A big part of why I got into Ateez in the first place is because I was extremely fascinated by the world the story took place in. Though the name Strictland leaves much to be desired - and it took weeks before @iluluilui and I could say it with a straight face - the concept of a city that preys on its citizens' feelings was fascinating.
There is no easy way to summarise Ateez’s storyline, and trying to do that would mean making an entirely separate post (which I’ll maybe do at some point). Instead, here are some general things to know: in addition to visual storytelling in the music videos that are up to interpretation, there are also Diary entries with the albums that have the canonical storyline. There is a wiki maintained by @tothisemptiness with summaries of all canonical information, and a recent 400+ side ppt made by @/joongiephilia on twitter where they analyse the diaries alongside the music videos, concert extras, and a million other things. Not all of this is necessary to understand Utopia (barring maybe needing to read the diaries to understand the eras) but it is all worth mentioning.
Generally when I worldbuild, I like to have a visual of the setting before I get into the details. I find that if a place has a visual identity, it becomes easier to compile features and traits. In my initial designs for Strictland, I wanted to match it to the aesthetics from the music videos. I started, as one does, with the harsh brutalism of the Movement EP. Brutalism is an easy thing to incorporate into a dystopia, it's almost ubiquitous in the genre. Another feature I wanted to integrate (inspired by the song Sector 1) was the concept of several separated sectors of the city that players could explore. The original design was a honeycomb, with each sector walled off, and sector one in the centre, slightly above the rest. I scrapped it because, frankly, it was a bit boring, and somewhat cliche looking in my head.
A second design I had in mind was much more complicated. I designed it to be somewhat staircase-like. It's difficult to explain, so I’ve added a rough sketch sketch. The idea was that the lower sectors lived (literally) in the shadows of the upper sectors, where the ruling class (so to speak) primarily stayed. It would also serve to explain the differences in architecture - the aforementioned brutalism in Movement, and the cyberpunk cityscapes of the Outlaw EP. That way players could decide what their campaigns looked like, if each sector had a distinct space carved out.
The issue with this one was primarily in its design. It's difficult to represent and hard to describe. The concept worked on paper but required too much assembly to be realistic within the somewhat-canonical age of the city. There’s no actual canonical World Z timeline, of course, but it's safe to assume the city’s transformation into the state it is in now was gradual, rather than being constructed whole-cloth to fit into Z’s machinations (I did disregard this when I made Wonderland, but only to allow for folklore/mythology in the world, which I think is an important part of world building). While it isn’t unreasonable that the architecture of the city followed the newer reforms, building a spiral staircase-like structure requires a bit more planning than I think the leader of a city called Strictland can manage.
The design that made it, of course, is the one based on the compass. Apart from fitting in with the themes of Ateez’s storyline and also being based on iconography from several music videos, it also allowed for 8 main sectors (a number that comes up a lot for obvious reasons) and the central Sector 1, which functions as the governing center of the city. The disproportionate sizes of the sectors, with Sectors 2 to 5 being smaller than Sectors 6 to 9, allowed for each sector to be assigned a specific purpose and allowed for architectural dissimilarities between them. Of course, there is some assembly required for this version of the city as well, but it seemed slightly more achievable. Those of you who may be architects or urban planners who are upset at the slightest implication of this being an achievable expansion, I would ask you to suspend your disbelief and not be mean to me.
Each sector being unique in its functions was partially to add to the dystopian-ness of it all, but also to give players the choice to decide what the campaign they were playing in would look like. Would it be in the swanky halls of The Mist in Sector 5 or would they be sneaking through the industrial plants of Sector 8? Each sector’s purpose, seen in the image below, mostly corresponds to what I think would be interesting settings for campaigns, rather than how I think a city would function.
That’s not to say there was no thought into how the city would function. Each sector has a purpose, whether it's economic or just vanity. They’re listed in detail in the official guide, but here are the barest bones of what each sector does. A good deal of the placements of the sectors (like 8 being next to 4) was done to facilitate each sector’s greatest needs.
I also wanted to account for the fact that a large chunk of our audience would not be used to TTRPGs, or PbtA systems, and so we included locations and rumours to kickstart the process of worldbuilding and campaign/character planning. The rumours could be plot hooks, and the locations can be start points for backstories - in the campaign I ran for my friends, each of them chose one location for their characters to be ‘working’ at, anchoring them to the city and their respective sectors in a big way.
There was a lot of stuff that was scrapped - this was an expanded continent map of world z, made with a specific campaign idea in mind. The expanded map had settlements, important locations and vast swathes of empty land for GMs to build upon, but it made the game just a bit too big for me to deal with at the time. Maybe in the future, we’ll come back to this idea in some kind of expansion, assuming, of course that Golden Hour Pt. 4 doesn't completely change our understanding of these worlds
