Good Sir @TheEdVerse,
For someone with an interest in world building (but continuously caught up in minor details), what would your first draft look like?What is good to, or not to, focus on?
Do you start small and expand? Or with a big map and fill it in?
— Jared Parker Mick (@jaredparkermick) April 21, 2019
1)
It works differently for all of us, and my own answer is generally: it depends. On what the scope of the project is. Or to put it more simply: what are you using the world you’re building for? A series of short stories? A short campaign? A one-shot? Or a home for fiction… 2)
…and roleplaying adventures for the rest of your life?
Hint: if the minor details are bogging you down, start with something small, like the first adventure you want to run or first tale you want to tell. Detail the locale it will take place in, AND note "connections to…— Ed Greenwood (@TheEdVerse) April 22, 2019
3)
…elsewhere” baked into the story, like trade routes and caravans faring along them, which mean they’re taking surplus goods from somewhere “afar” to places where those same goods (turnips? lumber? cheese? furs?) are in short supply. You can literally draw a “flowchart map”.. 4)
…with lines from your developed locale heading out in various compass directions to "names of places floating in the white space you're drawing on" with notes about creatures who live in those places, goods produced there or wanted there, etc. And develop full coverage of…— Ed Greenwood (@TheEdVerse) April 22, 2019
5)
…geography and politics outwards from that detailed locale as storytelling or campaign play need, and develop as they unfold. The Realms began long before D&D or any fantasy roleplaying game existed, as a series of short stories starring Mirt the Moneylender, swindling his.. 6)
…way along the Sword Coast from port to port. Eventually he settled down in Waterdeep, and when D&D play began there, with the Company of Crazed Venturers, I mapped the entire city, worked out details of the noble families and the guilds, and so on. Soon I started a…— Ed Greenwood (@TheEdVerse) April 22, 2019
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…D&D campaign at the public library I worked at, that became the Knights of Myth Drannor, and began detailing Eveningstar and the Haunted Halls, and very quickly thereafter Shadowdale. When not at the gaming table, I entertained myself describing Cormyr and the Dales, … 8)
…and then the l-o-o-ong caravan routes through the Heartlands connecting the Sea of Fallen Stars and Moonsea areas with Waterdeep and the Sword Coast. Which gave me the idea for the driving goal of the Zhentarim, and things grew from there. All before the Realms got…— Ed Greenwood (@TheEdVerse) April 22, 2019
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…published, so my needs (as I developed the setting for fiction and to answer my players’ requests for info, as they tried to give their characters day jobs and investments and neighbours and local social ties) drove the ongoing detailing of the setting. Which continues to.. 10)
…this day, and I work on the Realms every single day of my life. BUT your worldbuilding need not be huge or daunting or overwhelming; detail what you need to, as you need to, and let it grow, and it'll be just like living life, one day at a time: smaller, easier tasks you..— Ed Greenwood (@TheEdVerse) April 22, 2019
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…can finish and feel good about and review to see if you want to change anything. Don't sweat the details at first (though details are what I daily deal with, now, after 54 years), or it'll stall and mire you!— Ed Greenwood (@TheEdVerse) April 22, 2019
1)
I guess what I’m looking for is that long-running world I’ll use for as long as I can. I currently have no game and, with moving for military, no stable group or place. My holdup often involves “If my players want to be from here, how much do they know about the area/world?”— Jared Parker Mick (@jaredparkermick) April 22, 2019
1)
Okay, in that situation I’d go with the “PC group is thrown together by circumstances, so they’re all locals, who have to learn about the world from possibly wrong local gossip and news brought by traveling merchants or sailors, or by going and seeing for themselves.” … 2)
So if the setting is quasi-medieval-cum-Renaissance tech/social level, most folk are tied to the land and DON'T travel (real world: you travel with the military, but how many Americans don't leave their home state to live elsewhere, or much at all?), so you detail the place…— Ed Greenwood (@TheEdVerse) April 22, 2019
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…they’re from and the immediately surrounding geographic area (“to yon line of mountains”), design the adventures to be what flows out of those circumstances that threw them together, do the flowchart map-thing of “faraway exotic locales” that the spices and drugs and… 4)
…strange fruit come from, and expand via an adventure-needs-based approach (which when you stand back and look, is what Wizards has been doing for 5e). If you want to discuss the implications of this or that design decision, I'm always a day away on Twitter (because I'm…— Ed Greenwood (@TheEdVerse) April 22, 2019
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…typically online only twice a day, briefly, and might miss your post until the next day) and am happy to chat. Because that's key: innocent little details have implications for the entire world. Something that keeps tripping up folk in the real world!— Ed Greenwood (@TheEdVerse) April 22, 2019
2)
Then a lot goes into the regional aspects, government, infrastructure, and the sort. But I then get overwhelmed with feeling the need to do the same thing on a global scale. And for such a project I’d eventually want a world map but then feel at that point it’s set in stone. I understand. But remember: maps can be wrong. The only maps your PLAYERS need to see is the ones they can buy/rent a look at, that ship captains and temples and expensive map shops have, and those were all drawn by fallible humans…
Consider the "face" of a government. In a…— Ed Greenwood (@TheEdVerse) April 22, 2019
…far country, you (wearing your military hat) can be what an inhabitant there sees and knows of the country you represent. They may or may not know, or have heard, stuff about the governance of that country (so detailing it, as opposed to broad strokes) can wait until down…
— Ed Greenwood (@TheEdVerse) April 22, 2019
…the road. Yes, doing a map can make it feel set in stone. So consider a "many islands, large and small" setting. You can detail an island…and then just move it aside to insert another, later, if the need for that seems apparent.
But don't worry about big scope. Player…— Ed Greenwood (@TheEdVerse) April 22, 2019
…characters DO have to worry first and foremost about where their next meal, or rent payment, or tax collection comes from. ;}
— Ed Greenwood (@TheEdVerse) April 22, 2019