13 November 2019 | Genesys

Crafting Your Reality

Preview How to Build Your Own Setting in the Genesys Expanded Players Guide

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Pre-order your own copy of The Expanded Player's Guide at your local retailer or online through our website with free shipping in the continental U.S. today!

Creating a new setting gets to the heart of the Genesys roleplaying game. Even if you are using one of the established settings provided in the Core Rulebook you still have the freedom to experiment. To add and take away aspects of the world that better suit your games.

Creating and modifying your own setting can be a daunting task, but the Expanded Player's Guide provides a step by step process on how to craft your own universe. Join us today as we take you through this process!

The Expanded Player's Guide provides plenty of new tools for players and Game Masters alike. From the setting creation section detailed here to new talents and skills, to sample settings, the Expanded Player's Guide gives you everything you need to take your games of Genesys to the next level!

The Blank Slate

The first step to crafting your own setting is organizing your thoughts on it. The Expanded Setting Sheet available in the book and soon on our website is a great place to start, breaking aspects of your world down into smaller segments and making it more manageable to create. The book itself breaks your world down into six aspects for you to develop, and each of these sections contains plenty of examples to draw from in the form of charts. These charts can both spark your imagination with a variety of options, or they can simply be used to insert random elements into your world for variety. Read on to discover the various aspects that will inform your setting.

Tropes

Tropes are common storytelling devices, clichés, or both. They can help define a genre, like steampunk or alternate history, or they can define morality, like good and evil. Tropes can be refined all the way down to specific elements within classic stories, but you should stay more general when developing a setting.

Tropes help give your setting an easily recognizable element for your players to identify with. If, say, your setting has the gritty realism trope, this helps your players know what kind of game they’re going to be playing in. It informs how they build their characters and what kind of adventures they can expect.

This section contains a full list of tropes on a table to help narrow down your options or you can pick a few at random to help develop your world.

Technology Level

Technology levels range from the historical to the fanciful. Most settings have a primary technology level that applies to most, if not all, of the setting. Some settings may have access to multiple levels of technology, as some parts of a world advance at a quicker pace than others. However, you should put some thought into exactly how far apart those levels are, and how much it matters to the stories you’re telling.

The Physical World

What kind of physical world does your setting exist in?  The natural or artificial environment characters deal with every day a effects adventure and story construction, at least to some degree. Interesting worlds provide an enjoyable backdrop for your stories and can draw the players further into the setting, hopefully enticing them into discovering memorable locations.

Your world can have one environment, or many environments. The choice is always up to you!

This stage goes in depth on developing climates, locations and more for your world. As always, handy charts can make it easy to spark your imagination or throw in a few random elements to keep your world fresh.

Religion and Cosmology

One important element of most societies are their religious practices. Gods and religion are a prominent part of most settings, just as they play a prominent role in our actual history. In some settings, the gods are going to be real, tangible beings with their own desires, fears, and agendas. In other settings, there may be little evidence of the existence of the divine, but that doesn’t stop society from having established religious practices. Thinking about Religion and Cosmology will lead you to the next section detailing the society of your setting.

Government and General Society

How do the people in your setting organize themselves politically and socially? What does their government look like? What is it like to live, work, and succeed in the major society of your setting? Just as importantly, does your setting have one society, or more than one? These questions can be difficult to answer, and the Expanded Player’s Guide provides plenty of avenues for you to answer them.

Society tends to group up, a table within the Player's Guide can let you populate your world with a variety of these factions. 

All of these charts can help spark your imagination, but don’t feel limited by the ideas suggested within them. These are your worlds, your setting, your decisions. The suggestions made inside are merely that, suggestions. You are the final arbiter of the world you are creating, the Genesys Expanded Player’s Guide is just a tool to show you the way!

Igniting the Spark

The Expanded Player’s Guide is the perfect way to spark your imagination and make your games of Genesys bigger than ever. A system with no limits, Genesys can be whatever you want it to be. What worlds will you create when the Expanded Player’s Guide releases in the fourth quarter of 2019?

Create your own world with the Genesys Expanded Player’s Guide (GNS11), available now for pre-order from your local retailer or our website!

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