D&D 5E How do You Detail your Settings?

[SkidAce]

Top down to build the world, mythic history, the planes, gods, etc. Love that big picture stuff. And there are different continents and locations for many different styles of games.

THEN bottom up for details when the players start a campaign in a given area.

Because, in what seems to be a minority opinion, I've used the same world since around 88-89.



However, the world isn't static, when we do the bottom up parts, the players create stuff and it gets worked in, so over the years the world has evolved to its present state.

 

[SkidAce]

Even though I've been "actively" working on it since 2003, I'm not very far with many aspects. Stupid editions changed too often in those 16 years.

Yeah, I hear yah. "Revising" does take some time.


/side note

For the longest time, "sorcery" in my world was evil, vile, diabolical summoners, that were shunned.

THEN 3E came along and called a class "sorcerers". /sigh.

I rebelled about a year ago, and changed the word sorcerer in 5E to "adept". And made sorcery evil and taboo again. All it takes is telling a new player once, and its all good.

 

[Coroc]

Top down for the rough overarcing story, but then all down, and small scope.

Why? Because you do not know how your players will co-develop the story.

You need some background of course, e.g. what are the countries / cities major populaces, mobs, religions how does magic work, who is a well known power player / villain etc.
but it is much more important to draw your players in within the first session(s), so give your starting village some love even if you only use it once more lateron as canonfodder to be invaded by the forces of evil.

If your campaign has a certain flair like darksun or ravenloft, then try to capture that flair in your small scale. You will see that this might be much easyer to do with a squishy low level party, i mean e.g. to point out everyday threats like thirst in darksun or fear in ravenloft etc.

 

[Ratskinner]

I generally just start with a few ideas that might make the campaign world interesting. These generally don't have to be world-shaking, but its okay if a few of them are. Most importantly, they should have some impact, right at level one. Changing the way languages, cultures, etc. work is pretty easy.

Some examples:
Your world is slowly dying...its greying out and dusting away, and magic is a thing of legend. Then a portal is discovered that lets you visit a magical world and bring back "magic" to rejeuvenate your home. Humans-only.

Its a magical Earth...except that Buddha and Alexander swapped roles.

A new god is hanging around. He just invented Goblins to worship him. They have constructed a huge labyrinth, part of their worship is to tempt adventurers into death. You have to go through orientation and sign a release.

You are human slaves/workers/livestock in a world that fell to a cabal of liches centuries ago. (this was 3e and the players started with the non-heroic classes). Some captured rebels are brought in and teach you your first level of heroic classes.



Usually things just kinda bubble up as play progresses. (Although the Alexander one required the occasional bit of research.)

 

[Draegn]

I started with a map of Europe and North Africa as it would have appeared 12,000 years ago when Doggerland was above the North Sea. I altered the map somewhat. For example, there are a pair of Italian boots rather than a single one. I then added some historical elements, though with different spellings of names. This gave me an illustration for the players to look at and make comments amongst themselves which I borrowed from time to time.

Out of all the displayed world I took a little bit the size of Luxembourg and detailed the city and smaller towns with prominent npcs as a starting area.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

As stated in the title, I'm interested in how you, the DMs of ENWorld, organize and build your settings.

Do you build from top-down, down-up, large-scope, small-scope, small-scope, large-scope, or something else?

Do you create deities, kingdoms, oceans, and nations, or do you start with a village in unknown wilderness?

I've always gone for a top-down approach. Honestly, this: https://www.gmbinder.com/share/-LLf_UIEr6n0GMeSWpKn (my "Player's Companion") might be a tad too long...

Do you bother detailing things that won't come into play?

*Note that "The Elf Queen" is supposed to be "Elk Queen" (in my "Player's Companion") I won't fix it now, because it would mess up the link, but I am always looking for typos.

As I usually post on such topics...it depends.

Sometimes, my settings are utterly generic or straight up published materials. Sometimes I get inspired by some small detail, like Aspen trees being clonal, and how that might interact with Awaken (see RangerWickett’s Campaign Ideas thread in my sig) and build around it. On some occasions, I see the whole picture at once.

 

[Bitbrain]

Bottom up approach. I start by figuring out what kind of overall environment the world will have. Then I determine what kind of monsters will exist for the players to fight, then what player options exist, then what sort of magic items, then I figure out the starting town and low-level mission, then the surrounding towns and higher-level missions.

Next, I figure out NPC names, because NPC names are the hardest thing for me to do when building a world.

Finally, after everything else, I determine the divine pantheon.

 

[drl2]

While running my current campaign out of published Forgotten Realms material, I'm planning ahead for the next one in a custom setting. The approach I'm taking is a little bit top-down and a little bit bottom-up.

The setting will involve two worlds and a cataclysmic event which will provide the impetus for much of what happens in the campaign, so on the macro scale I want to have basic maps of both worlds with major geographic features laid out and a few major cities identified. I'm working on some lists of deities, broad outlines of various factions, kingdoms, politics, etc. in both - because that's the kind of information that will enrich character backgrounds right from the start. I'm also trying to plan out some broad-brush events which will happen outside the characters' control but will influence their decisions and drive some of the story.

Using this high-level information, my players' first experiences in these worlds will be to actually experience this cataclysm from a point of view that's appropriate for their character backgrounds (in a somewhat railroad-y way, I'll admit). So up front I'll need to create a few important NPCs who normally wouldn't be needed until later in the campaign.

Surviving the disaster will land the players in a growing refugee camp which will gradually start to become a town in its own right, and that's where the bottom-up side of things takes hold. I'm hoping the camp-to-town growth process will help invest the players in protecting it (and knowing my players, I'm pretty sure it will) - so I'll have both sandbox-y exploration in the area of the town and story events driven by threats both local and global. As they branch out further from their home base, they'll start to learn more about the worlds-wide impact of the cataclysm, its cause, and the larger threats looming in its aftermath... details which I, myself, only have vague ideas about at the moment .

 

[77IM]

I create almost nothing for my settings except a general idea of the "feel" of the place. Then I set up a starter town and an adventure location and maybe some vaguely sketched-out environs in case those details are needed for framing the adventure. As the players establish details about their characters, which are appropriate to the "feel," we add that to the setting canon. During play new details are added as we go with the rule being that new details cannot contradict that which was already established. Over the course of the campaign, a rich, detailed campaign world is fleshed out.

This greatly reduces the prep work for the DM and sets things up where the players are more bought into the setting since they had a hand in creating it.

This is what I do. I call it the "Theme-First" approach. I decide what kind of "feel" I want the game to evoke, and then I create whatever elements are necessary to evoke that feel in Session 1. If I've done a good job, then it's usually easy to extrapolate from those initial elements to improvise new details during play.

I've also found the following list of 20 questions to be immensely helpful when preparing info for my players. Most players don't care about the setting beyond how it affects them, so this list keeps the focus on those interactions: http://jrients.blogspot.com/2011/04/twenty-quick-questions-for-your.html\

Also, since we're sharing, here's the handout I gave my players at the start of my current campaign. It's a whopping 6 pages, but half of that is art, and I didn't really expect them to read all of the later pages.
View attachment Saltmarsh_Info.pdf