Worldbuilding - How to Steal from History

I've said it before and I'll say it again: a good GM has to know how to steal.  This is never more true than when you are creating your campaign setting.  Even Tolkien, the father of fantasy worldbuilding, stole the language and culture of the Rohirrim from the historical Anglo-Saxons, with the twist that they are horse people of the plains rather than an infantry-heavy insular people.

It may be satisfying to create a whole continent of kingdoms and city-states and emirates from scratch, but it is even more time consuming and difficult.  Plus, you'll have to spend just as much time explaining your world to your players as you did creating it.  Worse still, you run the risk of creating a bland and unengaging world full of shallow, interchangeable kingdoms.  Pilfering ingredients from history makes your world easier to create and more accessible for players.  Once you've decided, for instance, than Kingdom X is going to be based on Charlemagne's empire, you can use pseudo-French and pseudo-German names to lend your kingdom a consistent overall character.

Immersion requires a sense of verisimilitude, which is just a big word that means realism.  Verisimilitude helps players become invested in your world, lose themselves in it, and have great roleplaying experiences.  For that, you need a world that seems real, that makes sense on a human level, and that is readily accessible.  There is no better source for realism than the pages of history itself.  You have ten thousand years of human history at your disposal, displaying a bewildering variety of societies, governments, religions, warriors, and architectural styles.  Steal something from here, something from there, mix and match them, add a twist of your own, and you've got something.  Even the more obscure historical civilizations will add that verisimilitudinous flavor to your campaign setting because they are inherently human, and on some level we understand them.

So go get an entry-level history book from your local library or used book store, read about history on wikipedia, watch some documentaries on Netflix (or the History Channel, if you can find anything that's not about aliens or Templar conspiracies or pawn brokers).  Even just dipping your toes in the waters of history will improve your worldbuilding.

Now, let's take a look at how we can apply what we've stolen to our campaign setting.

"Where Do You Keep All That Stuff?" - Storing Things on Your Person

How much can you hold?  I'm not talking about carrying capacity - there are already rules for that and I encourage you to use them.  I'm talking about potions - where do you keep them?  How many can you easily store?  I'm talking about arrows.  Do you remember buying a quiver at the start of the game?  Where exactly do you fit your 40 arrows?  I'm talking about weapons.  You can't just scroll through your entire inventory of weapons like Gordon Freeman, you've got to put them somewhere.

Most of the time, this is just sort of abstracted.  The character has a backpack they probably store things in, but everything they need in battle at the moment is always right there on their belt, even that cold iron morningstar they found in the crypt a month ago and the potion of invisibility they've been carrying around since their first adventure.

This makes the average adventurer seem like a bad 90s comic book hero.

Rob Liefeld, via progressiveboink

"I don't need to worry about encumbrance because I have the belt of many pockets, 

the pants of crotch-asterisk, and a magnetic back."

The following items in gold are available as Open Game Content under the OGL.  Open Game Content is ©2015 Jonah Bomgaars and d20 Despot.

Food and Drink: Never Adventure on an Empty Stomach

"I'm starving.  Let's break out some rations before we rest," Folg suggested, patting his rumbling dwarven stomach.

"There are no rations," Kyliss shot back. "Daldreth was carrying all our food."  She cast a deadly glare at the cleric, who was dusting himself off in the corner.  

"Hey, if you guys hadn't taken your sweet time getting me out of that gelatinous cube, maybe we'd still have some rations left!" he shot back defensively.  "Or if you guys carried some of the food, for a change..."

"We had a week's worth of rations.  Your saying all of it's gone?  What are we going to eat?"

Kyliss thought for a moment.  "Well, we killed all those dire rats a few rooms back."

Daldreth pulled a face, but Folg lit up.  "Now you're talking," the dwarf said.  "Fresh meat!  Daldreth, go get some of those R.O.U.S.es! I'll break some of this furniture up and get a fire going; this is a vaulted ceiling, there should be enough space for the smoke to go without smothering us all."

Kyliss rubbed her hands together decisively.  "Right, I'll attach a rope to this bucket and draw some water from the well."

Daldreth turned.  "A dungeon well?  Do you want throat-leeches?  Because that's how you get throat-leeches!  No, I'll just cast create water."

"Into what?  That gross-ass old barrel?  It smells like someone stored jellied fish in it."

Kyliss sighed, walked over to the barrel, and cast prestidigitation.  With a flick of her hand, a cloud of dust and unidentifiable ancient muck shot up out of it and splattered against the wall.  "We're good."
~~~~~~~~~~

Food and drink should be important considerations for any adventuring party, because you need that stuff to live.  But, like weight and encumbrance rules, such things are often neglected in favour of gameplay expediency.  A lot of gaming groups feel that keeping track of rations is too 'simulationist' and slows things down or distracts from the fun.  Well I'm here to champion the right of every PC to eat a square meal a day, and not just for the sake of realism.

Making Realistic NPCs

There is one secret to making realistic NPCs: treat them like real people.  That doesn't mean every innkeep, dirt farmer, and bandit thug needs a backstory and daddy issues.  It doesn't mean you need to create motivations and secrets for every character in the village.  Heck, it doesn't even mean every NPC needs a name or a stat block.  It just means that NPCs should feel like real inhabitants of the world, not cardboard cutouts put there to sell magic items, give quests, or fight to the death against the players.

Source

"Stop right there, criminal scum! Nobody breaks the law on my watch!
I'm confiscating your stolen goods. Now pay your fine or it's off to jail."

Let's break it down: