Commonly missed elements to world-building

[Zorku]

If that's the case, then what would you reccomend a new GM to start with in terms of world building?

The thing you genuinely need? The tutorial level. The first mission.

It can set up the main plot for the campaign or be totally unrelated to the main plot, but it needs to be something that the party gets involved with and that's about it.

Terrifyingly open, right?

Whether you simulate plate tectonics and weather systems and zoom in from there, or you ask yourself what cultures the setting is going to have and try to zoom out a bit to fill in the gaps, you've got put together adventures in this, and until you've made yourself actually piece together a couple of those, no other prep work is actually going to help with this. Once you've got the basic hang of it then sure, knowing that this campaign takes place around a particular sea, or a mountain range, or on the fringe of a war between turtle dragons and pixies; will steer you around pretty quickly, but until you're at that point all of this other stuff is just a way to delay doing the scary part.

So, some actual advice for doing that:
The method I like is simply, rationalize a random mess of crap. List off a bunch of cultures, races, monster types, and whatever stuff you feel comfortable enough having in your story; then make random tables out of them and roll the dice a few times.

Undead, Romans, temple, kuo toa.

Well that's meaningless, but we're gonna rationalize it. Romans were pretty up tight about keeping the dead buried (unless you were a criminal, in which case you rotted in plain sight in the familiar Roman style,) so zombies getting out of crypts or much more decayed zombies plucking themselves off of their display racks would cause a fuss, or this could be after the fall of Rome and just people from that era are reanimating and shambling around in togas.

Undead and kuo toa can easily come into conflict. Undead don't need to breathe so this could be an underwater sort of adventure, though those are really mean to throw at players in general, much less at level 1. Romans had temples, a foul temple could be the cause of the undead, and an underwater temple would suit the kuo toa.

This all feels like a little too much, so I'm gonna have to trim it down to only some of these elements.

The adventurers run into a desperate murlock kuo toa shaman begging them for help. Her people are being driven from their native waters by hordes of undead, set upon them by a bunch of warmongers who disgrace their defeated enemies and criminals by reanimating them. The trouble is that there is a very important ritual that the kuo toa need to perform in their underwater temple in order to prevent the fire god (volcano) from getting angry. The party needs to either delay the attacks or complete the ritual to prevent this place from going all plane-of-fire.

Well, that became a much more cogent idea than what we started with. Maybe not one I want to try and open a campaign with, but this took like ten minutes if I round up. I didn't actually make random tables so we'll say I spent a few minutes doing that and actually rolling some dice in the comfort of my home. I can save the text if I like it and roll the dice again until I rationalize up something that sounds a little bit easier to run as an adventure, and maybe I'll make the Roman necromancers thing into some larger plot thread for the campaign by tacking on a few other reasons the party needs to fight or negotiate with them.


And if you want to set your sights a little bit higher? Try to come up with 3+ things like that that are going on in the local region, and then when your players roll up their characters, rationalize a little bit more to come up with reasons that each character should be particularly invested in one of these things. Family legacies, religious ideals, business, you name it; at least one of the characters has some personal stake in this roman necromancers mess.

After you've got those ideas taken care of, work on your map just enough that you feel comfortable improvising any other details as you feel like the story needs them. If you've got time go ahead and work on the map a lot more than that, if you enjoy that kind of thing (I know I do,) but you only really need "just enough that it works."


If all of this still seems to intimidating, there's no shame in running published modules and campaigns. You only need to make your own world and write your own adventures if you want to.