In reply to Varsovian (msg # 1):

Take a look at An Echo Resounding for a way to make a world that hangs together but is easy to generate.
Alter "the spice" as needed for your vision.

I also start with factions when world building (I love it). Then, after determining what and how many factions I have, I then decide okay how much land does this said faction rule? Then I find a capital for it,then just dot maybe one or two major cities, then let the rest happen in gameplay. Players also are usually great at adding in stuff.

Thanks for the advice, guys!

Re: starting small. It sounds like a good advice, but you can't really do that with gods... at least, in something like Pathfinder. If you have a cleric character, then this character needs to have their god defined - the alignment, the domains etc. You can't skip this.

Although, I guess, there's a difference with coming up with one god and with the whole pantheon...

Looking at real life pantheons may give you some ideas. Looking at fantasy sources outside of the mainstream, big-name sources may give other ideas. For example, the Diamond Throne setting was one with no gods set in stone, but one race (the Faen) had the ability to spontaneously become aware of whichever god ruled over an activity that the faen character was doing at the time.

A friend of mine built his own fantasy game...kit-bashed a system for it from the parts of several other systems that he liked, and then drew up a vague map and came up with about seven or eight races and decided where on the map they came from...and that was about as far as he got on his own.  But when he decided to play-test it, he offered players additional points for building their characters if they would go through and detail some aspect of the world.  I, for instance, wrote up the general information on his avian-humanoid races...where they lives, how they organized their society, their attitudes toward other races, etc.  Someone else did a very detailed map of a very large city, someone else refined the geography of one of his continents and added a bunch of natural features like swamps, forests, and rivers that would serve as natural boundaries...

He didn't keep it all exactly as written, but it helped him flesh the world out in very fast fashion (he ended up writing a fantasy trilogy set there...it was cool to read it and pick out details that came up which I'd contributed to the overall 'brain trust'...)

He did have his pantheon very clearly delineated before we got started, though...and even if someone decided they wanted to create their own deity, he figured out a way to work them into his pool of deific entities so that it was still plausible that they would be worshipped, but they couldn't somehow over-write the mythology he created.

The way I do world-building is neither to start large nor small, but both, and work in from both ends toward the middle.

You need some sort of overview of your world, or universe, how it works, how you move around it, who the people are, races, species, gods if you need them. Basically just describe your setting on one side of A4. It's just a framework.

Then go to the other end. What do you want this particular adventure to be about? A dungeon crawl? Then all you need to do is lay out the dungeon and its contents. Nothing exists beyond a framework until it is brought into being by action.

If your game is to start with the PCs in a nearby tavern, then make a sentence or two describing the bar room. It's just a facade, a stage set, and you're a set designer. You don't need to describe or design the layout of the entire tavern, how many bedrooms it has, where the connecting doors and stairs are, because the PCs/audience will never go there. The bar room is just a scene.

Likewise the village the tavern is in - unless the PCs are going to have a battle there, you don't need it. In fact you don't need to describe up front whether the 'floating' bar room is in a village, or at an isolated crossroads on the moors, or in the hold of a vast starship - unless it becomes pertinent to the plot. The plot is about the characters meeting in a bar room and then finding a dungeon. All you need to build/describe is the bar room and the dungeon. The rest doesn't matter.

So what happens when the PCs inevitably go 'off piste'? I hear you say. That's when you use your overview knowledge of the universe. You will have a handle on what sort of things may lie beyond the immediate scene, and you will also have a handle on what you want to do to with players who go off piste. Do you want to reward them or punish them?

You will already have a hazy idea of what might be nearby, and a hazy idea is all you need. You bring them into being as they are needed, like a cartoon character laying railway line in front of his train. You know where you want the PCs' train to go, or where they want it to go (and if you don't, ask them OOC), so lay track in that direction.

What you develop at a local level might give you some further insight into the universe at large. If so, write it down for use later. If all of your games take place in the same universe, it will grow and take form over time - you just have to make sure it remains consistent.

