An Abridged Worldbuilding Survival Guide
Worldbuilding is one of the most exciting and entertaining experiences I’ve ever had the pleasure of enjoying. It is also one of the most grueling, arduous, and damn near insanity-inducing experiences I’ve ever had the displeasure of subjecting myself to. However, up until about three years ago, I had only been worldbuilding for fiction novels and the like, and that is an ENTIRELY different monster from worldbuilding for TTRPGs.
There are a billion different methods for worldbuilding, and those methods should change depending on what it is you’re worldbuilding for. Are you worldbuilding as a game master or as a game designer? Is your goal to paint a pretty backdrop for the characters to explore or set out paths for the characters to investigate? Even within the fiction writing sphere itself, how much worldbuilding you put in should depend on what you’re writing and what kind of experience you want your readers to have.
All that is to say, there’s no objective right or wrong way to worldbuild. You figure out what works best for your brain, your game, and your story. But hey, just to get you started, here’s some unsolicited advice from a TTRPG designer and fiction writer on how to worldbuild effectively!
Find The Core
Most people don’t worldbuild like hardcore fantasy and sci-fi authors do. I have, and it’s fun, but it isn’t always conducive to the kind of story I want to tell. What I HAVE discovered is that the most important part of the worldbuilding process is knowing what’s driving everything. And I don’t mean within the world itself—I mean within YOU.
Is it a specific historical aesthetic? Is it an ideal player experience? Is it some kind of broad, overarching theme? Is it a “what if” question about science or magic? What is the thing driving you to create this world and story? Figure out what that is, write it down in giant block letters, and put it somewhere obvious and unforgettable. This concept, this idea, is your primary motivation. Your lodestar. Your core. If you ever feel like you’ve gotten lost in the weeds or if you get stuck and can’t find a way out of the hole you just dug, go back to your core. Check the work you just did against that core, ask yourself if it’s contributing to that core or not, and decide whether or not you want to keep what you just made.
Let’s start with a simple example: you want to build a sword and sorcery style fantasy world. The aesthetics are much more classic Lord of the Rings than they are typical Dungeons & Dragons, with magic being incredibly rare, mysterious, and often dangerous, and medieval-style weapons and cultures being the norm of how people deal with problems. You want characters to be skilled, exceptional individuals from various walks of life who band together to help others throughout the land, but with a distinct lack of organization or bureaucratic oversight—less Adventurer’s Guild and more Wild West, if you catch my drift.
I would describe this as “Sword and sorcery world meets the Seven Samurai,” but you write down whatever works for you. We’ll use this example in the next few sections too.
You may not know what your core is when you first start worldbuilding. That’s totally okay! Once you find it, though, make sure to write it down somewhere. This method has saved my butt from spiraling down a self-loathing, Wikipedia-fueled rabbit hole more times than I can count.
Build The Framework
This is where you’ll likely be spending the majority of your worldbuilding process. The framework is the actual, “material” baseline of how things function in your world, and though it’s informed by your core, it should also be affected by real-world experience and even other aspects of the framework itself. I like to start the framework building process by writing down the truths about the world that I absolutely want to exist.
Using our “sword and sorcery meets Seven Samurai” example above, let’s start with the following three truths:
Magic is rare, mysterious, and dangerous.
Medieval style aesthetics are the norm.
Society is largely ungoverned and disorganized.
Once you have a few truths, it’s time to start picking them apart and figuring out WHY these are the truths of the world. Why is magic rare, mysterious, and dangerous? Does magic come from deities, secret study, nature itself, or something else? If it’s rare, how do people acquire magical abilities? Is it rare because it’s actually uncommon in the natural world, or is this rarity of magic something orchestrated and maintained by those who already have it? Is magic mysterious because of its rarity, or is it mysterious because it’s truly impossible to understand without a great deal of study and experience? If magic is dangerous, why would people seek it out in the first place? Is the magic itself dangerous or is it only dangerous in the hands of one skilled enough to use it? What are the costs and restrictions on using magic? How do regular people view those who wield magic? If it grants people incredible destructive powers, are these individuals the rulers or major players of society? Is society in a sort of “magical cold war” situation where major kingdoms pour huge amounts of resources into magical study and don’t attack one another for fear of mutually assured destruction? Was this, perhaps, what society was like before, and the reason society is so largely ungoverned and disorganized now is because there WAS a magical apocalypse years ago, and people are only now beginning to recover from the event?
