Designing Your World
So after a long hiatus I'm finally back to DMing to a group IRL and that means I'm in the mood for more unsolicited advice! This time we're talking about how to design your game world.
Don't Do Top Down Setting Design. Start Small.
And I know it's hard. Drawing world maps is very, very fun. Deciding where landmasses and oceans are, etc makes you feel like a bountiful god, graciously dispensing geography unto an unshapen universe. And that's not even the best part. When you start getting to populations, nations and civilizations, that's where it REALLY kicks in.
Maybe you like the Robert E. Howard school of just taking real-life historical civilizations and plopping them onto your world. Or maybe you ascribe more to the J. R. R. Tolkien school of organically developing an internal timeline for your world where myth and history seamlessly merge. Or maybe you don't give a fuck and write what feels cool to you without putting too much thought into it.
And all that's FINE. Except it's not, because designing your setting from the top down removes you from the CORE of your game experience.
Which is the stuff that happens at the table.
The Legendary Empire of Lawana is a cool place you have in mind and your players also think it's cool and one of your players decides his character is gonna be from Lawana, and that's cool, but all that means is that you should just write enough about Lawana to try and trigger that "damn that's cool" idea in your players.
But you don't need to go TOO MUCH into detail, if your game is not SET there. Use all that free time and energy, instead, to detail the place your game IS set in.
I mean, you CAN make it work, and, even if you can't, well, I'm not going to stop you. (Also I physically can't unless you give me you address and also a baseball bat, but that is going a bit overboard... and also sounds suspiciously like work so I'll pass.)
But... If you're designing for a D&D campaign, start small.
Starting city, patch of wilderness around it, dungeon.
Decide on a scale for your map, but make it small-ish. One to three days of walk to get to the dungeon, tops. Starting parties might have trouble with assembling a larger expedition.
So, maybe, a map that's 100-ish-miles? Keep in mind that overland travel is roughly 16-24 miles per day. (depending on load, terrain, weather and stuff. Your favourite RPG corebook will have the relevant numbers.)
So, if you like hex maps (and you SHOULD!), make a 15x15 or a 20x20 grid, or something in that general ballpark, with each hex being 6 miles across. If you feel ambitious, up that to a 30x30 or about.
Place your City, your Dungeon, and draw some wilderness. A good ballpark here is "party will move 3-4 hexes per day of travel". Use that to gauge distances.
Then, add some extra stuff. A secondary dungeon, a mystery location, a secondary city or village, an Area Of Bad Thing To Avoid (dragon lair etc) to taunt and tease your players, a scenic location (waterfall, volcano, enchanted valley etc), stuff like that.
Don't make your map TOO crowded or it will look artificial. Don't make it too sparse or it will look empty.
A decent rule of thumb, for me, is "1 point of interest every 10 hexes of map", which means that on a 20x20 map (400 hexes) you get 40 points of interest.
Of course only a handful will be fully fledged locations. It's ok for most of them to be just a one-line note like "45 kobolds (1 leader) holed up in hidden cave, entrance trapped, type O treasure".
Finally, and most importantly, put arrows around the borders of your map that say "this way to Distant But Interesting Place!"
The Big City. The Desolate Place. The Ominously-Named Empire. The Implied Edge of the Known World. The Vague Mythological Reference.
