Dungeon Master's 10-Step Guide to Worldbuilding

    When it comes to being the Dungeon Master while playing Dungeons and Dragons, one of the most intimidating parts is how you go about crafting the world. The process of creating a diverse setting, NPCs, antagonists, and gods can seem like a lot to tackle, especially if it's your first time DMing. To help new and old Dungeon Masters alike tackle the daunting task of world-building for your Dungeons and Dragons campaign, here are Ten Steps to make engaging you and your players fun, easy, and effective.


 

STEP 1: Read the Dungeon Master’s Guide.

Yo that looks like something you should read

    It is a bold move for a blog to start with “read something else,” but it is warranted here. The official Wizards of the Coast Dungeon Master’s Guide (5E, but any edition works) contains, among other things, many tips and tricks for crafting a solid campaign setting, grand world, and striking multiverse. It is a godsend for a beginner DM trying to wrap their head around the specifics of what a setting would need, and it offers a lot of practical insight into how your world should intersect with your player's play style and preferences. 

    For example, the first few chapters of the 5E Dungeon Masters guide discuss not just how to tailor make your campaign to your player's tastes but how to craft gods and unique faiths, developing locations (with all sorts of details to think about like scale, commerce, governments, etc.), factions, magic systems, inciting events and much MUCH more! It is a must for DM, but where do you get it?
    The book is reasonably straightforward to find for free online (such as the Internet Archive), but it can also be easily acquired from any bookstore, hobby shop, or major retailer. Many mom-and-pop bookstores sell used copies at reduced prices and in excellent condition. 

    Overall, the Dungeon Master’s Guide offers a lot of well-written, nitty-gritty advice to help you craft a setting and would be an excellent place to start for advice. In contrast, the meat and potatoes of this blog are more concerned with the macro craft of world-building, offering the broad strokes of the best approaches to save time, reduce the anxieties of the daunting task of world-building, and make your role-playing sessions more memorable. How do you start this? By setting the scope of your campaign.

STEP 2: Set the Scope of your Campaign

How far should this go before you run?

    A good trick when outlining your worldbuilding is understanding how broad its scope is. Is your campaign just a one-shot? Is it going to be a handful of sessions? A multi-month, even multi-year campaign? How many players do you have? What level do you plan to start your players on, and when do you plan to cut them off (if at all)? While seemingly unrelated to making a world for a role-playing game, all these questions offer an excellent framework for designing the world and how much you’ll need at a given time. 

    For example, a one-shot, which is literally just a session or two long, will not necessarily require your players to traverse many drastically different townships, cities, and civilizations like a multi-month or year campaign might, so temper your focus to accommodate that scope. A one-shot set in one or two story-rich towns will be more rewarding for you and your players than a vast world that will remain unexplored in any meaningful way. On the flip side, a multi-year campaign set to traverse all sorts of locations necessitates a more expansively planned world that could fill out such an extensive duration of time and, therefore, be worth the effort in the first place. In either scenario, another critical factor is how many players there are and what level you intend them to be at.

    The number of players and the general level of the party are also significant to know when going in. A handful of level one characters, compared to level five or twelve, will require different challenges that scale with their power level, and the setting they inhabit must reflect that difference. A few level one players are best set upon by bandits or wolves on the road, while a level ten party of the same number can tackle an Aboelth and its cult or even a Dragon in its lair! With that specific level of power, your players kept in mind, you can craft your setting to accommodate the level of danger they would face without it coming off as jarring. For example, a village facing a kobold problem sounds like a perfect starting point for a campaign of early-level players (of any duration of time), while a capital city besieged by demons is either best suited for the middle or the end of a campaign for higher level players; or the inciting incident of a high-level campaign. 

    In any case, understanding the scope of your campaign and the amount of firepower your players have (in level and numbers) is just as essential when crafting the setting you wish them to inhabit.
    Now that you have a good idea of the campaign's length and your party's numbers and strength, it's time to start world-building! Where do you start? Small.

STEP 3: Start Small and Build as you go

You pondering the world you are building

    Rome wasn't built in a day, nor will your massive role-playing world be. The previously discussed scope of your campaign provided an excellent blueprint for building the world, but now the actual construction has begun, and it's best to start small.

