How do I start making my world less empty? pt. 1

(Map Making is Half the Fun)

Welcome to the third of many posts that will be focusing on the art of world-building, particularly when it comes to D&D. This one is fairly long and relates to making maps in a virtual fashion, so I’ve broken it into two pieces.

For this section, weʼre talking about turning your world from a vague landmass into a thrilling world of communities big and small. No small order here. If you havenʼt read the other two sections, definitely check them out as weʼll be building most of this off of the ideas weʼve talked about previously.

How do you flesh out a world as big as the characters youʼve created?

The good news is that youʼve already laid in a lot of groundwork for actually building a world so shaping out the land and the sea and all the dominions within should be relatively easy.

I almost always start with the characters that Iʼve now created (plus my inciting plot monologue) to start building my world. At this point I have a few big bad evil guys (BBEGs) and a few other influential people, both good and bad. The beauty of this is that you can start to decide if they are acting this way (if they are motivated) by a rejection of society (they are an outcast/they have seen the real truth/they are breaking a system/etc) or because it fits in with society (they are rich/powerful/deigned to rule/etc). Having these two axis to work with means you can create a variety of characters in the same area and based on how strongly they fit in or reject society, you can build a complex world with little work.

Either they are acting out because of society or they are acting out to reject society. So if you have 5 big characters, you can have 5 societies easily drafted up in no time.

For example, letʼs look at Star Wars. You have about 5 or so main characters: two from the same planet, for these purposes at least (Luke and Obi-Wan), Han Solo, Princess Leia, C3PO & R2D2 and Darth Vader. If we place them on a chart:

You can easily go across, and based on eachʼs personality, build the environments or societies that made them/they occupy. Not all locations are used immediately or used in more than passing, or even to illustrate a point.

Starting on the left, you place your character and depending on what you’ve written on them, you write out whether they would reject or be unhappy with where they live or if they benefit or choose where they live. Then you list how strong it is, which is how you can have characters from the same area with differing opinions or for different reasons. Could these be factions in this world? Possibly.

Then you can see how various graduations along them build complex societies or societies where multiple characters can exist and both would make sense. Thereʼs more art to this than science so you really just need to have an idea of whether itʼs a strong push or a weak one. These arenʼt binding guidelines of what you need to do, just a way to get a sense of what you want to do.

Hereʼs one I did for my BBEG:

Baldric the Bold

• Because of

• STRONG — he both rules and is ruled by what he discovered about the main religion, he hates tradition but it’s become a defining characteristic for him

• Nefryitak society — the heavy caste system of magic established that there is an inherent order to peopleʼs worth and that real powerful magic, or truth is the only thing that matters. People who reject it have a hard time fighting against it, so most move within the system, even if they hate it

This will also help you build out what societies PCs might fit in— especially for newer players. Even if they pick one and act out of turn with that culture, it still fits because itʼs a rejection of that society.

But now onto the fun part:

How do you make a map for a world that doesnʼt exist in reality?

Map making, by its very definition, requires a place to exist in order to map it. Map making is the butter to the bread that is the world, you need it to make toast better but the bread is still the key component. Otherwise you are just buttering a countertop.

So how do you do that?

Now thereʼs plenty of map makers online but some of them are futsy on my system (Macintosh family for LIFE) or they require a lot of editing OR they needed me to go in and do a lot of manual work to match my world that I’ve been dreaming about. I didnʼt just want a map to overlay some places—I wanted a map that reflected this real world that I have built above.

And I did that in a few steps, using Affinity Designer. My original map for my world was done in Illustrator but seriously, why pay for that when there are better or cheaper options around. All screenshots are from Affinity Designer, except for any pics of the original map in AI.

Why Affinity Designer?

• Same tool as Illustrator but cheaper and I don’t have to give money to Adobe with their ridiculous subscription system

• Nicer workflow, once you get the hang of it after switching

• Easier installation of brushes — you don’t have to go through their weird 3rd party application service, just install brushes and fonts as you normally would

Why not in Photoshop? For a few reasons, here’s why I work in Designer/Illustrator:

• Rasterization — working in Designer has the benefit of being a vector image, so I can size up or down however much I want, export to all sorts of formats, while keeping the quality very high

• Brush tool — works just like it does in old PS BUT it makes paths that I can free transform out of the result, point by point, which is super helpful in the city and location maps, less so in the world map

• Pen tool seems more powerful — I have no data to back this up but it feels like it is. Plus with the Direct Selection tool, you can easily adjust points on a path without having to go through the harder-to-decipher-yet-same task in PS

