Toggle Theme

Archives of Nethys

Pathfinder RPG (2nd Edition) Pathfinder RPG (1st Edition) Starfinder RPG

Rules Index | GM Screen
GameMastery Guide / Creating a World

World Building

Source GameMastery Guide pg. 140
While running games within a published campaign setting or a favorite fictional universe is a lot of fun, many GMs enjoy creating an entire setting from scratch—a world in which every idea, NPC, and location, is an expression of your creativity. It’s a powerful feeling, one that can give you countless hours of enjoyment even outside of the game session.

Yet creating a setting from scratch can also be intimidating. This chapter provides you with tools to help take the guesswork out of world building, breaking down monumental considerations into small, manageable chunks. While this section (and indeed this book) presumes you’re creating a fantasy setting for use with the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game, most of this advice can be applied to any game genre or system. Keep in mind that not all of these questions need to be answered ahead of time, and creating as you play allows you to keep things fresh and fun for both you and your players.

Defining a Setting

Source GameMastery Guide pg. 140
When beginning work on a setting, it’s useful to start with a concise description of your idea—a mission statement of sorts. Try to keep to the essentials. If the setting is derivative of something else, don’t be afraid to note that. Every artist pulls inspiration from existing work, and this is just a starting point—by the time you’re done, your setting will likely have evolved into something completely different. Moreover, if you try too hard to make a setting unlike anything your players have ever seen before, it might leave them confused and disconnected—having to confront a 60-page synopsis just to be able to create a character gives players a major incentive to go play something else. Drawing from the real world or fictional universes familiar to your players gives them an easy entry point, and when a player can visualize the world you’re presenting, it’s easier for him to get caught up in it. This initial premise is also a good place to note any fundamental rules you intend to follow, such as a lack of intelligent non-humanoids or a quirk in the way magic works. Your entire concept might be something as simple as “an alternate history Europe, but with a Viking empire bigger than Rome’s.”

When working on this setting definition, remember that a setting is not a world. Focus your attention on where you expect to spend most of your time in the campaign. Later on, you can always expand outward—this is often known as the “bullseye” method—and leaving blank space around the edges of the map creates a sense of mystery key to exploration.

More than establishing any concrete facts, your fundamental concept for your setting needs to capture what makes it special and different from other settings. Try to answer questions like the following: What is the single most defining aspect of this setting? What is the one-sentence hook that would make players want to play in it, and what aspect are you most excited to work on? It also helps to write down what type of game you’re hoping to run. Is it a swashbuckling sword and sorcery adventure? Complex political intrigue? Wild magic in the wilderness? A good setting should encompass and facilitate multiple types of play, but defining the game you want to run can steer you toward setting choices that compliment it.

Tools of the Trade

Source GameMastery Guide pg. 140
Every GM has his own preferred method of world creation. For some, this process starts and ends with pen and paper, in which case it’s often useful to have graph paper to help judge scale and create miniatures-ready maps, or a small notebook to carry around and record ideas as inspiration strikes. Yet not even those are necessary—part of the beauty of pen-and-paper RPGs lies in the freedom from material components.

For some GMs, technology can be a huge asset in world design. Programs such as dungeon-building and mapping software, name generators, and the like can be found for sale or for free on the Internet, and spreadsheets and wikis can be invaluable when keeping track of important names, dates, and other world details. More importantly, the Internet offers convenient access to a wealth of information and inspiration, such as online encyclopedias, atlases, and more. It’s the rare fantastical concept that hasn’t already been dreamed up or carried out by some real-world historical culture, and cribbing off real-world maps can be a godsend when you’re new to mapping or strapped for time. If you don’t have computer access, a local library can fulfill most of the same functions.

The following pages cover a number of questions you should consider when designing a setting, but sometimes the easiest place to start is with a single setting element, such as the city your players find themselves in at the start of the campaign.

Building a City

Source GameMastery Guide pg. 140
Even if you decide to take a broad-strokes approach to campaign design, eventually you’ll need to get down and gritty and start creating an environment on the level at which your PCs will interact with it. Likely the best place to start is the major city or town closest to your campaign’s focus—as with every aspect of building a setting, how much work you spend on a location should be commensurate with how likely players are to spend time there, and it’s nice for both the GM and PCs to have a base of operations. Along with the natural lures of healing, buying gear, and selling loot, you can use memorable characters like mentors or patrons and favored restaurants and taverns to help make the city feel like home. (These details also raise the stakes significantly if you later threaten the city’s existence— it always helps if the PCs have some sentimental attachments to give them a personal stake in a region’s defense.) Bear in mind that players are fickle and may become attached to unexpected people or entirely ignore characters you expected to become linchpins. Don’t be afraid to roll with the punches if they prefer the halfling pickpocket to your paladin laden with adventure hooks. In fact, it’s often best to wait until you see where player characters focus before fully exploring any particular NPC.

Creating a city can follow a pattern similar to that used when creating nations. Start with the natural geography and the locations of the borders and the most important elements, which are likely inherently tied together (see pages 146–147 for further information on how geography informs a city or nation’s layout). From there, work out the government, cultural institutions, economy, and so on. Try working on your city both from the top and bottom, letting the middle shape itself out as you go. For example, while you should know who the highest potentates in the city are, unless your players will be interacting with them immediately, it’s probably best to put this aside and spend more time on the level of the common people, the streets where most people live and work.

If you’re just starting a campaign, this city may be the best place for you to introduce the underlying themes of your setting. Figure out how to immerse your players in it—how can these themes play out in the first session? How can their early interactions foreshadow and set them up for their coming adventures?

Once you’ve got the big picture for your city, it’s time to start filling in details. Don’t panic! A city has a lot of space to fill, but you don’t need to know what every dot on your map is. Create a number of colorful locations, characters, and connected plot threads—but don’t pin them down. Remember, you only have to detail as much of the city as your characters can interact with. If your characters head east from the town square looking for an inn, give them a few choices. If they instead head west—give them the same choices, but turn that waterfront bar into the best inn on the hilltop. If you want them to run into a certain character, they can do so whether they head to the market or the boatyard. While such tactics might feel like “cheating” to some GMs, roleplaying has an element of solipsism to it, and if your players never experience a given location, it effectively doesn’t exist. Change names and ad-lib where you need to—in this manner, you can populate an entire city with just a handful of businesses and characters, and ensure that your favorite creations (whether NPCs or adventure hooks) get the airtime they deserve.

For more information on building cities, as well as important questions to consider, see pages 156–157 and page 209.