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One by one he shed his names. He stripped his back bare of shadow cloak and laid his staff of stone upon the floor. Rings of fire and of light, of wood and of water. All were left behind.
"I am Eritan, first and last of my name. I am Geshad, who has walked the narrow path twixt Lux and Nox in shackles of iron and stone. I am Ashtienan, King of the Stony Isles and lord of all the Crimson Sea. I am the wave that crushes stone to sand and the might that molds sand again to stone. I know the names of many things. Before me have the mighty fallen for all the years that I have walked this land.
"But I know not your name, Devil. Eldest of your kind. And I bring no magic of the world to bend you to my will. Six times has this proved folly.
"I stand bare before you, as High Saint Nimia stood before the gates of Athres, to beg for mercy at your foot."
The Lay of He-Who-Names-No-More
When it comes to writing fantasy (like traditional, linear novels), worldbuilding is typically considered a trap. Tinkering with the setting of your story feels like doing the work. It is creative labor. You are doing it in service of the work. But it’s not really doing the work.
Your job as a writer is to create meaning. Your job is to create and resolve tension. Your job is to coax or drag or trick your reader into engaging with your words. That doesn’t come from background material, it comes from text on the page of your actual story. It comes from dialogue, events, and scenes. It comes from things happening.
Having worldbuilding is often helpful. A rich world makes it easier to write rich stories. That rich world is not, however, a rich story itself.
As someone who has procrastinated a great deal of writing by worldbuilding, I think that this attitude is generally correct.
Worldbuilding for the tabletop is something of a different beast, though. Writing traditional narratives, the rote advice is to stop writing background and start writing story. Writing for the tabletop, we don’t get to write story. It is our job to write the seeds of story, and prepare a world that can react as our players make those seeds grow. This necessarily expands the importance of a well-built world.
That said, I think it is important that we DMs maintain some of that traditional skepticism towards worldbuilding. There are kinds of worldbuilding that can productively inform our stories, and there are kinds of worldbuilding that can distract us from our stories. It’s hard to tell the difference between the two, and it’s easy to spend all your energy on lore that doesn’t make your game better.
Today, we’re talking about what kind of worldbuilding will help to make your games more vibrant and interesting, and what kind of worldbuilding isn’t worth your time.
Foundations
We’re going to start with the big stuff, not least of all because I see most new worldbuilders starting with the big stuff. Myths, histories, and gods. The bones of your setting. The deep lore and ancient magicks. This stuff is important, but it’s important in a weird way.
Your players aren’t really going to engage with your world at this level. That’s because they can’t really interact with it; they can only interact with what is right in front of their character. It doesn’t matter to them what empire ruled here a thousand years ago, it matters to them who’s in charge right now. The former will influence the latter, but only the latter will matter to the decisions your players make at the table. Drama is not going to arise from your creation myth, and that means that your creation myth is not going to engage your players.
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