I’ve previously discussed my misgivings about worldbuilding, at least my misgivings about how the (separate) hobby of worldbuilding interacts with setting design for an RPG. Of course, if you are one of those lightly deranged folks who insists on writing a setting from the ground up, you know that you cannot ignore all the brass tacks of worldbuilding, even if said worldbuilding is nowhere near sufficient for making a gameable setting. For what it’s worth I’ve spent most of my GMing time over the past several years engaging with existing settings or games which encourage shared setting creation; the eldritch swamps in which my Apocalypse World game took place are just as attributable to my players as they are to me. Now, though, I’m writing a setting for a somewhat more traditional game, to be run in GURPS. I’m trying to balance two elements in setting creation: First, I am writing something specific, with different assumptions and conflicts than other settings I could bring to bear. Second, even in a traditional setting I don’t want to give up that sort of engagement with my players, who bring in not only interesting ideas but also clear opinions about what they want to interact with in the setting. So, without a system like Apocalypse World that cements that player input, how should we be prepping a setting to ensure that the game will involve “worldbuilding to find out what happens?”
I’m not exactly bullish on worldbuilding as the basis for setting creation for games. The amount of ground-up work to create an entire world is significant, and taking shortcuts is what leaves us with strange and inconsistent worlds that rely on real-world shortcuts and stereotypes to fill in the blanks that were too onerous or tedious to come up with the hard way. If you start with “our world, but” or “Points of Light, but” you’re able to more functionally make the changes that let you actually play the game you want. And ultimately playing the game you want is the whole point of writing your own custom setting anyway.
I think I need to harp on this again and again…the reason you write your own setting for a game is because you have something specific you want to do, say, or explore within that setting. If the themes and activities you want to explore already exist in another game, it’s going to be a whole lot easier just to go play that game. We don’t call the process of writing or assembling specific locations for your upcoming game sessions worldbuilding, that’s just prep and while you can do as much or as little of it as you want, you don’t need to ‘write a setting’ to do it. Coming up with a new solar system for your Mothership game? Not writing a setting, so long as you stick with the underlying assumptions within Mothership. Populating some hexes for a game of OSE or DCC? Not writing a setting, and which of those two games you pick is going to change the setting pretty drastically even if they’re “both D&D”.
I’m not saying all of this because I “look down on” gamers who adapt existing games and existing settings. Quite the opposite: There’s so much setting material out there that you can use for your games, and if you find things you want to use, do not reinvent the wheel. Beg, borrow, steal, adapt, and do whatever you feel most comfortable with to get that game to the table and enjoy with your players. That’s what I do almost all of the time. When I turned to writing my own setting, it was simply because the setting I wanted did not exist.
So now you know for sure your idea isn’t easily implemented with an existing game and a bit of homebrew. What you have in mind is more substantial, and you’re going to need to either really change a game or use a generic system to make it work. Maybe you’re thinking something multiversal, or you have an idea that spans a wide range of conceits. Maybe you have written your own magic system and you want to implement it, or you’ve come up with a weird twist on pantheons and gods that doesn’t quite work with fantasy systems you’ve read. The next big question is, simply, what are your players going to do with this idea? If your setting conceit is about magic returning to the world, how will your player characters interact with that magic? If the gods of your setting are ancient AIs awakened by some planetary cataclysm, when and how will they affect the PCs’ lives? I suppose you can write cutscenes about these ideas, but this is ‘Worldbuild to find out what happens’, not ‘use my RPG group as unwilling beta readers of my novel’. If you have cool ideas that you want to include in a game, you necessarily want to put them center stage in whatever game you end up running.
This doesn’t necessarily mean you need to break the logic of your setting. A post-apocalyptic world where the ancients had potent futuristic technology needs those ancients and that technology to appear, but the internal logic of the setting can state how rare, say, technological artifacts are. It’s less about demanding that the most important themes of your setting are drop-kicked towards your players immediately, and much more about the fact that all your cool ideas, concepts, and themes are not being shared with your players unless their characters get to interact with them.
