Dungeon Master's Guide Chapter 6

Another short chapter, this one discusses World-Building. This is a pretty important topic for long-running campaigns, so I'm surprised it's so short. Ah, well...more room for magic items, I suppose.

So, there are two philosophies about world-building in D&D. The first is to start small; this is the 'inside out' method here. Basically, you just work on what you need to get started; a home base like a village or a small town, a little bit of a wilderness around it, and a dungeon to get started. Tons of campaigns have started out like this. As the characters get experience and explore more of the campaign world, you add to it as needed, never going past what the characters need to have available. There's no point in writing up what happens on the other side of the mountain range if the PCs don't even go there, right?

The advantage to the 'inside-out' method is that it requires less work on the part of the DM, and the players can help develop the world through their actions in the game. For example, a PC bard goes hunting for a legendary treasure; now you need to put together the information needed for the player to get the most out of it, but you don't need to write up an entire historical timeline or draw the map of a long-lost kingdom that disappeared two thousand years ago.

The 'outside-in' method is the opposite; you start with a continent, or even an entire world. Or you can start with a political structure in which various kingdoms interact as either friends or enemies, giving an overview of the conflicts that will affect the campaign while the game goes on. The initial continental map will be necessarily lacking in a ton of detail, but as you zoom in to where the game will be taking place, you'll add more details to each level until you're down to the small town or village (if that's how you want to go). Some sandbox campaigns are developed this way, providing several options for adventurers to get started in the area, depending on what their interests are.

The advantage to this is you already have the grand outline of the campaign and don't have to make up nearly as much on the fly. The disadvantage is that you're likely to create a lot of detail that never shows up in the game because the PCs never get around to interacting with it.

One of the most important parts of building a world is the geography. After all, the characters need a place to walk around, and an endless blank, featureless plain isn't very interesting. You can study climatology and topography to make an extremely realistic world, or you can do what pretty much all fantasy writers do and just make it up as you go. If it works for you, go for it.

Every region should have a climate and a terrain; the climates are simplified to cold, temperate, and warm. There are eight different terrains: Aquatic, Desert, Plains, Forest, Hill, Mountains, Marsh, and Underground. Some people consider Urban to be a ninth terrain. But most urban centers will be in one of the other eight terrains anyway.

Once you've designed the geography of the continent or the region you're focusing on, you need to put together the ecology. This is just the process of seeing what actually lives in the region. You're going to need the earlier list of monsters by terrain and climate type here, but don't just drop everything in the same region. Be selective, and don't overdo the predators. Put normal animals that aren't in the book here as herbivores and prey for the top of the food chain. And don't forget plants; herbivores have to eat, too.

The point of the ecology is to figure out why things are where they are. You put a large tribe of ogres in the hills? Great. What do they eat? How do they get along with the mated pair of owlbears or leucrotta a couple of hills over? These sorts of questions will help develop your world into something the players can immerse themselves into, enriching the campaign experience.

Okay, so now you have a region and an ecology figured out. Great. Now, who lives there? As in, the humans/demihumans. Is the region dominated by a city? Describe it. Is it a rural area with a bunch of farms surrounding a castle? Who lives in the castle? Create the communities you need, and figure out their populations. This will be important for determining what items, mundane or magical, might be available.

Next is economics, which is the really boring part for most people. Coins, taxes, tithes...and don't forget the moneychangers, who love it when adventurers come to town with a pile of loot. And of course, supply and demand will have an impact on a region, although I've yet to see a campaign that actually does account for the sudden influx of wealth in a village the size of a football field.

Politics are important, too; who runs the place? Who are the power players? Remember, these don't always have to be visible; there are always people behind the scenes who are just as important, if not moreso, than the people who appear to be in charge. Many of those people are nothing but a front, figureheads for the real power behind the throne. The rules also give a few options for the political structure: Monarchy, republic, feudalism, etc. Politics will also involve cultural issues, high-level characters, legal issues, and of course the social classes.

One of the fun things to do in a campaign is start a war. An invading army can provide loads of adventure opportunities, whether it's a professional army of hard-bitten mercenaries, a howling horde of barbarians, or a wave of monsters coming out of the mountains. You can run a campaign based off of a small strike squad of elite soldiers (the PCs), like the A-Team. With fewer explosions, unless your wizard gets hold of a fireball spell. Which he will. They always do.

Two more important aspects of world-building are religion and magic. You're going to have to put together some sort of religious structure for the clerics to deal with. You can always go with the basic D&D pantheon, using the Greyhawk gods, or you can come up with your own. I remember when 2nd edition was going that TSR put out nearly thirty elven gods in different released, including drow gods. There were so many that I just took all of them, renamed them, and made them into a human pantheon. Why not? It was a lot easier than coming up with a whole new system myself.

Finally, you can look at building a world set in a non-medieval fantasy setting. You can make an Asian setting with ninjas and samurai. You can jump forward to the Renaissance and have crude firearms alongside rapiers and swashbuckling. Everyone loves the Three Musketeers and Zorro, right? The book even gives you ideas for running a game in a modern or even high-tech society. And there are suggestions for altering the level of magic; some games will have a low-magic setting where a wand of burning hands is a minor artifact, while some will be so high-magic that they have magical trains running through dimensional tunnels carrying passengers to other planes just like a modern subway. It's all up to you; that's the fun of world-building.

And that will do it for this chapter. Next, we'll discuss Rewards, which usually means treasure.