July Article: World Building Pt. 1 - Setting the Stage

This is the first part of a multi part series on world building. Here, I will lay out my foundational steps with some examples to help illustrate my point. I hope what I will share with you will be something you can use for your own games in the future.

A Primer on World Building

At first when you think of World building you are getting nervous, and perhaps a little intimidated. After all, we are talking about breathing a world to life complete with history, meaning, and adventure. Now, if you are reading this, it’s obvious you have some level of interest in this topic. If I haven’t already scared you off let’s start getting into the nitty gritty.

The worlds that I and Dirk make are honestly fairly piecemeal in execution at the beginning and grow over time to have depth and power. Dirk has been making D&D worlds for longer and had great advice on this: “If you spend 30 hours working on a 3 hour game, your players will only interact with 30 minutes of your world.” I’m not 100% sure his math checks out, however the core concept he is trying to convey is solid.

Essentially, the point here with these articles is to streamline your process to cut down on your time building to increase the player interactions with the world. In practice, the players only interact with a small percentage of the world that you painstakingly worked with creating… so why don’t you unload a huge chunk of your time burden and headache by just working on the things the players interact with?

Where to Start?

This may be the first question you ask yourself when you are beginning your world building. If you haven’t… well… let’s not make things awkward and please ask yourself this question now.

Every time I have started my world building efforts, I start with creating a Theme first and foremost. Why? Because a Theme sets some of the foundational aspects of the game: the mood, tone, and atmosphere. Setting the Theme also helps determine the demeanor of the NPCs of the world. Are they a friendly people overall? Or, with the world in a constant state of change and war, are they skeptical of any who perform good deeds. Maybe corrupt politicians and their figure head monarchs are really to blame for the state of the people.

The Theme of your world will set the stage to determine what is to come. Sometimes, you can set a single, overarching Theme to govern the world, and have smaller, branching Themes that create variety between nations and regions.

Dirk is a very big fan of his “3-5 Rule.” This is a good place to apply it. When setting the groundwork for his worlds I know that he uses the following format, which I think is a great place to start:

1 World Theme

2-4 Regional Themes that are opposites or somewhat contradicting to one another.

Here’s an example from his current game:

World Theme: Grimdark Cosmic Horror - A Cosmic Entity has breached the planar barrier and shattered the minds of the city of Swordfall.

Swordfall City Theme: While the city may be lost to the mysterious nightmare fog, the surviving citizens have hardened themselves to fight back the evil.

The Lost Heroes: Heroes from around the countryside have banded together to stand with Swordfall. Some of them have lost hope in the face of calamity and are descending into fear and depravity.

Set The Stage

This bit will feel a little tangential. I promise that things are going according to plan. You see, when first building a world for use in a game setting, I come up with my Themes and come up with a stage for where I want to showcase them. I try my very best to hammer home some of the most important themes in powerful ways. I try not to come up with an entire history of the world first thing. I don’t even do that second or third. The blanks for history will fill themselves in over time.

What helps me showcase my Themes to my players is come up with a “here and now” that will show the players what kind of world they will be playing in to help anchor and shape their expectations. The questions of where things came from and how we got here can be much easier to figure out once you have determined where you are at now. It is one thing to say, “Folks, this is Dirk’s Grimdark game. Prepare to die or slowly be driven insane.” It’s a completely different thing to show that the world has already started going insane and the only ones that are fighting it are the ones naive enough to believe they can win.

Here are some questions I, and Dirk, ask ourselves to help set this stage:

What is the current state of the world like?

How are the people living in it?

Is it a fairly chaotic world with only a few large kingdoms that don’t have the strongest of influence in the world?

Let’s take a look at some of the most famous stories and worlds that have been built. Particularly, I would like to talk about “Lord of the Rings,” which is arguably the greatest work of fantasy ever created. Tolkien set a beautiful stage for both the start of “The Hobbit” and “The Fellowship of the Ring”. A key moment to him setting this stage is when we are first introduced to the Hobbits. While these Hobbits would later be joined by many other equally compelling characters, Tolkien starts with a part of the world that draws our attention to the peaceful and uneventful Shire with the main characters, Frodo and Gandalf, making their way to Bag End to see Bilbo, Frodo’s Uncle, for his birthday. In the process of this, Tolkien introduces us to the lives and culture of the hobbit’s to help us better understand them before they embark on their great and fateful quest.

Tolkien shows the Regional Theme of the Shire first, which is nearly a complete opposite of the rest of the world. Then he introduces us to a relic of an ancient evil that threatened to enslave and destroy the world: the One Ring and, by extension, Sauron.

In my opinion, Tolkien set the foundation of his entire world of darkness and despair in the happiest little paradise on earth… and it was for a reason. He could have started things anywhere, but he chose the Shire.

Here are some additional questions you can ask yourself to help you set the stage for your world:

What is bringing your adventures together?

What is the point of the adventurers meeting and what is the end goal of their quest?

Do they know what the end is, or is it simply a distraction to hide the real ending?

What mood or atmosphere can I enforce that will hammer home my central theme?

What characters can my players meet to get a sample of the minor, regional themes that shape the dynamics and tone of my world?

Using the launchpoint, or the Stage, of the story as a foundation to build the world itself seems backwards in theory. In practice, however, it helps anchor the world in the relevant details that are shown to the players without making the details tedious, needless or boring.

It Doesn’t Have to be Perfect

As you are starting your first steps in world building, keep this phrase in mind, “It doesn’t have to be perfect,” at all times. You will only hold yourself back if you don’t.

