Worldbuilding Advice is Flawed

I've got a potentially playable idea for how we can worldbuild better for the TTRPG world.

World building for a tabletop RPG is a tricky thing. You need all the same things you need if you're building a world for fiction writing - strong themes, evocative imagery, unique ideas, and characters and history that embody all of those things. But you also need practical elements and tools that you use in the next phase of your game mastery, which is adventure design and session prep. You need tables, NPCs, treasures, and tidbits of lore to thread through all of those things to make your players feel like they are exploring a real world.

There's shockingly little practical advice in RPG world building. There's a metric boat load of opinions on what you should have in your world, and my experience, they are darts thrown at the wrong board. It isn't exactly meaningless to list out the things that make a world interesting, but the insidious thing is that you could spend a year filling out that list and you'll be no closer to having fertile ground for new stories than you were on day one. You have checked off every item on the list of things that makes someone else's world interesting, but it's not the contents of that list that are important, it's how the items on that list interplay and mingle and breed into new ideas and, most importantly, weave themselves into interesting stories, that creates an interesting new world.

Today’s Problem

My experience so far is that the common world building advice for the purpose of RPG play falls into two categories:

1. Start small, one town, three hexes, no more than you need for one session of your game. This is well intended but fails to separate two distinct activities - world building and session prep.

2. Start with the big truths of your world - pantheons and continents and epochs and creation myths. This is similarly well intended but is only practical for people with a ton of time on their hands and no children or, well, responsibilities. (I jest, but only a little bit.)

Personally, I need a framework that meets these criteria:

1. The output is usable and practical for TTRPG-ing.

2. The process is organic, and has a low barrier of entry.

3. It scales well with time and effort.

4. It's not prescriptive to a specific style of play or genre of fiction.

The most useful and practical output for TTRPG play. That's a big question, but at this phase of my life, my answer is tables and NPCs. They're also a bit hard to do. Tables are hard because of quantity (unless you're the demon-possessed Ktrey), and NPCs are hard because of quality. To address these problems, I'm aiming to build a system for solo GMs that alleviates that difficulty, and consciously tries to solve the other problems in turn.

My Idea, a Work in Progress

My idea is that world building, like play, can happen in sessions, and that each session has the same structure. It revolves around tables, oracles, and short stories. It's... basically solo RPG-ing. I'm not making something novel ground breaking here, but looping solo play back around to feed the early stages of the RPG hobby. It starts with a few tables, but you start off with only a few entries on each.

The first is the Big Idea table. This is stuff that you want to see in your game. Start with as few as four entries. The tricky part here is finding the sweet spot in between generic and specific. You want it to be generic enough that you still have to do some interpretation, and specific enough that it is interesting and meaningful as a concept in your world. "Elves" is good. "People" is too generic, and "The shadow elves of the Umbral Crater" is too specific (for the big ideas table). Maybe. Maybe you really want them to be present in a big big way in your setting. Go nuts.

Second, you need a Stuff table. This is the more generic "what type of thing am I going to write about" table. Some good ideas for this table are Weapons, Food, Shrines, Cults, Inventions, Spells.... archetypal stuff.

And lastly, you need an Action+Theme oracle. This may be the only table you want to steal from somewhere else, and have complete before your first world building session, because oracles have to be diverse early on to tell interesting stories, and writing these tables won't help your world building. I highly recommend the Ironsworn oracles for this activity, which are free online.

You can start from here, but you're going to end up building way more tables than this, which is the big point (tm).

So what do you do? Each session, you:

1. Add an entry to your stuff table, and then roll on it. Record this roll.

2. Add an entry to your Big Ideas table, and then roll on that. Record this too.

3. Roll on your Action+Theme oracles. Record that.

4. Your roll from step 1, the stuff roll. Whatever category you rolled up, you need to make or add to a table for that category. If you rolled weapons, create a new table for interesting weapons for your world. If you already have one, add an entry to it. Roll on that table.

5. Mash all those rolls up into an idea for some short writing. A paragraph, a few paragraphs, a few pages, whatever you're in the mood for.

6. Document your story. You probably had a character or two, a location or two, a bit of juicy lore. Write those down, using the context of your story. This is the lore that you just discovered about your world.

That's it. You make or extend useful tables, you discover a bit of story and lore and people in your world through play, and you can do it all in an hour max. That's one session. The more sessions you play in this world, the more of it you will discover.

My theory is that this will make world building easier, more fun, and more useful for your RPG sessions. Your little flash fiction stories will become quest hooks and factions and NPCs and lore. You get to do it by playing and discovering it and you end up with tables of stuff that's specifically cool for your world.

My next article is going to be an example of this. I'm going to run through my own steps for my own setting and show the outcome. Then, the third article will be an attempt to incorporate any feedback (including and most importantly my own) and make it more concise.