Prep Process: Context Engine

15 Jan, 2025

The Context Engine

Generating an entire setting, RPG or otherwise, out of random tables can lead to incoherence. The mini-essay at the end of the post explains what I mean. I wanted a simple, easy method to layer into my random generation that would add themes and coherence back into my random results, as well as creating fruitful voids for my imagination to fill.

I've decided to call my method the Context Engine, because it's a method to add thematic flourishes to the setting, to unify randomly-generated elements, and to provide consistency.¹ I'm sure what I'm proposing is not revolutionary, but I've found it useful and valuable for my own work.

How to Use the Context Engine

First, come up with a list of 6-10 "Motifs" in the setting. A motif can be anything that's of interest to you. They could be objects, factions, categories of people, emotions, historical periods or almost any big-picture, evocative, thematic setting thing.

Once the list is set, start to handcraft or randomly generate elements of your setting - people, places, objects, creatures, treasures, dungeons, etc., all the discrete bits. Then, for each element of your setting, determine or randomly roll for a motif that will be tied to that element. Add descriptions, sub-components, or aspects to the setting element to connect it with the motif. Optionally, ensure that element is tied in some way to elements you've previously generated with that motif.

And that's it! The Context Engine is just a random generate to prompt connective tissue. You don't need anything more. I'll go into further detail on each part of the process below, as that's where the power of the method lies.

Motifs

Motifs should be two things above all else: evocative, and multifaceted.

First, motifs should be specific to things you want in your setting. You want them to conjure strong imagery, or at least to give good color bits and pieces of your setting. Evocative is the name of the game. Think about your favorite movies, books, or other pieces of entertainment. They probably have some distinct elements that are intimately tied with them in your mind, that throw you right back to the moment you first experienced them - like a sense-memory. These are kinds of things you'll want to grab as motifs.

Second, you want them to be approachable from different angles. You don't want to paint yourself into a corner here by making one element a strong declaration or too specific. You could use facts about the setting for this list, but keep them broad and general facts. Motifs should be gentle guides, something that can flow naturally out of the setting.

If you want a starting place for motifs, look at any setting facts you've already created. Break them down into their constituent elements. See which of those elements you're drawn to, and which you'd like to extend out into your broader setting.

For example, "Every Tuesday in the Kingdom of Kalamara, the sky turns saffron yellow because the Junior Padishah was unfaithful to his husband" might be a great piece of setting lore or adventure hook, but it's not going to make a very good theme. It's too specific, specifying an event, time, place, and people, and declares firmly what and why it is happening. Great for an actual setting element - bad for what we're trying to do here.

Instead, this fact could be broken into several motifs, depending on what is important or interesting to you. Maybe the Junior Padishah or the Kingdom of Kalamara is an important entity in your setting that has a wide influence. In that case, either of those might make a good motif. But we can get more abstract with it. Maybe you're into the idea that the "Land and the King Are One", like in some mythologies. That certainly seems to be what is happening in the example I gave, and maybe you'd like to explore that concept or its consequences elsewhere in your setting. You could also have "Magical Royalty" as a more flexible variation on that theme. Going a little broader, you could have "Romantic Unfaithfulness" as a motif. Maybe there's just a lot of people breaking a lot of hearts, causing a whole lot of problems. If you enjoy writing that sort of interpersonal drama, that can serve as a great motif. You can explore it from they angle of the cheated and the cheater, the people who enable or police those actions, why someone might think they're justified and why they might sometimes get away with it. Going even broader than that, the motif of "Unfaithfulness" can be explored from angles beyond just romantic, and touch on treason, impiety, distrust, betrayal, disloyalty, and faithless actions of all sorts. That motif allows you to dive into the whys, the hows, and consequences of a hundred different things. It might end up being a little too broad for a roleplaying game, but with a careful hand it can still serve our purposes.

The other spot you can look for motifs is from the media (games, books, etc.) that inspired you and your setting. What sticks in your mind about them? What elements do you instantly associate with them? What parts fascinate you and won't leave your head? Steal liberally.

