Economical Worldbuilding
Or, As Little as Possible, As Much as Necessary
In a recent conversation with a friend of mine elbow-deep into their latest WIP, the topic of worldbuilding came up. More specifically, about when and how to worldbuild in the context of writing settings for a gamebook. My view? As little as possible; as much as necessary. This is a fun phrase, but it’s also pretty trite, so let's unpack it. We’ll also talk a little bit about what draws me as a GM to a particular system’s setting, and how I adapt setting guides into my storytelling and play, and what sorts of lessons we can draw as designers from that. To be clear - we’re working from a philosophy here that prioritises time at the table over time in prep - if you enjoy reading a tie-in novel to get you in the mood, for example - this won’t necessarily be useful to you.
Here’s a (partially) rhetorical exercise: When I’m running a game, 90% of that setting’s lore is functionally useless. What does the snake kingdom of Najara have to do with my Calimshan intrigue game? What does the fall of the Vienna Chantry mean to my pack of Brujah shovelheads in East London? What do the Black Pillars of U’duasha bring to my crew of Skov Bravos in Duskvol? That information is irrelevant, and so when I’m running it, I’m going to ignore it - and if I’m going to ignore it whilst running, what’s the point in the designer putting it in?*
A valid response is, of course, well, how do you, GM, define the parts that are relevant? Isn’t the point of putting a bunch of stuff into the setting book so that folks like me can choose what parts they want to be relevant? Well, I want as much information as necessary, and as little as possible.
A fantastic example of this is John Harper’s treatment of Duskvol in Blades in the Dark. He frames it in a logical order, telling us about the city of Duskvol, a single page timeline of its history, its cultures, and its languages. It devotes a page to light and darkness, necessary only because it’s a key difference in the setting from our expected norms that actively affects how the world works.It then devotes a few pages to the key factions, barely describing them, giving a couple sentences each - enough for me to jump off with, but not enough to seriously constrain me or get bogged down. The order he’s chosen drills down from an initial setting pitch deeper and deeper into more specific information.
Then, the largest part of the setting guide is the major locations and factions; the places and people the players are expected to interact with - and even then, each location is only a single page of information spread over a two-page spread for legibility. Then the factions, which begin with a list, each faction given only a single sentence or two to sell themselves. To demonstrate how the GM should view these factions, a small number of ones Harper finds interesting are expanded on the following pages, covering a representative sample of the different tiers and faction types in half a page each.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, he devotes pages and pages to roll tables - explicitly showing GMs what sorts of things one could find in his setting, rather than what specifics. With a roll table, one can evoke without constraining, give details of one's world without tying them to particular facts, which, for a GM looking to use those details, is fantastic.
In a book of just over three hundred pages, about 20% is devoted directly to setting** - and there’s a lot there; some other Forged in the Dark games operating on the same design processes slim it down even further.
U’duasha, as mentioned earlier, is barely given a whisper in the book. Why? Because it was more than what was necessary to add in. That information was excised to be used in a more relevant, more directed setting guide of its own - that way, it’s not cluttering up information unnecessarily!
In a recent conversation with a friend of mine elbow-deep into their latest WIP, the topic of worldbuilding came up. More specifically, about when and how to worldbuild in the context of writing settings for a gamebook. My view? As little as possible; as much as necessary. This is a fun phrase, but it’s also pretty trite, so let's unpack it. We’ll also talk a little bit about what draws me as a GM to a particular system’s setting, and how I adapt setting guides into my storytelling and play, and what sorts of lessons we can draw as designers from that. To be clear - we’re working from a philosophy here that prioritises time at the table over time in prep - if you enjoy reading a tie-in novel to get you in the mood, for example - this won’t necessarily be useful to you.
Here’s a (partially) rhetorical exercise: When I’m running a game, 90% of that setting’s lore is functionally useless. What does the snake kingdom of Najara have to do with my Calimshan intrigue game? What does the fall of the Vienna Chantry mean to my pack of Brujah shovelheads in East London? What do the Black Pillars of U’duasha bring to my crew of Skov Bravos in Duskvol? That information is irrelevant, and so when I’m running it, I’m going to ignore it - and if I’m going to ignore it whilst running, what’s the point in the designer putting it in?*
A valid response is, of course, well, how do you, GM, define the parts that are relevant? Isn’t the point of putting a bunch of stuff into the setting book so that folks like me can choose what parts they want to be relevant? Well, I want as much information as necessary, and as little as possible.