(Fair warning, while it IS a few steps, there can be a lot of repetitive actions within, you probably need around 2-3 hours depending on your familiarity with the software)

1. Pick a landmass type—use the list from the Civilization games, as I almost always do—actually all of the Civilization games do a great job of distilling what a city, city state or nation needs to function, so it’s a great resource to look into as you build those out 

• In my case, I picked Archipelago originally because I had written in some violent floods a thousand years before, leaving only plateaus in its wake. For my sample here, I chose instead large continents, because I wanted something familiar to earth

• Why does this work? Because it gives you a hint of what amount of conflict can people expect. Did you choose Pangea? Then chance of conflict is going to be higher at borders. Many small islands? Thatʼs great for those that want a lot of exploring but also leads to exploitation and defense of key resources like fresh water. Pick a landmass that makes sense for your societies that youʼve plotted out.

2. Pick an animal—it can be any animal. In my case, I picked sloths because I was, in all honestly, I love sloths. Draw or trace your animal or find a picture of it online.

• Use your handy dandy applications to make the animal into a blob: You can do this using image trace on Adobe Illustrator or Gaussian blur on Affinity Designer and turn your animal into a smoothed somewhat formed creature of sorts. The goal is a silhouette.

• Or you can do this old school—grab an online coloring book page for your animal. Bonus points if itʼs really low resolution. Color the whole thing in black or some other dark color. Overlay it with graph paper and trace the shape on the graph paper. You can even do this digitally and use the graph lines to start working on step four, which is:

4. Create a grid or hex grid on a new layer. I like Hex grids because they look cool and also work better for large, world maps. Anything smaller than that and I prefer squares. Maybe it’s my family history in landscape design? Who knows.

There’s really no fancy way to this, just create a hexagon using the polygon tool, hold down shift while you do it so the hexagon is equal, then copy and paste those next to each other. Hexagons should have a black outline and no fill color. Group them once they reach about ten or so, then copy the group and stick together. I usually start out with one the size of the canvas, shrinking the Groups down until they reach a size I like and can cover about an inch off the canvas on all sides.

5. Duplicate that group of hexagons! And now you’re ready to make some land. Next on the list is to duplicate that layer and start making those hexagons into land. I also will sometimes make a lower layer in blue (below all the sloths and hexagons) and change the opacity of the sloths to 50-60% so I can see it better. The Lock option is going to be your best friend here, so you don’t accidentally select anything you don’t want to select:

I also like to zoom in, so I can better grab segments. One thing you’ll like to do (which I forgot to do until halfway through the first landmass….) which is Group the green segments together as you go. Group and Lock are you basic functions as you go. To select more than one shape at a time, you’ll need to shift click.

I like to leave gaps in the sloths, one, so it doesn’t look like a bunch of sloths turned into hexagons, but two, so I can vary up who lives there. Lot of islands? Sea faring folks. Wide expanse bisected by a wide river? Warring areas.

Doesn’t matter which colors you pick right now, because you can change them up later once you have all the shapes defined.

Repeat this process (select, Group, color, Lock) for each landmass you want, making sure to adjust the coastlines and areas to your liking (at this point, you might start to hate your animal for having so many parts/arms/etc. This is natural):

6. Move all your landmass groups to their own layer. This is for two reasons, one, easier to turn Visibility or Lock on and off and two, now you can easily make some ocean depth.

7. Repeat the process with ocean depth. If you’ve done this correctly, you can start from the center of the locked landmasses and drag Select wider areas of hexagons to change to lighter or darker shades of blue. Group, color and Lock as you did before.

Tired of working on large areas? You’re in luck—it’s time for height, cities and rivers.

8. Let’s add some height! Height is an easy thing to add and gives context without having to be detailed. You probably remember most of your maps through school showing height. I find it’s easiest to work from a duplicate of the landmass map and start the same process over again, instead with dark green for lowlands, like deltas or swamps, then yellow, orange, dark orange and brown for the various heights, with brown being the highest areas:

Now you can start to throw in some stories as you get ready for the Cities segment. Like this area has a high up plateau with a fancy lake on it/ Maybe the lake is where the gods sit in Slothia.

9. City time! So far, we haven’t even used my favorite tool in all time, which is the Pen tool and that is a crime. The Pen tool holds all the secrets to the universe IMHO. You’ll need it for the next two segments, which is making cities and trade/general routes and rivers. The big benefit of the Pen tool is that you can do cities and routes in the same step, making it fast and easy.

