As some of us give consideration to campaign world design, it’s a good time to look for ideas and inspirations. I personally tend to err on the side of too much realism, and must look to find ways to get more fanciful in my outlook while still feeling at least a little grounded. One route is to seek out the fantastic in our real world: on one hand it serves as an example of what is, and on the other hand it acts as a sort of bounds-test for what could be. It’s a convincing DM who exudes a sense that everything in his world is believable to the inhabitants of that world, and by extension the characters, and even hopefully the players. Believable is all well and good, but as with any decent vacation or escapist journey, the scenery better be impressive!

What can we look for in the world around us for gaming world inspiration? I count three items very quickly. The first item is natural formations and phenomena, which serve as interesting settings. The second item is ancient manmade structures, which can be references as believable models from varying cultures and technologies. The third item is modern manmade structures, which hint at different forms that might be retroactively applied to your own distinct ancient cultures. In all cases, the pale images you might conjure up in your head are sometimes dramatically inferior to the real thing, and it’s a nice creative jolt to see some good pictures and find that out. Take for example a picture of the salt-encrusted beaches of the heavily evaporated Aral sea, littered with the sun-baked hulls of lost fishing boats. However you might imagine it, it’s likely not as evocative as the picture I found of it…

To this end I’ve recently been reading/paging through Earth From Above, one in a series of photo coffee table books by Yann Arthus-Bertrand that are, as the title implies, aerial pictures of interesting things on Earth. You can see a handful of such images here. (This particular series has an unrelenting “green” bent that is, at turns, both enlightening and awful. Your mileage may vary.) You can probably get the same effect reading National Geographic for years and years – this is somewhat more condensed.

Of course it’s not all buildings and landscapes. It’s also people and events. You can study history in the same twofold sense of examples of what was and a limit for how crazy things could be. And for plot and narrative and dialogue and true flights of fantasy, nothing beats pure fiction…

It’s tempting to just “wing it” from your accumulated memories and sense of imagination, but it might not be the best approach overall. So, what tools do you use when creating a game setting, other than your crazy brain and a case of Mountain Dew?