66 - A Powerful Worldbuilding Tool with Steel Stash - Part Two

B01_17 - OPE - Final Half of ASCOPE === In this continuation of our, ASCOPE PMESII discussion Steel Stash lays down the law on how we make the best use of this flexible worldbuilding tool. Let's talk ASCOPE PMESII. Welcome to the WorldCraft Club podcast, a show for dungeon, masters, writers, and storytellers designed to help you build rich immersive settings that will bring your audience back time and time again. I'm your host, James. And today we're continuing the second half of the discussion. We undertook a couple of weeks back with our guest. SteelStash: / I'm John aka a Steel Stash. I am one of the co-founders of the Black Dragon Dungeon Company and the host of Lonely TTRPG, the Solo actual Play and review podcast. (link in the shownotes) To get you back up to speed though. I'll give you the basic rundown. ASCOPE PMESII is a tool that's used by military folks to define an operational area. it's supposed to streamline the explanation of the area and provide clarity to whoever is operating there. ASCOPE stands for area, structures, capabilities, organizations, people, and events. PMESII P M E S I I. Stands for political, military, economic, social, infrastructure, and information. You want to provide an, ASCOPE for each letter of your PMESII Stash has been using his setting of the city state of nightside to serve as an example. Because the city is primarily military focused. We began with the 'M' in PMESII. But as you'll soon, see, when you develop settings, these definitions tend to blur on the relative scope of your exploration begins to creep. This can be incredibly useful, but also a potential pitfall. A lot of our discussion to follow is about setting up effective guard rails to make the most out of the tool without spitting into the stratosphere. For the second part, I'm going to dump us all right in the middle of the action. in the first half, we covered area, structures, and capabilities. This leaves organizations, people and events. We're starting with organizations. SteelStash: This is where your groups in factions are gonna go. It's gonna be your political parties, it's gonna be your military units. It's going to be your major news conglomerates. it's gonna be your, entertainment. It's gonna be your entertainment conglomerates. you know, so like, It's gonna be your tribes, families, that sort of thing. Any type of non-government organizations that you have, so your nonprofits,all that, all that type of stuff. And you want, honestly, best way to do, best way to do something like this from a worldbuilding standpoint is to list out the organization's and factions that you want. Do, like a brief, like this one would honestly work better almost as a spider web, uh, where you list out what you want, you list out how they are connected to each other, or how they're anta antagonistic to each other in that particular realm. And then, you know, write your percentages for it. So, you know, for example, looking at, looking at US political parties because it's easy, because we only have two. You know, if we were to do the political organization for America as a whole, it would be Republican, Democrat, and you know, something like 51 to 49%. James: yeah. SteelStash: and then like a couple sentence brief sentences on what those organizations care about. from a military standpoint, uh, going back to the city, state of night slide, James: Hmm. SteelStash: I have three major units in my, in my military, that form up the organization. So you have the, you have the infantry, you have the Calvary, and you have the artillery James: Mm-hmm. SteelStash: so those are your three organizations. And then the heads of those three organizations form the Tri-Council. And the Tri-Council is led by the Lord So you can see some crossover in that because the Lord Marshall leads the city, state, and Nightside and defers to or converses with the Tri-Council. The Tri-council, and the Lord Marshall would also be in the political block as well as the military block. James: This seems to be one of the messier components of this, because you're gonna have a lot of overlap in here. It's interesting. SteelStash: yeah, you do have, you do have a lot of potential for overlap, especially as, especially as one organization has its fingers in more pies than anybody else. James: Yeah. Especially tribes, families, powerful families could like often, you know, want to be in every one of PMESII if they can help it. You know, it's like they're gonna be distributing their, their authorities, so they're not slowed down by anything. It's fascinating. This is a particularly important point about this tool and something that I want you all to take away from this. A scope. DC is a tool, not a rule. We're not asking you to robotically work your way down this list, ensuring that you fill each component as you go, and then never doubling back. This tool's primary utility, in my opinion, is in the way it causes your world to expand as you write it. It's a discovery tool. As we hear