http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AdventureFriendlyWorld

farms in this kingdom?" Bowser, Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story "These look like crops! Who the heckin this kingdom?"

An interesting phenomenon in World Building in gaming, and certain kinds of Speculative Fiction: the focus of a game or story dictates aspects of the setting in many subtle ways.

Typically, a heroic setting focuses on a handful of characters able to accomplish things sufficiently great to create a story about. This means the authors increase the potential impact of individuals while the accomplishments of large masses of people such as armies and society as a whole are toned down. In order to justify that, the authors frequently extrapolate the Anthropic Principle and imply that it is a valid choice for characters to embark on a given adventure precisely because the world is designed to encourage adventures of that type.

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To provide an example, let's say you want to have legal duels to the death over a matter of revenge; well, in order to have that, you need to have very weak law-enforcement (a relatively strong law-enforcement body takes, of necessity, a very dim view of revenge, as it runs directly counter to the very premise of strong law-enforcement), a heavy honor code on the part of the background culture (otherwise, why take lethal revenge, and even if you do take revenge, why not just assassinate the target?), and a world where life is cheap (why risk your life on such a matter if it isn't?).

Can be explained in several different ways:

Functional - how the various natural or unnatural laws of the universe ensure the universe is what it is in spite of the tendency of its sentient inhabitants to change it. For example, using functional magic and fictional natural phenomena to explain why the world inexplicably never seems to run out of monsters and dungeons despite the fact that a single party of adventurers can clear them rather handily.

Advertisement: Cultural - why people act in various implausible ways. For example, explaining how the local navy hasn't managed to hunt down the Pirates for centuries despite being able to, by a combination of social and political factors: political instability, corruption and occasionally having said pirates being useful pawns in a larger conflict.

External - why the world's rules only seem plausible from a certain point of view. For example, using Lampshade Hanging to show that, yes, the authors are aware that a land with More Criminals Than Targets only makes sense from the point of view of a crime-fighting hero, rather than an average farmer or trader, and yes, they decided to ignore it because this is not a story about farmers.

Note that both functional and cultural explanations can be gradually subverted. If at some point during the story, or just before the beginning, the status quo is changed by political reforms, ideological conflicts or technological breakthroughs, you could have a story where characters used to the world being one way are forced to adapt, fight back, or otherwise deal with the realization that their lifestyle is no longer viable since significant resources can now be applied to stop them.

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Functional explanations include:

Cultural explanations include:

An old-school Dungeons & Dragons-styled game needs a lot of unexplored wilderness and ruins (possibly even a Dungeon-Based Economy). This strongly implies a recent collapse, or people moving into a new territory if you're willing to forego ruins. Guess what two things most fantasy roleplaying settings have in their recent background?

A more politically-focused game either implies a powerful city, within a relatively stable state, or a closely-connected world.

A smaller scale tactical wargame (on the order of a very small number of units) is going to want a very connected world (to maximize the possible pairings), with more Border Skirmishes than outright war. As you go up in scale, the setting will have more and more war and political instability, to better explain why one side or the other is regularly throwing large fighting forces at a target.

If you want pirates, you need either virtually no state at all, or fairly weak states. Or, alternatively (or in addition to), you can use their cousins, Privateers, who require at least fairly potent states capable of commissioning and supporting one, but not strong enough to send regular forces out to do it themselves. Another possibility is lacking a desire to do so, maybe due to political complexities where privateers are deniable assets that states can disavow but regular armies obviously are not.

Bounty Hunting in the classic fictional sense relies on a similar kind of logic as piracy, in that you need a setting where the police are overstretched (or incompetent) or the criminals are otherwise beyond the reach of the long arm of the law, but the government (or perhaps a wealthy individual with a grudge) has the resources to make a bounty hunting career profitable to anyone who's willing to take the contracts. Alternatively, governments and/or wealthy individuals may use those people as sacrifiable proxies to avoid a direct confrontation.

If you want Spy Fiction, you need (at least) two powers at each other's throats (possibly at war, depending on the kind of spy you want).

Open conflict between two similarly powerful blocs requires some excuse for why nukes or equivalent WMD don't start flying. Mutually Assured Destruction usually works for this (it did in real life). For bonus points, have the two powers engage in proxy wars instead of fighting each other directly.

Wide Open Sandbox crime games, or mob dramas in general, usually take place in a Wretched Hive where Police Are Useless or Dirty to explain why there can be so many or powerful gangs running around openly while the cops only go after the protagonist for the slightest offence.

