World Building: When Less is More
Earlier this week, Simon Burley turned his Bluesky TTRPG thought of the day towards world building. He ruffled a few feathers by suggesting that minimalist world-building was better for games than immersive, encyclopaedic world-building. I couldn’t agree more, and the exchanges have inspired me to put my thoughts down here because I think it is one of the crucial points to building the hobby and creating accessible gameplay.
A History of World Building
Personally, I blame Tolkien*
When you encounter Middle Earth as a teenager and see the world’s depth and richness, with maps, languages, history and family trees, it can be mind-blowing. This used to be the headline act when it came to world-building, and more often than not, we sought to emulate it. I remember proudly appearing at my first-ever public D&D club visit with my lever arch file rammed with ‘my world. ’ It was a detailed mishmash of ideas and rip-offs, ramming things from Dragon and Imagine magazines, fantasy fiction and my little imagination together – and it was detailed. I remember the organiser of the club looking through the folder, politely, and nodding, before he replied ‘That’s nice’ and walked away. I was bemused how someone could not be beguiled by ‘my’ Middle Earth. Had I done something wrong? Was it not magical?
At the tender age of 13, I didn’t comprehend that people faced with such an edifice of information will bounce off it – hard! And also, that I was not the only one to be doing this. I went ahead and played that first session in the same organisers homebrew world and system and will never forget (a) the phrase ‘Nuada Beserker’ and (b) still not knowing what the fuck one is or was but (c) being killed by one for an infraction of etiquette. It was 1984.
It’s not like we didn’t have loose world-building all around us back then. Let’s, for example, take the TV show ‘Happy Days’? We knew that the Cunningham family lived in Milwaukee; they were a typical TV nuclear family who happened to have a cool mechanic living in a room above their house. Richie, the elder son, had two friends, and they hung out at a diner run by a guy called Arnold. The lads had a hand, and the sister, Joanie, had a friend called Jenny Piccalo and was eventually courted by Fonz’s nephew, Chachi. Oh, and they went to Jefferson High. That’s all we needed to get onboard with Happy Days. I bet, if we had to come up with a character to place into that show, we could with no problem.
But for fantasy, Tolkien taught us we needed a setting bible. So we made them.
These settings have become some of the most beloved in RPGs. Look at Glorantha. A massive, intricate world which has far more written about it than Middle Earth, I would guess? Or the Forgotten Realms? Traveller’s Imperium? The World of Darkness? Or the complex world of Warhammer 40k? Even modern-day games, like Spire, can amass a vast amount of setting detail very quickly.
But this might not be the best way to approach a setting.
*Oh, I know, there will be people reading this who swear blind they have never been influenced by Tolkien. They’re the same ilk of people who proudly state that D&D was not their first RPG and see that as some badge of honour. It’s a generalisation.
Using tropes
I’m going to suggest here that there is a massive difference between visual media and written media, especially TV and film, when it comes to translating world building into games. I think the use of tropes and imaginary chimera in visual world building makes it so much easier than the detail in a written form. I’m going to go out on a limb now and say that it’s because the visual media creates a pre-made filter for imagination which ties the experience together.
Consider if you will, Star Trek?
You could spend a long time explaining the structure and load out of a Constitution class starship in text. You could explain the intricate workings of phasers, transporters, tricorders, etc. You could explore the Klingon Empire, the culture of Vulcans and the mission of the Federation. Or, you could just watch an episode or two of Star Trek, and you’re pretty much there. Indeed, most people have enough understanding from popular culture to drop themselves instantly into the setting in their imagination.
So you can get away with cutting a lot of work by simply leaning into tropes and building a world-building chimera from those tropes quickly and efficiently. You can also strip things from the tropes to create creative constraint – ‘It’s the Star Wars universe, but without any Jedi involved’ makes for a straight-up conceit for a game that’s clear and limited and forces people to think in a slightly different manner. It’s Harry Potter, but in Japan, etc.
Less leaves more space for imagination and improvisation
Another important factor for world-building in games is the concept of ownership – i.e. how shared is your game table when it comes to creativity? Now, fair play, there are some people who really love exploring someone else’s garden of ideas, and others who want to be guided into a pre-written setting to plumb the depths. I’ve run enough Symbaroum and marvelled at the richness of the world not to rage against that.
However, there’s something magical about games where all of the players, not just the one taking the role of the GM, have some skin in the game when it comes to creativity. It becomes their world, and their game. They own a part of it, and it matters.
