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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jester David" data-source="post: 7325194" data-attributes="member: 37579">Just ran a session today. 5e. Generally a more sandbox game. I try not to create heavy plots but I do throw out seeds that the players can latch onto and decide to turn into plots. But my players do like a little guidance now and then, so I'm slipping in Tomb of Annihilation as a big "heroic deed of legend". The players spent the first third of the session slowly making their way overland to the location where the tomb is located, a distant lost city. But I'm placing the tomb in my homebrew campaign setting, which is loosely a kitchen sink world and heavily detailed. But the players' chosen route just happened to pass alongside a gnomish vault. (Think a Fallout franchise vault.) I hadn't planned that and had very few ideas for the vault. So I planned to just let the players walk passed and use it as a dash of world flavour. Like passing giant statues in Lord of the Rings, having it too sealed up to enter. But my players fixated on it and really wanted in. Because treasure. And they managed to magic a solution. So they entered. I pulled some details of the location out of my ass. Gave it some flavour and tied it into the "plot" of Tomb of Annihilation by having one of the leaders suffering the Death Curse. There was a fight with some kobolds, some exploration, and a huge moment of character growth as a PC had erased memories restored. Which allowed me to point them in the direction the plot needed them to go, preventing random wandering and wasting of time in exploration. This random side-quest incidental encounter, which only occurred because I threw a random point on a map and never detailed it, suddenly fixed a gap in the plot. Worldbuilding! So, what is worldbuilding? Really, it's creating the setting. Which can be as big as making a huge sprawling campaign setting for the players to place dozens of campaigns in. Or it can be as small as just keeping the continuity of people and locations in a campaign: selling treasure to the same merchant, sleeping in the same inn between trips in the dungeon, befriending a local drunk at the tavern. They can even be entirely confined to the dungeon. Say the party has a random encounter with an evil dwarf who manages to survive and escape the PCs. If that dwarf shows up later, that generates continuity. That's worldbuilding right there. I don't see worldbuilding as unrelated to "classical" D&D play or design. Lots of early modules had monsters that moved from place to place, having a certain percentage of a chance of being found in one location. And there was discussion in a few of guards being replaced if the PCs killed the previous guards and left. Or monsters that call for reinforcements or run away. All that creates the illusion of a living world. It's as much worldbuilding as creating a backstory, kingdom, and detailed world to place the modular dungeon in.</blockquote>

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