Welcome to the first of many posts that will be focusing on the art of world-building, particularly when it comes to D&D.
(regular content? On this blog? It’s more surprising than you think!)
For this section, we’re going to start with the absolute beginning: how do you start coming up with an elaborate world that you can fill with quests, plot hooks, NPCs and all sorts of objects for your players to interact with and potentially destroy.
Where do I start with my world?
Let’s start with the best example on planet earth on how stories should work:
I stole this from a post on Tumblr somewhere a long time ago and haven’t found a better resource. I also cannot find it again so when I do I will credit you, kind user. I think it outlines how a story functions, from a purely logistic level, in a simple way that is best applied to something like D&D. It also says that no point of the triangle can change without the other two also being affected or being the cause.
Conflict is what drives a lot of stories, whether it’s internal, external, extraterrestrial or even all in a dream. No one watches a story where nothing happens and definitely no one enjoys it if they do. People don’t remember art house movies like that. People do remember Michael Corleone’s dissent into mob life though.
A vibrant world has all three of these components and is independent of your players.
Let me say it again: your world should have all three of these components WITHOUT ever needing your players to enter into it. Controversial, I know, but trust me, it will make sense.
Building your World: Three Easy Paths
To start building a world, there’s three ways you can go about it. If you like high conflict stories, like I do, then you might be more inclined to start with something plot based. A call to action from beyond, or throwing the PCs right into unfortunate circumstances that they must escape from. Is it fair? Is it unfair? Do they take too long to decide and wreck the world? This event could easily affect both the world and the characters, internally or externally.
You could also, if you’re like me, a fan of unknown circumstances or just really enjoy Stephen King, start with something happening in the world. A strange tower has appeared in the middle of a field, unending floods, perhaps a city has just stopped communicating entirely. This could easily affect the characters, who have family easily effected, or it could affect the plot, causing their previous actions to be interrupted.
Or, like many common adventures, you start with the big bad evil guy (BBEG) causing a problem in the world that the party decides to resolve. Maybe they get a request from a friend of theirs to chaperone a party. Maybe they need to be involved in something that people are doing right outside their home—a revolution perhaps? Again, the affects of these events change all aspects of the world and holistically make it more realistic of an event, even if the actual event is not realistic.
Remember: no story is really new. When you break all stories down to the the raw components, most stories are pretty similar. The trick is to add enough heart, flavor and spice to it to make it meaningful to your players. They are your cast and in order to act well and care, they need to know what it all means. Do not keep them in the dark about the world that you are building. Saying you’ve always wanted to do a space adventure like Star Wars will not ruin your plot or make it lame or make it boring. In fact, you’ll probably get a lot of people saying that they’ve always wanted to be a Jedi or a Sith. Everyone, at some point, has wanted to be in a movie—Trust your players.
Rules: the Most Most Important Thing
I’ll touch on this more in the next part, but the rules for how your world works is far more important than just letting the players do anything or building out an elaborate culture that they can mess around in. Click here to read that post, once I’ve written it of course.
So why again would we want a world without the PCs?
Have you ever seen The Truman Show? If not, the premise of the whole movie is that Truman has been watched on TV his whole life—everything around him is a construct that is carefully curated in his life and creates a world for him to, within limits, live in, all for the entertainment for the millions of audience members who watch it. It’s a superb movie. But more importantly, there’s a great scene in it where the entire ‘world’ stops, briefly, while Truman is starting to question his own reality. As if everyone was frozen, which the audience knows is because their ear pieces are all emitting high pitched sounds. Truman of course thinks this is insanely odd before the radio fixes and everyone resumes moving.
Your world should not freeze depending on if the PCs are there or not.
I’m going to spoil the end of that movie—the main theme, though perhaps not the deeper meaning of the movie—is that a curated world and space is nowhere near as good as a real one. And to make your world real, you have to develop rules, boundaries, areas and plots that aren’t dependent on the PCs. Life should go on without them. People should make plots happen, make events happen, make changes to their world as if they are real people because it’s more satisfying. If you base all of the plot on the PCs, you’re not only going to box in the characters, you’re also going to give them all of the control.
This has to be done with a bit of a deft hand, because you obviously don’t want to go one month from being safely away from the BBEG and the next he’s right next door breathing down your neck—but if a new outpost of his popped up nearby, that could work. Or they get on a trail of outposts, each older then the previous, to a regional stronghold, then that’s a good way to go about it. Or maybe his lair is hidden and they have to slog through different outposts of different ages determining which one is the closest to the lair. You want your world to feel as if other factors are in motion, so as to spur the PCs onto making decisions and changes that will affect the world, for better or worse.
And it doesn’t always need to be very big things— it can be small things like holidays passing, weather changing, things only being open certain times of the day or year and if they miss it, they miss it. It implies that the world is as alive as they are. That people go about their business and it makes the conflict seem that much real.
Obviously, if you’re in the middle of a battle and have to pick it up another time, then yes, you should freeze the moment and take it up next time. But life moves on outside of their interaction and you should build a world that feels like it exists outside of the characters.
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Theory is great but what do I do?
So how does this all tie together? How do you actually start writing and creating a home-brew world that will be you and the PCs home for the next one, two, ten, 15 years?
For me, it all started with a monologue.
