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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Raven Crowking" data-source="post: 3546175" data-attributes="member: 18280">First off, I don't think it is possible to run a game in which world building elements do not accrete over time.   No matter how much prep work you do, the players tend to take you on angles that you haven't thought of before, or even ask questions to which there is no prepared answer.  So, I would say that allowing details to accrete is mandatory.In a TV show, of course, the script tells the actors what to do, so there is a limited degree to which this is possible.Look at your dino island suggestion again, and take it in light of the Bottom-Up-Top-Down methodology I suggested earlier.First you create your initial adventure location (what you would call creating your initial adventure).  Then you examine what that location implies, and make outline notes on it (in this case, make a rough map of the island, come up with some other major locations that NPCs and PCs might know about, and roughly one-line a few other villages -- name, rough form of government, maybe name of ruler....there are DM aids you could roll for this stuff out of, taking you 10 minutes at the most).  I would also add some qualifiers to the map, personally, from Wildscape, so that I know what hazards (disease, biting insects, tangled undergrowth, quicksand) individual areas might have.  This would take about an hour or so to do, but results in a world where the PCs can choose to map the island from a ship.I, for one, don't think that desiring to map the island from a ship is the same as not buying into the campaign setting.  Knowledge is power, and most D&D players IME know this.  Divination spells are likely to see use, even at low levels, to gain whatever information is available.  Since the players have no means of knowing what is important, and what is not important, to the adventure at hand they tend to want to know all sorts of things that might not be immediately relevant.Better yet, my mapping the island made me include some shark-haunted reefs on a whim.  Now that I am looking at that map, though, I have a great idea for an adventure that takes the PCs to the ruins beneath that reef, discovering exactly why sharks congregate there.  So, I write a brief outline of that location.  I do the same for several other locations that interested me when doing the map prep.Now I go back to my initial adventure.  I lay hints, seeds, and clues about the locations I've outlined.....something which is impossible if I only focus on the one adventure.  These hooks occur organically in play, so that when the PCs finally get to the shark-haunted reef, they have a sense of what it is as well as what they hope to accomplish there.  Or they have a sense that the reef is a place to avoid, and their fear of it means that I never develop it beyond an outline.By the time I'm changing the Volcanic Caverns from outline to adventure location, I might be seeding hints about the world beyond the island, which by this time exists in outline and rough map form.</blockquote>

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