Once you are using the Pen Tool, use the settings to change the width (slightly bigger than the lines for the hexagons), change the style (dotted or dashed, your choice) and the end points (circles!). Using these three things, you can easily create som cities and trade routs by following the hexagon lines from one area to another:

I also use this time to create some kingdom boundaries since I’m here (duplicate a landmass Group, change the color and opacity, delete sections of the group you don’t want) so I can show where entry and exit areas of a city might sit.

10. Rivers! Text! Using the same, glorious Pen Tool, make some rivers. I have a few done in different ways here (Pen tool based and Brush tool based) depending on how much variation you want with the rivers. Naturally, the size and shape are all up to your discretion and only serve to show the general area that rivers exist in:

I also use this time to make some locations and cities, but never do I write the name of every city, for the same reasons I mentioned above. I want to give myself an out so I can retcon locations as I go. There’s also an implied number of cities scattered around the routs and in the empty areas that you can throw in if you need to.

Is this a foolproof method? No. But it is easy to follow, especially when you have no artistic skills but still want to control the result. You could also just download a randomly generated map, but if you’re like me, you want to make it your own and lack the advanced skills to make something that looks like it came out of the Silmarillion.

[/actual advice]

Personally, I feel like maps are only as good as the people and places in them. And trust me I do write out a lot of places. There are tons of awesome set pieces that Iʼve written that rely heavily on the location, but I never try to cement it into a specific location. (For example, when I work on the physical maps, I always overlay them with overhead sheets so I can write with dry erase on the map, then get rid of it. Players just need to know then area, not the exact map spot.)

One of the great things about starting at such a high level, the entire world or continent view, is that when you place an icon down, depending on your scale, getting down to the PC level can vary between fifty miles and a couple hundred miles, meaning you donʼt need to be exact.

One of my favorite lessons from The Design of Everyday Things (and seriously, I should be paying Don Norman royalties at this point) is that the difference in being 97% accurate and 95% accurate is pretty negligible to the average person and system. Unless you need to be absolutely accurate on distances (like in combat) being absolute is unnecessary.

Our next segment will talk about making City Maps and location maps, both in Affinity Designer and in person, mostly because it’s another bulky post but because it will tie nicely into my thoughts on moving our sessions to Ye Olde Virtual Realm.

Now time to get back to my Hard/All Collectibles run of the Uncharted series and to work on my knitted blankets and knitted sweater.

<3,

Steph

How do I start making my world less empty? (People Mover Edition)

Welcome to the second 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 talking about turning your world from something with an outline and into a world that appears to be dense, alive and fully fleshed out, and how to do it with very little dense world-building, focusing specifically on Non-Playable Characters.

How do you flesh out a world’s big players?

Remember the pyramid from the first post:

This is where you should start. What major players (NPCs) in the world are trying to change or affect things? What are their motivations? How are they going to accomplish what they want to change? When you break these down into bullets for each character, it give you a really strong sense of current geopolitics that you can hint at, or class systems that exist. Let’s do an example. Pretend you have a regent for a large, sparse kingdom that’s going through a drought. He’s going to be your minor Big Bad Evil Guy (BBEG) to reveal a greater threat later on. Set up some paper or a digital notebook to say something like this:

• Name: Gerrad Hornswallow, Regent

• Ultimate goal: provide for his kingdom by bringing prosperity into it

I like to always start with an ultimate goal because it’s a very concrete thing that is anchored in affecting the world and plot, rather than starting with some fluff description or details about his class, or the history of kingdom. But wait—is that really his goal? And is it really his kingdom? Let’s add some more flavor to it:

• Name: Gerrad Hornswallow, Regent

• Ultimate goal: Prove to the people that he’s better than the real [missing/MIA/etc] king

  • Sub goals: provide for his kingdom by bringing prosperity into it

  • Sub goals: steal people to work the fields

  • Sub goals: steal produce/machines to work the fields

Now we’ve got a character with some denser motivation, it’s almost reverse flanderization. He can become a tragic character, depending on what your players do and how you play the absent king. Was he drawn into this path because the king is the real BBEG? Is it because he, like Mary Shelley said, mistook the evil for the good he seeks? Is it because he’s trying to protect the people that the king ignored because he wanted the wealth of the kingdom for himself? Or you could make him more sinister—maybe he killed the king to take the wealth for himself and he’s only pretending to be sympathetic. Maybe he’s possessed by the king to be set up as a fall guy. Maybe the king was killed by a higher power and he’s trying to solve the mystery poorly. 

