Hello my fellow masters of the dungeons 👋, I'm quite a new dm and my players have started asking big questions about my world like who's the god of xyz or how the dragons were created. 

I personally aren't big on the official lore / gods so would rather make my own if I'm going to be spending so much time DMing.

So, What should I do when my players ask these questions? Is there certain things i should prepare about my world before or something else I should do?

All help would be greatly appreciated and thanks to all those who respond. 

Have them roll a history/religion… check while you make up a new bit of lore and then write it down somewhere, so it is usable in the future sessions.

it is also fine to tell players to wait a bit while you search/write down the notes. Sometimes I tell players that it is not important now and I will let them know in the next session. It is impossible to be prepared for all these questions players come up with and even if you are, you have so many notes you cannot always find them.

PS: I like to use existing lore or mythology when starting a new game, so I have a vague idea about the workings of the world, but whatever I do not remember I fill in with my own improvised stuff. I make it clear to my players, that we are not playing the “official” Forgotten Realms or whatever, so I do not need to argue about lore they found on wiki or something.

Agree with Andy on making it clear with players if you are building a custom world should make that known to the players. As far as gods go I use existing DnD gods just make them more custom to my world. Like the Triad, Moradin, Sune, and Lolth. I am still adding more as well. Though it doesn't really answer your question.

When your players ask those questions think about what their characters would know. Would a former Pirate, Farmer, or Hermit really know anything about the mainstream religions and would their character have cared enough to study it? If the answer is no then I don't even let them role or impose a heavy disadvantage. Which sounds unfair, but hey there might be a Cleric in the party so go ask them. Lets the party spread the wealth on rolls. I do that with most world knowledge. Religion ask the cleric, criminal underground ask the rogue, nature ask the druid, demons ask the warlock, etc. If their character doesn't know or failed the check and they still let them try to find out in game. "There is a remote monastery south of here," or "You could check the library in the capital." That way you have time to plan stuff out. 

As far as preparing lore I think about what is their main goal and what are my players interested in. The main enemies in my campaign are devils and the Nine Hells so most of my prepared lore is for that. My Players currently seemed to interested in money, magic items, and making friends. So my religion lore is skin deep whereas most of the npcs have backstories. Other than that maybe I will prepare bits of lore depending on where they are and what they will interact with. I don't think you need to prepare a wiki page for everything but a couple of sentences just to help describe stuff. "This is City. Mostly human with a mixture of elves and dwarves. Mainly a fishing port with a large wizard tower in the center." Hope this helps. 

Quote from _Jamie_ >>

Hello my fellow masters of the dungeons 👋, I'm quite a new dm and my players have started asking big questions about my world like who's the god of xyz or how the dragons were created. 

I personally aren't big on the official lore / gods so would rather make my own if I'm going to be spending so much time DMing.

So, what should I do when my players ask these questions? Is there certain things i should prepare about my world before or something else I should do?

 Another thing you can do is let the players invent lore. In my game, I made up a few of the gods initially (I needed them for cosmological reasons), then gave the players the option of inventing the gods they follow. Similarly, if they ask how the dragons were created, ask them what their people's story of it is.

This may not lead to a consistent mythology, but that's just fine, because mythologies don't need to be consistent. In the unlikely event that you need to know how the dragons were created, you can take an existing explanation.

Similarly, you can let the players decide details about their cultures, and lots of other world detail.

When making a new pantheon, I think it is helpful to have a quick primer you can give to players just on who the gods are, since they’ll be unfamiliar with them (which is one of the advantages to using official gods and modifying them - players might know the basics and there are online resources already existing).

All you really need for the primer is a name, list of their domain keywords (winter, death, fate, etc.), their alignment (though recognise gods, like others, can have complex alignments - for example, Vecna in other editions was listed as having a large number of Good followers), and maybe a single short paragraph about who they are.  This is what things like the Player Handbook do when describing gods, and it is a pretty good place to start.

