Worldbuilding for TTRPGs

As much as worldbuilding is about the world you're building, when worldbuilding for a TTRPG, the things you leave out can be just as important. One of the most important things to understand about building setting material is that there needs to be room left for both the game master and the players themself to finish filling it out.

This leaves an interesting puzzle where you must balance providing enough content to make using it worthwhile, with leaving enough space for those using the content to use it in a unique way.

Generally speaking, this means developing context, without getting too caught in the weeds about specific details. The exact details of a setting are often better left to planning a specific adventure or campaign. This doesn't mean you can't have any details, and can only have a broad strokes overview, just that you don't want to force a specific narrative just by virtue of the world's nature.

Once you have created the major building blocks for the world, you can begin to develop some points of interest. These provide a jumping off point for any gamemasters or campaign writers using the world. These points of interest can come in many forms, but often exist as a location, event or just an individual character. It's best not to build a point of interest with a specific narrative in mind, but instead make people, places and events that are complex enough to facilitate a wide variety of possible plots.

For example, rather than creating a town, whose primary canon is that they are being threatened by a group of tolls nearby. Instead create city which, while it has a troll problem, is also plagued by corrupt politicians and a local temple secretly home to a cult and paladin's order waging war against the local crime family. This come complex setting allows for a context within which any number of events could occur. Even if the game master never engages with the specific details given, they provide a framework granting the game master enough flavour to understand the kind of people who might live there, the history that might have lead here or the kinds of things some helpful adventurers might do which could aid the city.

That example isn't to say that you can't develop smaller locations, but rather just highlight that smaller locations often come with a more limited scope, making them more helpful when creating a specific narrative, rather than a world for people to explore. A small village doesn't usually come with complex political conflicts, opposing factions or military engagement. It might have one of those things, but providing a location with only one thing going on will likely make game masters running a campaign in that world feel limited in what they can do there.

Once you have developed some points of interest, make sure to provide enough context, such that expanding on the area feels easy and intutive. Doing so will create little islands of content, between which is a nebulous sea which the game masters and players themselves can fill in as they travel through the world. In some cases, as with the city I described above, the location itself may form most of the island, and you may just need to add in a few details about the city's relationships in the surrounding area, or repution. For a point of interest in the form of a character, however, there may be a little bit more work to do to for this island.

For example, developing a few details about where they live, people they know or acts they may be known for can do this well. Keep in mind, however, that the person themselves is the point of interest, so don't feel the need to make the village they're from, or people they know especially interesting on their own. Those details primarily serve to provide the game master using the world some information which they can build on-top of to suit their current needs within a campaign.

The space you leave between these islands is where the real stories are told. A world can be amazing, but it's the collaboration at the table that is where the real magic happens. Make sure you're leaving enough of the world unfinished such that people writing campaigns, or the players together at the table to fill it out however they see fit. Don't build so much of the world that those playing in it have to constantly decide between maintaining canon, or going along with whatever is happening at the table. If the worldbuilding has to be consistently ignored, then there's not really much of a point in using the world to begin with.

This circles back to the beginning of this article where I discussed the balance between providing useful tools for the game masters and players through your worldbuilding, but also leaving them space to tell their own stories. These two things aren't independant. They work hand-in-hand, so always keep that in mind when building a world for a TTRPG setting.