External explanations include:

Flat out implying that it would be impossible to imagine a fully fleshed-out ruleset for the world due to the sheer magnitude of World Building required, so it might as well be kept brief and comprehensible.

Proving that acting as an ordinary contemporary human would makes even less sense in this setting than what characters actually do.

Arguing for grandfather clause: for example, tactical wargames have a tendency to have more and more unrealistic logistics as their focus expands because they're inherited from small unit warfare.

Examples

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Anime and Manga

Card Games

Magic: The Gathering Every plane has the five basic land types, even planes where that doesn't make much sense, like City Planets. Almost every setting has five major races of sapient beings, each one strongly leaning towards a specific type of land and the associated terrain, with a dozen more minor races not so closely aligned to colors. Individual races may look drastically different from plane to plane, but almost always have the same basic culture and Hat. A major change to the world almost always happens during or right before the events of the first set on a given plane. There are exceptions to the last three of those rules, but those exceptions are almost always plot-significant. One example resembles RPG settings specifically: the plane of Zendikar is tailor-made for adventurers. A natural phenomenon called the Roil causes entire landscapes to shift regularly, meaning that entire continents are constantly recreated to be rediscovered over and over again. Developers have explained the original concept of the plane was an "adventure world."



Fan Works

Played with in Bird, a great deal of the worldbuilding is oriented towards explaining how a psychiatric hospital for parahumans would function in the real world. The kicker? It couldn't.

With Strings Attached is set in C'hou, such a world, but it ran out of adventure. The society on Baravada is a crumbling anarchy, and the people are literally dying of boredom.

In The Keys Stand Alone: The Soft World, C'hou has been turned into one of these, complete with new geography, Monsters Everywhere, and ruins that make no sense, as the four constantly lampshade. They're told that the Pyar gods made the world to be more like the G'heddi'onian homeworld, which logically leads them to the conclusion that the gods are crazy.

Triptych Continuum: Word of God asserts that roughly 6% of the land and 7% of the sky of Equestria is actually a "settled zone", a place where ponies actually live and work. The rest of the continent is all wilderness, often crawling with monsters.

Gamebooks

Titan, the world in which the majority of the Fighting Fantasy games are set, is constantly having some part of it threatened by some sort of evil villain in order to support numerous homeless mercenaries the reader plays as. Most of the markets only seem to sell adventure-related gear, though it's mostly indicated that they also sell lots of other stuff, and the items the reader can buy are just the useful things that are on sale. Interestingly, Black Vein Prophecy and The Crimson Tide do make some effort to show a wider economy, and the effects of the wars and conflicts on ordinary farmers and craftsmen.

Magnamund, the setting of the Lone Wolf gamebooks, is constantly being attacked by the forces of Naar necessitating the Kai Order running about essentially putting out fires. When the Kai Order is down to one person, Lone Wolf has to do this all by himself....

Literature

Tabletop Games

Video Games

Web Animation

RWBY is set on a world where humanity is mostly restricted to four kingdoms, with everywhere else being the domain of monsters that grossly outnumber mankind and are out to Kill All Humans. Huntsmen and huntresses are trained to beat back the monsters threatening civilization, but the female narrator of the first episode (revealed to be the Big Bad Salem In addition, the Grimm are a constant, unrelenting threat. They specifically only target humans (only fighting normal animals due to territorial concerns) and large human expansions outside of the natural barriers protecting the kingdoms tends to result in disaster because of massive Grimm attacks. There are villages outside the kingdoms and nomads who roam the wilderness, who are often protected by the Hunters, but they are still vulnerable to being attacked by the Grimm. There is actually an in-universe theory that the Grimm don't even need to eat, and only eat human flesh because they choose to.



Webcomics

Web Original

Critical Hit's Season 1 and 2 World is one of these — it's a loosely affiliated continent of kingdoms, with monsters to the north, ancient ruins of Tiefling and Dragonborn civilizations, an underground city of robots, and even a moon full of Insane Gods and their creations.

Worm is one of these, with the profoundly unnatural superhero/supervillain system existing only because of the mutual threat of the Endbringers, the manipulations of Cauldron - and both are the result of the Meta Origin passing the Conflict Ball around.

—Interlude 29 The entity passed by him, and it leveraged a power. Wiping a memory, setting a block in place. The same blocks that prevented accord between the Wardens and the Shepherds. The same blocks that prevented Partisans special sight from seeing the entitys power at work.

Western Animation