steel stash, layout his design for the military, we can easily see how it might impact other elements of his setting. The Lord Marshall is both a military and a political figure. You may find that, in developing one element of your setting, it might cause you to stop over for a moment and start working on other parts. Other elements of the PMESII rubric. The point is that as you expand here, it causes you to work on other parts of the world that you may not have deeply considered until now. Stash is going to add a little more color to this. SteelStash: Where you kind of, where you kind of draw your break on it though, is you look at that specific aspect. So for example, if you have a tribal community, when you're looking at the social organization, you're listing tribal, you're listing your major tribes, you're talking about whether or not everybody belongs to one of those major tribes, or if those major tribes are smaller tribes that banded together. James: Yeah. SteelStash: and you're talking about how those tribes interact socially, James: Yeah. SteelStash: you know, do any of these tribes have a blood feud? Do they have attack on site? Are they pretty closely aligned to the point where they might almost be another tribe? Versus listing them on the political side, you would be list, on the political side, you'd be listing that the Strong Foot tribe, you're listing the political values of the Strong Foot tribe. You know, they believe in, they believe in strength projection and, everything like that because your social influence and your political influence while similar, might not always be the same. because your social influence, might extend a whole lot more than your political influence, uh, for, I'm trying to think of a real world example. Would it be fair to say in some ways, and this, this may be maybe a stretch, so, you know, if I'm kind of breaking this a bit much, let me know, but I almost feel like you could take individual groups, individual factions or organizations. I feel like they almost deserve their own sort of separate treatment. James: Like, you could take each one, and I like your idea of organizing it by a web. the way that I've, I've kind of typically done it is almost like each faction I've kind of gone, who are their allies? Who are their enemies? What are they good at? Is like what I want to know about each faction, SteelStash: Yeah. And that's bare minimum of what you need. James: yeah, but with, with this, I kind of feel like you can, you could almost take each faction and just PMESII them, you know what I mean? Like, which is kind of, which is where I almost like hear you going where you're kind of like saying, we've got a tribe. And they have, they have an organization that. Sort of views all of this stuff in, in, in a certain context, a certain way. Here's how they're organized politically. Here's their military assets, their economic, is that, what do you think? SteelStash: Al so almost, and like try James: like I, I'm airy about it. SteelStash: with, with. The problem with tribal and our understanding of tribal, is we know that, we know that, and this would be another point for this would be another point for the social organization, um, is tribal doesn't, doesn't tend to follow boundaries on a map. James: yeah. SteelStash: So for ex, yeah, so for example, the Kurds in the Middle East, James: Yeah. SteelStash: The Middle Eastern Kurds, they have a lot of social influence in the Kurdistan region, which encompasses parts of Turkey, Syria, and Iraq. James: Yeah. SteelStash: But it is not its own country. James: Yeah. SteelStash: So you have the Kurdish traditions and like the Kurdish tribes and everything in that. and I know we're talking about tribes and I just mentioned an ethnic group, so I apologize for that, but like similar concept, or similar application I should say. the, their region doesn't align with the geographic boundaries on the map. So in that region, they have a lot of social influence and social organization, but they don't have a lot of political organization because at the end of the day, they, at the end of the day, the Kurdish political organization in Kurdistan is split between the three countries that actually quote unquote own it. James: yeah. SteelStash: So yeah, you could kind of do it for the tribe, but again, that's where doing area first is important James: Yeah. Yeah. You're kind of identifying your point of interest and going from there. I, I, I think, I think that's, I think that's logical. It's, it's an interesting thing. I think there's definitely more than one ways to, to, to skin a cat on this. Like you can approach this a few in a few different matrices, SteelStash: if I was talking about the Great Plains region, then I would be talking about, you know, then yes, I would be looking at. The areas of influence that the tribes have and how that all blends in. another super fun thing that you can do for this section, uh, especially if you're more visually minded, is if you have a map of your area, make a copy of that map and give all