Worldbuilding Talk Thread

[Milo v3]

I'm having trouble coming to terms with how a D&D world even works. There's too many things in it for it to even begin to make sense.

Ageless immortal evils and goods (gods, powers, planes, etc) that apparently have no source or reason for existing (though we can't answer how our own world exists or why). Demons and angels have been fighting since forever, yet neither has won yet, and for whatever reason the material plane hasn't been completely overrun yet. Dragons have existed since forever, yet somehow the smaller races have come up from under them. Speaking of which, in a world of monsters, undead, demons and dragons, how the hell does a human come into being? How would they evolve up in a world full of scary evil monsters?

In most settings, in their present time, you have nations or empires of various races, all with their own territories, all dealing with invading armies of other races, plus undead, dragons, monsters, demon incursions, etc....why hasn't any one side come out on top and wiped the others out? That's how our world works.

Are they all separated by time and distance? Do the undead only pop up for a period of time every once in a while? Like, is the negative energy plane closer during some periods (ala eberron)? How come dragons haven't wiped us out or been wiped out by us (and how does a giant, flying, intelligent, fire-breathing lizard come into being in the first place)? Are they stuck on one continent for some reason, and occasionally come over to screw with us, but haven't done so in enough numbers to wipe us out for some reason? Can demons not get to our world on their own, yet somehow mortals can summon them? How? Gods exist, basically as powerful people, and are roughly balanced with each other, and have been so for a bajillion years, yet even they can't seem to beat each other? Then there's the aberrations down in the underdark. Yeesh.

How do we answer these questions?

I can handle one or a group of similar ageless evils bent on screwing up the world or any worlds that they come across. I can't handle the fact that they've been here a bajillion years and neither of us have won yet. What's the deal?

One simple answer is that not all of that exists. Whenever I make a setting, one of the first steps is to go through and decide what exists and what doesn't. Then I go into the cosmology of why different things exist and when they came to be, and how it all fits.

[Yora]

How do we answer these questions?

By making your own world and taking pieces from D&D. Rulebooks are resources for GMs and setting books are ways of how people have used those resources. The only setting I know that says it includes everything from all rulebooks is Eberron, and the result is famously weird. There is no D&D world, not even Grayhawk.
Take the parts you want and make something with them that you think makes sense.

[SirKazum]

One simple answer is that not all of that exists. Whenever I make a setting, one of the first steps is to go through and decide what exists and what doesn't. Then I go into the cosmology of why different things exist and when they came to be, and how it all fits.

Yeah, D&D in general does have a kind of a "fantasy kitchen sink" mentality that crams it all together in one place. Not just Eberron, mind - pausing to think about the sheer number of ultra-powerful monsters and factions in, say, Toril can be mind-boggling. I think that's largely for practical reasons - D&D is a role-playing game, and published material is there to give both players and DMs the opportunity to employ whatever it is they like best in-game. Many people just shrug and move on without thinking a lot about it, but once you stop and analyze it, yeah, it can get pretty weird. So, if you want consistency, I guess the only solution is indeed to carefully pick what you want in your setting and discard the rest, based on whatever internal logic your setting has. Which will likely mean starting from scratch, in terms of world design.

IMO, an example of a published D&D setting that does that rather well is Dark Sun. And, of course, as a consequence of that directed design, the available options for players and DMs in Dark Sun are heavily restricted - you can't really be a noble paladin or a home-making halfling or lots of other traditional fantasy things, and as a DM you can't use many tropes like a wise king who sends the heroes on quests, or dragon troves, or magical fairie-inhabited woods, and so on. It has to be stuff that fits the post-apocalyptic parameters of the setting. That's both good and bad - it's good because it makes the whole game very consistent in theme, flavor and internal logic, and on the other hand it may keep players and DMs from using stuff they like. That's a choice, but IMO, a worthy one. If you're going to design a world, better make it specialized but great than generic and wonky

[Yora]

I would even say, you don't need worlds. You just need sub-continents. Full worlds exist almost exclusively in RPG setting books for the extremely unlikely case that the players decide to randomly go on a 4 month boat trip out into the open ocean. For actual campaigns, something like Western Europe or Southeast Asia is entirely sufficient and still incredibly huge. You never really see them in fiction.

Again, good example Dark Sun. Which is just a pretty small region of desert on a whole planet of desert.

