Worldbuilding Game Help

[Khrysaes]

To note, while the following is not actually about D&D 5e, explicitly, it is intended to facilitate 5e play.

So, I am not satisfied with many of the "official" or "third party" D&D campaign settings. I am not sure if it is because of the massive bloat, the group interest, the lack of content/overwhelming amount of content, or the kitchen sink natures of some settings, but I think it is, at least in part, investment in the world, both for me or my play group as players or DMs.

Of the campaign settings that are official? I think Darksun is my favorite. Third Party? Probably Grim hollow. Although, I like some things from Scarred Lands, such as the "why" elves are the slowly dying/infertile race and the blood sea (I put these two into Grim Hollow since they work in the setting)

So, this weekend I want to propose to my group that we make our own setting, and build it together through play.

In part of this, I was looking at some systems that are games to be used for worldbuilding.

I think the first one I found was "Dawn of Worlds" https://worldbuildingschool.com/dawn-of-worlds/

but since then I have found others.

One page I found that has helped is: https://www.dicemonkey.net/2018/12/07/using-multiple-rpgs-for-worldbuilding/

The main point is that I don't want to just make a world for the group to play one campaign in. I want everyone to get involved in the making of said world, facilitated by some FUN game rules.

I was thinking starting with Dawn of Worlds, then moving to Microscope, Kingdom, Downfall, maybe Mythender, or some such as these.

That said, has anyone played any of these sorts of games? If so, which ones? How would you rate them/improve them?

Key parts I am looking for are 1: Is easy to understand, 2: quick to play, 3: FUN to play, 4: facilitates group world building.

Edit, also if you know a game where the players are "gods" and their characters are said "gods" that have powers associated with/limited by their portfolios. I was thinking of working the God Characters into Dawn of worlds.

[fbelanger]

I play such game once.
It was inspired very very loosely on Dawn of worlds.
simply make turn table, each players can make one creation, base on the current level of definition.
you can create like this pantheon, continent, historic event, and so on.
It’s more fun when players use one of the previous action to make some follow up.
very fun and very involving method.
I recommend.

[Wasp]

I have done Dawn of Worlds and Microscope and I think they are both good, i slightly prefer Microscope for it's non linear nature.

But i LOVE world building games and have done multiple games Like that here in the forum (some inspired by Microscope and some based on using Magic the Gathering Cards to develop a world).

[Khrysaes]

So i played Dawn if worlds with most of my group, missing one person. I think we did something wring because it felt kind of… boring? Then again we basically got through the second age then decided to end it.

My thoughts.
I think the scale of our map was too zoomed out.
I started with a blank hex grid and we made our own continents. I wish we had some to start.
We need a better understanding of all the actions we can take.
Once we got past races, we were kind of confused as to what to do.

[MrStabby]

Doing some worldbuilding at the moment. I hadn't realised there were specific systems for it so no experience of those.

For use started off with every player chosing three things they want more of in the world - or to have more significance. Then three things they want less of or removed from the world.

This gives a broad guide as to the world style. So one player wanted more oozes and for oozes to take a more important role in the world. One player wanted less high level magic. One wanted more extreme wilderness. THere was a bit of back and forth on this, clarifying intent and so on and making sure that everyone was comfortable taking things on. In the end we had a campaign world around a "world rot" giving rise to oozes, sapping arcane magics and undermining the efforts of the city states to hold the wilderness at bay.

Next step was each person got a region to flesh out at high level. The character the player played would probably come from that region to justify the greater knowledge of it. There were a few guides here:

1) Each region had to connect to at least two others with a relationship backstory or something. This was really easy in reality, bu it acted as a prompt to make people not just think about their zone in isolation.

2) No superlatives. You could have a big city, but you couldn't say is the "biggest city" or the "wealthiest city" and an NPC could be a powerful warlock but not "the most powerful"

3) A paragraph on politics and settlements, a paragraph on wilderness ecology, an entry into pantheon of gods.

4) Some stat blocks for CR1, 3, 5, 8-10, 15-18 and 24-26 ranges for potential enemies/NPC types for their region. A DMs job is hard enough working in a new world. Giving them some explicit building blocks to play with helps.

5) A really cool thematic location that captures the essence of the region

Then we built a map. So this was based on broad descriptions of relationships. Regions that had a lot of interactions listed were more likely to be neighbours. Things that made them less likely were things like having different gods of similar domains or vastly different ecologies. This was a rough "blob map" - luckily we have one person in our group who loves drawing maps and has produced a beautiful and much more detailed world from this.

This is where we are at the moment.

