Worlds of Design: Worldbuilding 101 (Part 1)

If you want to make up your own adventures, your own campaign, instead of using something someone else wrote, then sooner or later you’ll need to approach world building. This is “beginners notes” for world building, it's not comprehensive. It's primarily for gamers, but much of it applies to fiction writers too.

Picture courtesy of Pixabay.​

“Nobody believes me when I say that my long book is an attempt to create a world in which a form of language agreeable to my personal aesthetic might seem real. But it is true.” - J. R. R. Tolkien

“Every moment of a science fiction story must represent the triumph of writing over worldbuilding.” M. John Harrison (author of more than 20 novels)

Some people devote big chunks of their lives to world building. Some fantasy or SF novelists have J.R.R. Tolkien in mind (see quote above), and how much time he spent on world building. Remember that a game world is a way to help people write their own stories, or to help you write your own story if you choose, so don't overdo the world-building. Your world is an adjunct to your game, not the goal. It's a means to an end, not an end in itself, unless you're very unusual. Read Harrison’s quote above, if you haven’t yet.

A mistake that many beginners make is to spend vast amounts of time on the world and not get around to what really matters, which is the game or the story. Most people can take the simple route. My friend Jeffro says you only need to know six things about the world to start the adventure. He doesn't specify categories; I don't think he was thinking in categories. In other words, you only need to know enough to let the adventure push forward. You don't need to know all the details about the world. Nonetheless, here are some questions you can ask yourself about a (fantasy) world.

• What are the players going to DO?
• Who are the main enemies?
• Terrain? (Do you NEED a map?)
• Is there “a war on?”
• Who/what dominates the local area?
• How “present” are the gods?
• Is there a great mystery?
• How much does magic influence the world?
• How common are adventurers?
• What is the speed of communication and transport?

Notice that I don’t mention the history of the world. Insofar as the history doesn’t make a difference to the players, why spend a lot of time on it?

What are the players going to do?

The first question is what are the players going to do? For the majority of game players, I think, games are about doing. They're not there to admire your world, and we can say that of novels as well. Even if you're talking about an entire world, it's part of a novel: what's important are the events of the novel. Occasionally the worlds are so striking that people are there in part to admire that - Larry Niven's Ringworld comes to mind. Tolkien’s world is often admired (in part because of the detail?), and so forth. But this is exceptional.

Who are the main enemies?

This can be anything from individual villains to entire nations or species. Individual villains can be more personal, more “me against him (or her)”. I'm going to get this guy or this girl no matter what. The large villains such as a nation or species can provide the feeling of being overwhelming, of inevitable failure or despair, and that may be a feeling you want introduced your game. I think the Underdark of early editions of D&D existed mainly so Drow could be a major enemy.

What's the terrain and do you need a map?

You probably need a local map (which will have terrain features) but not a world map. Games need a local map because players move about in it; novels often get away only with a large-scale map (so as not to give details away). Of course, if you're doing an RPG you can add to the local map as necessary and you can decide whether the new areas are mountains or something else. Maps are fun, on the other hand, if you make the entire world map now - that'll be much larger than you think- you limit yourself. Science fiction and fantasy author Glenn Cook (the Black Company stories among many others) doesn't like maps because they constrain what he's writing. So he doesn't provide many maps and it's hard to follow exactly where people are, because he's not worried about that he's worried about the events of the novel. Think about that.

Is there a war on?

War is a straightforward and immediate cause of action. It can be a generalized war on evil or can be much more specific. I always think of fantasy role-playing games as good against bad and that's the way I play. War also provides opportunities for action such as scouting the don't usually exist in peace time. War provides a focus that some campaigns lack.

Communication & Transport

I do want to mention communications and transport, which are two big questions. How fast is communication and how fast is transport? In science fiction we can have instantaneous communication, and much slower movement, though not the reverse of course. Movement speed is also communication speed in fantasy. Both are usually slow, as in a medieval world, but it doesn't have to be that way. Imagine a fantasy world with magical teleportation to any civilized part of the world readily available. . .

We'll come back to communication, transport, and the other worldbuilding questions in the next article.

 

[dragoner]

"History is a set of lies agreed upon." -Napoleon

That sets the tone for any truth in History, those that support a certain narrative, usually have an ulterior motive.

My current setting is hard-ish science fiction, realistic star maps and events, economics, things like that. It works well enough, and is plausible enough; somewhere between mundane and awesome is where the characters are.

 

[Lanefan]

It works so as to help the gm more than anything but only if the players take an interest in the setting it's self.

If the players take an interest in the setting that's a bonus. And if they don't, the DM still has the underpinnings to run a better and richer game even if the players don't appreciate it.

There's an eventual point, of course, where too much is too much; but I think that point is much deeper into the setting-construction process than the OP's article wants us to believe.

 

[Fenris-77]

I think its important to differentiate the action of a game from the setting. What you really need the players to be interested in is the action. The setting will be just fine if all it does is provide set dressing and provide a framework to help drive the fiction. It's fine, and cool, if the setting itself is also a draw, but it really doesn't need to be, at least not to start. Some really great games start with very little wider setting material in place, and just fill in the blanks as the table plays to find out. When I'm writing my own setting I prefer to come up with one or two cool or interesting features to start, things that will be front and center in the fiction, and things that the players will actually interact with and/or make decisions with reference to. For example, if I'm writing a city setting, I'm far more likely to start with a couple of factions and political interplay than I am with a detailed map and several hundred years of history. If you want to talk about setting like a character class, the map and the history, generally speaking, are more ribbon that rock. Impulses, drives, motivations and actions are the rocks.

