Hello everyone,

I am currently world building just for fun. This new world is the world I intend to run my games in for a long long time. Now I tend to over prepare my world with a lot of complex interlocking lore. This has proven a pointless venture as my players either never encountered the lore, or they never retained it. Thus hours of work wasted. However, One cannot run a homebrew game without any lore/worldbuilding. And not to idealize Matt Mercer, or Mark Hulmes etc. They definitely have fairly formed world before they run their games. Now this subject is heavily covered by many web DM advice people. But I want normal people opinion here haha. How much do your prepare for a long form campaign (1-20)? How much do you leave empty for your players to inform the world? Do you fill on the info out and then explain lore in session 0? What say ye! 

Thanks!

How much you need depends on what you want to accomplish.

I drew out a world map and named all the cities. I worked out the governments and racial homelands and how the governments related to each other. I figured out who the BBEG is, what he wants, and what his plans are. I worked out the starting town and some intro adventures. And then I have worked out the rest as we went along.

Oh... and I did the cosmology. To me that is very important. I can't add that later.

In my most successful games, I start with a theme* (Arthurian, gothic, Tolkienesque, Norse, etc) and a local map. Then I work on the actual adventure hooks in the starting town, and develop the rest of that town (NPCs, shops, landmarks) around them. I also figure out the general flavor of different regions on the local map where the characters might go next. Then I call it a day until session 2.

So, basically, always, ALWAYS start with the adventures, the stuff the players will actually do, and build the world around that. If the players won’t care about it, then all you’re doing is taking the spotlight off them. It’s probably okay to worldbuild on top of that, but don’t force it into the game, and don’t do it before you’ve built your first adventure or two! Trust me, one of the campaigns I was most excited about DMing died with a whimper because I focused on the lore and not the players. I know this sounds really harsh and I’m sorry, but I don’t want anyone to have the same disappointment I did! And remember, if you like world building, you can do it as a hobby on the side: it doesn’t have to be the same as your campaign.

Short answer, then: if your players won’t care, it’s time to move on.

*The theme is useful because you don’t have to explain all the lore to your players for them to create appropriate characters. You can just tell them, say, “it’s like Charles Dickens” and they’ll show up with a crew of noble orphans, sleazy thieves, and puffed-up officials. The nuances can come later. Plus, it helps you give your game a distinct flavor!

It depends on if you're having fun making it. You said for fun, so if some of it is not used, you still had fun making it. 

If you are planning on running a lot of adventures, I would say do as much as you can, because even stuff that's not relavent in the first, might be in the second or third.

Otherwise, make what's relavent to the adventures you are running in the word, and improvise if something you have not made comes up.

But I personally spent hours and am still spending more time making it an amazing world.

How much is enough? Well, I have created two campaign books. (Links in signature)

It is usually enough when you can answer to these questions:

Location in the world (In Faerun for example)

Location in region (One A4 page, 1 square is 1 mile)

Environment (Snow for example)

Population (Races)

History (Very short one, Answers to question why this town was established)

Commerce (What people eat, produce, buy and sell)

Government (Who is leader of the town)

Religion (Temple in town)

Magic (Is magic normal or rare in your world)

Services and NPCs who run them (Marketplace, tavern, inn, specialized shops, office of important faction)

Factions (Easy way to create a conflict for the region)

You mention trying to live up to Mercer & Hulmes, Hulmes in either a live stream or a video covered a bit of this. He even talks about getting it from Brandon Sanderson.

its the idea of the iceberg - so we all know that old adage about x% being above water - your players find something out about your world and they look below the surface and marvel at how deep it goes. What the players don’t know or need to know is that the iceberg is hollow!

in my campaign I am running a homebrew world called Urathil - in a continent called Mirrea which has 10 magical cities that are the Homebase’s of the Wizarding dynasties that make up the magiocracy that rules Mirrea.

8 of those cities I have not mapped out yet and there is a chance that more than half won’t be visited. I plot and create what I know my players will interact with and plant seeds for the rest.

i have notes, bullet points for what it will be. But not prewritten lore for everything - that would be a largely wasted effort of the tree falls and nooner is listening.

in my opinion, if you enjoy makeing pages and pages of lore, then do it,and have fun, and if your current group ignores/never learns it, maybe your next group will get to enjoy it. (l'm not saying to ditch your current group, l am saying that most groups dont last forever,and if/when you get a new group,they would also benifet from the lore you made,even if its decades later.) 

In terms of making tons of lore -- not only is there nothing wrong with it, but it can be good for your world, as long as you enjoy doing it, and it is not taking away from important things like developing your adventurers and such.

A friend of mine once described why he liked some fantasy worlds and not others. This was for novels, but it works for D&D as well. He said that some fantasy worlds, felt like all the author had developed was just exactly the lore needed for telling the story in the novel. Anything not included in the novel, the author did not bother to create. And those worlds felt shallow and fake to him. Other worlds, he felt like the author made up tons of lore, and what you saw in the novel was just the tip of an enormous iceberg submerged under the water. All you see is the tip, but that tip is only there because of all the parts you don't see. You got the sense of a huge, enormous world with complex elements in the background, stuff that was never talked about or described directly in the novel. To him, these worlds felt real, and believable. His primary example of this was Lord of the Rings. We all know (because it's been published posthumously) that Tolkien created mountains of lore that never made their way into the books, and this gave Middle-Earth a feeling of reality.

So go ahead and create all that lore. Maybe the players won't see most of it. But having it there, means you have answers whenever they go looking for some bit of lore, and it will all fit together in a way that just making it up on the spot will never allow you to do.

In my opinion Give them lore that the characters in the party would know or enough lore for them to understand the stakes and give them more lore as needed or when they ask just stray away from multi page lectures unless they ask.

 give them more lore as needed or when they ask

I agree, wait until they ask to give the lore. My advice, however, is not to make that lore up on the spot at the table when they ask. Doing this will lead to a Gordian knot of lore that makes no sense and doesn't hang together. At which point the players will see no point in learning it since they will quickly realize you are just winging it.

Good, coherent lore, cannot be winged. Anyone who says otherwise is either lying, or has a completely exaggerated impression of the quality of his or her own lore.

I agree 

So another thought is perhaps there’s a difference between common Lore (I.e history, religion, reliquary, and guilds/factions) and adventure Lore (the stuff that ties the plot into common lore) because I find I personally struggle with finding a balance between these Ideas... it’s easy to get literally lost in your fictional histories haha.

Yes, it is a struggle.

And for me I find that I have to go back and forth. I start with the big "world lore" and then start working on an adventure, and something in the adventure will need more work on a blank part of the world lore (or a change to an existing part of the world lore) so then I go back and fill that in/fix it, and then working on world lore will suggest another potential adventure -- and so back and forth little by little filling in.

And I would not try and have all of it done before the first session... but I keep working on it bit by bit as the characters are adventuring. Building more and more so that now, six months into the campaign, I have another full city detailed and mapped out (in addition to the starting town), part of another, more detail on the gods, and so on.

Well, the main question is, do you like making lore? I personally do, and currently I'm working on a 5,000 year timeline of my world's history since its creation. It may be years before I get to use it, if ever, but I had fun making it, and that's what matters the most. If you're like me, then make as much lore as you want. And if you aren't, then only make as much as is directly applicable to your current adventure.