your organizations a color James: Yeah. SteelStash: then color code your map for the spots that they actually have to control in. so like if we were doing the Great Plains region, I would definitely be looking more at tribal and how the tribal politics affects all of that. Uh, versus looking at a specific city in the Great Plains. You know, like Lawton, Oklahoma,I would not necessarily be looking at native tribal politics for how it affects Lawton. because while yes, there is like, yes, there is an effect because they are a large group in the area, it is not necessarily completely pertinent to what I am trying to build for Lawton because there are a lot of other conflicting influences here. you know, the United States Army, because we have a, we have a major training base here. the locals who have congregated in the area and all of their conflicting inf interests, you know, looking at Barstow, California, Barstow, very small town. you know, look, you know, I would be looking at the five families who have just been in power in Barstow for the past 50 years. Those would be the ones that I'd be more interested in James: Yeah. Those are the organizations and factions that I would be looking at. Your major players. Okay. SteelStash: Because again, we're trying to, we're trying to build something that you can glance at and get a decent understanding of. So when you're looking at your major players, your minor players tend to slot in with those major ones James: Yeah. They find themselves aligning in certain sectors with certain groups, you know? That's interesting. Yeah. This raises a great point. Area is distinct and it seems like it would be wise before you even begin the process to select a specific area and go from there. Otherwise, you'll get so much 'scope' creep that you'll get stuck in a worldbuilding vortex, which is always a risk with a discovery exercise like this. The area sets the level of magnification that you're interested in. While a few key families might be important in a small town or city that might pale in comparison to a nation or broad geographical region. Like the Great Plains. This gives you an idea of how granular you may want to get with this exercise. The smaller, the area, the tighter, the magnification. in this instance, we've decided on Nightside. while we may be talking about entities that have brought a reach or implications in the setting. It's the area of the city that we're concerned about. here. It seems like we're zeroing in on a process to complete ASCOPE PMESII first begin by identifying your area. Then start working your way through the 'SCOPE', part of ASCOPE for each letter of PMESII. SteelStash: Moving on to people, this is probably one of the easier ones because you're looking at the actual individuals, James: Yeah. SteelStash: like the actual individuals. Like you could do, you could do demographics here as well you wanted, James: Gotcha. SteelStash: or you could do demographics with, you could do demographics with organizations depending on what type of demographics, but, you know, people, good place for demographics. So, you know, if your city is, 60% human, 25%, half elf, 10% dwarf, and 10% half orc and 5% other. Yeah. you know, you could do those demographics in there. And then you're looking at the major people, the major people within those demographics and that particular, that particular realm. for the city state and Nightside, who is the Lord Marshall, not just the concept of the Lord Marshall, but who is the Lord Marshall, who is in charge of the three military branches who is responsible for logistics? Who, you know, you're looking at, you're looking at your who's, James: Individuals. Yeah, SteelStash: who is your major banker? you know, who do you have to go to to borrow money from? Who is leading your religious institutions? James: yeah. SteelStash: Who owns your media companies? give a couple key things about these people So when you have to come up on the fly, talk about them, you kind of know what they're like. You know, so James: yeah, yeah, SteelStash: major media people, you know, Rupert Murdoch owns Fox News. Very conservative. You know, that, that is fine. James: Gives gives you enough to work off SteelStash: yeah, it James: players decide to chase a cat into Fox headquarters. SteelStash: yeah, exactly. You know. Exactly. James: Yeah. SteelStash: and then finally events and those are gonna be your major events. So those are gonna be your government holidays. All right. On the political side, your government holidays, any type of training, holidays, military holidays, military observances, do you have an annual military parade? Do you have an annual, founding day? James: yeah, SteelStash: on the economic side, what are your, what are your major seasons? Does, do you have a trading season? When is that trading season opening close? Are there, are there, almost ritualized events surrounding those opening, closing a trading season, you know, Wall Street every day. Wall Street has the ritual of ringing the bell to open Wall Street. James: