On Worldbuilding | Mastery

Writing lore that players care about

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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

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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.

The setting bible for my D&D setting: The Tapestry

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.

So we’re going to spend very little of our energy adding details to our foundation, and we’re not going to use this foundation work to hook players into our world.

Instead, this layer is going to be our first opportunity to establish themes. What are the ideas that you would like to explore in your game? What interests you about people or about the world? What feelings would you like to tell stories about? Take these ideas, these feelings that make you want to write, and build those feelings into the lore of your world.

I care about stories. I care about the way a culture’s stories define it. I care about faith. I care about what it means to believe in something and to have that belief challenged. I want to tell stories about these ideas, so I have carved them into the bedrock of my world. My setting is defined by the faiths, myths, and legends that inform the lives of ordinary people.

I care about resistance. I care about the evils that rise from sovereignty and control. I care about the way ordinary people experience hardship in a world that is not our own. I want to tell stories about these ideas, so I have sown their seeds in my world from the first. My world is filled with conquered peoples who live despite.

In the Tapestry: The Parents’ Revolt

Here’s a piece of my Deep Lore: twenty years ago, there was an uprising in a region called the Cradle. Catalyzed by a quick succession of wars and conscriptions, the Parent’s Revolt was a desperate resistance against the reaping of whole generations of young people.

Sparked by the aging families of conscripts, the cause became organized as it was taken up by local religious leaders; both Illian Priors (isolated leaders of the mainstream faith) and Keepers of the Old Faiths (practitioners of pre-Illian religions) helped to align their communities against the powers of the region.

The territory’s archbishop, unable to trust a military force recrutied in the rebellious territory, looked outward for allies. Before the Parents’ Revolt, the Silver Company were seen as heroes. They were the shield between mortal folk and the creatures of the night. Now their name is a curse, their legacy a ruin.

They chose to oppose the revolt, and it was utterly destroyed.

Y’all can probably see where this lore comes from. There’s competing ideas about what a faith means for a people (in the conflict between local priors and the ruling archbishop). There’s a holy order whose self-asserted story was contradicted by its actions. There’s an oppressed people struggling for a better life, and a stratification within that group regarding whether they belong to a mainstream or minoritized faith.

Your deep lore sketches the borders of your setting. It shapes what kinds of stories can be effectively and easily told at your table. You use your writing here to narrow those ideas into something that you care about. This is where the bedrock of your world should come from. By defining core themes here, we can use these pillars to guide our more granular worldbuilding.

Bringing drama to the Deep Lore

We also need to guide that worldbuilding into being interesting. Our Deep Lore isn’t the hook that we’re going to use to get players into a world, but making sure that our foundations contain interesting tensions is going to do two important things.

First off, tensions in our foundation are going to make it easier to build tension into the rest of our storytelling. Secondly, it’s going to make sure that when our players do start caring about our setting, there’s something interesting waiting for them to explore.

So we’re going to make our foundational lore dramatic.

Once we’ve identified the themes we’re interested in making into lore, we have one enemy. That enemy is the static. The done. The dead and buried. Things that are finished are not things that our players can touch. They’re not dramatic, and our worldbuilding needs to sow the seeds of drama because drama is what makes our players care about our ideas.

So as we write, we create tension, and we do not resolve it.

The themes you’ve decided on are complicated. Not everyone feels the same way about them. Demonstrate that in your world. Use your foundational lore to start exploring conflicts between people who feel genuinely and strongly about your ideas.

Do not let those conflicts end within the space of your lore. There can be momentary victors. There should be ideas that hold power and ideas that do not. But all these ideas should survive to meaningfully impact the decisions and experiences of people in the present day.

In the Tapestry: The Parents’ Revolt cont.

Let’s look at this lore from a dramatic lens: there’s lots of people in this history, and they all believe different things. The Archbishop believes in her own authority, that it is righteous that she should call upon their subjects to fight and to worship as she sees fit. The Silver Company believes in protecting their idea of civilized society. The priors of the cradle believe in their parish’s right to self-determine. The Keepers of the cradle believe in the right of their communities to practice their faith. Lots of different, conflicting opinions aligned on two broad sides of a conflict.