[SirKazum]

I would even say, you don't need worlds. You just need sub-continents. Full worlds exist almost exclusively in RPG setting books for the extremely unlikely case that the players decide to randomly go on a 4 month boat trip out into the open ocean. For actual campaigns, something like Western Europe or Southeast Asia is entirely sufficient and still incredibly huge. You never really see them in fiction.

Again, good example Dark Sun. Which is just a pretty small region of desert on a whole planet of desert.

IIRC Dark Sun doesn't make it very clear what's out there beyond the described portions of the world (Tyr Region and Jagged Cliffs Region), other than saying that in the plains below the Jagged Cliffs there are a lot of thri-kreen. But yeah, it could easily be a small part of a larger world, that's completely different in other places. Although I wouldn't necessarily recommend mixing it with other kinds of fantasy settings that way - the reason I used Dark Sun as an example is because the game rules themselves and even the cosmology (from Revised Edition onwards) are rather incompatible with "regular" D&D. There are some materials that try and mix the two (such as the Kalidnay domain in Ravenloft, for example), and the results are really wonky. IMO part of what makes Dark Sun great is that it knows what it wants to be, and isn't afraid to dive headfirst into its concept and leave behind all connections to other kinds of fantasy.

But if what you want to do isn't such a radical change of concept as Dark Sun, then yes, I think you could have a bunch of different settings in the same planet, each pretty much isolated from the other. Toril tries to do that to some extent, by having Forgotten Realms, Kara-Tur, Al-Qadim and Maztica all in the same planet. Although FR still pretty much tries to do "everything that's vaguely European / traditional fantasy", even with some African, Middle-Eastern and Asian concepts, and ends up being a huge patchwork of disparate regions.

With D&D, though, the only problem is that physical separation may end up not being all that it's cracked up to be, with spells like teleport and gate being available to characters, and dragons being able to fly really long distances if they want to. Not to mention that inter-planar relations ignore that physical separation altogether. So some of Seharvepernfan's questions still remain, even if you separate the monsters/factions/etc. into different continents or other physically separate areas.

[Milo v3]

I would even say, you don't need worlds. You just need sub-continents. Full worlds exist almost exclusively in RPG setting books for the extremely unlikely case that the players decide to randomly go on a 4 month boat trip out into the open ocean. For actual campaigns, something like Western Europe or Southeast Asia is entirely sufficient and still incredibly huge. You never really see them in fiction.

Again, good example Dark Sun. Which is just a pretty small region of desert on a whole planet of desert.

In my case, I don't think I could actually build a setting without building the whole world. Cosmology matters to much in my opinion, so if outsiders can travel to two cultures on the one planet that are physically isolated, there should be overlap created by that.

[Yora]

But yeah, it could easily be a small part of a larger world, that's completely different in other places. Although I wouldn't necessarily recommend mixing it with other kinds of fantasy settings that way - the reason I used Dark Sun as an example is because the game rules themselves and even the cosmology (from Revised Edition onwards) are rather incompatible with "regular" D&D.

That is exactly my point. It works perfectly well as just a single region with the rest of the world left completely undefined. I think it actually works better because the rest is left completely blank.

Which is why I always think that every setting needs to begin with a well established theme and purpose before any other descision is made. What needs to be in the setting and what should not be in the settings depends entirely on what the setting is trying to accomplish. Dark Sun is ultimately about oasis in a barren desert controlled by terrible people. Getting lost and being isolated with nothing but sand as far as the eye can see is a big part of the setting and that applies at all scales. It works much better if to your knowledge there are only seven cities and beyond that endless dunes and monsters. There is no option to try to break out and reach a better place. The Tyr region is an island of terrible in a sea of horrible. Just like all the city states and slave villages are, and the houses of the few people in the world you can trust.

My homebrew setting is about exploring the unknown wilderness covered by ruins of vanished civilizations. And that is also a concept that requires
the world map to be almost entirely blank, with just a single small area of the known world.

If you would want to make a pirate setting, it might very well be a good idea to have a full ocean and perhaps even several. But in that case all you need to describe are the islands and the coasts. Anything more than three days travel away from the water is irrelevant for such a setting as the campaign is almost certainly never to go there. And if you design the settng that way, there really isn't any reason why the players would want to do so. The King and the government in the capital city are just words used by admirals and port officials to add flavor to the game, but they don't have anything to do with what happens in the ports and on the ships.
Detailing only small parts of the map does not have to mean working out only a specific square section on the world map. But you always need to know what things about the world you are really going to need. In a campaign about demigods and the wars between great temples, you need to detail the religions and the main temples in each region. Cities that don't have a temple might not be worth describing at all, and even those who have could be limited to the temple, the government, and the military, without any mention of the trade or the thieves guild. Which might exist, but for the purpose of the campaign are irrelevant.

