World-building toolkit
Erica and I Costorytell a lot of campaigns. We partner on both of our role-playing games — regardless of which one of us is primary Storyteller — because we’ve had a lot of success with the results. This year, though, I’ve had the opportunity to partner with a friend who is usually a player in my group, but who wanted to run a game for us.
He’s a different person and a different kind of gamer, so his process is — no shock — different. Add to it that this is our first real joint venture, so we don’t have the years of rapport that Erica and I have built up, finishing each other’s thoughts and flowing naturally in the same direction.
It’s been a fascinating process. I’ve been learning to adapt and enable my friend’s process, so our work has been continually improving. And it’s made me think about how we do world-building.
There are a lot of ways to go about it. None of them are right or wrong, better or worse, but having seen someone else’s style up-close behind the Storyteller’s screen and watching it unfold in play has highlighted some of the pros and cons.
A lot of the strategy of world-building depends largely on when you do it. Erica and I like to go on long walks and talk game worlds over dinner, where we build out settings in as much detail as possible long before any game or story takes place in it. Our process is extensive, deep, covering religion and culture, commerce and government. Even fashion and food! By the time we’re ready to kick off a new game campaign, we have descriptions of the sounds and smells and people everywhere that the characters go, and we can answer questions about the in-world history because we’ve already written that up.
Of course, world-building is never entirely complete. Players are clever and curious, and will always be able to come up with some question that we didn’t think to answer before, surprising us. But it means that if someone asks who the monarch before this one was, we’re not also trying to figure out the form of government and how succession works — we only have to invent a name and some facts about the previous king.
But intensive world-building is… intensive. Erica and I spend months writing and working before game begins. Right now, we’re lucky enough to have a nice leapfrog gaming schedule going — while my friend is running his campaign for our group, I’m working on my next one. The longer our current game takes, the more time I have to build up mine.
But not everyone has another Storyteller to run a game while they plan. And even if they did, not everyone’s got the free time to craft entire worlds and societies for an RPG.
All of that planning is not how my friend does things. He’s got a job, two kids, and honestly likes to wing things far more than I do. He has concerns about railroading the players, and worries a bit about boxing them in with his world. Erica’s character in this game is an archeologist and I had to all but beg him to come up with a very basic historical timeline just so she would have some history to learn about.
But it’s a working model, and the Storyteller has come up with a fair amount of world-building in this game! He just does it as needed, on-demand in between sessions. We found a magic tome and asked if it had anyone’s name written on the inside cover. The Storyteller told us that there was a faded crest inside that we couldn’t make out. Then, between sessions, he worked out just who had owned it.
By the time we took the book to a library and got our friendly gnomish researcher — Binkle Bandersnatch — to help us identify the crest, he had an owner for the book. And the previous owner, then the owner before that, right back to the wizard who wrote the book and some historical information on them all! Our party also has in its possession a cursed horn (the kind you blow into, not that grows from a tiefling’s head), and it’s covered in runes in an unidentified language that we’re slowly translating. The Storyteller didn’t know what they said before game began, but he’s adding to their meaning as we go.
This on-the-go world-building doesn’t take as much time, which really works out well for him. And since we play only every other week, he’s got some time between sessions to come up with his lore. And the history of the book was great for a magical item — one whose only original purpose was to give us an extra skill proficiency. But when the players ask questions, a Storyteller who doesn’t yet have an in-depth world-building document still has to make stuff up on the fly or try to stall for time.
Because my friend hasn’t done as much world-building up front, he has to wing it a lot more than I do. But he’s more comfortable with that — so as far as a downside to this method, it’s very subjective!
And some Storytellers can just wing it the whole way. Play in an open world, with an open structure and open history. I reviewed a very nice guide for using random tables to take the burden of planning off of your plate, so if free time is a luxury — and it is — then you can just make stuff up as you go.
The downside there is that it can lead to the world feeling shallow, like a video game that only renders the immediate area. As everything gets made up one piece at a time, making those pieces fit together with each other can become a challenge. The party enters a tomb and fights some elven ghosts — but they just left a dwarven town, so why are there dead elves in their backyard?