Repeat as required.

There is an exception to this - the GM as an artist, which swordchucks mentioned above. If you enjoy your world building and it's a hobby in itself, then by all means go to town on it and reveal some of its rich splendour to your players as they go. But don't expect any accolades. Most of it you'll never use, and even the bits you do use will never be appreciated by the players, because they'll never see the effort that went into it. You're doing it for yourself, nobody else.

Sometimes you can start out with a facade universe, get the bug, and turn it into a detailed work of art. If you're enjoying what you do, it doesn't matter how you do it. If you're not enjoying yourself, stop. :)

icosahedron makes a lot of sense.

I've always thought that all you need of the larger world to begin is an outline of the known continents and the approximate location of the major empires/kingdoms/citystates. For the continents players might know a bit about the climate and geography. For the states they might know a bit about the current political context, recent wars, plagues, etc. A sketch of maybe 100 years of history (living memory) and you've got enough of the macro setting.

You need a bit more detail for the place they start in, of course., but it only really needs filled in as it's discovered. And you can get the players to help with that.

A lot of sense.  That was a seriously good post.


But that's my favorite piece.  Back when I had more time for that sort of thing, I built dozens of worlds no one else is ever going to see.  And literally hundreds of characters I'll never play.  (Figuratively, millions.)  I don't consider any of it a waste of time.  I had fun, and that's what it was for.

If you're finding your world-building is getting in the way of the fun you want to have, as the OP suggests, then I totally agree with the other advice noted in this thread.  Dial down your standards a little and work on letting it develop more organically in-play, instead of having every detail laid out ahead of time.  Think procedurally-generated instead of every-detail-pre-programmed.

Why not world build as you go?  That's half the fun.

These are great comments! As an observation, the richest game I've run here is one that was dropped in my lap literally two GM posts after character creation. I was new to the site and offered to take the game on myself. The GM signed it over to me, but I had absolutely nothing to work with other than the opening scene, and a very generic map with the locations of seven cities. No plot, no background, no world, no nothing. The coolest thing happened however. The players didn't know any of that, and so it all just grew organically as needed. I took comments and ideas the players expressed in-character, and grew them as needed. Bit by bit it has grown and the gaps are filled in as needed and only as needed. It's been a very fun and rewarding experience as a GM, and yes, a bit challenging sometimes, but keeping track of things as they come up has been the key.

So bottom line is to take some of those suggestions above, let your world grow as it needs to grow. Jot down ideas as they come to you, and introduce them as seeds into your game. Spend your creative time fleshing out the parts where your characters are at presently and leave tendrils out ahead that can be picked up when needed.

Also, solicit ideas from your players! They will do much of the work for you if you're clever!

Good luck!

Okay, thanks for the comments! :)

BTW. You know what the other obstacle for me when creating a game is? The amount of reading you need to do. As I said, I'd like to try Pathfinder, but... I have no time to read the whole rulebook. :\ It's the same with other RPs, too - for example, I recently got books for NWoD's Mummy: the Curse. The game looks good, but I simply have no time to read 800+ pages of material...

That's my current problem: I own so many games I'd like to try running! But I have no time to learn the rules and the settings...

(Thanks for the reviews guys.)

I don't bother with huge rulebooks any more.
Likewise I have loads of books that I've accumulated over the decades, some I've read, some are a pleasure still to come when I get the time.

But over those decades I've come to realize that you just don't need all that stuff. There are rule sets out there whose pages you can count on your fingers - 'indie' games, some are amazingly good and a lot of them are free downloads. You don't need to be a Jackson Giant to write good rules, they all started out somewhere.

I've played games with 800 pages of rules and I've played games with 8 pages of rules, and, particularly in a PbP environment, once you add in Rule Zero, your players simply can't tell the difference. You can have just as much fun with 1% of the page count.

Besides, more than half of those 800 pages are typically chrome for the designers' pet universe and, as I've indicated, you can just design your own as you go.