Of couse, one can try to make a complete world, but it almost always is unnecessary and means that you're never going to be actually finished. And with only a very few exceptions, settings are not made just for the sake of itself, but to be used for something. If you think "I want to run a pirate campaign and need to prepare a setting for it" you want that setting ready quickly to be able to start the campaign. If 10 years later you are still working on cowherds in the Alps and camel trading in the Sahara, you're not getting any closer to actually starting a game. Same thing if you're making a setting for a novel. You can't do a fully complete world in a lifetime, you always need to make a descision what things need to be detailed and which one are not relevant. And that depends entirely on the type of campaign you want to run.
My setting has background information on only a single local ruler, and he's a divine emperor who is sitting in his palace and who the players are never going to meet or learn any actual information about. He just exists so that agents of that country in other parts of the setting can say they are on a "on a mission for the Emperor" and that they will need the help of the players "in the name of the Emperor" or vow to destroy them for "defying the will of the Emperor". The whole palace with its hundreds of courtiers and officials is irrelevant for a setting of exploring the wilderness for old ruins. The closest players are ever expected to possibly get to the emperor is to be hired by hired by an official from the palace who is bearing the imperial seal. I could write pages on the court and the history of the empire, but it wouldn't get me any closer to running a single adventure.

[Everyl]

Of couse, one can try to make a complete world, but it almost always is unnecessary and means that you're never going to be actually finished. And with only a very few exceptions, settings are not made just for the sake of itself, but to be used for something. If you think "I want to run a pirate campaign and need to prepare a setting for it" you want that setting ready quickly to be able to start the campaign. If 10 years later you are still working on cowherds in the Alps and camel trading in the Sahara, you're not getting any closer to actually starting a game. Same thing if you're making a setting for a novel. You can't do a fully complete world in a lifetime, you always need to make a descision what things need to be detailed and which one are not relevant. And that depends entirely on the type of campaign you want to run.

I have to agree with Yora here. It's very easy as a world-builder, especially as one without a current group of players, to fall into the trap of trying to detail too much setting. It's fun, and odds are you've enjoyed reading published setting books for D&D or other RPGs, so you'd like to emulate that scale and detail in your own way. The trouble is, not many of us have teams of writers, developers, and editors with steady paychecks supporting our setting-building. Worlds like Toril (already cited by others as having four entire campaign settings in it) probably rival a print encyclopedia with the number of pages written about them over the years, and they still tend to have large blank areas waiting for DMs to fill them in. Even games with settings that are "like the real world, with a few differences" take volumes upon volumes of material to describe vampire politics in different major cities or East Asian megacorporate politics in 2072 or whatever.

Unless you can get your setting descriptions to be as well-written and engaging to read as those of Exalted, Shadowrun, or well-written published D&D settings (Dark Sun being a personal favorite), your players aren't going to want to read it all. It's not just easier, but also more effective as a GM, to focus on what matters to the game you're going to run and leave the rest as vague rumors of distant lands. It doesn't hurt to have an idea of what's in those lands, but if you're making pseudo-Europe and you know as much about the politics of the places that silk and cinnamon are imported from as you do the politics of the faux-Italian peninsula, you're probably not using your time efficiently.

[TheWombatOfDoom]

That is exactly my point. It works perfectly well as just a single region with the rest of the world left completely undefined. I think it actually works better because the rest is left completely blank.

Which is why I always think that every setting needs to begin with a well established theme and purpose before any other descision is made. What needs to be in the setting and what should not be in the settings depends entirely on what the setting is trying to accomplish. Dark Sun is ultimately about oasis in a barren desert controlled by terrible people. Getting lost and being isolated with nothing but sand as far as the eye can see is a big part of the setting and that applies at all scales. It works much better if to your knowledge there are only seven cities and beyond that endless dunes and monsters. There is no option to try to break out and reach a better place. The Tyr region is an island of terrible in a sea of horrible. Just like all the city states and slave villages are, and the houses of the few people in the world you can trust.

My homebrew setting is about exploring the unknown wilderness covered by ruins of vanished civilizations. And that is also a concept that requires
the world map to be almost entirely blank, with just a single small area of the known world.