This allows the game to become the product of multiple imaginations, rather than one, and thus it can go places it would never have imagined. Sure, sometimes there needs to be a bit of table consensus about tone etc. but when you’re all on the same page? Brilliant.
I will hark back to a game that I played in – Dresden Files Accelerated. We were playing in New York, and occasionally, we needed to make the bodies of demons and monsters disappear. The GM asked how we did this, and I suggested that there was a service, run by a magical person, who did it. And then I dropped that it could be an agent of a crocodile god, like Sobek, who ate the bodies! That came out of nowhere, but it then became a functioning part of our game world, and a right royal pain in the arse as well. She was a great NPC but was never part of the lore the game was built upon.
The true gold in many games lies in the spaces which are unknown. The points where you play to find out, as the phrase goes. When everything is already planned out, where does imagination and improvisation settle?
Avoids contradictions and saying no
One of the other benefits of having a light touch world building method, is that you avoid those moments when player creativity and inspiration smash headlong into the setting. When someone is passionate about a game and their character, nothing punctures that enthusiasm more than being told ‘no’ – no, you cannot have that type of character from that area; no, the armour you want won’t be invented for another three years; no, you can’t call your character that name as it was reserved for the Imperial family thirteen thousands years before the campaign.
You don’t have to do that with a light touch campaign build. You can easily build these things into the world as they come up. Sometimes constraints can be good – ‘the world doesn’t have any magic’ or ‘there’s no FTL travel in this game’ – and trigger some creativity, but setting-as-blocker doesn’t do that.
No wasted effort
In our time-poor worlds, light touch world-building can save you a whole heap of time and effort. I’m going to drift back to Tolkein here and into the wonderful world outlined in the Appendices. Let’s not pretend that I, like so many, looked at all of those family trees and lineages in awe at the detail and the thorough thinking behind it all. As an adult, however, it did strike me that very little of that detail entered into the adventures of the Fellowship. Sure, some do, but nothing depends upon it. We don’t need to know who the previous Stewards of Gondor were before Denethor, or who the Durin’s were between the first and the last, and Legolas seems to be fine without much of a lineage at all. Only Aragorn benefits from it because his character schtick is tied into it.
When we go full-bore on world building, we waste so much effort on that detail and then it is either wasted and never mentioned, or it is shoehorned into the game in exhausting detail – often to the boredom of the players. We can do without both.
Little is enough to start with, onboarding
Finally, I suppose, the most oft-quoted reason for avoiding this is the strongest – it creates a palpable barrier between new players and the game. I would argue it creates more than one. There’s the onboarding barrier, where players need to be read into a setting to stand a chance of being able to work within it without stumbling into a contradiction or an essay on some minor, irrelevant detail. There’s the issue when there’s a massive disparity of knowledge at the table, and it keeps rearing its head as someone expert-splains the world to the new player. There’s an issue when the past seems to be more important than the present or, indeed the future – it makes the PCs seemingly irrelevant and unimportant.
A Working Example
I’ve just started a game of Scum and Villainy recently, and set it firmly in the Star Wars universe. Here’s the world building that we did.
- It’s on the Outer Rim of the Star Wars galaxy. Why? Because that’s less defined and thus we have more room to do whatever we want.
- It’s nowhere near Tatooine or any other defined world. Why? It removes the temptation to tie ourselves back into ‘the Skywalker Saga’
- There’s no Jedi in the campaign. Why? Because they complicate matters with respect to timing and canon. Speaking of which…
- It’s roughly after the Clone Wars and before Andor. Why? I mean, who cares honestly, but it’s the height of the Empire so Stormtroopers, TIE fighters, speeder bikes and gurning Imperial Governors are the norm.
And with those four tenets, and the Stardancer starter sheet for the campaign, we kicked off. There’s the city-moon of Warren orbiting the mining planet of Aleph. Great, super, that’s all I need to know. There’s some factions, but also Imperials. They’ve got two bounty hunters chasing them. Why? We don’t know. They have a ship, how did they get it? We don’t know! We don’t know how the two characters met, how they work, where they got their pet alien cat from or why they have the strange item known as the Aleph Key … but we are going to have a load of fun finding out.
And yes, before someone says it, we are playing in a game where George Lucas et al have done world-building for us, but you could say the same about any historical game too. We know the broad brush strokes, the rest doesn’t matter.
Outro
So I would encourage two things.
- When running or designing games, think how you can create as much space as possible for the unknown in your game worlds, and play towards those spaces.
- If you’re using an established behemoth setting consider how constraint can help, and how you can bundle up tropes and knowledge to make getting players onboard as easy as possible.
