One of the things I find myself saying occasionally on #ttrpg Twitter is we don’t do world-building. People are often shocked by this. Some find it hard to grasp. The absence of world-building is so alien they often don’t understand how the game can be happening at all.
The true answer to that question is we are world-building all the time, it’s just not your world-building.
What date is it?
We don’t create lots of canon or a legion of facts. World-building to many people is history, dates, geography, maps and politics and cultures. At its peak, this results in the Runequest ttrpg meme of needing to ask what year it is before you start playing because the traditional world-building is so defined knowing what year it is is deemed necessary to understand the setting well enough.
We do very little of that. At most, we do just enough.
A funny example is our campaign about a great elven civil war. This was an elven civil war in a world we’d not visited before. This meant it was a great historical event in a world we’d not played in where it was a historical event. A prequel without the foreground. During that whole campaign, we had no map of where the elven nations existed in relation to each other.
Geography did not exist. It never mattered. We even started with nothing written down.
A part of the reason we had no map or awareness of spacial geography is travel didn’t matter as we’d just go to the places we needed to go to either because major cities had teleportation or because we had methods like flying creatures to get to where we needed to be. Getting to where we needed to be was never important it was all about what happened when we got there. However we do it, this is often a feature of all our campaigns. Travel as a thing is not important in and of itself.
When it comes to cultures we focus less on knowing volumes of history, what they eat or how they dress that is only colour. We don’t do equipment or money. In a way people might think there is nothing to connect us to the world our characters are in at all. There is, it’s just we see other things as being more important. We concentrate on outcomes, consequences and relationships as it’s these things that provide meaning.
I could go on. There is world-building all the time both large and small it’s just we’re concentrating on why not what.
What we build
What we build is slanted more to the why than the what, because it’s why that’s important. So what do we build? It tends to be relationships and story which are often the same thing.
Let’s run with an example.
Imagine a game about airships sailing between floating islands. Those floating islands were all analogues to European cultures. That was about as much world-building as we had. There was a bit more, but on a world-building scale not really worth mentioning.
We had a flashback in one of the episodes and I introduced the battle of El Diablo’s Eye which was when the ‘Spanish’ revolution against the religious state lost. In one flashback a location called El Diablo’s Eye was introduced (imagine a vast spacial whirlpool vortex), the pivotal revolutionary battle and the fact my protagonist lost fiends and a cause at this point. It was all woven up with emotional why and exciting imagery.
That’s what we create. In like 5-minutes of actual play.
Importantly this is a signal that this event is important. It shaped my character moving forward. That’s what world-building is for us, not establishing cool facts people can nod sagely to and soak up the depth, but stuff that can be handed to others like a baton so they can use it to build further.
So, did El Diablo’s Eye feature in the future? Of course, it became the location of the final battle against the ‘Russian analogues’ rising from the space below as El Diablo’s Eye existed because it turned out it was a rupture through to that space and it was their way in. The baton was passed and callbacks build the world and makes the whole final battle more emotionally resonant. All because of 5-minutes of world-building in a flashback.
That is more the world-building we do and it trumps, for us, exhaustive details of geography, culture, food, politics, dress and the need to know what date it is to understand the world because you’re world-building it just happens to be one of relationship, emotion and narrative.
The latest campaign
Let’s take the current Rime of the Frost Maiden campaign as an example. It’s working on a different model than the games of the regular ‘gaming group’. The campaign is not as focused on world-building of either type as much as other campaigns. This is probably because it is a pre-written module, delivered online in more of a streamlined, one-shot friendly model.
The character was approached outside of knowing this would be the approach so it still gives us some examples.
All that was originally defined was that she was born as a result of a pact her mother made with a hag and, as such, she was destined to transform but didn’t, at least not fully. The rest was play to find out. This raises loads of questions: –
- Why did she not fully transform?
- Who or what saved her?
- How can she pass as someone of Orc descent so well?
- How did a girl from a remote village become a Paladin?
- She left her home at the age of ten and returned a decade later?
- How does she feel about the hag who wove the curse?
- How does the hag feel about her deal being broken?
A couple of things about all these questions: (1) I didn’t know the answers when I started playing, but I have figured some of them out since and (2) while having nothing to do with geography, history, politics or facts they ARE world-building?
They are world-building because they are the touchstones that are put into play and then taken forward by others that go on to define other things and what happens in the future. It shapes what conversations happen, what relationships form, may introduce new characters and contributes to the meaning of events in the future.
This is another example of what I see as world-building.
And, Finally…
What gets discussed as world-building with respect to tabletop role-playing games isn’t, for the most part, something I or my gaming table values. At least that was true at one point, I suspect it might be slightly different now as membership changes. We just don’t do a lot of it.
But we do a lot of world-building. It’s just about different things.
This is because world-building can be about what is narratively important to the characters in the past and into the future not necessarily the world as a thing in its own right independently of the characters.