If you would want to make a pirate setting, it might very well be a good idea to have a full ocean and perhaps even several. But in that case all you need to describe are the islands and the coasts. Anything more than three days travel away from the water is irrelevant for such a setting as the campaign is almost certainly never to go there. And if you design the settng that way, there really isn't any reason why the players would want to do so. The King and the government in the capital city are just words used by admirals and port officials to add flavor to the game, but they don't have anything to do with what happens in the ports and on the ships.
Detailing only small parts of the map does not have to mean working out only a specific square section on the world map. But you always need to know what things about the world you are really going to need. In a campaign about demigods and the wars between great temples, you need to detail the religions and the main temples in each region. Cities that don't have a temple might not be worth describing at all, and even those who have could be limited to the temple, the government, and the military, without any mention of the trade or the thieves guild. Which might exist, but for the purpose of the campaign are irrelevant.

Of couse, one can try to make a complete world, but it almost always is unnecessary and means that you're never going to be actually finished. And with only a very few exceptions, settings are not made just for the sake of itself, but to be used for something. If you think "I want to run a pirate campaign and need to prepare a setting for it" you want that setting ready quickly to be able to start the campaign. If 10 years later you are still working on cowherds in the Alps and camel trading in the Sahara, you're not getting any closer to actually starting a game. Same thing if you're making a setting for a novel. You can't do a fully complete world in a lifetime, you always need to make a descision what things need to be detailed and which one are not relevant. And that depends entirely on the type of campaign you want to run.
My setting has background information on only a single local ruler, and he's a divine emperor who is sitting in his palace and who the players are never going to meet or learn any actual information about. He just exists so that agents of that country in other parts of the setting can say they are on a "on a mission for the Emperor" and that they will need the help of the players "in the name of the Emperor" or vow to destroy them for "defying the will of the Emperor". The whole palace with its hundreds of courtiers and officials is irrelevant for a setting of exploring the wilderness for old ruins. The closest players are ever expected to possibly get to the emperor is to be hired by hired by an official from the palace who is bearing the imperial seal. I could write pages on the court and the history of the empire, but it wouldn't get me any closer to running a single adventure.

I wish someone had told me this...ten years ago...

I've seen it both ways. Sometimes (with a novel at least), the story forms from the details you make in the world, or forms with more unity when you're writing with a setting in mind. Sure making things up as you go along works, but I think its a matter of what the writing style of a person is. Some people are good at making the story fit a setting, others are good at making a setting fit a story. And there's a strength in both.

The main thing is, with writing a novel, creating a first draft where you write the story and make the setting fit it is all fine and dandy, because you can make the continuity changes on the second draft and so on. With a campaign, you can't really do that (unless you run the campaign again with other people later), so some people like to be prepared.

Me, I'm usually making stuff on the fly to answer questions and so on, but I've been writing a book for 15 years, being stuck on creating the setting for a lot of them. Now its been a productive 15 years for sure, but I'm no closer to writing my book...I have figured out what I NEEDED to make, however, so there's that. And for all the work of the last 15 years, that part that I need is not completed yet.

[SirKazum]

I wish someone had told me this...ten years ago...

I've seen it both ways. Sometimes (with a novel at least), the story forms from the details you make in the world, or forms with more unity when you're writing with a setting in mind. Sure making things up as you go along works, but I think its a matter of what the writing style of a person is. Some people are good at making the story fit a setting, others are good at making a setting fit a story. And there's a strength in both.

The main thing is, with writing a novel, creating a first draft where you write the story and make the setting fit it is all fine and dandy, because you can make the continuity changes on the second draft and so on. With a campaign, you can't really do that (unless you run the campaign again with other people later), so some people like to be prepared.

Me, I'm usually making stuff on the fly to answer questions and so on, but I've been writing a book for 15 years, being stuck on creating the setting for a lot of them. Now its been a productive 15 years for sure, but I'm no closer to writing my book...I have figured out what I NEEDED to make, however, so there's that. And for all the work of the last 15 years, that part that I need is not completed yet.

Right now I'm... doing it both ways actually I'm developing my Haliburn Galaxy ("Heplionverse") setting pretty much for the heck of it, just to see where it goes. And I'm also writing a story (The Heplion Contingency) in said setting. The story started out just as a way to do something with the setting (since I don't really see DMing in my near future), but I'm getting a feeling the story may end up becoming a bigger project than the setting itself in the future. Meanwhile, I'm kinda running both things in parallel - writing the story and developing the setting.

