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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9562678" data-attributes="member: 6790260">IMO, that isn't even quite what's needed either. Far Harad got no details in the Legendarium, while Gondolin did. Why? Because Far Harad, and Khand, and other places are just not relevant enough. Instead, I'd say it's having fairly rich and comprehensive worldbuilding for all places close enough, whether conceptually or physically, that folks might be curious about it. Novel-authors can get away with more and more of a facsimile of full depth the further afield the location gets, until you have places like Far Harad, or Robert Jordan's "Mad Lands", about which we know almost nothing at all, and that's fine because it just isn't relevant.But this does point to one of the very important areas where TTRPGing diverges from authorship (a separation I find most people inflate massively around here, even though I agree that it exists.) Namely, you as setting-creator don't have a foreknown, planned plot everyone is following. (Well, outside of "Metaplot" stuff, but that tends to be Very Unpopular.) Your audience (be it DM, player, whatever) decides that. You can't get away with superficial detail at the ragged edges because there are no ragged edges; everywhere with a name or a concrete direction is somewhere to someone. You can't get away with a facsimile of depth.Unfortunately, you also can't entirely rely on another common novel-writing tactic, which the Great Wheel leans extremely heavily on: just straight-up """borrowing""" (or, in D&D's case, often outright stealing) things from other sources, like IRL mythologies (Celestia = Heaven, Ysgard = Valhalla, Arborea = Olympus) or works of mythic/legendary fiction (e.g. Nine Hells = The Divine Comedy), etc. Such heavy reliance on "oh, pshaw, you know what this is!" leads to pretty thin worldbuilding, doubly so when much of the way the outer planes work is handwaved away as just Planar Weirdness™.</blockquote>

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