The point is, you want your motivations to make sense, but play out in multiple ways, which gives your players a lot of agency to change the story without you having to come up with new BBEGs or giant plot hooks and arcs. A great example of this is the Nolan Batman Trilogy—even when he lost his BBEG due to unfortunate circumstances, he still had laid the right groundwork to make a change, which, when rewatching, if you don’t know that the main villain was supposed to be the Joker, Bane fits in rather well to the plot hooks, themes and lines setup in the first and second movies.

Let’s look at how he’s going to accomplish this:

• Name: Gerrad Hornswallow, Regent

• Ultimate goal: Prove to the people that he’s better than the real [missing/MIA/etc] king

  • Sub goals: provide for his kingdom by bringing prosperity into it

  • Sub goals: steal people to work the fields

  • Sub goals: steal produce/machines to work the fields

• Possible quests:

  • Transport some unknown machinery to another place in the kingdom but don’t let anyone know where it’s from

  • Get rid of some dissenters in the town square but don’t kill them

  • Take these files to a volcano and destroy them but don’t look at them

Now we have a bunch of ways to flesh this out the player interaction with this character and multiple ways to play it. Maybe the machinery is stolen but he’s going to distribute it to the village folk. Or maybe he’s stealing it from them and blaming it on bandits or the party themselves. Maybe the dissenters are fake and meant to help him complete his coup. Maybe the papers show how terrible the king was and he’s trying to maintain the king’s reputation.

You could even go as far as to work these into a twist in the story, maybe all the suspicion makes the party think he’s a bad guy. Maybe he’s so charismatic they believe he’s a good guy or that the ends justify the means. This twist could totally work and even make your players shocked without them thinking the twist came out of nowhere or wasn’t earned.

Here’s where you can start working in motivations:

• Name: Gerrad Hornswallow, Regent

• Ultimate goal: Prove to the people that he’s better than the real [missing/MIA/etc] king

  • Sub goals: provide for his kingdom by bringing prosperity into it

  • Sub goals: steal people to work the fields

  • Sub goals: steal produce/machines to work the fields

• Possible quests:

  • Transport some unknown machinery to another place in the kingdom but don’t let anyone know where it’s from

  • Get rid of some dissenters in the town square but don’t kill them

  • Take these files to a volcano and destroy them but don’t look at them

• Motivations:

  • His position of power

  • His wealth

  • The safety of his family

• How is he going to accomplish this:

Now we have even more information about what the players can do to resolve the problem rather than just a straight up fight. The reason we want to do this is because all players are different, so you have to plan out a few scenarios for the type of play they do.

Maybe they’re sympathetic to the man and want to remove him democratically (threatening his position of power) by finding the real king or leading a bloodless (or bloody) rebellion. Or they help an assassin into his home. Maybe a heist is in order, where they can either keep or redistribute his wealth. Maybe they decide to kidnap his family to force him into exile or free his family from their fear of him, causing him to go mad and jump off the castle walls.

All of these could be great quests and ideas for different sessions with the PCs, which we’ll explore in more detail later, but you would put in the list of ‘How is he going to accomplish this:’ section. Make the list long. Make it varied. Make some of them useless and some of them toeing the line of good and evil, especially if you’re going for a twist. 

The reason you want to list all these, even if only a small amount of them turn into actual things the players accomplish or directly interact with, is you now have a list of things to reference and throw away with your NPCs.

By doing this, you flesh out a whole political system without having to elaborate in great detail, especially if the players never ask the Thieve’s Guild how they feel about the regent. You can also have NPCs mention events without giving further description, either out of fear or pride or because they’re deus ex machina killed before revealing more information. This allows the players to draw their own conclusions and thicken the plot without you having to do much work. It also helps you parse out who should be a major and who should be a minor character. 

One of my favorite moments in all gaming is when you’re first given the option to kill a Little Sister in Bioshock. This is a key game mechanic and the first decision comes just 20-40 minutes into the game. If you’ve explored every nook and cranny or breezed through every area, you’re still given a very difficult decision to make when you have the least amount of information (most of it based on the opinions of people and very few facts) about the world. You have two conflicting voices—one that says you should save the girl, because it’s the right thing to do and because they’ve already been treated inhumanely. The other voice says you should kill her, because she’s too far gone and you need all the help you can get if you’re going to survive. At this point, you know next to nothing about these characters, their motivations, their ideas, even if you can trust them, and they’re asking you to decide a life. It’s an insane amount of power to give a player and it works beautifully. You either end up being grateful you didn’t kill her, queasy if you did or grimly determined that this is an acceptable loss. And all with characters you don’t know.