One side of that conflict is victorious, but the conflict is not resolved. While organized resistance is crushed, there is an entire generation of witnesses to the Silver Company’s brutality. The Archbishop continues to conscript, the Old Faiths continue to be restricted. Surviving rebel leaders continue to organize their allies in small actions towards resilience or vengeance. People still exist that are motivated by all the ideas present in this history.

Factions

Which people have their lives most impacted by these ideas? The people in factions. This is where we start to turn foundational lore into something players can touch. We’re going to take the ideological conflicts established by our Deep Lore, and we’re going to present them as conflicts between groups of current people. These groups are factions.

Take the perspectives from your Deep Lore, and turn those into objectives for people in the present day. If someone believed deeply in something regarding one of your themes, what would they want to change about the world? What would they fight to keep from changing?

Once you know what a faction wants and why they want it, decide what they will do to get it. What resources do they have access to? What lines will they and will they not cross in pursuit of their goals? What do these methods say about their beliefs?

Now take a perspective that is in some way rival to that of the faction you just built. Craft that faction, emphasizing the difference in objectives between the two groups. What ideals led to this difference in objectives? How is each faction trying to stop the other? Who’s winning?

In the Tapestry: West Ten

There are a lot of factions present in my lore for the Parent’s Revolt, and most of them are still alive today. The Silver Company still has a presence in the Cradle; externally they are fighting to secure strongholds in each of the regions cities, and internally they are struggling to find a new identity following their sins during the Revolt. The Archbishop is still in control, and her followers are orchestrating a highly elaborate plot to wrestle control away from local nobility and back into control of the church.

I’m going to focus on the resistance here, though. A very small descendant of it, at least.

When the New Saints reached Oakhurst, they were battered and penniless. They needed shelter, they needed medicine, and they needed a place to rest in this hostile, unfamiliar place. They found all of these in Oakurst’s West Tenement District. Organized and connected by necessity, the folk of West Ten are engaged in an everyday battle to survive and to keep things from getting worse. It is a battle they often lose.

This faction became a focal point for many of the ideas of this campaign. This was an Old Faith community in the city of the Archbishop, and it was an impoverished community in a city highly stratified along class lines. They are a community struggling to affect change, but which experiences every change that larger factions enforce on the world.

Factions became your lore made manifest. They take your themes and make sure that those ideas impact the decision-making space of your players. If your players are making decisions in a context that is defined by your themes, it means that those ideas are going to become evident in the choices your players make. This aligns the stories your players tell along certain thematic lines, which makes those stories more impactful.

The New Saints “Murder Board”

When your players start to engage with your world at this level, it’s really cool. Beyond the meaning that these thematic conflicts create, getting factions involved raises the stakes of your drama. In my New Saints game, the party ended up using the above “Murder Board” to track the plots and conspiracies of a rival faction. It was rad as hell.

This still isn’t a good layer to try and get players hooked at, though. Good, thematic factions will start to guide your stories into line with the ideas that interest you, but they’re not likely to get your players engaging with those ideas intentionally. That’s because factions are still too broad to be good hooks. They’re too big for players to build an emotional connection with, and they’re too grand for a player just entering your world to feel like they can impact.

We need to focus our worldbuilding to be even tighter. We need a razor’s edge of emotion and interactivity. We need some NPCs.

Avatars

Grand worldbuilding lays the foundations for drama. It establishes the ideas that our story will play with. Factions define the context for our drama. They create the broader struggles that our players will become a part of. Avatars are going to be where our real drama lives.

Avatars are characters that we are going to imbue with all the umph that we’ve built up with our foundations and our factions. Take the ideals of your factions, and make characters who care about them desperately. Think about what they believe and why they believe it. Think about how these people’s lives will materially change if they win or lose the struggle that they are a part of. How will the lives of their loved ones change if they win or lose?

