Talk to me about DnD Worldbuilding

So as a relative newbie to DnD I have been taking a look at the established campaign settings and have been considering how to go about adpating one of them with elements I enjoy and campaign ideas I have had. Green Ronin's The Book of the Righteous is an example of something I have found that I really enjoy, the Tal'Dorei campaign setting is another one, pretty much all the monsters and races and how they exist with one another is something else that is awesome. A campaign idea I had was having the setting transitioning from no to low to high magic. The game would start with non human races, monsters, magic and gods coming back into the world and would ramp up as the campaign wore on. The players could play whatever they want but an elven wizard would have a different experience to a human fighter. The party would be pretty much the only group of adventuers and help these new societies restablish themselves or learn to cope with magic and monsters. What I am struggling with is how to take all the pieces and fit them into something cohesive. So my question becomes how do you approach world building and making it fit together in a believable way.

Start small. Don't try to develop everything at once. Focus on a specific local that the players start in. Building whole worlds takes time. As the players travel you open up new areas. Take notes as you go and much of what you need will fall into place. If you mention a far away city put it in your notes so that in a later time you can develop it further.

On area you may want to spend a little time is dealing with magic and religion in how it works and so forth. Still it just needs to be the major strokes and the finer details can follow. One of the biggest things that can cause a GM to struggle is trying to do everything at once and more often than not the world dies before it can truly be explored.

Agree with Viking, but spend a lot of time really fleeing it your 'big idea'. If you start low magic and go high, how does this happen? What caused it?

Then I like to think of four factions:
1. Regressions: they want it back the way it was. How are they doing that?
2. Futurists: they want the changes to accelerate
3. Status Quo-ites: they're happy with the way things are evolving
4: Alienists: they're working for something entirely different

These ideas get you thinking abstractly about the political forces, be they different races, cults, or gods. Remember, they may not ever see they light of day in your campaign, but having those different unstable tensions will create depth and realism.

The Dungeon Master's Guide has some solid advice on how to go about making a campaign setting.

I personally like to start with a map. The land came before the people and shapes the course of history.

I agree with Viking that starting small is a good idea, especially if you want to start gaming in this world soon. But, if you're doing Tolkien-style world building as a fun exercise then the higher-level questions are probably preoccupying your thoughts. Sometimes having a clear big-picture view of the world helps slotting in all the details.

For example, in 2002, WotC put out a setting contest where anyone could submit a setting. The winner was Keith Baker's Eberron! Apparently at the start of the project, writers had to submit a 1-page proposal that answered 6 questions. Being forced to concisely describe your world sometimes give you the clarity to move forward. Here are the questions:

1. What is your Core Ethos Sentence. [A sentence that describes the core ethos of the world. For example, Forgotten Realms is a world of sword-and-sorcery adventure, where heroes battle monsters with magic.]

2. Who are the heroes of your world? [Brief description of heroes central to the setting. This need not be a comprehensive list.]

3. What do they do? [What are the main objectives of the heroes, and what steps do they take to achieve those objectives?]

4. Threats, Conflicts, Villains [What is the main danger to the world, and from whom does it come?]

5. Nature of magic [What is the source of magic? How abundant/scarce is it?]

6. What’s new? What’s different? [What makes this setting unique?]


Good luck!

Many things. BUT! I promote the DMB whenever possible.
102: One World, Multiple Impacts (feat. Greg Tito)
Ep 101: World Building; Monarchies
78: World Building; Origin Story (feat. Aram Vartian)
70: World Building with Ed Greenwood 02
69: World Building with Ed Greenwood 01
67: Player Influenced Story Telling (feat. Reid)
52: Creation & Inspiration V- Part 01; World building with Lou Anders
32: World Building; Towns & Cities
31: World Building; Picking Your Pantheon (feat. #MagicMark)
23: You Are Not In A Tavern
11: World Building; Time & Space
01: Building a World (Pilot)

Are just a couple of episodes i could quickly think of and things. I freaking love this podcast. but listen and gather your own ideas

Wow guys thanks so much for all the responses! I will start digesting and responding to all of it when I get home but @CaveJohnson whats DMB?

Edit: Nevermind just realised those were links :p

Edit 2: Oh hell yeah, I was looking for a DnD podcast!