 

    What is “small” in this context of role-playing game worldbuilding? That would depend on your priorities, but a good rule of thumb is to start with what you need as soon as possible. A long-running campaign will unlikely need the intricate lore of the lost city the entire story will be building to on day one when the party first meets at a tavern, but some lore on the local happenings and monsters in the area would come in handy. You are not writing a novel or making a video game when you are the Dungeon Master in D&D (even if there is a lot of overlap). When you are the Dungeon Master, you are playing just as much as the players, and prioritizing the immediate things you all will be engaging with will make your life a lot easier when you start and then build up as you go.

 

    A campaign can begin in many places, like taverns, prisons, battlefields, etc. Whatever the case, beginning where you will engage in play first, as a player and a DM, is a solid place to begin. That is not to discourage future planning or more scattered bits of world-building lore you string together as you go, but what matters is that you start one piece at a time.

    Creating a world, be it for a one-shot or long-running campaign, is a big task, and breaking it down into sequential little steps will make it more manageable and less daunting. That can shake out in any manner; starting with the first immediate location I just described, making a handful of continents and some general locations you might use, the gods your world has, etc. It can be tackled however you want, but it does not have to be all at once. It does not have to be all on your own, either. It is a team game, so why not get your players involved?

STEP 4: Make Your Players Invested in Your World By Making Them Part of It

Romance? Intrigue? Backstory?

    The relationship between Dungeon Masters and their Players should not be adversarial. They are not trying to defeat one or the other but collaborating and enjoying a role-playing world together. Consulting the players could make the world that the Dungeon Master is building even more engaging in its early stages.

    A world in which your player's characters exist is one in which they already have a history. Those characters, be they knights of a kingdom, wandering magicians, cutthroats with a dark past, or whatever the case may be, will need personal connections, backstories, etc., for the world they live in. Now, that is not to say you or the player need to write an entire book on the subject of their character’s life up until the start of the campaign, nor should they need much of one at all. What matters is giving them personal stakes in the setting.

    World-building does not stop when you have a slew of fantastical locations, NPCs, etc.; it is about connecting your world with the players to best engage with it. This engagement can involve the player characters actively consulting with their NPC close friends and loved ones in the campaign, villains from their past taking center stage in the world, or the locations they call home being the central setting of their activities. Either way, making the players feel like they are a part of this world is vital. The specifics will vary from group to group, but it almost always starts with communicating with your players beforehand.

    When your players are constructing their characters, be it during Session 0 or beforehand, try to communicate with them to understand the stories their characters are going to have. Knowing what sort of backstory, places of origin, fears, and goals the player characters have can go a long way in designing settings and conflict that lead to attractive roleplaying opportunities and greater engagement. It would be good to have a hand in crafting your player's backstory, giving them input on what would best fit, and collaborating on how both parties can enjoy them to the fullest.

    Admittedly, these practices are better for more well-established groups where open communication is more accessible, like with friends and family, than, say, a group of strangers meeting up at a local games club or Discord, but even just tossing a few references to their characters' lives in your already established setting makes all the difference when crafting your world for your players' enjoyment and your own.

    If all else fails, you can draw inspiration from elsewhere to spice up your world and foster more engagement from your players.

STEP 5: Don’t be afraid to be Inspired

Pick your Poison of your Passions!

    Coming up with a world for a D&D is, shocker, hard! It is even harder to come up with a slew of new ideas right out the gate, so what better way to fill those gaps than to get inspired from outside sources?

    No story or setting is perfectly original. Every creator draws inspiration from their favorite books, shows, games, etc., to help inform their unique creative voice. D&D is brimming with direct inspiration in its most official sources (drawing heavily from Tolkien's works to the point that their Hobbits needed to be renamed Halfings for legal reasons), so why not do the same with your own?

    Do you have a favorite plotline or faction from a video game or movie? Take it, put your spin on it, and put it in your world! Read up on other people’s D&D campaigns and settings, see what most appeals to you, and see how you can translate it to your own. Even just reading setting guides and other official Dungeons and Dragons books can offer a wellspring of different sources of inspiration to help craft your world. It may feel like cheating, looking at other people’s work and putting it on your own, but it's a necessary start to many creative processes. Your sources of inspiration can be molded and changed to best fit your tastes and be modified in practice when your campaigns begin in earnest until they are no longer some other idea but your own. The world is filled with so many incredible pieces of art and media to draw from, and there is no shame in taking some aspects of any of it and making it something unique to you.

