Goal Oriented Worldbuilding

Worldbuilding can be an overwhelming experience, especially if you are new to it. There are numerous pitfalls involved, including over-building, under-building, lack of direction and not knowing when to stop. Most, if not all of these problems can be eliminated by having the proper goals defined before you begin.

The first thing to consider, before you get started, and before you even begin defining your goals/bounds, is what purpose does this worldbuilding serve? Are you writing a novel? A whole series? Designing a world to play a TTRPG in? This can drastically impact the kinds of goals and bounds you may want to set for yourself.

Depending on the purpose of your worldbuilding, whether it be for a story, a TTRPG campaign or just to exist on its own, you may want to make a statement with it. This could be as basic as reinforcing the theme of your plot, or a more more nuanced message that communicates via allegory or metaphor. It could serve to satirize a common trope or cliche, or to explore real-world issues through an alternative lense.

This is also where you can really emphasize or facilitate the genre of your story or theme of your campaign. For example, if you were writing a mystery novel, the cultural norms could serve as great fodder to conveniently obfuscate the truth. They could give good reasons to lie, or the over/under-valuing of various activities could serve either to obscure evidence or deliver it conveniently. While the worldbuilding for a high fantasy epic would be well served by creating awe inspiring kingdoms making grand achievements. Mosters lurking around every corner could serve as excelent plot hooks to keep your adventurers both on their toes, as well start them adventuring in the first place.

The scope of your worldbuilding is likely going to be the single largest influence over the goals you set and the bounds you aim to stay within. Many stories actually require a much smaller scope than many people think. If you only write epic fantasy, then you're almost always going to be writing with a grand or epic scope. Many stories though, even those that may be set in a high fantasy world, don't require you to build an entire world with a hundred or more countries, each with their own unique culture, customs, economies and conflicts.

Below are some example story premises and the kinds of worldbuilding which may be in scope. It should be noted that the scale of the story and the scope of the worldbuiling do not necessarily have to match. For example, you could have a qaint little story that takes place entirely in a tavern, but through conversation explores a much grander world.

Finally we get to the part where we set the goals and bounds for our worldbuilding. I have been using both of these terms throughout the article thus far, and that's because they both serve as two different sides to the same coin and can be understood together as a border around where you are worldbuilding, where goals are your minimums and bounds are your maximums. You want to fill out the borders, but you don't want to expand beyond it.

The exact goals you set are up to you, of course, however as discussed above, you should pick goals that match the scope of your project. You should be careful not to set goals that are too broad, or overly ambitious, as this can lead to both burnout, if it ends up taking too much to meet your goals, as well as wasted time. You can always expand the bounds of your worldbuilding if you begin writing, or running your campain, and you find you are lacking, however you can't get back the time you spent if you did too much.

Below are some examples of goals, which correspond to the scopes discussed in the previous section.

Once you have your bounds defined, you can get started. Obviously, your exact starting point depends on your goals. For example, if you're building in and epic scope, you may want to start with a world map. If you're building in a grand scope, you may instead want to start with the government, how it's structured and how corrupt it is.

One way that you can approach filling out the bounds, and reaching your goals in a more structured fashion is to make lists. List out the steps required to meet each of the goals you set, and tick off each of the items one by one. And once you have completed a step, try not to linger too much on it. For example, if one of your goals is to define a cultural custom for each nation, once you have the custom, for example a special greeting, don't spend too much time trying to come up with a history to the greeting, exceptions to when it's used or what the symbolism is.

While these may be interesting details, they are also details that can be easily developed later, either on a second pass or while working on the story, campain, or other project that the world is being built for. If you find yourself lingering for too long on each step, or even just on some steps, you can try developing goals and bounds for depth to draw more defined limits which allow you to continue towards your major goals.

It is important to regularly assess whether or not you have met your goals. This is easy to do if you are tracking your progress towards them, however not everyone works this way. For those of you who don't, you need to regularly look back at your goals and determine whether not you have achieved them.

If your are worldbuilding for a story, try to start writing. Write the first chapter, maybe even two or three, and then look at whether or not it feels as though you are lacking on context or detail for the setting. Do note that you will always end up filling in some amount of details as you write. If it feels, however, like you really don't have a good enough grasp on the setting, then try to determine why. Maybe the story is leaning more on cultural impact than you expected, and your goals were more focused on defining the government and military. In those cases, you may want to set some new smaller goals to fill the niche that you missed before, after which you can return to writing. It is worth stating, as well, that you can do this at any stage of the writing process, just be careful not to return to full-scale worldbuilding everytime a city doesn't have a name yet, or you have to decide on the price for a coffee at the local coffee shop.

If you are worldbuilding for a TTRPG campaign, try to prepare a session. If you want to push a little further, make some assumptions about the progress and decisions the players will make and prep the following session or two as well. If you feel like you don't have enough material to work with, then try narrowing your scope a little bit to where the campaign starts and flesh things out there a little bit. Unlike with a written story, a TTRPG campaign will almost always require you to do some amount of improvisation once the players start actually making their own decisions. Do not take every time you have to make something up on the spot as indication you have to dive back into worldbuilding.

Setting goals for your worldbuilding can be a great tool for managing your progress, which allows you to both guide the direction of your worldbuilding, as well as aid in the avoidance of the dreaded worldbuilding disease! Setting goals for your worldbuilding also give you the added benefit of helping you develop more fleshed out worlds, as it encourages you to cover all the facets of the world you actually want to cover, as opposed to getting sucked down the rabbit whole of a handful of details, at the expense of others.