With other stories though (such as No Legends for Us), there may be a fictional setting they're set in, but it's secondary to the story. I'm writing NLFU pretty much by the seat of my pants, and developing only as much of its setting as absolutely necessary. Of course, it helps that it's a more or less generic D&D setting, so there's enough basic infrastructure and premise for me to go on there.

Now with other stories, such as say, The Man from Lagash (not in my sig, but it's in my Wattpad page), where the setting is entirely novel and not helped by anything pre-existing like D&D, I can't help but develop some background and world-building before I get to writing anything, even though in that one, too, I'm focused on just writing the story. But I have to know how things work in that undersea setting full of fish-folk, so it involved some research on marine biology, as well as some thinking about what led the world to being the way it is. But nothing deeper than it needs to be... well, as much as I can help myself. I've got that world-building bug, and the researching bug too, so I can get a bit carried away with that stuff. Hopefully, it doesn't go to waste and helps flesh out the world better, giving it more flavor.

[Milo v3]

I like making settings for the sake of it. Seeing how different ideas play out and how different societies would develop when magic is in the mix is interesting to me.

[Mr.Cobalt]

I like making settings for the sake of it. Seeing how different ideas play out and how different societies would develop when magic is in the mix is interesting to me.

I kinda know what you mean. I personally am working on a homebrew setting for a Pathfinder campaign idea I had (focusing on four mage schools, each focusing on a different type or source of magic but all owned by the same guild) and I'm currently having more fun with just making details and history of the schools themselves in addition to NPCs and potential subplot hooks, but so far no ideas as far as actual overarching plotlines go (except for the initial story of the PC's either attending the schools and all that entails, or about to go on a "graduation exam" quest together that will net them full Guild status and sponsorship).

[Tzi]

What I've been struggling with for years is to find a name for them. Never really had anything good that doesn't make it seem like a total ripoff (even though that's what they are. )
I've been clicking through a big thesaurus and what about "anathema"? It means "dedicated" or "offered", with the later implied addition "to evil". In early Christianity it was used to mean excommunication.

Now in my setting there are no Gods, no hell, and no afterlife and no objective Evil. The word "demon" is just a negative term for a type of very old, rarely seen, and usually extremely dangerous spirit. That means many classic terms to describe evil black magicians don't really work. (They are not "damned" or "heretics".) But I think anathema would still work. Once the demon has taken possession of the body, it's interests and goals are those of a demon and sorcerers who did it willingly were after demonic power. The creature is now a danger to all living things that doesn't care about any traditions, customs, or laws and has no desire to integrate into human society. Their allegiance is now to the Underworld and other demons and while there is no supreme god to cast them out, they have cast themselves out. The original spirit of the person is now part of the demon and can never rejoin the ancestor spirit from which all new children of the tribe are born. (Even though memories and personalty are erased, it is believed that strength and couraged are preserved are preserved in the ancestor spirit and make future generations stronger.)
And though most people are unlikely to know the meaning of the term (I had to look it up myself), it's one that most people have heard of and know it has something to do with evil. And even if not, it still sounds ominous and negative. (Though in this case, the a- is not a prefix meaning "anti".)

What do you think of it? Does it sound good? Is it fitting for a bronze age Sword & Sorcery setting? Not 100% happy with the name myself yet, but names usually get much better once you use them for a while.

I explain that things are as they are because of perceptive reality. In my current edition of my setting the planes are different and certain cosmological features are altered. My players played in this setting but at some point in its own past. When asked why the change I explained "Previous assumptions were how the material world was comprehended, this is how present people understand things. They too are likely to be proven wrong." So for example the casting off or cutting off from an ancestral spirit is the current explanation for a function of demon possession? Is it LITERALLY what happens? No probably not but as far as the players are concerned that is how the world works or how they were raised to think it works.

[Yora]

I was going through my many monster books again, and that makes me wonder what kinds of non-standard creatures other people might be using in prominent roles for their settings. Stuff like thri-kreen, warforged, or qunari.

Most of those that are in my setting are pretty standard stuff. Lizardmen, serpentmen, fish people, trolls, fair folk, and so on. Even the one unique race I created is still pretty much an orc-lionman hybrid.

One that I am working on are a race of forest giant fey. But I think they are pretty similar to cloud giants from Dungeons & Dragons, except that they live in forests.

I am currently really considering adding some kind of bee-people fey, like the thriae from the Pathfinder Bestiary 3, who live in castles in the foothills of large mountains. That would certainly be different.

