Detailing Your World
GameMastery Guide, page 141
Game designers work for months on setting sourcebooks, novelists agonize for years over how their world might work, and screenplay writers have production designers and art directors helping them present a movie’s backdrop to the audience. You, on the other hand, may not have much time to create the world your players will adventure in, and you definitely won’t have a huge production staff to help you.
Luckily, you won’t need it. With just an hour or two of considering the following questions, you should have all the answers you need to kick things off with a bang. What follow are 30 of the most important questions in setting design to help you formulate a quick world-building cheat sheet.
In this section
- The Heroic Details First things first: What do the heroes do in this new world of yours?
- The Mundane Details Once you have the key heroic details figured out, you have a rough sketch of an adventuring world. Now you’re going to have to think about the run-of-the-mill folk who populate it.
- The Scholarly Details Now we come to the information that perhaps only a sage would need to know, but which forms the underpinning of your world’s physics—and metaphysics.