As Much as Necessary
Give me enough information to get me interested. Give me a taste of the setting, and a sweeping overview of the general features and themes, and as few big details as necessary to get me going. Some things are going to need more detail, some things - more than you’d think - can just be a single sentence or even just a single phrase in a list. If you can show me the sorts of stories you want me to tell in this game by demonstrating them in the lore of the setting without swamping me in extraneous prose, that’s as much as necessary.A fantastic example of this is John Harper’s treatment of Duskvol in Blades in the Dark. He frames it in a logical order, telling us about the city of Duskvol, a single page timeline of its history, its cultures, and its languages. It devotes a page to light and darkness, necessary only because it’s a key difference in the setting from our expected norms that actively affects how the world works.It then devotes a few pages to the key factions, barely describing them, giving a couple sentences each - enough for me to jump off with, but not enough to seriously constrain me or get bogged down. The order he’s chosen drills down from an initial setting pitch deeper and deeper into more specific information.
Then, the largest part of the setting guide is the major locations and factions; the places and people the players are expected to interact with - and even then, each location is only a single page of information spread over a two-page spread for legibility. Then the factions, which begin with a list, each faction given only a single sentence or two to sell themselves. To demonstrate how the GM should view these factions, a small number of ones Harper finds interesting are expanded on the following pages, covering a representative sample of the different tiers and faction types in half a page each.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, he devotes pages and pages to roll tables - explicitly showing GMs what sorts of things one could find in his setting, rather than what specifics. With a roll table, one can evoke without constraining, give details of one's world without tying them to particular facts, which, for a GM looking to use those details, is fantastic.
In a book of just over three hundred pages, about 20% is devoted directly to setting** - and there’s a lot there; some other Forged in the Dark games operating on the same design processes slim it down even further.
U’duasha, as mentioned earlier, is barely given a whisper in the book. Why? Because it was more than what was necessary to add in. That information was excised to be used in a more relevant, more directed setting guide of its own - that way, it’s not cluttering up information unnecessarily!
As Little as Possible
In designing, there is the concept of the fruitful void; the intentionally unanswered question which gives the players the opportunity to play to find out. This is powerful, and we’ve already begun to discuss it with slimming concepts down to their barest mention. If your setting is already totally played out; all the big questions are already answered, all the threats are spoken for… where does my group come in? The more niches and holes there are for a story to crawl into, the more of an ecosystem of play you’ll create.
It’s why systems set in established franchises can have a real task when creating their settings. Dark Heresy solves this by inventing its own, unexplored, sector of the galaxy, free from the conflicts of the past, but retains all of the potential conflicts; the aliens, the demons etc. Free League’s The One Ring solves this by placing its setting in the interwar period between the events of the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings, free from the rigid stories of the books, but retaining the locations and general conflicts (though when I run it, it’s hard to break out into truly epic campaigns simply because the story is ‘constrained’ by canon - I’ve not got as much space to tell a story in as I’d like).
Give me unanswered questions, and give me the freedom and the trust to answer them. If you pose and then answer the questions, especially if I don’t like the answers, I’m more likely to ignore them and substitute my own - or worse yet - ignore your game entirely. Of course, the challenge is to give me enough of a foothold that I can answer the questions - but only just enough that I still want to keep climbing. Fickle creatures, GMs, aren’t we.
First things first, if my setting is a continent away, we might ignore it entirely, and if we were to include it, we’d devote only a single sentence to it in a list about notable places in the Western Heartlands:
It’s why systems set in established franchises can have a real task when creating their settings. Dark Heresy solves this by inventing its own, unexplored, sector of the galaxy, free from the conflicts of the past, but retains all of the potential conflicts; the aliens, the demons etc. Free League’s The One Ring solves this by placing its setting in the interwar period between the events of the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings, free from the rigid stories of the books, but retaining the locations and general conflicts (though when I run it, it’s hard to break out into truly epic campaigns simply because the story is ‘constrained’ by canon - I’ve not got as much space to tell a story in as I’d like).
Give me unanswered questions, and give me the freedom and the trust to answer them. If you pose and then answer the questions, especially if I don’t like the answers, I’m more likely to ignore them and substitute my own - or worse yet - ignore your game entirely. Of course, the challenge is to give me enough of a foothold that I can answer the questions - but only just enough that I still want to keep climbing. Fickle creatures, GMs, aren’t we.
An Example
Let’s look at Najara in the context of a campaign set in the Forgotten Realms, and see how I would present it in this sort of format in a setting guide, depending on what sort of lens I’m looking at it in. We’re using the Forgotten Realms as an example because it has so much information - way too much to be useful at the table, which has a lot to do with it being an old and current universe; Ed Greenwood came up with it in the late 60s as a storytelling universe before TTRPGs were even (really) a thing, and it’s constantly updated; it’s the flagship setting for D&D. To be clear here, I’m not presenting my examples as perfect - just enough to demonstrate the different scales and amounts of information.First things first, if my setting is a continent away, we might ignore it entirely, and if we were to include it, we’d devote only a single sentence to it in a list about notable places in the Western Heartlands:
If my setting is instead the Western Heartlands, I’d profile them as a more fleshed out location, and give some hooks and a little bit extra detail so that they could be relevant if a GM wanted:
Of course, if my setting was Najara itself, the profile would be far more detailed, but that’s left as an exercise for the reader to decide exactly how detailed that is, and what useful information to put in and leave out.
