Worldbuilding with your Players

I created a homebrew setting for my current campaign. My favorite campaigns are, without fail, the ones where I make my own setting. The sense of ownership and authorship I have over the setting makes it so much easier for me to get invested in the story being told. Plus, it lets me tailor elements of the setting specifically to the stories that I want to tell. You can tell amazing stories with published settings like Eberron, Wildemount, and Theros, and these pre-made settings can save you tons of hours of work—but they also ask you to put in the time to read them cover to cover a couple of times to internalize the lore.

Everyone has their own preferences, but I want to encourage you to try making your own personal campaign setting at least once. I’ve made five or six campaign settings over the ten years I’ve been DMing games of D&D. Two of them were thinly-disguised remodels of the Sword Coast that I transposed published adventures to. When I ran Princes of the Apocalypse in my personal campaign setting of Tymor, I made it so that the setting was of roughly Eberron-like levels of magical technology—but the catch was that all of this technology was predicated on the capture and ultimate consumption of elemental spirits from the Inner Planes.

This setting conflict raised the stakes of the adventure, and allowed me to give Vanifer, leader of the Cult of Eternal Flame, a sympathetic motivation by turning her into a well-intentioned extremist abolitionist who was preyed upon by the apocalyptic power of Imix. She eventually got a redemption arc—and started working towards achieving her goal of freeing the elementals being consumed to power Tymor’s technology… just without ending the entire world in Imix’s cleansing fire.

That’s just one way that creating a homebrew setting—even one that’s just a published setting that you’ve changed 10% of to suit your needs—can breathe unexpected life into your D&D campaigns. Check out previous articles in our series on worldbuilding:

Get Your Players Involved

In my Princes of the Apocalypse campaign, I tailored a pre-existing campaign setting to my needs by adding details that helped the setting support the story I wanted to tell. In my current campaign, I made a new setting from scratch. Why? In this game, I wanted to create a wholly original plot rather than running a pre-made adventure. And when I run original campaigns, I go to great lengths to have my players inform the plot. If they have backstories, I explore them for characters I can use as villains. If they don’t have backstories, I think about their characters’ personalities and desires to create villains that can serve as foils—either by being diametrically opposed, or by being a mirror that reflects the darker side of their own ambitions.

And to serve this goal of bringing the players’ characters to the forefront, I always try to work with my players to create the setting. Worldbuilding together with your players is a remarkable thing, because it can help solve a lot of problems all at once.

  1. You don’t have to come up with as many ideas. It can be exhausting coming up with enough cool ideas to populate an entire continent’s worth of world! Brainstorming ideas with your players gives you loads of free material.
  2. Once you’ve created a world’s worth of ideas, there’s no guarantee that your players will care about any of them. Brainstorming ideas together helps ensure that your players are personally invested in the world from the very start, since they helped create those ideas!
  3. Since your players helped come up with the world, it’s easier to make plot threads you create seem personal to the players. Saving a random town is a boring act of altruistic hero work, but saving a characters’ home town turns that rote adventure into a desperate struggle with stakes that feel real!

Start with a Structure

If you go to your players and just say, “Help me build a fantasy world!” you’re probably going to get a lot of blank stares. Maybe someone else in your group is secretly a fellow worldbuilding buff and you two will go off and brainstorm together for hours, but let’s be honest, that’s a pipe dream. Every writer fears the blank page. It’s your job as the DM to facilitate good storytelling. You’re not the only storyteller at the table, because everyone in a D&D game is a storyteller. But it’s your job to give your players the support they need to tell stories in a fun and safe way.

That starts with giving them structure.

In my current home game, I started by making a rough map showing two landmasses. One eastern land, one western land, separated by a wide sea with an island in the middle. Together, these lands made “the Continent,” the yet-unnamed land where the game would take place. I knew I wanted a setting that was reminiscent of the ancient Mediterranean, where a dozen different cultures traded, warred, politicked, and intermingled, creating a diverse, volatile, and highly exciting land rich with story potential. So I made the characters’ home base on that little island in the middle, a neutral ground where all nations came to trade and negotiate.

Then, around that central island, I divided the two landmasses into five nations of roughly equal size, plus the central island. These were their descriptions:

  • Pristine forest realm; no large cities, home to highly insular elven enclaves
  • Temperate realm of feuding states; Holy Roman Empire vibes
  • Mountainous snowy nation; high levels of magical technology, home of artificers
  • Declining colonial empire transitioning into a major mercantile power; climate and culture inspired by Portugal
  • Sweltering tropical nation, waging a war of conquest against its former colonizer; now a major naval power; environment like American bayous with Caribbean coasts
  • Central “Isle of the Dawn,” a major hub of trade and diplomacy in the center of the Five Nations; your home base

I didn’t name any of these nations, and didn’t think of any more details beyond these sentence-long overviews. I gave these descriptions to my players and asked them, “Where do you characters hail from?” After they responded, I moved to private messages and, over the course of the week before the campaign began, asked them about where they came from and what their homelands were like. This campaign has been going for a few months now, and I’m still bouncing ideas back and forth with players about what their homelands are like. It’s an ongoing process, and there are tons of details that just don’t need to be nailed down until they become relevant. It’s completely okay to leave the finer points of your setting loose and undefined until you need to set them in stone.