Next steps are something like:

1) Decide where we start and flesh out that area. Lets get the campaign rolling and we can add detail as we go.
2) Add a lot more links between regions and more stories/tales. This is expected to hapen as part of writing character backstory, so it will be inconsistent.
3) We need to discuss how to ret-con the world if needed, how to adjust or deal with atypical things. For example if one player says most dragons in their region are good aligned then do they then have a reasonable expectation that the DM wont throw one of the rare evil aligned ones at the party? Where does the creator agnecy end and DM discretion begin. I tough question we probably should have asked sooner.


I can't say wha it is like for a campaign, but building the world has been fun. Some people have gone a lot deeper than others, but this hasn't been a problem - more interesting/rich areas will proabbly just mean that it is overrepresented in the material the DM wants to use.

Some people have gone down a very focussed route - one region is a theocracy with the "cool location" being a temple, the "wilderness hazards" being a wasteland blighted by a divine curse, the stat blocks are all clerics, holy warriors, inquisitors, angels and construct temple guardians. Honestly, it seems to work well enough there.

[Khrysaes]

Doing some worldbuilding at the moment. I hadn't realised there were specific systems for it so no experience of those.

For use started off with every player chosing three things they want more of in the world - or to have more significance. Then three things they want less of or removed from the world.

This gives a broad guide as to the world style. So one player wanted more oozes and for oozes to take a more important role in the world. One player wanted less high level magic. One wanted more extreme wilderness. THere was a bit of back and forth on this, clarifying intent and so on and making sure that everyone was comfortable taking things on. In the end we had a campaign world around a "world rot" giving rise to oozes, sapping arcane magics and undermining the efforts of the city states to hold the wilderness at bay.

Next step was each person got a region to flesh out at high level. The character the player played would probably come from that region to justify the greater knowledge of it. There were a few guides here:

1) Each region had to connect to at least two others with a relationship backstory or something. This was really easy in reality, bu it acted as a prompt to make people not just think about their zone in isolation.

2) No superlatives. You could have a big city, but you couldn't say is the "biggest city" or the "wealthiest city" and an NPC could be a powerful warlock but not "the most powerful"

3) A paragraph on politics and settlements, a paragraph on wilderness ecology, an entry into pantheon of gods.

4) Some stat blocks for CR1, 3, 5, 8-10, 15-18 and 24-26 ranges for potential enemies/NPC types for their region. A DMs job is hard enough working in a new world. Giving them some explicit building blocks to play with helps.

5) A really cool thematic location that captures the essence of the region

Then we built a map. So this was based on broad descriptions of relationships. Regions that had a lot of interactions listed were more likely to be neighbours. Things that made them less likely were things like having different gods of similar domains or vastly different ecologies. This was a rough "blob map" - luckily we have one person in our group who loves drawing maps and has produced a beautiful and much more detailed world from this.

This is where we are at the moment.

Next steps are something like:

1) Decide where we start and flesh out that area. Lets get the campaign rolling and we can add detail as we go.
2) Add a lot more links between regions and more stories/tales. This is expected to hapen as part of writing character backstory, so it will be inconsistent.
3) We need to discuss how to ret-con the world if needed, how to adjust or deal with atypical things. For example if one player says most dragons in their region are good aligned then do they then have a reasonable expectation that the DM wont throw one of the rare evil aligned ones at the party? Where does the creator agnecy end and DM discretion begin. I tough question we probably should have asked sooner.


I can't say wha it is like for a campaign, but building the world has been fun. Some people have gone a lot deeper than others, but this hasn't been a problem - more interesting/rich areas will proabbly just mean that it is overrepresented in the material the DM wants to use.

Some people have gone down a very focussed route - one region is a theocracy with the "cool location" being a temple, the "wilderness hazards" being a wasteland blighted by a divine curse, the stat blocks are all clerics, holy warriors, inquisitors, angels and construct temple guardians. Honestly, it seems to work well enough there.


This seems like a great idea for us. Ill definitely bring it up

To describe my experience with Dawn of Worlds. It felt like the map creator of Civilization 6. Then we added races. I think for a general world, it may work, but it didn't feel as engaging as I hoped it would..

I may still use the point system as a base and try to elicit things from each of my players.

Maybe as an auction?

[Maan]

As a functional advice I'm going to tell you: just build what you need.

That is: have a general idea. Have some detail about places, organizations and the like. Have a map, too, sure: of the area the game will start in.

What you shouldn't do is trying to detail the whole world. You'll burn yourself out for no real benefit to your game.
Just add detail as you need. It's more fun too, and you can adapt to what your players do. The boss that managed to flee? They just happens to be a member of that organization and will become an hook to introduce that new opponent in the campaign.

Most important, a game is a lot more manageable when you avoid Tolkien Syndrome.