If you feel overwhelmed by all that…yeah, that’s worldbuilding, my guy. Just take it one step at a time, and really dig into the truths about your world and figure out why and how these truths exist. Again, this right here is the meat of your world. You’ll be spending the majority of your time unraveling and reforming your world around the truths you want to exist.
Decorate With Details
The final step of my worldbuilding process is the hardest part (and my personal favorite): creating the culture. Now, I’m an anthropology and linguistics nerd, so I come into this phase of worldbuilding with both a wide breadth of knowledge and far too much enthusiasm. Most people probably don’t have both, and I can’t fix the enthusiasm part. Culture-building crash course it is!
Let’s go back to our “sword and sorcery meets the Seven Samurai” example again. You’ve got a classic medieval setting with rare and dangerous magic and a widespread, fairly disorganized populace. You’ve established for the players that their characters are a roving band of adventurers who help out anyone who can pay (and sometimes people who can’t, depending on how heart-of-gold they’re feeling). Let’s also say that you’ve figured out from your framework building that the world is full of dangerous, magical monsters that need slaying, and that’s where the PCs come in. They travel from town to town slaying monsters, saving people, and just scraping by.
That’s all well and good, but what do you do when the PCs walk into a brand new town and you suddenly have to describe it? The answer is more worldbuilding. I know, I know, what a surprising answer in a blog post about worldbuilding.
I like to start with questions. First, what sort of land is the town resting on? Is it in woodlands by a river? Is it perched on the craggy edges of a frostbitten mountain? Is it next to a desert oasis, a perpetual storm, a road? Building the town from the ground up, literally, is a great way to start. What do people here need to survive? Where do they get drinking water, food, clothing, shelter? What resources are available for people to use to craft tools, build their homes, defend themselves?
Second, why is the town here specifically? The answer to this question can be as wild as you like, but once you know the answer, make sure the worldbuilding around the town reflects that. Did some individualist pioneers strike out on their own and stake a claim to this land a few years ago? If so, how would that affect how the town was built and how the people react to outsiders? Alternatively, ask yourself: how does this town sustain itself? Do the people hunt and gather? If so, why are they sedentary instead of migrating with the seasons and animals they hunt? Do the people farm? If so, where is the farmland around town? Do the people mine for materials underground? Where’s the local mine entrances, and how do they trade what they mine for things they need and can’t get around here? Is the town a large trading post? If so, how many roads enter and exit the town? Which merchants in town are the richest, and do they have more power because of that? Is there a wall around the town to defend against attackers?
Third, what sort of fun can the PCs get up to in this town? Do people need monster hunters but don’t have a way to pay? Are folks here wary of outsiders and want the PCs gone soon, even if the town is plagued by monsters? Is there some sort of injustice occurring in town that the PCs get wrapped up in, voluntarily or not? Did a group of kids get lost in the abandoned mine north of town and they need the PCs to rescue them?
Once you answer those three questions, everything else can come pretty easily after that.
For example, let’s say the PCs are in a town situated near a desert oasis that primarily serves as a trading post, and they’ve been offered a job to clear out a monster nest in the nearby cave system. If the town is in a desert, the people here will likely dress in light, flowy fabrics to keep the sun off their skin and stay cool. If the town is both an oasis and a trading post with lots of large roads intersecting within it, it’s likely been the site of conflicts in the past as a strategic point for nations and wars, and as such it likely has a large wall built around it and a well-trained group of local guards. As a trading post, the people in town who manage the trading itself (the merchants) will likely have the most political power. If there’s a new monster nest in the nearby caverns, there might’ve been attacks from monsters in the night. Maybe some teenagers explored the caverns a while back and got hurt or killed by monsters. Maybe a younger sibling of one of the teenagers sneaks off to the caverns to slay the monsters themself and the PCs happen across them during their mission. Maybe some guards were sent to deal with the situation and never returned, and with the guards on edge and a good portion of them missing, a less powerful merchant or noble with less sway amongst the guards now hopes to make a move for greater political power.
