Crucible: My Introduction to Worldbuilding
After visiting Gen Con, I was filled with inspiration and I was itching to plan and run a new campaign. At the time I really wasn’t interested in running modules as I wanted something that was uniquely mine and modules felt too restrictive. But before we dive in, I want to take a moment to note that there is no shame in running modules, especially if you are new to GM-ing. I have run many modules over the years and I have many favorite worlds that I like to visit. I wish someone had pulled me aside when I started running games and said: “Don’t try to run before you learn to walk!” Worldbuilding, while very rewarding and worthwhile, can be incredibly taxing and frustrating, especially for a new GM without many hours behind the screen. I would hate for a new GM to become discouraged by trying to run before they learn to walk. [I actually just gave this same advice to a good friend of mine who was looking to create his own homebrew world. I told him that no new Game Master wakes up at the level of Matt Mercer from Critical Role. It takes constant practice, patience, and feedback. I encouraged him to run a few modules to gain familiarity with the system and to earn the confidence needed to take his game to the next level.]
It can be difficult to know where to begin when worldbuilding. I recommend building your world around content that you enjoy consuming. This way it will be easier for you to find inspiration for your world. I began building Crucible (the setting for my first homebrew) by considering the kinds of stories that I enjoyed reading about. I had always been drawn to dark and gritty fiction and I drew inspiration for my world from settings such as Fantasy Flight Games’s Midnight, Games Workshop’s Warhammer 40K, Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, and Blizzard’s Diablo franchise. To me, there is something compelling about a hero who is able to triumph over darkness, especially when the odds are stacked against them. I particularly enjoy the story of a hero’s desperate struggle to survive; where one decision could be their last in a world turned upside down. One of the other things that appealed to me was political intrigue. I loved the drama of the courts. Speaking out of turn causing someone to lose favor, secret love affairs, blackmail, manipulation, and the Machiavellian nature of court politics was fascinating to me. Therefore, Crucible would be a world that on the surface appeared peaceful and good, but just below the surface was strife, betrayal, and death. It was a world secretly simmering and on the brink of chaos, a world in need of heroes.
I wanted my players to be able to connect with the world, for it to feel alive.
Once you have analyzed your own interests and found your inspiration to begin building the setting you want, it is time to begin thinking about how to make your world feel real for your players. Personally, I knew I wanted something distinctive about my world that would serve as a constant reminder of where the players were. I decided to give my word a physical attribute that would serve this purpose. Crucible is a world very much like ours but it has a ring much like the planet Saturn. It is from this ring that the deities of Crucible watch over the mortal realm. Scholars refer to it as the ring of creation, the realm of the gods, or simply as the ring.
I wanted my players to be able to connect with the world, for it to feel alive. Working with and encouraging my players’ backstories really helped me with this goal and it further helped in shaping the world as a whole. For example, one of the characters was from the far reaches of the frozen north and had made his mark on the world as a black-hearted pillager. I worked with the player as we decided what being from the frozen north would mean and what it would look like. What I came up with was that the men of the north were on average much larger, tougher, and lived longer than the average man. They claimed to have descended from the first men to have walked Crucible’s earth and had been blessed by the gods themselves with long life. Others claim to have the blood of giants flowing through their veins. Some claim that the “northmen” grew strong and powerful out of necessity because the north is fraught with dangerous monsters and dragons. I wanted the north to be filled with honorable but perhaps misunderstood folk. Another player wanted to be from the far away continent. For that character, we came up with her having been raised by monks in a city of temples devoted to every deity. The City was a mountain of temples and at the top roosted dragons of every color. It was agreed upon that the City of Temples would be a sacred place no matter who came to do worship there. The rest of the characters would find themselves members of the main power of the continent: The Enlightened Empire or The Empire of Flame as they were called by some. When I created this faction, I was inspired by the fall of the Roman empire--I envisioned an empire near the end of its reign with its glory days a distant memory. A massive lumbering titan crumbling under its own weight, held together by bureaucratic red tape but still the most powerful nation in the region. A climate ripe for political intrigue, corruption, and power plays.
Paint your story in broad strokes and fill in the details only when it is necessary.
It is important to note that when putting together all of my notes, I started with broad strokes. This meant I began with large concepts (such as the name of the organization) and a rough idea of the structure. I did not go into granular detail unless I had to. Each town or area that I created had the following: a name, persons of interest, the main problem facing the persons of interest, and possible resolutions. If I knew that the party would be heading in that particular direction, I would be sure to flesh it out before that session so it felt alive. Details are great for setting the stage, but it is easy as a storyteller to become lost in the minutia. Paint your story in broad strokes and fill in the details only when it is necessary. Be sure to take good notes and keep them well organized so you don’t lose your place.
It is also necessary for good immersive worldbuilding to make sure to leave room in your world for the players to add their backstories and persons of interest. When we began the campaign in the early days, I asked my players to include elaborate backstories. I made sure to take these character backstories into account and took great pains to weave them into the world. I also made sure that everyone had a chance to shine in the spotlight. But I left plenty of room for characters to be creative and come up with interesting ideas to help drive the plot forward. This character-centric world took on a life of its own as time went on and many of my plans for the campaign and the characters dissolved into much more interesting solutions and plot progressions than I could have ever dreamed up on my own. Tons of character progression, difficult moral choices, and perhaps the saddest character death I have witnessed to date all would have been lost had I not allowed my players and their characters to hep mold the world I had built.
In conclusion, the best advice that I can offer is to make sure that you are telling a story that you are interested in telling and create a world that makes sense for the story that you are trying to tell and leave room for the players to carve their own portion of the story out for themselves. Take their ideas and their advice and let them help you build the world. You will find that they inspire ideas for your world that you would have never even considered. There is no greater prize than creating a world together with people you care about. If you are very lucky you will still be able to talk about it for years to come.
Take Heart!
Karington Hess
Game Master and Founder of Open Heart Games