Regardless of whether this is your first time making a world or your ten thousandth, you are taking on a massive endeavor. You are literally pulling a rabbit from the rabbit dimension without a magic hat.

The reason I tell you the world doesn’t have to be perfect (or whole) is because it will always be full of imperfections and these minute, annoying, inconsistencies and flaws that will drive you, it’s creator, absolutely bonkers. Your players, on the other hand, will most likely never notice the duct tape holding things together. Entire businesses and multimillion dollar corporations are held together with bubblegum and happy thoughts as they speed at a million miles an hour like a steam-powered-locomotive-dumpster-fire straight out of hell. Plenty of amazing worlds have been created that have been held together with less, were loved way more, and featured less child slavery than most of these corporations.

When you hit the point where you’re worried that your world isn’t whole or complete or wondering how the story will progress, here is my advice: Worry about the right here and now and how the world is being affected by having your players living in it.

The world is a living breathing thing to the people you place in it, speaking of the players, and the more experiences they have in this world the better it will be for them. These experiences will directly affect the topography and shape of the world where they see what the results of their actions were the better.

Did your players happen to piss off a whole town because they refused to help them? Great plot device. Later, the players come back to find the town turned into a fortified fort where they get attacked on sight due to existing hostilities. Small things like that show the world moves on WITHOUT, or even because of,your players.

How to Make Your World Breathe

I am a very big fan of using the momentum of the players as the driving force change within my worlds. After creating my Themes and positioning them to be shown on the Stage, I actively work to make sure everything the players do have an impact of some kind on the world as they create their own history. This is more of a side point I want to make while I have your attention.

As mentioned at the end of the last section, your world needs to move on without your players. Failing to do so can make the game feel stiff and wooden rather than dynamic and lively. Let’s use one of the greatest games of all time: Skyrim. In this fantastic game, it feels as if even though you spend all your time doing every single side quest that exists in the game, Alduin never ACTUALLY brings ruin to the world. You can finish your companions quest, Thieves’ guild quest, or end the Civil War but Alduin hasn’t destroyed the world and it doesn’t really seem like he plans on doing it unless you’re actively working to stop him. Please don’t take this as me bashing on Skyrim, because I have sunk far to many hours into that game to ever try and bash it, however, it doesn’t “breath” the way we are looking for in a tabletop roleplaying game narrative and the world really does feel as if it is made of wax or wood.

XCOM

Hopefully you have heard of this wonderful game franchise. In the recent years there have been 2 major XCOM games that very much work as examples to illustrate my points I’m trying to make about creating a breathing world.

The world of XCOM absolutely moves forward with or without the player. In fact, it is likely you could sit there and do nothing and watch the world burn without lifting a single finger. The way they execute this is by instituting a world timer, or countdown to defeat, and the only way to avoid it is to go on your missions to stop the clock. The timer forces the player to make calculated moves to beat the clock or pursue mission rewards to help you accomplish your long game.

When the missions are presented to you, you must make a choice between three missions as you can only go on ONE of them, and the other two will have negative consequences take effect because of not doing them. Sometimes the consequences are not so bad, but sometimes the consequences are so dire that instead of chasing mission rewards and the endgame, you get wrapped into frantically avert worldwide crisis’ that could jeopardize your endgame planning or even cause you to lose entirely. These things help create a feeling of “aliveness” that literally breathe life into a game that, without it, would be mediocre at best.

Let’s put these concepts within the framework of D&D and other tabletop role playing games. Here’s an example:

The adventures have saved a town at the edge of the wilderness and fought off the diseased animals spreading a horrid plague amongst the citizens. They did not, however, find and stop the Druids that started everything in the first place. The next time the party comes to town after a long adventure abroad, the Druid has used his corrupt magic to lay waste to the town and the inhabitants thereof. Maybe some other nearby towns knew that the players were involved the first time around and now are going to be less open about asking them for help.

This concept I’m trying to convey does not mean every action in the world is going to have a negative, or major effect on the world. In fact, it shouldn’t. However, trying to keep the game on a timer and having real consequences, good and bad, from the aftermath of an adventure can breathe much more life into the game then originally planned if you make the breaths meaningful. Here are some more examples:

A horde of goblins have been kidnapping women from a remote village. Some of the victims have been found dead while the others are still missing. However, a young man follows you guys to the goblin’s lair and manages to help you find where they are holding the women. As the game progresses it becomes clear that he too is a heroic type, and a romantic one at that. As a Good result after the story is finished, the young man marries one of the rescued women and live happily ever after, naming one of their first children after one of the party members. So sweet.

Your First Attempt

More than likely your first few attempts not going to be that great. It’s par for the course. However, walk away from each attempt trying to understand why things happened the way they did. Practice and reflection working hand in hand is one of the best ways to improve with any skill.

I recommend keeping an open dialogue with your players about what they want to see more of in their world, as well as what they want to see less of. Your players are an excellent source of information and feedback. So many places like to demonize the players or even portray them as stupid. Spoiler: they aren’t.

Your players are some of the best people to teach you because they get the opportunity to experience your game without knowing where it is going. Their perspective is absolutely invaluable.

The players may not honestly show that much interest simply because everyone plays the game for a different reason. They may just want a cool world to explore and that’s fine. Every group and every player is going to have a different perspective and reason to play, so use their perspectives as research to help you develop better worlds and refine your process.

That’s all I have for this article. Stay tuned in the coming months as I post the next steps I use to build my worlds. I would love to hear your stories and methods YOU use.

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Thank you for reading,

Otamhs

Critical Game Mastery