Of course, if my setting was Najara itself, the profile would be far more detailed, but that’s left as an exercise for the reader to decide exactly how detailed that is, and what useful information to put in and leave out.
Conclusion
Here are my key takeaways:
As always, feedback is welcome. When you’re writing a setting guide, what sort of things are you trying to impress on a potential GM? As a GM or player, how much of a setting do you really use? How much of your decision to play a game is based on its setting?
* A corollary point to note is that I’ve framed these questions in terms of my play; what my players would get out of that lore, how that part of the lore relates to, and is used by, the story and my players. If a player of mine decides to bring in an Austrian tremere to my Vampire game, then of course that part of the lore becomes immediately useful! I’ll talk further about this sort of Reactive Worldbuilding in a further article; and you’ll see that an economical approach as described here still allows for things like this to come up!
** There is a lot more setting woven through Blades in the Dark’s discussion of mechanics, and that’s because the setting is well-linked to the system; there’s a decent amount of rewriting that needs to be done to extricate them - and, in my opinion, that’s great; it makes learning the conceits of the setting effortless, as they’re learned stealthily whilst actively learning the mechanics and the character sheets.
- Understand your scale and your scope - don’t zoom out too much, and don’t zoom in too far, keep the granularity at the level you want people to tell stories at.
- Reduce your setting elements to the barest amount that still gives the vibes and themes you want across
- Pose evocative questions and present unstable situations that the GM can create stories from
- Kill your darlings; ask your friends and playtesters to read the lore, and then ask them about it - if something you’ve written doesn’t consistently come up, it’s clearly not interesting or relevant; why have it in the book?
- Layout, layout, layout. However good your prose, walls of text are terrible teaching tools, and even worse reference ones. Space your information out logically, cleanly, and with an eye for quick reference, especially if you have a lot of it.
- If in doubt, split it out. If there’s an obvious separation between different parts of your setting, such that each are pretty self-contained, split them apart into two separate setting guides, that way people who are only interested in one aren’t ignoring all of your hard work!
As always, feedback is welcome. When you’re writing a setting guide, what sort of things are you trying to impress on a potential GM? As a GM or player, how much of a setting do you really use? How much of your decision to play a game is based on its setting?
* A corollary point to note is that I’ve framed these questions in terms of my play; what my players would get out of that lore, how that part of the lore relates to, and is used by, the story and my players. If a player of mine decides to bring in an Austrian tremere to my Vampire game, then of course that part of the lore becomes immediately useful! I’ll talk further about this sort of Reactive Worldbuilding in a further article; and you’ll see that an economical approach as described here still allows for things like this to come up!
** There is a lot more setting woven through Blades in the Dark’s discussion of mechanics, and that’s because the setting is well-linked to the system; there’s a decent amount of rewriting that needs to be done to extricate them - and, in my opinion, that’s great; it makes learning the conceits of the setting effortless, as they’re learned stealthily whilst actively learning the mechanics and the character sheets.
Loved the article, thank you! Great thoughts all around!
ReplyDelete1) When you’re writing a setting guide, what sort of things are you trying to impress on a potential GM?
I think the most important, and often-overlooked, part of a setting or setting guides is providing potential GMs with story hooks. Either through the text itself, or (preferably) explicitly called out in the rulebook, I like to have hooks that the GM and players can look at to spur their imagination by telling them how this part of the setting can be applied in an actual game session or an entire campaign's worth of stories.
Blades is good at doing this with the Factions, where some of them have a Situation that can guide at least a score, if not a whole campaign. And it's also generally written to incite you to action in one direction or another.
Having SOMETHING that players and GMs can latch onto is pivotal for me when thinking about settings and setting guides.
2) As a GM or player, how much of a setting do you really use?
This varies, but I only really use the fundamentals, and what's directly relevant. I suppose the entire setting is de facto present because the game is taking place in that world, but I only draw attention to the relevant bits, when they become relevant. So I might start with a 30% use of a setting, and go up to 80% by the time a campaign is finished. Of course, this isn't guaranteed, and I certainly don't call attention to anything that might confuse the players or that wouldn't be relevant.
I LIKE that there are different names for days or times of days, etc. etc., but... I'm also left to wonder what the purpose is, in practice? I won't use those, as it'll only confuse me and my players, who already have some pretty ingrained knowledge (like days of the week, their names, and how many there are!).
3) How much of your decision to play a game is based on its setting?
Very little. I am a pretty big fan of setting-neutral TTRPGs, so setting alone won't sell me on a concept. If setting and mechanics marry up nicely (and still are under the crunch threshold of comfort for myself), then I am more convinced to play the game.