I always get questions on world building for people who want to make their own Dungeons and Dragons setting. Where do I start? Where does it end? Which parts of the world do I absolutely need to flesh out? The answer is, unfortunately, difficult. Each person thinks differently, and each idea lends itself to different approaches to design. So here, I will go over different approaches to conceptualizing a world.
Top-Down
You have a broad idea for a setting, and then proceed to fill in details. Top-down is a decomposition of a broad scope. This is more about populating a toned canvas. You aren’t starting with a totally blank slate, and you use the world to define what you put into it. What sort of communities would develop in your setting? What races would thrive there? How have creatures adapted to the setting? Your overarching idea should lead you to answers and guide the overall vision and feeling. This method produces a unified setting, but sometimes can lack in variety compared to a Bottom-Up design.
Examples of Top-Down Prompts
Make an Egyptian world ruled by mysterious and malevolent god-pharaoh.
A harsh jungle region is the center of the campaign and the lich Acererak has placed a curse upon the living.
A plane has limited width but infinite height, and psionics are more powerful than magic here. What sort of world would develop?
Bottom-Up
You have one or more neat ideas, then broaden a setting around that or find out how to make them work together. Bottom-Up design is additive as you keep widening the scope based on one or a few small concepts. It could be an idea for a single culture, a new race, a story arc, or even a single character. It’s a process of coming up with rationalizations for your concepts as you ask more and more questions. Another way to think about it is coming up with a quest hook and then broadening the scope as you add cities, people, regions, and monsters. This method leads to more variety than a Top-Down design, which can feel very unified by comparison.
Examples of Bottom-Up Prompts
Find a way to make vampire-conquistadors, dinosaurs, merfolk, and pirates all work as the main factions in your world.
A Tarrasque is in the process of regenerating over several months. How are the PCs going to to stop it before it’s fully healed? What places will they visit?
You have a series of dungeon modules you want to run. How can you make them all fit into the same world?
Outside-In
Similar to a Top-Down design, you start with the entire world, or cosmology even, and then focus in on what matters. This creates epic stories with plenty of unique names and places to go, but with not as much mystery (as you have answers for everything). This tends to make unique worlds that sometimes screw with deities, physics, planar theory, etc.
Example Process for an Outside-In Design
Develop the multiverse/cosmology/deities
Develop the planet/world/plane composition
Draw a world map
Draw a region map (terrain, major/minor communities, named geography)
Draw the starting city map
Fill out City Information like culture, economy, history, and politics
Stat out the Main Characters the PCs will interact with
Inside-Out
Directly the opposite of the Outside-In design, this one is where you start very close to the players and expand the world outward. This can be either a method of brainstorming or as a method of improvisation. When improvised, you create and establish more of the world with each session of the game, taking notes as you go. As the players explore, they discover more of your world. In general, an Inside-Out designed world will create an air of mystery to the world as the DM might not have answers for every question about the world as a whole. Improvisation, however, requires a lot of experience, confidence, and innate player interaction and curiosity.
Reactive
This method of worldbuilding is when you create a world around the players and their characters. You sit down in session zero and figure out what everyone wants to play. Ask them questions like where they are from and what their story is, explaining that the sky is the limit. Create your setting about the stories of the players. This requires a lot of imagination from your players and you have very little control as a DM, meaning that you need to be willing to accept that you are telling their story, not the other way around. However, this method tends to produce a world that the players have a heavy investment in, making them more excited about the game.
Mad Libs
You have or create a set list of concepts and fill them out systematically. Unless I have an idea in mind, this is my go-to for organizing my thoughts. Despite the name this type of world creation is highly organized but it tends to create cookie-cutter regions of your setting with fewer problems. Ensure the places you create have intentional flaws in different entries you fill in.
Example of a Mad Libs City
City Name
Location
Biome
Climate
Area Size
Economy
Exports
Imports
Factions/Guilds
Merchants Guild
Thieves Guild
Artisans Guild
Heroes Guild
Religions
List of different churches
Military
Strength of Military
Composition of Military
Shops
Government
Laws
Rulers
Magic
Frequency
Laws
Uses
Randomization
You use dice or randomizers to choose aspects of a setting at random and creativity springs forth from your rationalizations and justifications for certain combinations. I use this method when I get stuck on something or when creating a variety of unique cities. Even if the randomness isn’t really random and you are just using the generated entries to help spur ideas, randomness still helps. Think of randomness as a tool to inspire creativity.
This method is where you mash two existing, relatable concepts together and create a new one. Then you would likely work with a Top-Down design to fill out such a world. The Three-Beat Premise is essentially “X meets Y.” An on-the-nose example would be Kingdom Hearts is “Disney meets Final Fantasy.” It’s normally used as a tool to quickly pitch an idea by using two concepts that are familiar to help describe a new world using concepts we already know. You can even add a bit of randomness in there by making a table filled with your favorite settings and choosing two at random to rationalize. Try to combine settings and themes from the lists I made below.
Motherfucking Cowboy Meowchow 