yeah, SteelStash: You know, so yeah, that's a daily event, but that's a major event. James: yeah, SteelStash: That is a major economic event. social, you're looking at, you know, you're looking at what type of social holidays you have and what type of, your religious holidays you're looking at, what type of events that. People like that people would look at for major gatherings. So weddings, cookouts, family reunions, that sort of thing. James: Yeah. Your information that's going to be, this one becomes a little more nebulous, especially with the example that I have because it is military focused. But, you know, what are the, what are the major information events? Well, you got the six o'clock news. SteelStash: exactly. Yeah. There you go. Six o'clock news, you know, every night the town crier goes out and stands in the middle of the, town square and says, what's going on? James: turns up. SteelStash: You know, ev Yeah. Every three months the merchant shows up, you know? There you go. Thank you for, James: Or the melting. The melting of the pass or something like that. Could be another one. Yeah. SteelStash: and then of course your infrastructure events, and those are going to be, James: street SteelStash: yeah. Yeah. You know, when are your street troopers coming by? When are your, one of your pigeon dropping cleaners coming by? James: Dude, that was a cool, that was a really cool mention there. I shouldn't highlight it because it was rad. I might delete this, but yeah, that was, that was an interesting thing. Yeah. The pigeon dropping SteelStash: yeah. Li little bit of a deep cut, but, James: will link that in the show notes, cuz that is actually fascinating and is exactly what we mean when we talk about fairy cake and worldbuilding. But carry on. SteelStash: also with that, you're looking at what is, what is your maintenance schedule for your infrastructure? You know, for example, you know, for example, golden Gate Bridge gets repainted every year James: Yeah. They go from one end to the SteelStash: Yeah, they have to, so they start at one end and by the time they get to the other end, they have to start back at the, beginning again. You know, that is a major infrastructure event. James: Yeah. SteelStash: your inspection of dams and aqueducts and cisterns and wells and roads, like how often are those being conducted? Are they being conducted? Is there a systematic way in which they're conducted or is it just if you see something, say something and then somebody will come out. James: Cool. SteelStash: you know, so tho those are the major events that you're looking at. And in the grand scheme of things, that is all of PMESII ASCOPE in a very brief nutshell. and like I said, like I said at the beginning, you can use this from a macro all the way down to a micro view. And you may not have answers for everything the, the smaller you go, but we did, we talked a little bit earlier about doing it for small towns and things like that. Yeah. You could do this for a small town and it's valuable for a small town, but. You can also do this for your urban campaign. James: Oh SteelStash: You know, you have a, you have a large city and you have your party playing urban characters. They're not necessarily gonna be going outside the city to do anything, but this PMESII, ASCOPE breakdown for the entire city isn't going to be as valuable for your campaign. But cities are always divided into neighborhoods and blocks in different geographic regions. So do this for those regions. Indulge me for a moment while I pause the podcast, because this was raised on the discord server while I was editing this episode and it's gold. There's this post on Reddit, which I believe is a screenshot repost of a tumbler blog. In which a person describes how a strange cultural phenomenon can become a rich part of your worldbuilding. It involves doves living in a city. The doves are viewed as sacred. So people feed them. Because they feed them. They multiply because they multiply. The city has to work hard to keep their city clear, a bird droppings, meaning that there's a whole element of their infrastructure management, just devoted to this. Take this concept and work it through with a scope Hamisi and you have a city with a rich and interesting infrastructure. There may be public holidays or events devoted to the whole town mucking into cleanup, pigeon crap, or perhaps a venerated profession whose job it is to manage the cleaning up of the pigeon poo. Tools like this conserve to expand on ideas like the pigeon crap story or the dove crap story, and meaningfully extrapolate them into something useful. That gives an area clarity for your audience. I'll put a link in the show notes because it's, as I said, Gold anyways, on with the show. James: I, I think, I think this is incredibly useful,in a lot of context. Like for me, it's, it's kind of interesting cuz like, the first thing I think about when I look at it is, how can I turn this into like a, um, into like a note taking tool, you know what I mean? It's like, I sort of wanna, I want to