What really needs to happen is to combine your various ideas. Personally, I like to visualize what I'm thinking about. Sometimes I draw a rough picture, make an outline in a word document, or a table. To help I actually made a rough table, this site won't let me attach the document, so I have a base picture and filled picture for you all.
Figure 1
Figure 2
Now let us go through the process of creating a Chimera. There are a few options seeing how we have this table. Much like with the tables provided in the Dungeons and Dragons Dungeon Master Manual we can use any form of Random Number Generator (RNG). This can be dice, a program in excel or google spreadsheets, or seeing how we have eleven option we can pull from a playing card deck. Aces are elven, and we can ignore Kings, Queens, and Jacks.
After that it falls to you how many times you want to use your RNG. For an example I will draw three times. . . . . . . . I got a 4 of clubs, 2 of spades, a King which we don't care about, so I drew again and got an Ace.
Currently our Chimera has Elves as provided in the regular D&D mythos, A dwarf with half a beard, and Finally a plot which involves someone good murdering at night. Is this something we would want to use? Do any extra ideas or direction come from this?
That's what should be taken away. With world building things need to work and make sense within the world. Otherwise there will be no suspension of disbelief which allows players to get into this world being created. This process is arbitrary and constant, even as a game is being played.
For example, my Saturday group started their campaign in a squalored city. After a five sessions they've made a name for themselves and are learning to go out into the world. Initially they didn't need to worry about where to sleep, how to keep watch, travel time, nor how much food they had. The practical reason is because I wasn't sure how to track that. The reason I gave them is that in the city they were working with guards and simply sleeping in Broken Bridge Tower, which was a dilapidated guard barracks in the middle of gang territory.
This is also where I introduced random encounters to them. Remember this is a group that likes the fights the most. That means the more fights that happen the better. I wrote in some leaflet paper a few rough hostiles outline and simply rolled a dice whenever they left the city. Fortunately they got this one.
Figure 3
Now my inspiration for figure 3 was simply a level 3 ranger from the Player Hand Book, along with just how powerful my girlfriend's level one ranger was. Having enemies that behave similarly to a player is dangerous in this game, as players have more thought in actions and far more capabilities. But what does this have to do with continually modifying our Chimera?
Well the best example is that they never did anything for the first few days of travel to provoke a fight from him. A month before this game I had watched The Ghost and the Darkness, so I added elements of that. Wide open tall grassland without wildlife, just silence. All characters with high perception were told they were being watched. To throw them off I added the ranger ability of Animal Handler, which simply meant he had a pet. I already had a hawk listed elsewhere in my journal so I used that.
For the first two nights the party wasted time shooting at the hawk, and keeping an eye in the sky rather than on the ground. The party's warrior, Bruce Nightvale, decided that he should set the brush on fire. He attempted to steal some fire starter, an il flask, from another player and was kicked in the groin. This would lead to some issues later on.
Several hours later, in the game world, I decided they should just fight the guy. Looking at the table everyone thought they had gotten the strange hawk to leave, and they were all fine. It al started with the hawk appearing once more and an arrow hitting the human cleric, Father Marks. The Deranged Ranger had the player ability of favored enemy. What that means is he was more likely to hit a target that was his favored enemy. It could be a monster group like Giants, Elementals, or Demons. Yet, he's deranged. So instead he had the second option of two humanoid characters. His being orc, which wasn't anyone in the party, and human which was everyone except the Halfling thief Sharp.
Father Marks had such high armor, he never took damage before. This fight would lead to him almost dying, which when your healer/ heavy hitter is about to die, it makes people anxious. Bruce Nightvale, decided they should set things on fire again. He proceeded to prove how chaotic and evil his alignment was by attempting to steal Sharp's oil flasks to help start said fire. This actually set up four rounds of combat, in the game world 24-48 seconds but for the players 4 loops around the table of people spending their turn, so for them twenty minutes. This meant it was really Father Marks and the female barbarian Olga the Dainty fighting the Deranged Ranger, while the warrior and Halfling just kicked punched each other over an oil flask.
He eventually did start a fire, but ne where the barbarian and the cleric was in danger as well. Eventually though the Sharp managed to get into the fight. Not being a favored enemy the Deranged Ranger had a much harder time at hitting her than he did their plate armor covered Cleric. Then comes the next improvised twist.
The party thought that this person was too great at fighting to be a random bandit, rather than it from them not fighting as a team which was happening more and more, due to them feeling combat was too easy on average. This would lead to an exchange where Olga would take the Good aligned character Father Marks back to a wagon they had to heal. The two evil aligned character then proceeded to torture the ranger. Now I could have gone "I just hate ye homans *hacks and spits on your face.*" The players though speculated he was hired, so I went with that. He stated in lose terms that he was hired "to go kill me sum cantankerous adventuras." (I gave him a cliché old prospector voice).
That's the thing with Chimeraization. You are never really done with the adventure because something will always pop up or players will not act as you initially thought. Remember it isn't your story the players are in, its their story and you simply manage the world. The whole mythos being created is a collaborative effort. I didn't intend for the ranger to end up stalking the party for three days, nor that he would have a hawk friend, or even have been hired by the villain.
Figure 4
I've mentioned before that the game I play with my girlfriend is more free form than my Saturday group. I learned from the Deranged Ranger encounter that random encounters can be really fun. The point of them is never to be easy, its to make getting to and from places a feat in its own right. To accomplish that if I state a road is dangerous I better include something nasty. Goal is never to kill the party for me, it's to create a captivating experience.
Figure 4 shows a small booklet I made for her campaign. There is no set in stone overarching plot. This is the most Chimeraization for a campaign I can get. Her character wanted to know about a random giant she had to kill. She also felt bored cause there wasn't anyone else playing with us, it was just her and me as DM. When she was in a tavern I pulled out an old character sheet for a human Paladin, and asked her if she knew him and how.
I made up that he had just recently gotten down collecting zombie parts for a local High-Elf Magister, Garivald Kalic. Someone the barkeep told my girlfriend's character, Chandra Golondel, might know a thing or two about the giant issue. It was spontaneous but it didn't feel forced cause she wanted someone to bounce her character's personality off of. A human vengeance paladin, someone who is just obsessed with killing a particular thing to where they have fervent magic power, was great for an anti social half-elf ranger who hates humans.
Figure 4 shows some basic and custom non-player characters (NPCS) that I can pull out at any point. This means she can do whatever, and I won't be left confused and rifling through a pdf on my phone on what she should be fighting or seeing. That's more into prep work, so we'll end that train of thought.
How about a recap? Chimeraization is hyberdizing your ideas into something you can use. We really talked about using it to create enemies and a campaign setting, or world. We can talk about specifically creating a character at another point, as the character creation is often daunting for people. Just leave this post understanding how important and easy it can be to blend ideas, and that it is a never ending process.
Chimeraization is Hyberdizing your ideas into something you can use.
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