    Whatever you decide to be inspired by, there is one thing you should never let fall by the wayside when creating your world: ORGANIZING IT.

STEP 6: ORGANIZE! ORGANIZE!! ORGANIZE!!!

Organize!!!!

    Worldbuilding takes a lot of pages and notes, so you better organize them. It cannot be overstated how much extra time and effort is saved by doing some basic organization when coming up with your world from the onset.

    How do you organize your concepts, locations, and gods? It is a pick-your-poison situation where your preferences for writing and note-keeping matter most. You can use Google or Microsoft Suite programs (Drive, Doc, Sheets, Word, Excel, etc.), use dedicated world-building and writing programs that streamline the process (like World Anvil, Fantasia Archive, and Obsidian to recommend a few), make use of simple pen and paper binders and notebooks, or whatever works best for you! What matters is using something you are comfortable with writing with, can keep organized and easy to refer back to, and, as needed, share with your players.

    Disorganized world-building can be disastrous for your creative process and campaign when it begins in earnest. Imagine how much time you could have spent designing a fantasy culture if you just didn't have to search through each document/paper for a particular lore idea you had. It will save you a lot of headaches by keeping all your world-building elements tidy, well-documented, and organized for your mental health and the health of your fledgling D&D world.

    No matter how many ideas you generate and organize for your world, you will almost certainly encounter something in the campaign proper. What do you do when that situation arises? Improvise!

STEP 7: You Won’t Know it all. Improvise!

 

Do what he says!

  At its core, tabletop RPGs have a lot of built-in improvisation. Players constantly make role-playing plans and combat choices on the fly, and the DM is similar. The players will throw as many unexpected situations, questions, and scenarios at the DM as they will at them. When interacting with worldbuilding, there is no question that something you have yet to consider will arise in the gameplay. How do you handle a situation like that? You do what your players do: Improvise!

    As already discussed, world-building is a step-by-step process you will not complete in a day. It is just as accurate that you will never truly have a totally complete world. The very nature of roleplaying, where an infinite number of eventualities, questions, and activities could be involved, does not invite the possibility of ever really having a world filled out. So, improvisation is as vital to your world as methodical writing and organization.

    There is no Dungeon Master on Earth who has not gotten blindsided by something from their players, which then forced said DM to improvise. It is just part of the game for the DM as it is for the players, so expect it and account for it in your world-building. You do not need to have every name of every shopkeeper in a town that is not plot-relevant, so just make something up when asked and integrate it into your world if you like it. You will get players wanting to explore areas that are not as fleshed out or going in directions with the plot you have yet to account for. Roll with it (within reason) and allow your world to build itself organically around this new route. In essence, allowing for gaps in your worldbuilding, large or small, is natural, as improvisation is just part of the game and an organic way to build your world through your player's interactions with it.

    That said, there is a big difference between allowing for improvisation and having your players take the reins of your world in a way that you would instead not go, and you must stop it.

STEP 8: Make sure your Players know the Limitations of the Craft

Arguments at the Table are Bound to Happen

    Dungeons and Dragons is not just a game for the players, but the DM, too, playing in the world together. The exact modes of enjoyment between both parties may differ, but the game is a collaborative experience where the enjoyment of everyone involved should be the chief concern. The sensation of seeing the world you painstakingly constructed, being engaged with, enjoying, and actualizing via RP is hard to describe and an experience any Dungeon Master can relate to. With that fact in mind, it is not wrong to prevent your players from taking things in your world in a way you do not enjoy, as your fun is just as important as theirs.

    The nature of D&D, a game where coming up with things on the fly on both sides of the table happens often, can snowball or go in the direction the DM or other players might not be comfortable with. Situations like that can usually go for the better, like a one-off NPC becoming a player favorite, a dumb joke becoming integrated into the world, or an in-character argument that keeps everyone engaged. These examples(and more I did not outline) can result in new and dynamic ways for your evolving world and the players to interact with it, but it also can go wrong.

    A situation might arise where players try to go dramatically off course in a way that you are both unprepared for and frankly unwilling to go, be it active defiance of the plot to go to a completely unrelated location without ever engaging with the story or even NSFW elements uncomfortable to most involved. It will happen somehow and in some way, and it is imperative to communicate that these situations are not cool as early as possible.