For things beyond that, do what works for you.  I personally have ideas for their history, followers, different belief systems that I jot down whenever I have an idea, and that becomes part of my official canon.  Additionally, as others have said, if players ask a question you don’t have an answer prepared for, just ask for a second to check your notes or otherwise pause with a thinking face on, then answer with confidence, even if it is something you made up on the spot that your gut says fits with that god. Some of the best in-world D&D lore comes about because of ad libbing—and the key to ad libbing (and much of DMing generally) is just to say things with the confidence of a person who is the final arbiter of whatever happens in your world.

Now, sometimes you might be called out on your players for saying information that is contradictory to something you previously said.  There are two good ways to respond to that situation. You can either go with “oh, yeah, oops” and correct yourself to be in line with the old statement or you can mysteriously pretend like that is part of the mystery of the world and the contradiction was intentional (even if it was not).  Both have their purposes and it is worthwhile to use both systems at different times.  There are some DMs who are scared of the former or appearing bad to their players, but if your players are folks worth playing with, they’ll understand that there is a lot of information a DM needs to track and mistakes can happen.  If they are not forgiving, that’s a much bigger red flag than “DM does what all DMs do and forgets something they said that a player remembered.”

You live in a world which includes theists, non-theists, atheists, misotheists, agnostics, theists who believe a different truth than the other theists, psychologists, social scientists, physicists, philosophers, and many more seekers after understanding besides. All of them want answers and all of them have different ways of arriving at truth. Your job in creating a world is to avoid revealing that there is less complexity in your creation than there is in reality. How you get there is fungible. Your specific points might be answered in several ways.

To your first observation that you find the setting specific lore uninspiring, awesome! Make-your-own is going to be better every time. And you can make as much or as little as you like, and you can beg, borrow, and steal as much as you like provided you aren't planning to publish anything. So go for it!

What should you do when players ask, "Who is the god of forges?" or "How were dragons created?" You should have an answer. That's not to say that you need to tell the players what the answer is--that has more to do with the plot of the story you're telling and the characters' abilities to access that information. Often a good answer is, "There's no way your character would know that without doing some research." But to the point of having an answer, you need to understand the world you have created deeply enough to be able to answer any question raised about it. That might not happen over night. It can also be aided by adlib--although as a personal preference, I think you should have planned enough in advance to arrive at an answer that makes sense.

Is there something you should prepare? Only insofar as the plot of the story you're telling touches on any of the lore from your world. It can be fun to prepare a lot of information, but characters are rarely interested unless there's a plot attached. A good way to solve this issue if you want to include some lore is to include an NPC who is a scholar or expert, so that the information can come out through conversation. It worked for Tolkien! But if I may add a personal opinion, I'd say you have one more obligation... The fantasy genre is often accused of being a dead genre in which every story recapitulates The Lord of the Rings. You have one final obligation, and that is to question the origins and foundations of the stories we tell and to add something of your own. I think you're already on that track. Good luck!

Also, I'll leave you with this thought. A player asking "Who is the goddess of the sun" is looking for you to order your world in a predictable way. Predictable is a bane and a boon in terms of story. You should be prepared to meet expectations but you should also break them from time to time. After all, will a fictional world need god to exist any more than the real one does?

Agree that coming up with a pantheon is a good start. Maybe a creation myth/story too, or some brief notes about how the important nations in your setting got started. For the rest, you can make it up on the spot and take notes, turn it into something that requires research...or make it something that nobody knows. 

Maybe the history of the dragons is a well-guarded secret, in your setting. Maybe the sun goddess is a mystery - just like you can't look at the sun without injury, you can't look into her lore without losing your senses. Maybe the founding of the kingdom was recorded on scrolls that burned in a fire millennia ago and all that remain are legends. Unattainable knowledge can be fun in limited doses, and even more fun if it turns into a plot point or quest for the players to uncover. 

If you need ideas for what to include in your world, I highly recommend researching ancient mythology and folklore, picking the bits you like, and then fitting it together in your world. In my world, Gruumsh is the sworn enemy of Hephaestus and Hephaestus is good buddies with Xolotl, the Aztec god of death, and I have a long and complicated reason why. Also I recommend allowing your players to make up a lot of the lore. If a player wants to play a warlock or a cleric, then let them make up a patron to serve. If a monk wants to have a monastery, let them design their own. Give them some of your options if they want to, but it can be fun for the players if they can impact the world and mold it in a way they want. But if they ask a specific question about a certain thing that you don't have planned, unless it is necessary for them to know right then and there, just tell them that you will let them know either at the next session or out of game. Give yourself time to plan and come up with an answer.