There’s also no shame in having a few two dimensional characters in a big vast world, or starting out with them. You can have some easy, straightforward ideas where the players have to go do the thing and it’s a complete story. No one has ever gotten upset that the one-off quest where they went and dealt with a trade scandal by the docks and it didn’t elaborately tie into the regent’s plans. You don’t need to know the deeper motivations of the dentist who steals Nemo in the movie and we don’t need to have a deep understanding on why he chooses to steal fish in order for the movie to have meaning and character arcs and emotionally satisfying moments.

Sometimes, a pipe is just a pipe.

How much is too much?

Tolkien did a great thing when he invented Lord of the Rings. I love Lord of the Rings. But it is TERRIBLE for coming up with D&D ideas. He wrote a history book on the world that is hundreds of pages long about people that never appear in the main stories. The dude wrote several languages for funsies. While teaching about linguistics. He also got paid to do it! (You should also really read the story of Diana Wynne Jones because her dealing with him in his lectures is fantastic).

You (likely) do not get paid to make D&D characters and worlds. So don’t try to build out every single item in the world. It’s cost ineffective and as I mentioned before, the chance of your players stumbling upon it without you railroading them is slim.

You should instead follow the rule of imperfect knowledge. If your character starts to get too smart for the world, you should stop or tone it down. Trying to make an all-knowing character is not only boring for the players, because it makes their actions ineffective, but it leaves you open for lots of plot holes and confusion. You can have an insanely smart character but don’t give him or her all knowledge ever; Abed from Community is a great example—he has perfect knowledge of the tv world, but his application of it to the imperfect real world leads to a lot of conflict that works well. 

It’s a lot of planning to make an exceptionally dense cast of characters not only work but have distinct personalities so it’s tempting to make them very rigid in their abilities and knowledge. Imperfect knowledge cuts you a lot of slack.

From these character outlines, you should be able to make rules on how people react. The same way that someone’s clothing colors or status changes how people treat one another in the Handmaid’s Tale, you should be able to develop rules for how people interact and treat one another in this world that will make the interactions with he players fresh each time but consistent. You’re essentially going to the video game school of NPC-Making, where each character has pre-programmed rules in how to react. This way, when your players throw something weird at you, as they are wont to do, you’ll be able to formulate a response that’s fast and in character.

[/actual advice]

Of course, this is all just what I find personally works. I always want to avoid pigeonholing a character into a plot just because it seemed cool at the start. Endings for characters that don’t match what they’ve become are some of the most unsatisfying things I’ve found in stories. Consider fan fiction, a whole genre of writing focused on rewriting stories and endings to be more satisfying. When I’m writing out a character, I try to think: would readers or listeners be happy with this character’s arc? Would they be angry in how it ended but understand why it would happen? Would they want to try to stop it from happening again in the future if they were upset?

One of my players has a character who is the bastard-turned-legitimized son of a noble. I purposely started my characters in the semi-lawless area of the Storm Lands, a place that is a breeding ground for mercenaries, pirates and ripe for adventure because I wanted the first session to be more or less setup for the newbies to understand how the game works and for them to form as an adventuring party in a low stakes situation befitting their level one-ness. 

What became a running joke and a funny moment for the party was every time that this character tried to use his noble signet ring or status to intimidate or persuade someone, they would have the opposite reaction because there are no nobles or love of nobles in the Storm Lands. People chose to live there because they ignore noble birth in that land and they reacted accordingly. This became even better for the party because then if he failed any rolls where he might have noble birth advantages, it started layering in a lot of groundwork for his character just based on failed dice rolls. 

I’m excited to see how he builds on his imperfect knowledge of all things noble, how he reacts when they get into areas where nobles are more known. Or areas where he might need to perform acts to prove he’s worthy of the title.

Because of exercises like the one above, I was able to come up with a simple caste system for magic users in a specific kingdom, a specific event that affected another kingdom that most people would know of, and detail the various relations between a lot of different groups of people. Do I know the specifics? Not at all. But I do have a series of rules that I can then apply when the party gets there. They’ll probably, depending on the caste, treat the son of the noble well. Unless, of course, that noble family has a history of hating magic users. Or maybe they are patrons of them. We’ll just have to find out, together.

A good character should make them want to lean into the story, rather than not lean away. Having clear ideas of who these people are goes a long way into making a better and more elaborate world that takes very little effort.

[/Personal Story]

Anyway, that’s enough of a block of text for the day. Feel free to comment below if this helped you more easily design key NPCs for your campaigns and start to flesh out your world with a wide variety of characters that can make things change.

<3,

Steph

Part One: Where do you start?

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.

[/actual advice]

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:

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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