    When creating your world, do what you can to curb any potential “off the rails” shenanigans you are frankly uncomfortable with. Dungeon Masters, while just as much playing the game as the players, are the ones actively creating the setting, story, and direction of the actual “playing” that is occurring, and have a right to establish ground rules for proper conduct and keep the world from spiraling in ways they don’t want.

    The most common way to achieve this is to establish and discuss some ground rules before the game starts properly. Player etiquette, the types of story elements in the setting that might warrant a trigger warning you may or may not use, and even the types of player lineages, classes, or backgrounds that are and aren't allowed are all perfectly valid things to outline and encourage when making your world and campaign. Your ideas and interests do not just shape your world but what you are and aren't comfortable with, and making sure your players understand that is just as much about worldbuilding as it is about collaborative gameplay.

    Be it rules to keep things on track, intentional gaps to improve, or worldbuilding tools, a DM needs many tools in their toolbox to make the most of their setting, so why not get as many ready as you can before letting your players interact with it?

STEP 9: Set yourself up for Success!

The Tools to be a Master of the Dungeon

    To bring back the “Rome was not built in a day” analogy, it was also not built with a single tool for its entire process. It takes many diverse and specialized tools and resources to make a building, let alone a whole empire, and that is also the case with worldbuilding for D&D.

    We have already discussed many potential resources you can draw on to make your life easier, like world-building programs, official books, and more, but why stop there? D&D is a game enjoyed by millions, with many incredibly talented enthusiasts taking the time to create resources waiting to be used to make your world-building a little smoother.

    Let's take some time to outline some of the many out there in the hopes that a few can used to make any reader’s worldbuilding woes a little bit easier to weather:

Map Making Tools

    Here is a collection of free and paid tools for constructing maps that can be as big as worlds or as small as cities or streets! Either way, they make great visuals when presenting your world.

Inkarnate

Wonderdraft

medieval-fantasy-city-generator

Song Of The Eons

Dungeondraft

Fantasy Name Generators

    Names can be some of the hardest things to conceive in writing, especially in fantasy settings where they can be odd and esoteric. Here are some robust free online name generator tools to save you a headache by generating any name you need at the click of a button.

Fantasy Name Generators

Donjon

Behind the Name

Homebrew Tools:

    Creating your monsters, magic items, and lineages is just as much a part of worldbuilding as anything else. Here are some free tools to help you craft your homebrew or even generate it!

Giffy Glyph's Monster Maker

The Homebrewery

Kenji's Magic Item Generator

Here Be Taverns

Rules, Resources and Reference Guides:

    There are A LOT of rules, player options, monsters, items, etc., in D&D! It can be hard to keep track of what cool things you can integrate into your world when so many options exist across the many books that possess them. Here are some handy catch-all reference websites for 5e materials and some 3e and 3.5e tossed in there, too!

5e.Tools

dnd5e

d20srd


    These tools, tips, tricks, and steps in this guide are all meant to make worldbuilding for your Dungeons and Dragons campaign straightforward. It makes the chief reason for even playing the game as achievable as possible: having fun!

STEP 10: Have Fun!

Fun begins at a Good Table

    At its core, a tabletop RPG is played as a dungeon master or as a player to have fun. These steps and tricks aim to make the daunting task of world-building much more straightforward and ( ideally) fun by giving it more concrete aims and tools to eliminate much of the tedium.

    As explained before, worldbuilding has many components and is unlikely to be genuinely “complete,” but it never has to be. The world you craft is nothing but a stage for your players to act on and for you to direct them from; the immersion and depth will only need to be as deep as you all need to find enjoyment in. Even with that in mind, it can be a long and tedious task, but having a proper scope, tools, and know-how can make it all the easier. It becomes all the more fun and engaging when you build your world with your players in mind, set firm boundaries so everyone can have a good time, and have some fun by letting some improvisation and spontaneous thinking shine through!

    To reiterate, you are not writing a book when you present your players with your world, but rather a vehicle for them and for you to have a good ride together in the crazy ride that is tabletop roleplaying.

    By following the previous steps (in whatever order you choose), I hope you are prepared to offer a fun experience when your setting is complete and have a stellar time playing in it for your campaign!