I’m autistic, and so making things up on the fly is a nightmare for me, and you can bet your butt that I already have a story for why a dwarven town is built on top of an elven tomb. You just might have to wait a month or two before I’m ready to start the campaign to even learn that either of them exist.
My own process works for me, and my players enjoy the results — but right now, I’m on the other side of the Storyteller’s screen and watching a very different style in play. And it’s working. Find whatever works for you and do it.
You don’t have to do it in a vacuum, though. Regardless of how much time you spend building your world or when you put that work in, there are some questions you can ask yourself that will help give your RPG world-building depth and make the results a little stronger when the players test them. And they will test your world. You can use these before your campaign, between sessions — or if you’re quicker on your feet than I am, use them real-time to make world-building choices that don’t feel flimsy.
Exactly what happened, what is this thing, or who is this person?
Give out specific names, dates, and locations. A no-name bandit captain is fine for an encounter, but you can make them more integrated with your world and your story if they have a name, a reason they resorted to banditry, and their own goals. The same goes for items or historical events. Was there a recent war that has left its mark in the game world? Just telling your players where someone or something came from and when can make it a lot more real.
Why did it happen, and why did it happen this way?
In the case of the book that we found last session, it was written by a gnomish wizard by the name of Tamryn. Wizards write books all the time, so why did this man write this book?
Tamryn was an arcanist spurned by the elitist wizard school. He called them out for being arrogant jerks, and they gave him the nickname Tamryn the Fair because he was famously ugly. (Rude!) Because of their differences, Tamryn went and wrote the Encyclopedia Sentia — five volumes of the Book of Ancient Wisdom, one of which we had found — to share and spread knowledge freely with all, not just the elite.
That’s the lore we got on our simple magic item, making it more than just a piece of loot. As an item it has more importance and might impact what the party does with it — Sell it? Donate it to a library? — and it even created some history for the world. And it all happened due to personality differences between wizards.
How might one person’s choices or mistakes cause history to take a turn? Why did someone create this item or why does a nation have this culture?
A related question that your players will often ask is was there an easier way? If there was an easier way to conquer that kingdom over there, dispose of that cursed ring, or appease that angry god, your players will want to know why someone took the more challenging route. That reason can be simple — the army couldn’t march in winter, that kind of magical dye isn’t available in this part of the world — or as complicated a piece of world lore as you feel like constructing. But be ready with an answer other than uhh… because it was the first thing I thought of.
What happened next?
Now you know where that book or that bandit came from, but what’s the result of that history or decision? In my friend’s game, one of the kingdom trains bladesingers — because one of the players wanted to play that class — so we worked backward from there.
Why are there wizards with swords? Well, there was a threat to the kingdom that required magically trained scholars, but who were also capable fighters. What kind of threat was that? In answer, we came up with a mimic infestation! After all, wizards would be of great use in uncovering mimics. So we went on to ask why there was a mimic infestation, creating a disgruntled warlock and a short war, then asking why the warlock was disgruntled, and so on.
What were the impacts of these choices? Well, besides an in-world justification for bladesingers, it added a suspicion of warlocks to the town culture, and a city-wide habit of knocking on furniture before sitting down to make sure it isn’t a mimic. Justifying a single character class created history and culture, just by following the questions that it raised and asking what happened next.
If there was an event in your world, what are the ripples? Did that event give rise to a saying? A tradition? Was an organization founded because of their part in this event, or did one fall? Nothing happens in isolation, and one event often leads to other events. So just asking these questions one by one can unspool into detailed backgrounds. It doesn’t even have to take long — I helped my friend come up with the mimic war during a single bathroom break.
World-building is one of my favorite parts of role-playing! I spend a great deal of time on it because I find it fun and a good investment of my evenings. But it doesn’t have to be a second job. You can build your game world between sessions or right there at the table. With a few questions and just following the logical outcomes of their answers, you can enrich your world for you and your players.