As you can see from this image, I started on this idea almost a year a half ago, mostly as a monologue that would start the story (which I decided on because a lot of my favorite stories had monologues at the beginning). This was about… nine months, give or take, after the end of the Balance Arc and is actually the second draft of this note. Originally I had started in Evernote with my novel from 2017 in Shaxpir, but then I found Bear (which is hands down my favorite writing app, linked here) and moved all of my fandom, writing and whatever-this-was-surely-I-will-remember-it-later stuff into Bear. The original “10,000 Year Old Note“ note was created in EverNote in January of 2018.
At the time, it was more an exploration of a throwaway joke from Theater Mode where the drinking game says you need to drink any time someone finds a 100 year old note. For me, this was an easy joke to turn into a story because it makes sense in the fantasy world. The Lord of the Rings movies start with monologues of events long ago, most Zelda and Fallout games do the same, so does Harry Potter, starting in the past to then jump to the present so that way you can get started right away with the inciting incidents.
An absolutely fantastic recapper of both movies and the Twilight books, Cleolinda, calls this a Trip to the Department of Backstory. Some people call it an info dump, monologuing, That Character That Explains The Plot, but it’s more or less when someone explains where you are, what you’re doing and what’s happening. A lot of books and people will tell you that you shouldn’t ever do a trip to the Department of Backstory but I think it’s a fine way to start your world building for a few reasons:
It lets you figure out what possible storylines you can throw in.
In my 10,000 Year Old Note, it explains how the world got this way but not who did it or why, who came before but not with specifics of their motivations and the inciting incident, but not who did it or why. I have around 10,000 years of history in this world to draw from so I want to make it apparent that this is a beefy history but the PCs are not expected to remember it all.
It lets you leave many plot hooks that you can drop or add in as misdirects if the story goes a different way.
The 10,000 Year Old Note comes from a single perspective of an ancient being losing their mind. Some of their details, later one, could have been opinions rather than facts and some could have been misremembered. You never want to write a character that has ALL of the answers factually correct because it means you’re going to have to fact check everything versus being able to fudge some of the things and people will go along with it. This is also why I didn’t have an all-knowing deity give this speech but someone who had attempted to become one 10,000 years ago who WILL have imperfect knowlege. Give yourself an out.
It lets you set the tone.
The way you write and tell this component will give your players a strong sense of what kind of story you want to tell. How serious, dark or light and happy you make it, and how you toe that line, lets you set up what they can expect. And when people can set and meet expectations, they have a greater time then always trying to be edgy or twisty. The same way in the second point where you are trusting your audience to know that you’re human, you also have to make sure that if you set something up, the payoff both makes sense and is setup correctly. If you’re going to trust them, they also have to trust you. You cannot rush through the final boss fight with a deus ex machina just because the players won’t be expecting it. No one who played Breath of the Wild was upset that they had to fight Ganon in three stages because that’s the way it was set up and that’s what the players expect.
That is to say, I don’t think you should start your absolute very first session with a long monologue in the middle of the road from a higher power. Instead, you want to start with some session 0 to set up how you found each other and a simple quest to drive them towards the real plot. But that’s another blog post.
As I mentioned before, you see this trip often dropped into the beginning of the story because it makes the most sense—you want to do all three of those things before dropping your characters into an open world where they can do almost anything. Giving them something to latch on to helps you create a sandbox with boundaries, what tools and toys they have, how they should treat the other people there. D&D is an inherently taskless game and human’s love completing tasks so you need to balance both.
For a lot of this, I actually pulled on my knowledge from The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman, which is, funny enough, a book about good product design, but it gives you a set of really great tips about how people approach things they have never experienced before and how humans determine what to do and how to do it. If you haven’t read that book, you really should, it’s fascinating stuff and a fun read.
But wait—you haven’t told me where to start.
You’re right so let’s remedy that.
Where you start depends on where you’re comfortable—I’ve been writing for a long time, so writing a long monologue was second nature for me. It helped me set up what story I wanted to tell in my way, so that way the map and the world were easier to set up after. If you have a really great scene in mind, you might want want to start with an imperfect monologue which you can later flesh out with your players. Just make sure to follow the steps above.
For others, starting with a map makes the most sense. They like having a visual representation to make a few really great cities with their own problems to start players in. Maybe, like Lord of the Rings, the cities near the coast are the last bastion of defense of something coming from inland—or conversely they are the first line of defense against a new threat. You might want to start with a map if you’re looking to build around cool, ever-changing locations that players can run through. There’s a great quote from Jorge Luis Borges that says: “The worst labyrinth is not that intricate form that can entrap us forever, but a single and precise straight line.“ Just remember that he also said: “There is no need to build a labyrinth when the entire universe is one.” Start with just a district and a reason why they’re there and let them roll on from there. Make some matching districts in each city, Disneyland style so they can always orient themselves even if the rest of it changes.
If you’re looking to start with an overarching plot, then go ahead and start with a plot. Just make sure you’re ready to change it when it makes sense. Don’t write out all the story beats or even what should happen in each arc. Instead, write out the bones of the plot. Write who the big bad is, their flaws, their motivations, their daily routine. Write who exists who help or hinder the players, why they’re doing what they’re doing, why they might change or if they feel conflicted. Write who gives them the idea to go after the big bad, if their intentions are pure or not.
[/Personal Story]
Anyway, I’ve rambled on enough. It probably sounds like a crazy person talking but if you can’t be weird on the internet then what the heck is it even for.
ttyl ladies and germs,
Steph