Good Bones. Kickass Techniques for Structuring your D&D World Building

July 25, 2019

Intro

Have you ever considered building your own RPG setting? Creating a custom world for you and your friends to adventure in is a very fun and rewarding experience. It can also be very daunting. It can be hard to know where to start. And, if you’re not careful, you can spend a lot of time working on things that will see little to no use in the long run.

We’re making it easy to do D&D world-building with three step by step guides that will walk you through the process. We started with an article on finding your spark. So if you’re just finding this here in the middle, you may want to start there.

So you’ve got a spark! Some inspiring, thought-provoking concepts that you’re excited to explore. That’s the best, and hardest step. We’ll call this next step building out the “bones” of your world & campaign. It can be so easy when world-building to get sidetracked with minutia. Focusing on building out the bones of your campaign allows you to build out the framework that’s easy to fill in and explore later. Building out the bones gives your story a framework to help bring it to life! Let’s jump into world-building – building the bones of your world.

Level Set

There are a few core concepts that will serve you very well when world-building that we want to just get out in the open here. They will be our mantras that we will reference time and again. In this series

Who this Guide is, and is Not For

Experiencing awesome collaborative storytelling and adventure is the goal here. Spending a tremendous amount of hours in preparation and in working out the details of tedious matters (like how many children the 18th NPC you’ve imagined for your 13th small fishing town in your world).  There are different schools of thought here. If you are looking for a guide that really explores how to make a fantastically detailed world because the process of creating and world-building is fun and relaxing and self-expression for you… that’s great.  This is just not the guide for you. This guide is for players or DM’s who want to focus on building enough, and having enough tools available to create amazing, fantastical (and yes, detailed) worlds with a minimal amount of fuss.  We want to get to the collaborative experience faster. 

Less is More

The less you try to plan every detail of an adventure and a world ahead of time, the happier you will be as a DM, and the happier your players will be with your playstyle.  Here’s why; this less is more technique frees you up to make it a story that is character-story driven. This makes it more fun for your players, and in turn, more fulfilling for you as a DM.  Less is more does not mean that you as the creator of a setting do not create amazing, immersive scenes that paint the palette of the senses of your players, nor does it stop you from creating memorable, relatable real feeling NPCs in your world that your players will love, or love to hate. Do these things, but with wise restraint not to overdo it. This saves you time and fuss and allows the players to shine, and to collaborate as a part of the story.

Their Ideas Are Far More Interesting to Them Than Yours Alone.

Hard-hitting but true. This concept is tied very closely to “Less is more” above, but deserves its own section.   A D&D story that pulls from the backgrounds of the characters and the ideas of the players is likely the very best technique in getting your players very interested in your game. The more the players feel that the story is an expression of themselves, the more they will be invested in it.

Building out the Bones

When taking your campaign from a few interesting concepts into a fleshed-out world, it’s extremely helpful to have in mind what bones you are trying to build out in the first place.  What are the main concepts that you want to nail that will allow you to flesh out your adventure? It’s very helpful to have a touch of structure to help you map out your thoughts. Consider the following questions and tools

Main Question #1 – What Are Your pillars?

What are the 3-4 really big pillars that are major factors in your world? What makes it distinct and allow other ideas to form from them? When thinking of your pillars consider large events, or dominating forces / people. Here are some example “pillars” sampled from my own world-building and some of my favorites:

Example Setting 1 – Knembadj

  • There was a great shattering that physically tore a piece of the world away, it has floated off into space
  • Since the great shattering, there have been rifts in reality that have torn open, appearing randomly with aggressive fae creatures pouring through

Example Setting 2 – Sky Pirates

  • The entire world is “fantasy post-apocalyptic-light.” There was a draconic scorching of the world that destroyed most civilizations and life about a century ago.
  • Flying ship technology has been invented, this with the combination of a largely lawless world, has given birth to sky pirates
  • Some magically inclined ghosts that died in the scorching have manifested within inanimate objects, animating them and transforming them into clockwork animations. Some are very large and fearful