Just keep asking questions and coming up with answers until you feel like you have something solid that will be fun and entertaining for the players to explore. Once you get the hang of it, the prep work doesn’t actually take too long. And hey, if all else fails? Ask your players what THEY want to explore, and build something out of their responses! The best part of playing TTRPGs is you aren’t telling the story alone.
Staying Organized
Now, I claimed this was a survival guide, and you probably feel like you’ve been thrown into the deep end of a pool right now. How do you keep all this information straight while also running a campaign? There’s a plethora of tools out there to help with that (some of my friends’ favorites include WorldAnvil and Obsidian), but my personal favorite? Using headings and links in a plain old text document.
My word processor drug of choice is Google Drive at the moment, but if you use Word, Pages, or some other fairly robust word processor, you should be able to use the same general method. The key here is that once you figure out how to make headings in a document, you should be able to hyperlink to those headings within your text. Think of each heading as the title of a specific Wikipedia page or article in your world’s wiki site. The text under each heading can include hyperlinks to other “pages” or “articles” (read: other headings). If I write something down and realize it should be a heading, I usually highlight it yellow so I remember to create that heading and link it later. And the best part about this method is that word processors come with built-in search tools! Need to find an article fast? Just pull up the search tool and type in what you’re looking for. Even if it doesn’t go straight to the entry itself, the first thing you’ll happen across will almost certainly hyperlink right to it anyway.
Now, because I’m insane, I tend to write out full prose article-style stuff under my headings, but as long as each heading has the information you need under it? Do whatever you like! Honestly, if I’m not feeling a full prose thing at the moment, I just write bullet points and hyperlink/highlight what I need, and then I go make it pretty later. Remember, though, you don’t need to make it pretty, just functional. Unless you’re like my friend Maggie. She is very appearance-focused with her worldbuilding documents. It helps her think better.
Additional Resources
Wow, this got away from me. I thought I’d be writing a short and sweet little blog post about worldbuilding! Ha. Fool behavior. I’ve never been brief a day in my life. Anyway, here’s some other resources I like to use for worldbuilding:
The Overly Sarcastic Productions Trope Talks YouTube playlist — https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDb22nlVXGgcljcdyDk80bBDXGyeZjZ5e
The Hello Future Me YouTube On Writing YouTube playlist — https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL1TLSKocOLTvdl54a6wgNdB8oSm-eZ7h6
WorldAnvil, a website that lets you literally build your own Wiki for your world (free but with paid subscription options that offer more versatility) — https://www.worldanvil.com/
Obsidian, an app that also does that, but it has a mind map view setting that’s very fun (free but paid subscriptions for more features) — https://obsidian.md/
Fantasy Calendar, a calendar builder for your fantasy world — https://fantasy-calendar.com/
Inkarnate, for map making — https://inkarnate.com/
Vulgarlang, a one-time purchase fantasy language generator (disclaimer: I haven’t used it, but I’ve heard from multiple people that it’s a great tool for building your own languages) — https://www.vulgarlang.com/
Picrew, the spiritual successor to online dress up games (and particularly helpful for people like me who struggle visualizing or physically describing characters) — https://picrew.me/en/
A document I’ve compiled of helpful worldbuilding and character building questions — https://docs.google.com/document/d/1k3bcN9EsLNhmvdbkPNsibzNVEMOPN_AsbLFT93FS8S4/edit?usp=sharing
This article is part of the Indie Game Developer Network’s blog series. The content of this article reflects the views of but one member of the IGDN. This IGDN blog article is brought to you by Kodi Gonzaga from Los Angeles, California. If you want to get in touch with the contributor you can visit their website at www.kodigonzaga.com.