I’m still new at this. And I haven’t even gotten through all the material I’ve collected to figure this out, but I do have some initial thoughts on Worldbuilding for TTRPGs.

First, given that the game tends to never go as expected, and given that there is so much improvisation, it seems actually fleshing out a whole world for a campaign is not the best way to do this.

Build the campaign from the inside out, starting with a single place, expanding then as the campaign grows.

This advice is directly from the Dungeon Master’s Guide!

Do you need a Kingdom? In The Gerbil King’s Quest, I didn’t bother with anything besides “there is a kingdom” and “the king and queen are now gerbils”. And I think that is the heart of what I’m trying to get at here: No, I currently don’t think the smaller or larger region should be created before starting the campaign.

How could you even know what the story will need?

Aha! Well… some things you might already know. You do, after all, have an idea of what the story could be, what it could become.

A civilization far far away, either in time or in space or both sounds like something that could come in handy.

I just started reading the novel “Children of Time” by Adrian Tchaikovsky and having an “Old Empire” to stumble upon is such a recurring theme in great stories. Especially when not a lot is remembered. So we can find a first rule:

Build the world that existed before

You don’t need to know a lot of this world. Just that it was big and great and powerful. It had magic and technology that we now can only dream of. It also was a long time ago and something aweful happened and it’s not here anymore.

Whatever destroyed the world before might destroy it again

Other parts of worldbuilding could include legends. This is a similar theme: What happened before? But can also include well-known individuals or civilizations that the PCs might recognize.

Since the whole point of worldbuilding is the stories we get to tell in those worlds, actually thinking about the stories of that world might be way more important than figuring out exactly how much fish is moved from point A to point B.