turn into an app essentially as I, as I think about it and go like, how would I organize this? cause that's the way I like to approach problems. but like, I think this is an interesting thing and I think it, it's gotta come under the, that that bracket of tools, not rules, right? Like this, I can see this being really useful. I could also potentially seeing it as being a bit of a distraction and, and almo, do you know what I mean? Like somebody like, cuz I, I was almost like having my brain tied in knots with the organization's thing and I feel like I would've gotten lost in it. I kind of feel like, and maybe a good way to approach this in some ways is one, the PMESII you can kind of do out of order, but it seems really reasonable to start off with areas just to. Just to give yourself some boundaries and some focus. Cuz like, I think part of the reason why even I was getting lost in there is I was kinda like, no, we're really talking about this city and that's, that's the most important thing. Don't get lost identifying, clan and tribal leaders beyond the scope of what you're looking at. Focus in on where you're looking. So I think that area thing is a really good thing to start with. I think you can kind of shuffle the rest to some extent cuz even as we're writing it out, I'm kind of thinking, I'd like to go back to structures now and talk about the capabilities of, you know, you know, this building and like how this would work and how this would coordinate and like, SteelStash: Yeah. No, exactly. And, and, and as you're, as you're going through it, like, yeah, you, you go down and you write, you write an organization and you realize that this organization needs a building, like they need a headquarters. So now you have to go back and put their headquarters in and that's fine. That's, that is perfectly valid. James: And I argue that that is, a feature not a bug. Because the other thing is the only reason you realized that you needed that structure was because you were going through PMESII and you got to the point where you were like, wait a minute, this organization doesn't have a home and like you have to go back and do it. So I, I think really a lot of the value of this is like if you were to go through a city and complete this, right? And, and by complete, I mean walk through the exercise. And I think really what you could do is you could honestly rinse through this several times. You could put this thing in the wash a bunch of times and come out with lots of very expansive ideas. But if you were to just sort of walk through this once, write a little bit for everything, you would have a fairly complete vision for a city that you could do in probably half an hour. You know what I mean? And you, you'd probably have like a. A complete enough version where if you are scrambling for something to do with a, with a d and d party five minutes before, something like that, you can PMESII through the city you're making and go like, okay, I, I have some breadcrumbs. You know what I mean? Like, not complete, but I've got breadcrumbs. It seems like, yeah, it can be quick and dirty, but it can also get very granular. I think if you were to go into it, and I can see how this, this can scale very nicely. So super useful SteelStash: yeah, no, it's, it's a toolkit. Uh, use the tools that you have available. If you're not sure how to use a tool at a particular time, don't use it. James: Yeah, just pause. SteelStash: You know, just pause or just skip it. because again, we're talking about, we're talking about helping create. With this, this tool was designed to look at civilizations and cities and areas that already exist and break it down in a systematic fashion that can be done relatively quickly and give everybody who has never been there before in their life a general idea of what to expect. James: Which is exactly what you're trying to do with your visitant, right? Like, you, like you're, you're, you're trying to give them that overview of what, what they're looking at now. they're, they're not gonna be reading your notes, but in some ways actually it's, for you, it's your own fictional studies to give you the idea of, of how things are going to operate there. So you can convey what's most important to your visitants, cuz you don't want them to miss some key details. Especially, I think you'd mentioned foreshadowing, this is huge, huge for foreshadowing cuz you can go through and if you know what your priests are gonna dress like, you walk into the city, you see a bunch of people walking together, reciting scriptures, dressed in, you know, mauve. And then you've got like your, you've got your priesthood and you can harken to them. And then later on you've got, you've got your foreshadowing set up for when you have to interact with them later. I think it's just, it is just incredibly useful for filling stuff out and um, yeah, I think that's, that's, that's a big portion of worldbuilding and it's a great note taking tool as well. And I think just a back office sort of thing that you can operate with and go