The Top-Down Worldbuilding series is a guide to producing a whole-world environment that makes it easier to spawn individual campaign settings wherever and whenever inspiration strikes. The output of this exercise is a world map and a gazetteer that describes what’s on it. As noted last week, the journey is not short, and in addition to tips, tools, and templates, I promised to share some design philosophies.
Before we get into what to create and how to create it, I’m asking your indulgence to I can lay the groundwork for why we’re taking the approach I’ll be shortly guiding you through. There is a method to my madness, and I’m strongly suggesting you adopt that madness, too.
Less Is More
I’ve talked about the Less is More approach before, but it bears repeating here in the context of worldbuilding.
In practice, “Less is More” is a cobbled mixture of:
- John Maeda’s Ten Laws of Simplicity, which state that Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious, and adding the meaningful,
- The Law of Triviality that says People within an organization commonly give disproportionate weight to trivial issues, and
- Parkinson’s Law, which asserts that Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.1My copy (pictured above; The Riverside Press, 8th printing, 1957), purchased at a used bookstore, includes an admonishing inscription: “To Ray – Another year gone! It’s time you took your cancer seriously! -Job.” Possibly the strangest way to alert a friend about their poor time management, and I hope Ray took the nudge.
Combining these three laws into a singular guide suggests that the important work should be simple and timeboxed.
For worldbuilders, these shake out to core practices:
Simplicity: The top-down world exists in a particular state, which is the backdrop for the campaigns and adventures in which the players’ characters will participate. Defining the current state is the primary goal of this entire exercise, and the more complex the causes contributing to the current state, the more detail you have to provide. This makes the current state harder for players (and you) to understand and engage with, and it also requires more work from you, which is a good segue to…
Triviality: The top-down approach focuses on the macro view of the world, and while small details at the micro level will be important later, they can wait until they’re relevant to a campaign. This isn’t to say that any detail you dream up should be discarded. Instead, put those ideas in a “parking lot” of things you can flesh out later. For now, direct your efforts to building the skeleton.
Time: The top-down approach can take as long as you allow it to, but pressure to start campaigning quickly will prevent you taking months and years. Plan and execute in terms of weeks by timeboxing your efforts. Give yourself enough time to create each bone in the skeleton, then move onto the next. Again, feel free to jot down details as notes, but don’t fall into the trap of finalising them before you have the whole macro view (trust me – they will change dramatically as you work through the process).
In practice: In my world, I wanted a divide between elves and humans, and I needed an historical event that put these two races at odds. At a high-level, I decided that the elves once governed a republic that included human territories. Initially, the republic prospered, but the humans eventually rebelled, ultimately shattering the republic and severing their cooperative union. The reasons humans rebelled are not clear to me yet, nor do I know how the humans managed to overthrow their elven rulers, or what happened in the immediate aftermath. I have some ideas that I’ve put in a notebook to flesh out later, as I continue developing the macro view. But for now, I know that the elves used to rule a large portion of the setting, the humans rebelled, and neither race trusts the other. There are implications for sure: what does human self-rule look like, are there new human territories, what is the impact of once-settled land converting to wilderness, are there elven ruins, and where are the elves now? But these can wait – thematically, this is all about describing the setting’s current state, it’s light on detail, and it took minutes to devise.
von Moltke’s Wargame
A riff on the old saw, the RPG version says: No campaign survives contact with the players.
Put another way, the Referee should assume that whatever they’ve planned for an encounter, an adventure, or a setting will not unfold as expected once it’s put before the players. While it’s helpful to have a loose plan in mind, relying on an assumed player response or outcome is probably a waste of time. In the context of top-down worldbuilding, this law suggests that your role as Referee is to set the stage for the players but not write the script – given them challenges and opportunities, but be prepared to adapt if player decisions or a random die roll push the situation in a different direction.
In most cases, this benefits you. First, you can save a lot of development time by teeing up challenges without bothering with solutions. Second, players will come up with better ideas than you, and you can use their approaches, theories, and assumptions as input to take the campaign in directions you haven’t considered. Third, this flexible approach is more engaging for players, since you pay off their hunches instead of your plan.