Over the course of my campaign, players have established that the declining empire is gripped by a fundamentalist religious sect, that the pristine forest realm has a non-isolationist and welcoming land of dark elves that lives in caverns beneath the forest, and that one of the feuding realms was once a dwarf stronghold taken over by a goblin clan. These are all clues that point me towards where I should focus my stories, going forward. I don’t want to guide my players towards locations they don’t care about; I should send them towards places that they already have an attachment to!

If you know that your players are seasoned roleplaying veterans, you might be able to skip this step entirely. Sit down at Session Zero with them and lay out the genre of campaign you want to play as the only guideline. (“Science-fantasy space opera,” “Fantasy western,” “Urban intrigue set in a single magical city,” etc.). Then, let everyone’s imaginations run wild. If your group is mostly made up of rookie players with no RP experience, then throwing them into the deep end like this probably isn’t the right way to do things.

Guide the Conversation

Once you sit down with players (in-person or over a chat server like Discord or Messenger), you should be prepared to start the conversation with a question. Usually it’s good if your opening question is broad and open-ended, like: “What does your character think about their hometown?”

If your player starts talking and it’s clear they’ve thought a lot about their hometown or homeland, that’s golden! You can just sit back, let them talk, and take notes—and maybe even be prepared to answer a few questions they have for you.  

Odds are, however, this conversation will be a leisurely back-and-forth between you and your player. You’ll ask a question like:

  • Are there any people in town that your character is close with, either as a friend or an enemy? Who are they, and what do they do?
  • Are there any important landmarks near your home, like a giant standing stone or a marsh that no one emerges from alive?
  • What peoples live in and around your home?
  • What kind of beasts and monsters live in the wilderness around your home? Have any been domesticated?

If this player is reluctant or unsure, providing more examples (like in the second point) can help. If a player really seems unsure of what they want, start to ask leading questions. Pose an answer in the question, like “There’s a swamp near your town that few people emerge from alive. Have you ever been in the Swamp of Despair?”  

This limits the variables that your player has to think about, and can make it easier for them to answer. It could also shock the player into saying something like, “Hey, that doesn’t sound right. I don’t think my town would have been close to a death swamp.” That’s perfect—it means that they do have an idea of what they want, they just don’t know how to express it. Follow up on this. Ask them what sort of dangerous landmark is near their hometown. Sometimes it just takes a little oil to get the creative wheels turning!

By the end of a brainstorm session like this, you may have a name for a town in your campaign setting, a few story hooks and dangerous locations, some ideas for monster lairs, and maybe even political details like the church system in that region, who rules the land, and how wealthy that land is. Look closely at the sort of details your players tell you; those are the things they’re interested in, the things they want to explore more deeply in the campaign.

If you have a player that really enjoyed brainstorming and worldbuilding with you, consider doing more one-on-one worldbuilding or even some one-on-one roleplaying with them. Taking time to talk and RP with my players one-on-one has deepened my connection with my characters and my setting tremendously over the course of this campaign!

Sometimes, though, a player just isn’t interested in doing worldbuilding. That’s fine, don’t force them to. They may not be interested now, but maybe they’ll have a revelation later on in the campaign once they know their character better. Maybe they won’t ever be that interested in your world. Or maybe they love your world, but just aren’t interested in doing any worldbuilding. You have to decide for yourself if that’s a deal breaker for you in the DM-player relationship. You’re not a jerk for asking a player to leave your group if they aren’t engaging in the game in a way that’s fun for you.

Make Your Worldbuilding Document Accessible

Worldbuilding in this way is a constant, ongoing process. Because of that, it’s important that you make your worldbuilding documents easily accessible to the players in some way or another. There are some sites that allow you to make “wiki-style” interlinked encyclopedia pages for characters, locations, and other important things within your campaign. These can be useful, but I honestly feel like performing upkeep and the urge to make these pages look “professional” makes them more trouble than they’re worth.

I use a Google Drive folder to organize all my worldbuilding documents for my party. That way, they can look at what we’ve created together at any time. If they have something to add, they can either leave a comment on the doc, or message me on Discord to say, “Wouldn’t it be cool if…?” Then we can have a short worldbuilding brainstorm and add what we created to the worldbuilding doc later. Any information I want to keep secret, I either keep in a private folder, or keep solely in a separate campaign notebook.

Keeping information private is obviously important as a DM. Huge plot revelations can make your story more dramatic and exciting, and you don’t want leave your plot twists out in plain sight. However, storytelling in D&D is a collaborative act. If you were a TV showrunner assembling a writer’s room, you wouldn’t keep your writers from seeing the show’s setting bible. When you’re playing D&D, you and your players are telling a story together. Give them the tools they need to be a collaborator, not just an audience member.

Have you ever created a world collaboratively with your players? Tell us about it in the comments!


  

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James Haeck is the lead writer for D&D Beyond, the co-author of Waterdeep: Dragon HeistBaldur's Gate: Descent into Avernusand the Critical Role Explorer's Guide to Wildemounta member of the Guild Adepts, and a freelance writer for Wizards of the Coast, the D&D Adventurers League, and other RPG companies. He lives in Seattle, Washington with his fiancée Hannah and their animal companions Mei and Marzipan. You can find him wasting time on Twitter at @jamesjhaeck.

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