This player interaction is ultimately going to be the core of your game. You’re not writing about your cool magic system, you’re letting it loose on your players and seeing what they do with it. Your ancient AI deities aren’t set dressing, they’re going to interact directly with your players who are going to be asking questions of you based on how they choose to interact. Your ideas are being poked, prodded, and twisted around by your players and that’s when you’re going to find the best, most fascinating answers about your world and your ideas.
In order to worldbuild to find out what happens, you need to leave big, fruitful voids in your setting creation. This may mean, especially if you are a considerate worldbuilder who is building the implications of the technology or magic or pantheon you’ve created into the setting, that there may be things you need to leave mysterious. If you’re interested in seeing what a setting element would mean or do, it may mean that said element needs to be a bit mysterious in your setting. This is going to vary, of course: Religion is always going to consist of conflicting theories and beliefs, and past a certain point you don’t even need to settle on what ‘truth’ is. For something like technology or a magic system, having it be poorly understood or recently discovered gives more leeway in the setting for the hard-and-fast reality of it all to be obscured or even changed.
Ultimately there are two directions in which to obscure certainty: New things are poorly understood, while old things see their understanding fade with time. Both provide interesting directions for you to explore your key elements in more detail while leaving reality more ambiguous. The Rowan, Rook, and Decard games Spire and Heart are very good at this, presenting a fully realized setting that still has so many elements and details left for players, GMs, and their groups to choose for their specific campaign. Wildsea is another good example: While the game has a strange and exciting setting, certain elements, like resources, are left completely freeform so that the details any particular group comes across can be adapted and customized to their particular vision.
Unsurprisingly, if we’re going to integrate the agenda of ‘play to find out what happens’ into a custom setting, a few PbtA principles are going to come along for the ride as well. ‘Draw maps, leave blanks’ is going to be key here…it maybe should be obvious, but ‘worldbuilding to find out what happens’ means leaving the full extent of your setting conceits and their consequences open to interpretation and investigation by your players. This generally means not only resisting the urge to fully define everything, but also placing your campaign and your adventures right on the edge of those blanks in the map…if you want the ideas to just be set dressing, you could simply do less work with them.
Related to that, placing key themes of your setting at the feet of your players is only going to result in something new and special if you ‘ask questions and build upon the answers’. As a GM you will have a lot of different options for how you want your players to engage with your world, and you don’t necessarily need to give free reign for them to establish setting details as the game goes on (though there are plenty of ways you can do just that). However, engaging with the setting and what your players want to do is critical for getting the richness that comes with more than one head in the design process. At the most basic level, character creation shows you what parts of the setting your players want to engage with and how they’re thinking about it. From there, a more robust session zero gives more leverage to your players, but still only at the establishment of the game. Once the game is underway, it’s up to you whether or not you want meta-abilities that let players declare setting elements, but even if you don’t, their in-character lines of questioning and investigation should in turn inspire your lines of questioning and writing.
This all assumes you’re following a relatively traditional cycle of game prep and play. There are other avenues to let players into your prep if you so choose. Worldbuilding games, most famously Microscope, can be used to democratize the entire setting development process. Here, though, instead of choosing themes and setting elements you want to investigate, you may be leaving the entire design process on the table to be tampered with. To direct the process of using something like a worldbuilding game, you may need to have a bigger conversation with your players about intent and your desired endpoint, though the more specific your vision the most likely it may be easier just to write up the initial setting document yourself.
Worldbuilding to find out what happens is, at the end of the day, about creating and using the tension between top-down elements in your world that you want to explore and bottom-up elements that are only cemented in the setting once your players engage with them. In a way, this is a core element of why implied settings in games like Dungeons and Dragons can be so powerful: The base elements and tropes are understood, but the actual execution is left up to each individual table. Letting your players into your setting prep not only enriches said prep by adding a few more brains into the mix, but it also deepens your players’commitment to the setting by ensuring that their contributions matter. As the setting moves from more nebulous to more concrete, there will be more investment at the table, as well as more desire to continue playing in the setting to see how all the big questions get answered. No matter the sort of game you’re playing, it will never simply be the GM calling the shots. Worldbuilding to find out what happens just means that the GM is keeping their players, their insights, and their contributions front of mind as their setting evolves and develops at the table.
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