I'm currently using a rule set whose core rules are written on a single A4 page. The whole booklet, including the perennial 'play advice' and two sample adventures runs to a grand total of 18 pages and it cost me $4 (at the pre-Brexit exchange rate that was about the price of a latte). It's brilliant. I've had more use out of that rule set than D&D and Shadowrun put together.

Cut the crepe out of your life, put those tomes on your 'retirement reading' shelf, and pick up a rule book you can actually use today.

Surf the net for indie RPGs, download a few ten-pagers, skim them and pick one. You'll be playing your game by tonight.

The number one thing I suggest (and I've suggested this before lots of places) is to find a podcast of the game you want to run and listen to that.  An actual play will give you something more important than rules - it will give you a feel for what is important to the game and how the game session flows.  How important is combat to the game?  How is opposition to the players actually implemented?  What kind of stories does the game try to tell?  These are all things that will help you focus your prep on what is important and some of them may be difficult to grasp using just the rulebook.

Really, once you understand the structure of the game and the general flow, you can typically look up any of the rules you don't know when you get to them.  I tend to read the rulebooks for familiarity, make a few characters, and listen to a few podcasts before I try running a game.  That's usually enough to make it make sense.

This is also, frankly, a place where PbP really shines. Skim the rules. Focus on character generation, and the rest you can look up when you need to. However many times you need to. Unlike face to face, you're not leaving anybody sitting around getting bored while you flip through the indexes trying to remember which supplement that was in.

A trick that I think a lot of authors and writers use is to create only what they need to entertain for the space of one story or book or movie or season (or pilot) and then backfilling as necessary if their initial idea takes off. Sure, sometimes that turns into a contradictory mess, though if the concept is enough to really grab people, they tend to overlook (and even justify) a lot of contradictions.

A reality about roleplaying games, as with other forms of endeavor, is that most of what's started never really gets anywhere, so there's an excellent chance that the background or self-consistent magic systems or anything else you put effort into will never see the light of day. That doesn't mean you shouldn't put that effort in if you enjoy it, but if you don't enjoy it while you're making it you're risking the possibility of never enjoying it.

I would echo what a few others have mentioned. Start small! I generally go with designing only the local area and a small village. As your players move around and explore that, it gives you time build out from there. What they do during the early stages of the game also helps guide you on what/where you need to focus on as 'their  world' expands.

In reply to Varsovian (msg # 1):

start simple, a hamlet with a black smith, a tavern, a few huts, maybe a witch that lives nearby in the woods. then, expand out. you'll get the feel of your own world, as you immerse yourself in it. if you try and do it all at once, it will overwhelm you.

You can always play an established world, you start with a ton of established plot hooks and can run published adventures set in those worlds.

This lets a gm get straight into the game with minimal preparation and lets him have a fun time exploring the world right alongside his players.

Not sure if it was already mentioned before, but yes; start small. One of the tricks I use is give the players a chance to add stuff in. Of course, it has to go through the "GM approved" filter first, but all I can say is that I'm currently running a fantasy game that has turned out about 15 times bigger than I originally anticipated. I started with three races, now I have 17 playable ones.

Started with a city and the nearby forest. Now it has around 20 playable "lands". My players and I have basically created an entire continent, with more room to grow. We have our own economy, caste systems, NPCs treated as actual player characters, additional plots, random happenings, a whole myriad of various deities and religions...

It might seem like too much, but the funny thing is that works for us and it's wonderfully complex and immersive. (Even though I had to get a co-GM just to keep track of it all.) ^^ However, I must warn you that it needs a lot of effort, hours of mulling it all through, on how it all ties together and finding that golden spot in between there it all falls into place. It's really hard work (not admiring my GMing skill here or anything, it really IS hard work, just a warning), but if you manage to pull it off, it can be amazing. If you are a first time GM, however, I would suggest cutting the size of it down to half or more, until you get the hang of it all.