Also, try to come up with things your players won't expect, if they ask about the sun god, say there is no sun god, the sun is actually a giant pteradactyl that flies across the sky each day. If the rogue asks about criminal activities they can be involved in, tell them that the best paying job right now is smuggling catnip to tabaxi's.

Hope this was helpful.

Depending on the background of the PCs, it is entirely possible that the PCs wouldn't know the answers to these questions, so there's no reason for the DM to need to provide the answers (at least not until the PCs find some scholar who might know the answers).

There is a way to deal with this at the table. Tell the person wondering about your gods that since the world is new they should have a say in what gods are available. The cleric is the one who really needs this information so ask her who her god is and what it was about the deity that attracted her to the being in question. 

If this is too much for the rest of the group to take, then set up a time when you and the cleric can get together to build your god or pantheon of gods. or you could find an older version of the deities and demigods book and choose a pantheon from there. since no one else can refute the existence of these beings prior to your group creating them on the spot it shouldn't be an issue. Then again I've met some contrary people while playing this game. Hell what can it hurt?

Make it up when they ask the question unless you already have the information available. If it is new then be sure to write it down on a note and add it to wherever you keep your notes on your game world so that the next time someone asks you already have the answer you made up before - consistency is crucial :) but knowing stuff in advance is not. Just answer the question as if it is knowledge you already had prepared - the players will never know the difference unless you take a while to answer or you tell them that you are making it up :)

Other than that, in general terms, when you create a game world think about it from the top down - with the most detail where the party is more likely to interact with it.

Nature of world - planet/flat plane/ringworld/dyson sphere - most people choose planet but it isn't a requirement

Pantheon - yes or no? - not essential but having the names and domains of a few gods prepared helps if anyone picks a cleric - this can be made simpler by just using an existing pantheon - eg greek/roman/egyptian/hindu etc

General physical layout of world - are there continents - are there more than one - are there islands - are there any seas? - is water scarce or plentiful? - some sort of basic map

Choose the area of the world where the current adventure is going to happen ..

Continent -> Region-> Country -> County -> City/Town/Village/Wilderness

Create descriptions of each of these with most detail wherever the party starts and the areas immediately around that location. Local geography and politics.

On top of this basic structure you overlay your stories -

e.g.

- local baron interested in expanding borders running a covert war against neighboring regions - maybe assassination/sabotage

- lost temple in the local mountains

- young dragon/giant/ogre has taken up residence to the south and is attacking caravans

- local trade in ale has been interrupted - where is it going? What is going on? Where is the ale the merchants are supposed to be delivering? Is the new local brewery any good?

Finally, you get to the party and their backstories - where they start and how do they fit in to the world. You don't want too many details in the world since it means less change required when integrating the character stories with your current stories. e.g. The character whose village was ransacked by raiders and parents killed - that village was in the next over barony - the raiders were surreptitiously paid by the local baron who was trying to make the adjacent baron look weak and unable to take care of his people. A planted agitator in the village has the survivors petition to move the village and environs (which has a valuable mine) to the adjacent barony since their current lord can't protect them. Ties character backstory into one of the ongoing events in the game world - which the players may or may not run into depending on their decisions. (e.g. if they decide to do some investigation of the raiders who attacked the party member's village then depending on how the DM wants to run it, they might be able to follow the money trail and see where it leads).

Agree with the above.

Some of those answers are not common knowledge and as such, I would not even volunteer an answer if asked.  Why would an ordinary person know the origin of a particular monster, or even grander, they creation of the world.  People disagree on Earth as to the answer of that question, so at the least, there will be varied opinions.  

If the topic doesn't matter, ask the player what they think.  What exactly does that new magic ring do?  If you like the answer the player gives, use it!  Same idea with mythology. What is the god of the forest like?  

You can spend hours and hours and hours writing these sort of things and if they aren't pertinent, I wouldn't waste the time.  

It might be easier to start with an area following a known pantheon, like Greek, Egyptian, Norse, Celtic or whatever fits with your world.