Okay so I have read the comment, I will try going from small to large after I have the broad strokes worked out. I think that will fit in well with the LazyDM style by Sly Flourish that I want to try out. I do like having some idea of the map as well. Does anyone know a decent map creator or do you think I should start with an existing campaign setting that I modify?

Looking for DnD podcasts you say? Here's my current commute line up (in spoiler tags so as not to derail the conversation too much.

I love this blog post about drawing a map to build a world: Holly Lisle's Blog.

For map ideas and cartography software suggestions, check out r/worldbuilding, which is a forum for worldbuilding almost 350,000 members strong. Among the links on the sidebar it suggests for maps includes the great Cartographer's Guild website.

When I'm building a world I like to start of with some constraints, you seem to have that step down, knowing what you won't have in the world helps to refine your thinking.

Moving from there I like to start thinking of the world in terms of it's narrative. On a broad scale what is the story of the setting. What rises and falls did it experience. Is the true story know to it's occupants. This kind of broad narrative need not take in all the details, after all if I ask you for a brief story of our world you probably would go into minutia about this kingdom invaded that and so on.

With regards to your specific question, I see this type of setting work particularly well when presented not as the magic appearing in a setting, but the magic returning. Ie at some point in the past a cataclysmic event happened, magic disappeared and all that was left were humans to pick up the pieces. In time the stories of the past fade to myths and humanity is just about stabilise and then BAM magics back! It's quite a compelling setting, especial as it offers you the chance to write adventures exploring the mythical days when the magic was still around.

Re podcasts, I'll suggest a few more that have either good examples of world building in them, or feature it as a topic.

DMB is also good as a place to stretch your creative muscles with the DMnastics section of the show/forum. Those guys had me plotting lunar mechanics at one point...

PPS. Also just noticed, welcome fellow Melbournian!

Wow guys this stuff has been super helpful thanks so much! The next question I have for you is how much do you research real-world history and the like to help inform your own settings? For example, I really enjoy looking at daily life back in the day and I have a bit of a collection when it comes to those books. My first thought for a bottom-up city would be to use something like Renaissance Venice for the bones and flesh it out from there. Thoughts?
Really? That's awesome! It's nice to know there are other players in my neck of the woods.

I like to use my knowledge of history to inspire me while writing setting, but also like to think about what might be different in the setting based on it’s own history.

Yeah, that's pretty much what I do as well, okay good to know I am on the right track there. Thanks so much for all the podcasts as well everyone! One last questions, is there somewhere on this board where you can upload homebrew stuff? My previous board had a section where you could get an individual board for that kind of thing. If not that's all good but I was just curious.

There is indeed a home brew section here.

Cool, thanks again so much for all your advise guys! I have had a really productive night pulling together a renaissance inspired city for players to mess around in. Nowhere near done yet obviously but it has gone a long way to showing me why bottom-up is a good way to go!

So I have been thinking things through today while at work and have the broad strokes of the cosmic scale worked out. From a bottom up level, I have the city mostly sorted. What I am liking is as the characters level up, in parallel the magic of the setting ramps up and so does the scope. It should be quite an organic ramp up too which is good. The only thing I am struggling with the timeline is that the ramp up should take centuries. Not an issue for an elf but I don't want to limit the involvement of the short lived races. Basically what I am thinking at the moment is that there is two major arcs to the story. Level 1-10 is low magic and the emergence of magic and the other races. How the PCs act in this section will decide how the races will interact with each other and how they establish themselves. From 11-20, we jump forward by a large amount of time and as a group, we decide how the societies evolve and what the world looks like. Then they get dropped into it and things ramp up into the end game. Thoughts?

This could work, but another thing to consider is, perhaps you should just ramp it up at the literal speed that the players level up at. Have it start of at level 1 with no magic, but by the time its level two there is at least a little bit of magic, and any casters among your players are at the 'cutting edge of magic'. Pretty much continuing that trend as it goes.

This solves your issue of keeping the shorter lived races still in play, but doesn't quite preserve the sense of slow reintroduction (then again, if it doesn't happen quickly it won't be a catastrophe which would be less fun).

I will keep considering it, the longer timeline is something of a requirement at this point but I will see if I can work it out. The longer time frame is a bit of a requirement at this point for the endgame.