While your foundational histories should be vague, these personal histories should be as detailed as you can make them. Make them empathetic, make them interesting, and make them representative of your themes and factions. Show these characters to your players, and get your players to care about them.

How exactly you do that last bit is the subject of another article, but I will promise you one thing right now: it’ll be a dozen times easier to get your players to care about a person than it will be to make them care about a faction or a world. At the end of the day, people are built to care about people. We’re built to form connections, so when we’re building NPCs all we need to do is give players a little push in the right direction.

Characters are how we trick players into engaging with factions, politics and themes; when they care about specific people, they will engage with broad struggles to protect or to hurt those people.

If they hate somebody, they will oppose their ideas and objectives, and they will come into conflict with a faction. If they love somebody, they will support their ideas and objectives, and they will come into conflict with a faction. When players are opposed by factions, they will usually have to seek out factions to ally themselves with.

Sutgr the Vile | Drawn by artist Lucy Ingram, linked in conclusion

As cool as that faction-level conspiracy board was, there’s a reason why two of the biggest images on that board were specific characters. To get the New Saints interested in a mystery involving secret societies and world-changing rituals, I started by getting them interested in people.

In the Tapestry: Adar

One NPC was particularly important in getting the New Saints invested in Oakhurst and West Ten. The community that assembled there did so around one man: Adar.

He was a veteran of the Parent’s Revolt. In that war, he lost his right hand and more friends than he’ll ever have again. He believes so dearly in everything he fought for, but when he fought he lost. So he has allowed his world to shrink, and now he fights for a piece of the world he feels he can protect. He was a field medic, and he was an organizer. He has built West Ten into a community built around healing and mutual support.

Adar is why the New Saints cared about West Ten and why they cared about the Parents’ Revolt. Adar was gentle and understanding, and he was suffering. He was suffering because of the broad conflicts that I wanted my players to care about.

These avatars are where most of your lore should live. If there is history you want your players to care about, make it these characters’ history. If there are societal struggles you want your players to care about, put these avatars on their front lines. Characters are the element of your world that players are the most primed to care about, so put the things that you care about into your characters.

Incidentals

When we think about worldbuilding, a lot of what we think about is what I call the “incidentals”. Incidentals are the kind of textural differences from our mundane world that reinforce to an audience that our story is taking place somewhere else. Cultural practices, currencies, geographies, and other stuff like that.

That kind of texture is really valuable. Your world is going to feel more real when it feels more lived in, and small pieces of everyday worldbuilding help to make your world feel like it is inhabited. This sense of verisimilitude makes the stories you tell more impactful. That said, there is a reason that I have left this kind of worldbuilding for last.

These incidentals are rarely going to create interesting drama, because they are rarely going to impact the decisions that your players need to make. That makes this a bad layer to put a lot of work into unless we’re being really thoughtful about it.

Here’s how we’re going to be thoughtful about it: in order to maximize the impact of these details, we’re going to try to tie them to our larger dramas as much as possible. Use these incidentals to illustrate details about your avatars, factions, and foundations. What everyday cultural practices can a member of a faction perform to show players what they care about? How can the economy of a region exacerbate the way a character is experiencing a conflict between factions? What does it say about a region that it is controlled by a baron? What do the names of a country’s coins say about what that country values?

In the Tapestry: Forbidden Music

In springtime are the babes a-resting,
Sleeping in their beds.
In springtime are the babes a-resting,
Bless their weary heads.

In summer go our babes a-working,
Hard from dusk till dawn.
In summer go our babes a-working,
Soon they will be gone.

In autumn comes the reaping season,
To lay our fields down low.
In autumn comes the reaper marching,
With all our babes in tow.

The winter leaves us parents weeping,
Holding heavy heads.
The winter leaves us patents weeping,
Over empty beds.

Unnamed Song of the Cradle

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This song was a symbol of the Parents’ Revolt, and to sing it today is punishable by death. This is a small piece of worldbuilding that gives my world texture. It is also deeply tied to the characters and themes of my setting.