like, okay, let's, let's lay this out. You may find yourself using other stuff or writing, you know, more detailed stuff here and there, or notes, however you want to do it. But like, this is such a good, it, it's, it's a good starting point. It can also be a good finishing point, like how granular it gets. So very versatile tool. SteelStash: Yeah. Again, you can use it in bullet points. You can use it as a grid. You can turn it into a Word document with, or you can turn it into a full on document with paragraphs of information and diagrams and maps and all of that. it can be the framework or it can also be the entire building. And then the other thing that it now helps out with is when like, when you see a random worldbuilding question on Twitter or Pinterest or Instagram or whatever, and you're trying to figure out, oh yeah, no, how would that actually work in my world? You can now refer back to this and go, okay, well, so, because I, you know, For example, you know, you know, how is, how is justice dispensed? You know, who are the judges? you know, you can go back to this and you can go, okay, well, we're looking at organization and people, and it's, you know, we're talking law. So it's a combination of political and social, you know. So what are my political and social elements in those two blocks that relate to dispute, retribution, rehabilitation? Do I have anything defined for that politically? No. Well, then what do, like, what do my people care about socially? All right. That they're a very, they're very, strength-based projection. I, for an I, so they're gonna use a retributive style of justice, James: Yeah. SteelStash: know, or they, or they believe very strongly in the power of the community, in the social. So there's this gonna be more rehabilitative. James: Yeah. SteelStash: It allows, it allows you to guide into answers that fit within your world a lot more smoothly. So you're not trying to rub out rough edges. when your player is like, wait a minute, didn't you? Or didn't you say this? Or you get that comment from a reader going, this doesn't make sense because of this, because you are going to forget about it. They are not, James: Yeah. SteelStash: know, and it's a good thing when they don't. But then you start running into the fun and interesting challenge of, oh crap. Well now I have this issue. How do I make this issue make sense in the world? James: Yeah. SteelStash: Which can be, can be a lot more painful to figure out versus trying to create something that slots in there easier. James: This brings both parts of the, ASCOPE PMESII discussion to an end. Part of the reason that I really love this tool is that it forces you to consider some gritty elements of your setting that you might not have otherwise meditated deeply on. What events impact the way your city gets their information? While public holidays are recognized in your nation. I think this tool does a great job of striking a balance between gently corralling you into a narrow framework while also posing some pretty granular questions. It comes with a risk, though. Of disappearing into Wikipedia instead of finishing your project. Here at the WorldCraft Club, we find that this tension is critical and our advice remains the same. Enter the process of worldbuilding with personal clarity about what you want to make. Is it a richly detailed story that might require worldbuilding at a tighter scope? Or is it a swashbuckling adventure? Where hand-waving is your friend? Let's lay out a couple of key takeaways from this. One area is critical to this process. Start by determining the actual geographical limitations of what you're working on. Since the exercise is a discovery tool. You're going to find yourself naturally one to expand more, but stay focused. . Maybe keep a list of, 'to explore laters' in the margin of your paper. As you've worked through this. Too. I think this exercise offers some pretty liberal interpretations. People the P and a scope can be very specific. But it could also be referring to the demographics of your region. You'll need to determine what you think is important as you expand, bearing 0.1 in mind. Discussing this one night in the discord with steel stash, he put it this way. If worldbuilding is like a garden, you can think of a scope Hamisi as compost. It can create a rich nutrient soup for your world to grow out of. You've just got to determine how much of that compost your garden needs. That about, does it. Find Stash's links in the show notes as well as our own guidance documents for ASCOPE PMESII if you want to apply it yourself. Don't forget to join us in our discord community. If you want to have conversations like this with other Worldbuilder's, that community is thriving and it'd be even better if you were in it. Also, if this was useful to you, please go ahead and give us a review on your favorite podcatching app. It helps more people find us, which is always great. So, for Steel Stash, I'm James. And this has been another episode of the WorldCraft Club podcast. Thank you so much for listening.