As you can imagine, setting up some of the major pillars of your world set the tone for other features that will come to life.  Not all of your inspiration for your pillars may come at once, and that’s OK. Set up a category called “pillars” for yourself, fill out as much as you can, and then come back to it as inspirations hit you. Just having a section like this to capture your thoughts will give you huge mental clarity

Main Question #2 – What is Your Palette

Create a “Bucket” to throw your ideas into that make up your “palette.”  It’s very helpful to think along these lines because it helps you start to get clear on what the world is going to feel like.  For example, I chose the term “fantasy-post-apocalyptic-light” as a strong palette setting for me because I knew that I wanted the post devastation aspect to be prevalent, but I still wanted the world to feel like there was still whimsy and light-heartedness to the story.  I could have alternatively described my palette as gritty & dark if I was going for a different feel.  I like bouncing between my palette, and my influences that I’m thinking of so that I can pull from other books / movies  / settings that I want my world to have some elements of. Think of the concepts that define your palette that make up what your world looks and feels like.

Kickass D&D World Building Technique: Try a Mind Map

Now that we’ve described maybe the two most important categories, or buckets to consider, your Pillars, and Palette, lets switch gears a bit and talk about tools of the trade.  I am a huge fan of something called a mind map for D&D world-building.  A Mind map is a simple thought organization tool that allows you to visually plot out your ideas starting with a central thought (a central idea circled in the center of the page) followed by categories (circles, connected with a line back to the original central circle, then expanding each category with inspirations, and specifics to flesh it all out.  Creating a mind map can be done simply with pen and paper, and there are electronic tools for this as well.  I find that pen and paper get my ideas flowing out faster, but digital media is cleaner / prettier and easier to share with others.  There are plenty of free / freemium mind maps out there, just google and have a heyday, The one I used to create this digital example was https://www.mindmeister.com

What started on paper as this… (15 minutes)

Turned into the digital version that looked like this (45 minutes)

When jotting down your ideas in your mind map, consider the following ideas. Some will spark a lot of interesting elaboration, and others might not be pertinent at all.  In the above example, I am introducing firearms and clockwork inventions, so diving into the tech level was really important to me. Tech level might be near irrelevant in your world.

Ideas / Questions to ask yourself for World Building &  Mind Mapping:

  • What are my pillars (detailed above)?
  • What is the palette of the setting (detailed above)?
  • What is society like?
    • Big Kingdoms? Small kingdoms? Mixed races? Segregated races? City-states?
    • Try not to get stuck in the details here but think about what is distinct about society, bullet it out, and move on
  • What are the major lore influences?
    • This one is big and open-ended. What big lore events / periods / influences are in this world
  • Locations
    • What locations seem exciting to build into this world?
    • What is the minimum different kinds of places that you might have to have the party run into?
    • A location that has a concept, and 2-3 distinct things about it is perfect. Don’t overthink these. Brainstorming examples:
      • Fishing village – cohabitation with merfolk
      • Dwarven mine town – rich with mithril – hates outsiders
      • Oakseny – big city built into the forest. Wooden architecture. Tree huggers. Savagely territorial.
    • Thinking through and jotting down maybe 2-5 small, medium, and large location concepts (this can be cities and towns or wilderness areas) will give you a great amount of fodder for setting the stage for your first story arc.
  • Influences
    • What influences do you think of when creating the concept for this world? books, movies, real-world locations, history, etc.
    • In the above example, I pulled from other similar worlds that I enjoy and can pull inspiration from.  This section does not need to be filled out distinctly but is a good receptacle for those bits of inspiration that jump out at you.  When I was writing this list I thought… what if it was like Firefly? And I just jotted down Firefly into the influences section and it was enough for my brain to feel like that thought was captured and I could move on.

World Building Next Steps

With your exciting Spark, and now your solid “bones” in the form of an outline / mind map, you’re set to start adding some great content to your world. Our next article will showcase three essential mentalities to have to reduce fuss and maximize fun for your game. See you in the next article.

Supplemental

Here’s some additional example mind map content that I made when creating a starting location for my campaign. This is the location that we started in on our live play streamed campaign with Co-Optimus. Please forgive any typos in the document this was literally created quick and dirty for actual play content and has not been revised. This fantasy paladin-run location was inspired by real-world Arab nations/cultures.