# Forum > Gaming > Homebrew Design > World-Building >  Strange Worlds

## BerzerkerUnit

Aloha,

Former art student/short term major in sequential art with a few conceptual design courses under my belt.  I'm a long time world builder for my homebrew campaigns and in my amateur capacity I want to say: 

Strange Worlds was an amazing experience.  Like feast-for-the-eyes-cliche-being-too-accurate-not-to-say-about-it good.

At 44 I can say it has been a loooong time since I left a theater and thought "I want a toy based on that!"  (and I have a small but notable collection of action figures and a growing boat load of minis for DND that I almost exclusively play online these days.)  For a fresh IP to trigger my "WANT ONE" response was a pretty big deal.

There was, I felt, a well struck balance between setting design, details, functionality, and an acceptable dismissal of the mechanical interconnectedness one would expect of those kinds of biomes (trying to avoid spoilers).  The movie just did a fantastic job of evoking its inspirations and I think for small children the act 3 reveal will give them an amazing "OHhhhh!" moment.  I think most adults will figure it out from one line in act 1, but for parents normally checking out in the theater, they might be surprised too.

If you do world building, this movie's world is the work of masters in the art. There will be questions, setting bible stuff I'm sure some would love to dig into, and the answers will likely be wanting and leave massive inconsistencies the True-Fan TM's will love to debate and tear it down with, but in this case the setting was made to serve the purpose of this story and that is a lesson I had only just started to learn to articulate for my own projects.

My worlds had ideologies, economics (macro and micro), distributions of resources and decades of history explaining the most minute details potential players could encounter because I enjoy coming up with a single conceit and then building backwards to explain the how and why.  But what it took me way too long to learn is that those kinds of explanations matter to 1 in 10000 people and the likelihood of any of the 5 people I regularly play DND with caring is 0.0%.

More recently I've tried to create a core conceit with an aesthetic that communicates certain kinds of challenges.  Example: My Foglands has a magic mist.  People that go in the mist get strong, then go crazy, then die.  Some people don't go crazy or die, but outside the mist every has 1 hit die of HP.

What's this communicate to the PCs.  In towns outside the mist (IE "safe zones") everyone, even commoners are deadly.  A single magic Missile spell can kill anyone.  In the mist, there are monsters and rarely any back up.  There are maybe 30 people in their town that can operate in the mist for an extended time so they're almost always spread way out doing their own missions.  Outside town: danger, inside town: safe.  But that safety is contingent on good relationships.  Your Bard lothario that seduces everyone they meet? maybe gets killed brawling with an angry husband or father, even if they're 15th level.  Your Barbarian that only ever intimidates, maybe gets made an example of by a gang of angry shopkeeps.  

Where'd the mist come from?  I have an idea, but no one cares.  What do you do about the Mist?  The mist is something people depend on as much as it creates a danger.  No Mist, no magic.  It creates a format for adventures, a reason for an "adventurer's guild" because only a small fraction of people can go out in the mist.  A reason to invest in the town and be protective.  That led to other towns that operate on different "relationships and motives."  A super capitalist town with socio economic strata pitted against each other for the benefit of the ultra rich, a town protected by a Patron entity that issue a "personal servant that just wants to be helpful" but essentially dominates their entire life.  How other towns uses that town as a kind of Rehab facility and provide support in the form of trade goods and experts to maintain infrastructure so their "citizens of diminished capacity" have a place to live where they get full time care...

Crop to pop ratio?  Nevermind
How do Patrons keep out the Mist? Nevermind
etc. etc.  Finding that balance of mechanical depth vs conceptual aesthetics that serve the stories you want to tell.  Strange World was just amazing in that regard.  Pls go see it.

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