Starting A New Setting

When you look online for world-building advice you often see the advice to either start top-down or bottom-up when creating your setting. Both of these have advantages and disadvantages.

TOP-DOWN

Top-down world-building will begin with the very basics of how the setting works and the various powers at play in shaping the whole world and what is possible within it. This may also set the tone you are going for and just laying everything out in the broadest possible strokes. Working from the top down is also a good place for you to look at which meta-elements you want to include or shy away from. For an RPG setting, this could be things like deciding which player character races you want to make available before you do any creation so that the ancestry options available to the players will tie directly into the story of the setting.

With a top-down approach, it becomes easy to create things which your players will never experience. This is where jokes about DMs turning into J.R.R.Tolkien come from. DMs can easily spend hundreds of hours making things just from the sheer enjoyment of creating. But for the "working DM" this is a danger you want to be on the lookout for. You want to use your time well to make things which will positively affect the play at the table.

BOTTOM-UP

Bottom-up worldbuilding is where you start with the specifics of one small area and build out as the players or your story progress. This is great for first time DMs. In one of Matt Colville’s first videos he lays out a perfect example of this kind of setting: there is a town with one tavern, a forest, and a tomb on the other side of the forest. Add in a few characters, some goblins who need a sacrifice, and a blacksmith whose daughter is kidnapped and you are ready for a few sessions of gaming. If you use this to build up a campaign around, as I have done, you can just add the next part whenever it’s needed. It is a very organic way to build out your world and you almost never make stuff you won’t use.

The downside of the bottom-up method is your campaign can have a very ad-hoc feel when people take a step back and look at it as a whole. Some things may not make sense when viewed together or may stick out as oddities in a bad way. This is how DM's end up creating a J.K Rowling problem. By the end of the Harry Potter books, it became apparent that some things had been well planned from the beginning, but others which had solved problems earlier had themselves become problems the author had to deal with later (time turners, we are looking at you).

Art Seek the Wilds by Anna Steinbauer

TOP THEN BOTTOM

As you can imagine, each DM or writer probably has their own take on using one or both of these methods. In creating Welkin we will spend some time at the top adding details as we go down, but then we will stop and move to the very bottom and work our way up for a while. I want to try this because in running my last two campaigns I came across another downside to the bottom-up method. We used the above mentioned bottom-up method and it invariably led to a rather generic setting. This isn’t a bad thing! My players had a lot of fun. But I had ideas I felt I could not bring into the game easily. This time, I want to make some large decisions about the setting before we jump into fleshing out a starting town.

Because I hope to explain my thinking as I go, this may take a while on the blog. But for a DM, I think all you would need is an hour or so at most of planning before your first session to lay out some broad setting ideas that set your world apart from others. This way, your players have something to bite into when creating their characters.

GOALS

I will try to enumerate my goals for my new setting, Welkin. I want the elements of the setting to tie together thematically. I would like to give my players tons of hooks without boxing them in. I want to make it easy for the game to be exciting. I would like there to be a lot of diversity in the setting; this should not be an "all-European all the time" setting. I will be creating this setting with Dungeons and Dragons 5e play in mind. Therefore, if it is in D&D it should have a place in the setting (it’s ok for something to have a small or hidden place, however. It will be there waiting for a player to draw it out). Also, we want the setting to seem fresh to experienced players without being overwhelming to new players. So, it will be fun to subvert some tropes and lean into other tropes. We should also hope to encourage players to engage with the setting.

• Elements of the setting tie together thematically 
• Tons of hooks without constraining player choice 
• Make it easy for the game to be exciting 
• Diversity baked in
• Build with Dungeons and Dragons 5e play in mind 
• If it is in D&D it should have a place in the setting 
• We want the setting to seem fresh without being overwhelming
• Rule of Cool: if it's cool, it may have a place
• Subvert and lean into various tropes
• Encourage players to engage with the setting. 

I expect to have varying degrees of success with these, but I am happy with the overall list.

-Ellery