“Aye, been livin’ all my life in the Wöisaen Steppes, I have. Nice enough place, I s’pose. Just don’t go into those ruins at night.” Orda, Wöisaen farmer.
The Wöisaen Steppes (pronounced woe-shen) is the setting of our upcoming Goodberry Adventure Zine, The Encroaching Wood. It’s a large region within the wider Reach of Sehrabadd, with the terrain primarily looking like, well, a steppe. Dark green grass, rolling hills, and whipping wind.
When Ivo Hoying and I sat down to figure out where we wanted our adventure to take place, we picked our relatively under-developed area of the map. Keep in mind, when I say “under-developed”, I don’t mean in terms of infrastructure or anything literal. I mean the idea for the region was under-developed. We knew we had a large grassland area taking up a big chunk of Sehrabadd, but we didn’t know what was in there.
The name, Wöisaen Steppes, obviously draws inspiration from the real world. Not just from the Mongolian Steppe, but from Irish culture, as well. I remember looking at pictures of the Irish countryside, and thinking “Huh. Some parts of this country look a little like Mongolia.” Then we proceeded to combine the two.
Setting The Encroaching Wood in The Wöisaen Steppes forced us to think more about the place. Are there cities? Who’s hiring your party? Some kind of ruler? What do the locals think of this emerging threat?
You don’t always think about things like that when you’re making a fantasy world. You paint the broad strokes and think it’s the finer details, until the time comes in your writing where you have to think about the finer details, and you draw a blank.
Try to keep that in mind when you make things like this, but also put yourself in a situation where it’s forced out of you. It’s cool to have areas of your world for the sake of having them, but it’s way cooler if your story takes place on that forbidden island full of dragons, rather than the capital kingdom of such and such. The Wöisaen Steppes feel alive, now, rather than just a name on a map, and that’s what a TTRPG world, or any kind of medium, demands. If there’s one section totally developed, and the rest just references, then it feels like a dead world.
Keep an eye out for The Encroaching Wood, dropping on Goodberry Press’s Patreon for those subscribed to the “adventurer” tier.
By Inti Navia
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