By John Henry ( Hammered Out Homebrew)
In the beginning, there was darkness. And then there was….. wait no! In the beginning there were two beings, one of fire and one of water. Or were they dragons creating a world to fit onto a turtle made of earth?!?
Grand scale ideas like those can be fun and can make a setting interesting but they are not ideal places to start building your world. What you need to look at first, is where and what the core of the setting is, or at least what it will be for the stories you plan to tell in it. This could be decent advice whether your setting will be used for TTRPGs or a book. For right now though, let’s focus on the TTRPG facet of it.
When designing a setting, you need a few things. First you need the core concept. How do you summarize the setting? Is it an Arthurian land where the legends are real? Is it a dystopian future where the rich stay alive through cloning? Or is it a high fantasy island with endless tunnels full of magic? This is your general frame. After that is decided, you need to decide where the heart is and where the majority of the story takes place. That is where the focus of your writing takes place.
An example. You, with some input from players, decide that the world you will base your games in is a traditional fantasy setting. Elves, dwarves and dragons run amok. But that is just the background. You and your players want the majority of the game to be street level and deal with more personal stories than others that may have grand armies deciding the fate of the continent. With that decided, you know where the majority of your writing needs to be. Those streets need to be fleshed out. How corrupt is the local government? How many gangs are there? What is life like for the average citizen? This is what you need to focus on. While getting a general idea for the surrounding area, other cities, and countries might be useful, those should really be backdrop thoughts instead of things you spend hours creating.
So let’s go through the process of that. I will use my own setting, The Hollowed Isle as a reference point. The general idea of the Hollowed Isl was for it to be a compact mini-setting to get away from the official setting we had started out using. I also wanted it to have more high magic and offer plenty of dangerous traveling encounters. So I created an island that was built like an iceberg. With that decided, I needed to figure out where to focus my writing. I assumed a great deal of time would be spent in the early tunnels and then time spent there would decrease as the party grew in power. Therefore I spent time detailing out my general layout and the dangers encountered in those early tunnels, and much less on the later tunnels.
I had a general idea for the people they would encounter on the island but not many specifics. The capital city was the most detailed since I expected the most time to be spent there. The village in the mountains was the next most detailed. Beyond that, the rest of the places had descriptions a paragraph long at most. The time spent in those places was roughly what I had expected. Brief portions of the campaign were spent in other areas of the island and I felt validated on how much time was spent in writing them.
In regards to the story of the campaign, that was fairly simple. I gave some outside motivation for the party to go there that I won’t bother going into here. I did not go crazy in detail. I knew my players mainly wanted to just have a good time and dive into some combat. So I had the island in the midst of an undead plague. This gave plenty of opportunity for fights and plenty of people that needed rescuing. It also drastically reduced the number of people the party would be interacting with, which reduced the amount of character writing I had to do.
The divinity and reason for some things to exist the way they did were not really important to the story or game so they were not mentioned, except in passing. In campaign 2, these things started to matter more, so they were expanded. Characters had questions and desires in regards to the gods so I put more detail into them. Areas that were important to these characters, like Docktown, were also more important. With that importance came a magnifying glass. So with a little collaboration, the gods and some more areas of the island became more fleshed out.
To use the same setting but from a different angle, campaign 3 had a much tighter initial focus. The players wanted a smaller, more personally invested story. The focus was put on Threespire, a militaristic dark elf clan. The government was fleshed out extensively as well as the criminal element. This was along with a focus on a particular cult. These second two were mainly because the players had unintentionally created a theme of secrets in the family. This allowed me to focus worldbuilding on factions on this smaller scale. Gone were any apocalyptic dealings with undead hordes or other world-ending threats. The gods were a background for some characters but nothing more. How the island got where it was mattered little to the characters so it mattered little to the story.
The point of these examples is that once the general framework was established, the details could come when they were needed. If you expect your characters to be dealing with demons and gods, those need to be firmly established. But if that might come up later, a general idea is fine. The details are where the story is; not in some giant Google doc full of stuff that will never be relevant.
That’s not to say that you should never write those things. That would be very hypocritical of me. It just should not be your priority. If you have the time and motivation, then go for it. Just do not let it distract you from the actual priority. That being either to flesh out the world that will let your players and you enjoy yourselves the most or make sure the immediate setting of your story is as robust as it needs to be.
About the Author
John’s TTRPG experience: He has played D&D off and on for 14ish years. Starting in 2019, he has consistently run campaigns and one shots. Starting soon after that John started publishing his homebrew to the internet. He has written enough homebrew that he has plans for a book of it to be released sometime in 2023(DrivethruRPG). He has also played Monster of the Week, many RP board games, Call of Cthulu, and Pathfinder. You can see other of his work on Instagram!
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