Motif Examples

Here's the Context Engine I put together for my Duchy of Avillers setting, my pseudo-historical cosmic horror-tinged fairy tale low fantasy version of Occitania/Provence Five Minutes Before the Black Death:

As you can see, I have a few key interests here.² First, there's a couple of motifs (Influence of..., Kingdom vs. Empire) that relate directly to factions. The influence of the Sovereign Archon, Lady of the Golden Tower, and Sanguine Soterion are palpable throughout the land - each entity has certain magical creatures, rituals, and vibes they bring to anything they touch. That's most obvious with the Sovereign Archon, who is noted as having "necromantic influence". As I further detail in my own notes,³ he also is associated with stasis, hierarchy, and stone, so there's a lot to play with if my d20 roll indicates he is connected in some way to the setting element.

There's also a lot of elements that are related to the real medieval world (Friars/Dominicans, monasteries; Chivalry; Troubadours & Romance; Corruption/politics of the Church). I wanted to make sure these elements made it into the game frequently. I didn't want interesting parts of society and culture of the period to get lost among medieval stereotypes. I also didn't want them to only show up when they would most obviously appear. I didn't want the only time I mentioned/explored chivalry to be when I rolled an errant knight on a wandering encounter table (which might happen just once out of every hundred encounters!)

As another example, here's a list for the Deadworlds, a set of five systems that form an "adventure zone" of collapsed authority and wrecked civilizations. They are a part of the Novarion Sector, a soft sci-fi, used cassette futurism setting:⁴

You can tell it's a very happy place to live.⁵

This time, there's a lot fewer faction and historical elements. Factions in the Deadworlds tend to be focused on their own systems, and so none of them really struck me as being good setting-wide motifs. The Jian and Caruñan motif is one I wavered on - it's a historical motif, relating to fallen empires in the past of the setting. As noted above, their largest presence will be the hidden and lost treasures they left scattered in dungeon-like environments. However, I decided to include them, because their presence impacted the planets. They ruled over these systems for hundreds of years and shaped the societies that exist today, in ways that will be felt by the players. I realized they were just as valid a motif as the Red Christian Crisis, a historical period which is just fifty years before the current date of the setting and the reason the Deadworlds are the way they are.

Instead, I've included a lot of motifs related to the feelings and setting vibes I want to focus on. I went in to the Deadworlds knowing I wanted a few different post-apocalyptic landscapes. I had specific ideas I wanted to generalize. I knew the Red Christian Crisis and the subsequent war of containment broke every society in the Deadworlds - it was just a matter of degree. So, I added Societal/Civilizational Breakdown as a motif. I wanted to highlight elements where things used to work, where people trusted each other, where people could live with reasonable security, now reduced to something less. I knew I wanted to explore different forms of ecological devastation, from the blasted, polluted wasteland of the planet Necropolis to the hypervivacious jungle hell of Zelotupia. So, I marked that as a motif as well - and there's no reason echoes of that couldn't be explored on other planets or through characters. The desperate, abandoned, post-apocalyptic societies that persisted have fallen to various forms of fanaticism, tyranny, and myriad other evils that make daily life horrible, but feel necessary in the face of permanent crisis. I added the Seduction of Tyranny and Fanaticism to reflect that, and to ensure that lots of little things in the setting reflected that. I also wanted to reinforce the idea that the Red Christian Crisis wasn't solved, it was just declared over by the invading powers once the guns stopped firing back. There was not a thorough defeat, so there are Hidden, Slumbering Nightmares yet still, laying low on airless moons, or deep in the oceans of Caliban, or in the planetary fragments of Arcadia.

Finally, I wanted to evoke the idea that this area is a bit of a no-man's-land, and so noted that one motif will be Exiles and Criminals, fleeing or being pursued into the Deadworlds. I really like the flexibility behind this one. The image of the desperado, fleeing to the hinterlands as they are justly or unjustly driven out of their home, is a powerful one and a good basis for characters and groups. I've created, for example, several pirate bands that came here from exile. One of the leaders of the Calcevermis Industrial Combine - a major faction - was exiled from his homeworld, and wants to use his faction's power to force his way back in. Locations might play host to political refugees, and bounty hunters hitch aboard starships in pursuit of their quarry. All of these still fall into the same motif, helping to reinforce each other and create coherence out of disparate elements.

Making Connections

When making connections between a motif and a setting element, it's fine to go with the most obvious connection. However, if you've set up your motifs correctly, there won't necessarily be an obvious connection with many setting elements. Use the process of bridging the setting to the motif to generate new ideas!

