, Abu Bakr, Akram, Anwar, Asif, Bassam, Fareed, Gamil, Hamid, Jaffar, Kareem, Mehmed, Noor, Omar, Kara, Raheem, Saeed, Wael Alekos, Angelos, Costas, Giannis, Lazaros, Nikos, Silas, Stavros, Stephanos, Thomas	Adila, Aya, Farah, Fatima, Hadya, Jameela, Latifah, Raja, Safiya, Waheeda, Yara, Yasmin, Zakiah, Angela, Domna, Eleonora, Evi, Fotini, Ioanna, Kilo, Olympia, Sophia, Tasia, Thalia, Zoi	Ahmad, Ali, Ayad, Burhan, Darwish, Faez, Habib, Hakim, Hussein, Jabal, Kazem, Maamoun, Taleb, Zaman Alexopoulos, Artino, Cirillo, Drakos, Hatzi, Kazan, Leos, Lykaios, Nephus, Othonos, Tsitak

Lifepaths

Each character starts off with 8 in each ability score. Then they make three lifepath rolls to determine their past history which modifies their ability scores accordingly. Each lifepath roll beyond three forces a roll on the Misfortune table. Players can roll a maximum of five times.

Lifepath Rolls:

• Drive + Early Life
• Drive + Failed Career
• Drive + Fallen in With

1d6	What drove you onward...	Modifier
1	Salvation and Redemption	+2 WIS, +1 CON,
2	Love and Passion	+2 CON, +1 CHA
3	Restlessness and Curiosity	+2 DEX, +1 INT
4	Boredom and Apathy	+2 INT, +1 STR
5	Misery and Suffering	+2 STR, +1 WIS
6	Ambition and Delusions of Grandeur	+2 CHA, +1 DEX

Early Life
1d12	Description	Modifier
1	Militaristic: coming from a long line of men who have served, you grew up playing with toy soldiers and hearing stories of war. You longed for the day when you could serve gallantly and bring honour to your family.	+2 STR
2	Itinerant: you grew up with your family living in a wagon, trading items here and there, your father doing odd jobs where he could find them. Whether because of persecution, or the call of the open road, your family lived in many places and spoke many languages.	+2 CHA
3	Servant: your mother was a scullery maid, your father unknown. You grew up in servants halls of your employer. Working for them just as your mother did, always seen, never heard, until you decided enough was enough.	+2 DEX
4	Seafaring: you grew up on a small town or village on the coast. The open sea called to you every morning and the gulls awoke you. Songs were sung as the catch of the day was delivered and all eyed the ocean carefully when storms rolled in.	+2 DEX
5	Agricultural: you grew up in one of the many small agricultural villages that dot the land. One of many brothers and sisters, you worked the farm and life was hard. Life was dictated by the seasons, both spiritual and earthly, a time and place for everything.	+2 WIS
6	Nomadic: you grew up taking care of your families herds. Moving with the seasons, you brought them to graze upon the open grasslands in the summer and sheltered in the forested vales in the winter.	+2 CON
7	Nobility: once upon a time you had it all. You lived in an ancestral hall with a silver spoon in your mouth. Then one day it was gone, the rest of your family killed.	+2 CHA
8	Religious Urban: you grew up cloistered in a tight knit religious community. You attended religious schools and celebrated religious holidays with your community. At times persecuted, the pain of one was shared by all within the community.	+2 INT
9	Mountain Folk: you are from the mountains and the proud folk that fill them. Forestry, mining, it doesn't matter, you learned much from the hard but friendly folk that you grew up among.	+2 STR
10	Town: you grew up in a tall house in town. Your father was a tradesman and your life was filled with the teachings and gossip of the town.	+2 INT
11	Impoverished: you grew up in the streets of a big stinking city. Wild dogs your only friends, cats your competitors, other orphans your comrades.	+2 CON
12	Pastoral: you took care of your family's flocks, letting them graze upon the hilly meadows in your youth. Long hours you spent guiding them, watching life slowly move by.	+2 WIS

Fallen in with...
1d12	Description	Change
1	Musketeers of the Guard	+2 STR
2	Conspiracy of the Black Hand	+2 DEX
3	The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge	+2 INT
4	East India Trading Company	+2 DEX
5	Church of Starry Wisdom	+2 WIS
6	The Merry Mountaineers	+2 CON
7	The Butterfly Troupe	+2 CHA
8	The Cult of Diana	+2 CHA
9	Veterans of The Thirty Years' War	+2 STR
10	Grand Freemason Lodge of Scotland	+2 INT
11	Northern Outfitters	+2 CON
12	Society of Jesus, The Jesuits	+2 WIS