I find that when the players are instrumental in discovering and even helping to detail and define the setting, that their level of enthusiasm and engagement is almost always higher.

 

[dwayne]

If the players take an interest in the setting that's a bonus. And if they don't, the DM still has the underpinnings to run a better and richer game even if the players don't appreciate it.

There's an eventual point, of course, where too much is too much; but I think that point is much deeper into the setting-construction process than the OP's article wants us to believe.

I disagree you can never have too much detail, as to cover as much of the possible in the setting so your not caught off, guard, the realms "which i hate" has vast amounts of information about it. Anyone could read this and know were every little thing is and not much left to the imagination if you a player or GM, but the way i see it is that until the players discover the information it waits. And this is about discovery and exploration as well as adventures and getting treasure killing monsters and such. Like in my modern fantasy seeing as it is set in the real world the other part remains hidden from normal humanity and the players must unlock the secretes of this other world within a world. They could also play as a race of this hidden world knowing in part the history of it, as i have done years of putting it together, mixing the real world with the mythical parts. Just reading the race options in the book i did gives a glimpse into that setting and sets the stage for inspiration and picks the curiosity of most that spend the time reading it. "To live a life without imagination and wonderment is a boring one indeed and such a life must be as if all was in shades of gray. To never see reds of passion or blues deep of sorrow the brightest yellows as the sun on a mid summers day, yes that life should be a very dreary to be sure." - Quote Dwayne Butcher DM

 

[Hussar]

In so many words, no you didn't. In tone? Well, that's perhaps a more open question....

You can waste a lot of time, to be sure, but it's immensely better to have too much prepared than too little.

That I'm going to disagree with. If you have adventures prepared, the rest of the world can largely go hang. If you have setting prepared and no adventures? Now you have five people staring at you waiting for something to happen.

To put it another way, who cares what happened on this spot a year, ten years, a hundred years ago? Unless it's immediately relevant to the campaign, it's meaningless and largely a waste of time.

It's a problem I've always had with Paizo adventures. Far, FAR too much backstory, 99% of which is irrelevant to the adventure at hand, and, no logical way to get that other 1% into the hands of the players, even if they actually cared. There's no game without an adventure. You can play for months without a setting.

 

[Lanefan]

That I'm going to disagree with. If you have adventures prepared, the rest of the world can largely go hang. If you have setting prepared and no adventures? Now you have five people staring at you waiting for something to happen.

To put it another way, who cares what happened on this spot a year, ten years, a hundred years ago? Unless it's immediately relevant to the campaign, it's meaningless and largely a waste of time.

It's a problem I've always had with Paizo adventures. Far, FAR too much backstory, 99% of which is irrelevant to the adventure at hand, and, no logical way to get that other 1% into the hands of the players, even if they actually cared. There's no game without an adventure. You can play for months without a setting.

I don't at all disagree that you need adventures!

My point is that you're likelier to have a richer and deeper game if those adventures have something solid by way of setting, background and history underneath them. Even if most of that foundation never reaches the players, some of it will; and you've no way of knowing which bits until after you've already dropped the puck. You want to be at least vaguely ready to handle whatever basic questions the players might ask, including:

--- physical and astronomic details e.g. how many moons, what are their phases (and by extension what does the game-world calendar look like)
--- a map of the local region showing major towns, major features, and homelands for all the various playable races in your game
--- names and positions (and usual locations) of the current ruler(s) and-or significant power-brokers
--- enough cultural details to give the players an idea of the milieu they're in e.g. feudal Saxon, ancient Greece, 1500's Far East, or whatever
--- any relevant inter-realm relations between the adventurers' realm and neighbours e.g. war, peace, ignorance, etc.; and how those came to be
--- the names of the last x number of rulers, so when the players ask how old a treasury coin is by looking at the ruler's head you'll know the answer
--- etc.

Put another way, yes you can play for months without a setting but that play will soon show itself to be lacking something.

And note that everything above assumes one is running a campaign bigger than a single hard-line AP, for which you need next to nothing.

As for Paizo adventures and their crazy amount of backstory: my issue is more that 99% of the time their provided backstory doesn't match the backstory that's already arisen within the campaign that's brought the PCs to the adventure; and I also wish they'd leave it out.

 

[Hussar]

the names of the last x number of rulers, so when the players ask how old a treasury coin is by looking at the ruler's head you'll know the answer

Forty years of gaming and not once has a player EVER asked me this.

 

[Lanefan]

Forty years of gaming and not once has a player EVER asked me this.

Obviously your players are not my players.

 

[Campbell]

We obviously have very different needs. I am part of an indie game club that plays a variety of OSR and indie games.

It basically works a lot like a TV show. You get a pilot session and if that works out you might basically get an HBO show style season (12 sessions or so). It can also get cancelled at anytime do to scheduling issues or if we are just not into it anymore. Additional seasons sometimes happen.

When I run a game I need a compelling premise, some initial content to get things started, and enough for players to build characters off of. Often for OSR play it is "playing this module".

 

[Aldarc]

Obviously your players are not my players.

Sounds like you are admitting that not every DM needs to write gigantic backstories for their worlds.