World Creation - The Beginning

[geezerjoe]

TOP DOWN ... first ...
Draw the coast lines
Place mountains, craters, gourges
Place rivers and lakes
Place forests
Figure out where countries go ... with some ideas as to who likes and who dislikes who

At this point I usually start very small with a particular local and begin working up as I need more detail. It doesn't work as well (I think) for me, and I should keep going with the top down ... developing a few hundred years of history and then getting more specific as I see oppritunities for good stories.

l8r

Joe2Old

 

[Deadguy]

I would add that 'Top Down' and 'Bottom Up' are not necessarily entirely incompatible as an approach. If you start with a theme, and start out with some broad brush strokes, then you can start somewhere small putting it into practice.

My current Shattered World campaign started out by loosely converting a novel (of the same name), but with a great many changes to adapt it to use a D&D ruleset. I sorted out some ideas about cosmology, and the aspects of the Fragments of the world.

And then I started writing an adventure, set near a couple of small towns, in a kingdom I'd mentioned in passing in my earlier notes. In writing that adventure I found where the holes were in what I had written so far. I also filled in quite a bit of history, just thinking where those towns had come from, and why my first dungeon was there.

Since then I have moved back and forth between the two aspects of worldbuilding, adding low-level detail as I write adventures, but linking it into new ideas for the top level of world design. It isn't quite as tidy as 'Top Down' nor as straightforward as 'Bottom Up', but it means that I create only what I need, whilst making me link it all together in a high-level envelope. All told, I've found this approach much more satisfying than any other way I have tried.

 

[Aeris Winterood]

Whatever is YOUR easiest way.

My latest homebrew, (and last I hope) was started by creating the maps of it first on CC2.... When I had the land areas completed (nearly) I then, by that time knew what I wanted the countries/nations to be and where to put them. I then created a complete pantheon and world creation theory and went from there.... still a work in progress, but then every world is....

The biggest thing... is have fun and do it your way!

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

Well, with Urbis, I first started out with the "themes" of the setting ("Big Cities & the impact of D&D magic on society)". Then I thought about some regions that represented sub-themes (progressive Dutch lowlands, Swiss halflings, Italian city-states, hobgoblin empires...). And then I started brainstorming on various interesting locations that PCs could visit...

 

[Snoweel]

Like everybody mentions, top-down and bottom-up have their pros and cons, so you should use both.

Start with top-down, so that your setting always has that hazy sense of verisimilitude (ie. you know where foreigners come from and so on) and once you've picked where you want your PCs to start, go bottom up from there, building as your campaign takes shape (and staying a few steps ahead of your PCs).

Of course, you should have the majority of teh TRUTH worked out well in advance - such things as the truth behind the creation/evolution of your world and its races and gods and magic and so on.

Then again, it can be fun to work this stuff out after it's had an effect on your setting. Only problem is, it can end up not making sense and you'll have to backtrack and tell the PCs that what they thought they knew was wrong, etc.