Don't hesitate to make connections between setting elements that share motifs. They're thematically linked, so it's helpful for them to share some other link as well. However, be careful not to only link things that share a motif - this can create weirdly staggered worlds, and deprives you of the interesting connections between elements that don't share motifs.

An element's connection with a motif does not have to be standard or straightforward. The entire setting element doesn't need to connect to the motif. It doesn't have to directly and obviously connect to the motif. It doesn't even have to reinforce the motif! It can serve as a contrast or downplay the theme to highlight it in other elements. For example, if a motif of the setting is threatening monsters or some haunting danger, a setting element connected to that motif could be a safe place the monsters don't attack and the danger doesn't reach.

Ultimately, the connections should help the players to understand that there are themes to the setting, certain conceptual through-lines recurring in the game. These good connections will help the players develop expectations about genre and world and grasp the setting. Players will have a stronger investment in the setting as they draw connections between the themes and setting elements, feeling like their attention has been rewarded. Players will also increase their own player skill, and the connections will form a sort of substrata allowing them to generate more actionable information and understanding from what would otherwise be just random "lore."

The Problem of Incoherence

I'm a big fan of random generation. When I'm just iterating and drafting on my own, the longer I go the more I can get stuck in ruts, returning to the same combinations and implementing the same obvious versions of every element. Random generation provides, for me, just a little nudge - a push to think about something in a way I hadn't before, or to consider how two seemingly contradictory elements can be reconciled. While I am quite the imaginative person, I feel like imagination works best when it's given some bounds. The challenge of incorporating random or contradictory elements generates a fruitful void, where my imagination can flow like a torrent. Plus, when relying on random generation, it's enough to just generate high-level setting elements, or the area the players will see first, with the understanding that there's a process whenever it's time to make the rest. You don't have to have every detail of the entire world hammered out before players can decide to ignore your dungeon and spend eight hours messing around in the starting town.⁶

But relying heavily on random generation has its issues. It's something I've heard said, and something I've experienced myself: when relying on random tables to generate a setting, NPCs, treasure, dungeons or whatnot, it is easy for a setting or world to grow incoherent. This is especially true if you're using general tables or tables from a different setting. You'll end up with a lot of the map filled in, but it's going to be disjointed. The GM can go back and add connective tissue by hand - that's something I nodded towards in the later stages of my first Hexcrawl25 post. However, it's one thing to do this at a high level for a few spots on a map. It's quite another to try to do it with locations, NPCs, groups of enemies, dungeons, treasures, and everything else that goes into a rich RPG world. It's not impossible - but it takes a hell of a lot of effort. Believe me, I've tried.

There are lots of solutions to this. One could throw random generation away entirely, and handcraft every little detail, choosing from menus or creating by whim. I've done this before, for some games and settings, but it's just not viable to do for large settings all the time.⁷ Part of the reason I decided to embark on this Hexcrawl25 journey was to see how far I could go with random generation - to see how far I could push things before I needed to bring in my editorial hand and manually adjust things. I think I can get pretty far.

Another solution might be to collaboratively build the setting, but this brings its own problems. Collaborative worldbuilding can be great, because every person is going to bring their own unique views, which serves much the same purpose as the nudge of random generation and takes burden off the GM. However, collaborative worldbuilding can be bad, because a group can easily fall into the traps of tonal whiplash or design-by-committee.

You could also try to curate your tables. For anyone thinking about making their own setting, this is something I highly recommend. Whenever possible, take generic tables and make them yours instead. However, it's one thing to just adapt a random encounter table or dungeon stocking table - it is another thing entirely to try to create a set of world generation tables that will give you only results which are thematically and aesthetically coherent.⁸ It's not impossible, and if you're putting together a published worldbuilding/setting expansion work it's probably required, but it's a lot to ask for just one setting.

And there's plenty others. I'm sure plenty of other GMs and worldbuilders have faced this issue and come up with other solutions. But the Context Engine was the one that I felt addressed my needs in a way that satisfied me. Hopefully, it will be able to help you as well.

Next post (or thereabouts), I'll run through the creation of a Context Engine for the Hexcrawl25 setting.

#hexcrawl25 #rpg #worldbuilding