Best of luck! :)
This message was last edited by the user at 08:22, Fri 23 Sept 2016.

Don't plan - prepare.

Random tables.

Use many small sentences. Expand them into monumental worldshaking plot-holes later.

Get a feel for the players and cater to them.

One way to do that is to ask them what they want, in a straightforward manner. Not everyone is good at that, and not everyone likes to be asked, but if you are and they are it saves a lot of time, and generates ideas that the players are bound to be on board with, because they came up with them.

I've used a particular trick for helping me get started on designing a setting for my IRL group of players.  It's called the 5x5 Quick Map.  I forget where I picked it up (it's been almost twenty years), but it's very, very helpful.  The process tends to take about two hours or so to complete, but you end up with a solid bunch of usable material and a lot of options to try and catch the interest of your players.

1. First, draw out a regional map on a piece of paper by filling it in with five large bits of terrain.  Mountain range there, forest here, river system over there, coastline down there, and a volcano right here.
   
2. Next, mark five cities on the map and draw out some roads that run between them.  Put one on the coast where the river empties out into it, put the second farther up the river, then the third can go nearby the mountains, the fourth can be at a crossroads inside the forest, and the last one can be in between two of the others along a road.
   
3. Now, each city gets a name and five details to define its existence.  The coastal city of Arumn is mostly populated by Humans, is run by a Circle of Guildmasters, trades with another city across the sea, imports lumber from upriver to make ships, and has an active Thieves' Guild.
   
4. Come up with five NPC's for each city; one or two sentences is plenty to describe their basic function, personality, and immediate goals.  Hector Timms is a straight arrow Guildmaster in Arumn that wants to oust the Thieves' Guild.  Jayce Highwind is a rapscallion sailor that would rather steal his dinner than work for it and is being recruited by the Thieves' Guild.  Griselda Highwind is Jayce's mother and is worried about her son and wants someone to knock some sense into the young man.  One Eyed Leroy is the proprietor of "Cheapskate's Heaven," a general store that's been targetted by the Thieves' Guild.  Rogger Blackstone is a lieutenant in the Thieves' Guild and responsible for keeping the boys out of trouble and an ear to the ground for incoming problems.
   
5. Last, come up with a story hook related to each city and its cast of characters.  If you end up needing more NPC's, that's fine!  Just add them to the cast from step 4.  The Guard Captain of Arumn is looking for new recruits to try and oust the Thieves' Guild informants that have infiltrated its ranks.  A Druid Circle in the forest hasn't been seen or heard from all summer, and wild animals have started attack some of the townsfolk.  Zombies have been spotted in the mountains, and no one knows what the source may be.  A Goblin tribe has started raiding barges moving up and down the river, and the boat captains are willing to pay quite a bit for some extra protection.  Farmers have started to go missing one by one and only a few drops of blood are left behind to mark their disappearance; the town's mayor and guards are at a loss but too scared to and too few to do much about it.

And there's the 5x5 Quick Map method.  Hope that's helpful!

Just as a player I find it's more common for games to have too much world building rather than too little. Points of interest and important NPCs are cool, but sometimes I read threads in a game I might be interested in and it seems like the GM has crafted this world that's so overwrought with gobbledygook that he didn't leave any room for players to carve out a spot. Gets even worse if you want to play a character that has a trained background instead of an autodidact.

In reply to cascadingfailure (msg # 29):

I've seen that too. I hadn't considered the difficulty of "carving out a spot," but it makes sense to me, in the way that players tend to engage more with things they've had a hand in creating. Players aren't going to remember that Ayersburg has a trade agreement with Brookville, just because the GM states the fact, but if the players were instrumental in establishing that fact, either in-game or via collaborative world-building, it's a good bet they'll remember then.

Your first two steps are great, but I'd only do step 3, 4, and 5 for the city you intend for the story to start in (well, maybe do half of #3 for all five cities).  If you start the game with the plot hooks out there and characters that are at least roughly tied to the world, that's plenty to get the first story arc underway.