A character singing this song means profound things for that character and the people they are singing it for. It is deeply meaningful that members of the Silver Company’s 4th Regiment will enforce laws regarding this song, but members of the 3rd Regiment will not.

Let your incidentals flow back into your dramatic worldbuilding. Use them to seed scenes that will give your players access to your more essential themes. In that way, you can use incidental worldbuilding to generate both verisimilitude and drama.

We can also use incidentals to explore the consequences of our larger world-building decisions. We wrote a creation myth or designed a magic system because it created opportunities to engage with a theme, but now that those ideas are a part of our world we need to explore their consequences. Take time to consider how these elements will ripple outward through the societies of your world. Use your incidentals to explore how your fantastical creations can practically exist in a peopled world. If a faction is in control on a grand level, how is that control felt in a small town? What resource is unreasonably expensive in a region? Giving practical consequences to the decisions that you made for thematic reasons will prevent them from feeling manufactured and false in play.

Not everything needs to be on-theme

I have a feeling that my razor focus on drama and meaning is going to chafe with some of y’all’s thoughts on worldbuilding. I have presented a strategy for lore that is single-mindedly focused on making interesting and engaging things happen at your table. Frankly, I do think that’s what’s most important about a GM’s prep work.

I do also acknowledge that people worldbuild for other reasons. It is fun and interesting to make decisions about a world because they are interesting to you on a practical level, and then to explore how those decisions impact each other and create systems in your world. That’s fun. That’s a hobby in and of itself.

So here’s my suggestion for folks who feel limited by the strategy that I’ve presented above: do your thing. Worldbuild however you like. Then, once your core ideas are on paper, take a step back and look at the world you’ve built. What interests you about it? Why did you do this? What themes are explored by the choices you’ve made? Use your initial process to inform this process of finding drama in worldbuilding.

You can always keep building your world. You can expand it beyond the foundations, factions, avatars, and incidentals that will be most impactful on your game. For your world to feel real, it should have elements that don’t conveniently tie back to a single thematic thread. Your world should have more than one core theme, and not every game should connect to every one of those themes.

It’s just that if an element of your worldbuilding isn’t going to impact the story that you’re telling, you can’t make a big deal out of it. When you focus on worldbuilding that contributes to your themes and drama, you get to make a point of it. You get to show off all the cool work you did. If your worldbuilding isn’t contributing to that, it’s your job shut the hell up about it and let the story happen.

I think that feels bad. If I’ve worked hard on a world, I like to be able to make that world a big part of my game. You don’t get to do that if your world isn’t designed with play in mind.

Wrapup

Boy was this one hard to write. This is ostensibly about worldbuilding, but it also gets dangerously close to being my thesis on what good GMing looks like in general. That article has to stay in drafts a while longer, though.

Thank you for reading this. The harder it is for me to write these, the more it feels like the techniques I’m articulating are valuable, and the more validating it is to see an audience growing here. As always, if you found this valuable then please subscribe and share this article with a friend. I’m really grateful for your support.

Let’s talk about the future for a minute.

I’ve got a couple likely candidates for my next post. My Running Rulers series is still in-progress, and I’m working on a next article that’s mostly about my current design process. You’ll also see an indirect follow-up to this worldbuilding article which will be about lore delivery. Where this article is about writing lore players will care about, that one will be about putting it into their hands.

I desperately want to return to my Monster Hunting series, but the game group I was using to playtest the ruleset moved away. That means I haven’t been able to test, and I don’t have any rules updates. I still have no idea what to do with the Loremaster). In this interim, I think I’m going to write up a demo adventure that I plan to use for my next test group. That will give y’all a chance to see how the system can be woven into actual play!

I’ll talk to you all soon. Until then, I’m sending you my love.

This article featured pictures of the New Saints murder board with art by Lucy Ingram. You can find more of their excellent work here.

The murder board also featured a map by me, which you can see more of here.