In practice: I once introduced an NPC who was an informant with intimate knowledge of the local thieves’ guild. My plan was that the informant got their info from a sibling in the guild who they wanted to protect. The players were convinced that the informant was a former member. That idea hadn’t occurred to me, but it opened up new opportunities as it gave the NPC better in-game knowledge of the guild’s operations. They players (who didn’t know of my original plan) benefitted from those opportunities, and allowed me to reuse the NPC for other guild-related hooks later in the campaign.
Spice Law
Worldbuilding Referees rightly differentiate races, cultures, and characters with flavour – call it trappings, setting dress, local colour, whatever. However, Flavour is the first casualty of mechanics.
Put another way, mechanics often impact player decisions; if flavour has no such impact, it’s likely to be ignored, forgotten, or discarded during play. It’s not that flavour is bad, but if you’re going to take the time to create these particulars, you want to make sure they affect player decisions in the setting.
In practice: Consider these examples of making flavour “real” by attaching minor mechanics:
- Flavour: A culture inters their dead so as to prevent them rising as undead.
Mechanic: Clerics from this culture cannot turn undead, hence their special funeral preparations. - Flavour: Humans harbour animosity towards elves.
Mechanic: Elves suffer a -4 modifier to reaction rolls with humans. - Flavour: Jungle cannibals file their teeth to sharp points.
Mechanic: During an encounter, groups of six or more of these bloodthirsty cannibals create the equivalent of a fear spell if they gain surprise. Alternatively, these cannibals gain a bite attack. You might also decide that they coat their teeth with a sedative toxin by chewing the leaves of some jungle plant; this suggests they’re immune to that poison. - Flavour: The Druids can heal wounds naturally with herbs and poultices.
Mechanic: Given time to find the necessary plants and prepare a remedy, Druids can cast the equivalent of a cure light wounds spell; a Druid of 1st-3rd level needs three turns; two turns for Druids of 4th-8th level, and 1 turn for Druids of 9th level or higher.
Derp’s Law
Simply put, What you think is simple, players will make complex.
Referees love to create tricks and surprises that challenge the players’ understanding of the setting. These challenges are meant to be overcome, because player agency is important, so Referees are themselves tasked to make them solvable. In my experience, that becomes an exercise in assessing difficulty: you want to make the challenge, well, challenging, but not so difficult that players get discouraged or (worse) find they can’t continue their mission.
Happily, this turns out to be a needless effort. What you think is dead simple is often just hard enough to stymie your players. Riddles, puzzles, clues to an NPC’s real identity, and X marks the spot may seem like easy solves to the Referee, but remember that you’re biased – you created the trick – and that the players lack that context. Add to that the players’ natural paranoia, and even a “simple” puzzle is likely to give the players just the right amount of challenge.
Players drive complexity – all you need to do is set the stage and let the players do the rest.
In practice: A dungeon I created included a false tomb. The players expected to find treasure inside a sarcophagus, but it contained only a scroll referencing “A starry deep in places north.” A section of the tomb’s north wall – 20 feet away from the sarcophagus – depicted a set of 8-pointed stars, hiding a secret door leading to the real tomb. I figured this would be an easy solve. Instead, the players assumed (then steadfastly convinced themselves) that the clue referenced an overlook in the hills north of the dungeon. Away they went, fruitlessly searching for a tomb that didn’t exist. (Softie that I am, I provided an encounter that helped redirect them, but the point is that something I thought was an easy win was terrifically complexifiedâ„¢ by the players all by themselves.)
Final Thoughts
These laws are guidelines culled from my own experience, but they coalesce around the central theme of saving yourself time by focusing only on the macro view of your world. The key to a playable world setting is flexibility, and providing detail at this early stage is counter-productive. Your goal is to build a foundation or stitch together a skeleton to which you can attach more detail later, when and where you need it.
I love the law of Derp!
The struggle is real 😀