[shawnhcorey]

I was going through my many monster books again, and that makes me wonder what kinds of non-standard creatures other people might be using in prominent roles for their settings. Stuff like thri-kreen, warforged, or qunari.

You can come up with something quite different by changing the behaviour of the monster. For example, my Goblins are nighttime scavengers and they prefer to live in the garbage dumps of human towns and cities. At night, they infiltrate the town and take away anything unguarded. Goblin-infested towns are the cleanest but don't pass out outdoors.

[Tzi]

I was going through my many monster books again, and that makes me wonder what kinds of non-standard creatures other people might be using in prominent roles for their settings. Stuff like thri-kreen, warforged, or qunari.

Most of those that are in my setting are pretty standard stuff. Lizardmen, serpentmen, fish people, trolls, fair folk, and so on. Even the one unique race I created is still pretty much an orc-lionman hybrid.

One that I am working on are a race of forest giant fey. But I think they are pretty similar to cloud giants from Dungeons & Dragons, except that they live in forests.

I am currently really considering adding some kind of bee-people fey, like the thriae from the Pathfinder Bestiary 3, who live in castles in the foothills of large mountains. That would certainly be different.

Well, mine makes ample use of aberrations as both literal Alien life, and in some cases indigenous lifeforms to the four moons. A minor theme is that these moons were terraformed to be what they are now. But also I'm making a lot of use out of War-Forged and various types of demons and angels and Fey, particularly on the Elven home moon. Or a lot of homebrew giant lizards and mutated "normal," animals on the desertified Orcish home moon. Ect.

[Yora]

I wrote about a page about the main trade goods that form the centerpiece of trade and commerce in my setting. I would really be greatful if some of you might give it a look and maybe point out any obvious errors I made.

[redwizard007]

I wrote about a page about the main trade goods that form the centerpiece of trade and commerce in my setting. I would really be greatful if some of you might give it a look and maybe point out any obvious errors I made.

It looks nice Yora. I'm sure you don't want to dive too much further into trade, but spices, alcohols, and food staples like cassava, grain, corn, rice, fish and livestock make great trade goods. For that matter, you could add exotic stone, gems, and more finished goods like pottery and jewelry.

[Yora]

Yeah, spices would be an obvious thing for long distance trade. But I think they don't really need any more detail than just "spice". Unless you're playing spice traders, the exact types, production places, and destinations most probably won't matter. "A valuable cargo of spices" is as much detail as the players are ever going to care for.

With food and pottery and the like, I feel like it's reasonably easy to take some substitute when you can't get your preferred exotic brand from a distant place. There are many alternatives you can use and lots of people who can provide them everywhere around. If you don't play grain merchants or accountants in the imperial palace, there is probably very little of interest for the vast majority of players and GMs.

Pelts and whalebone I explained primarily because I've always wondered myself why anyone would go to an almost unihabited frozen land for trade. Why the locals want goods from the south is easy, but how the merchants would make any profit from it has very long eluded me and is probably something lots of other people don't know either. (I'm from Lübeck, the city that got the most filthy rich and powerful from trading with Scandinavia. If we wonder about this, then everyone probably would. )

Geopolitically, I think the really important ones are salt and tin, given that it's a bronze age setting. The flow of these two goods makes and breaks empires and is a matter of life and death. If you want to understand the dynamics between the big powers, you need to understand what's the deal with these resources, who has them, who needs them, and what route they take. Took me actually several days of long research to really understand why it was so damn valuable. In some places the price for a pound of salt was a pound of gold. It doesn't really get any more expensive than that.

[redwizard007]

I'm totally on board. There are a few reasons off the top of my head to go just a bit deeper.

1. I just feel like once you start mentioning specific trade goods it is always nice to stay consistent. I also love dropping references to regional specialties and foreign imports as back drops for the less combat heavy games. "Exotic spices" is just fine but isn't up to par with "Frankincense from the sultanates of Araby."

2. It's easy to hand wave an economy, but if you take the time to mention the foundation of one area's wealth why not do the same for others? It could easily become a spring board for other aspects of society.

3. Just spending a few hours on trade can suggest alliances and conflicts that have a more realistic feel.

Yora, you are great at this and I'm certain these are things you've already addressed, but in the spirit of collaboration...

[Yora]

I guess it depends on the themes and style of the setting. With pretty much all elements, the main question is always "How does it affect the activities of the players?"
One setting I remember putting considerable effort in trade relationships is Forgotten Realms, and in the early versions rich merchants appear to be intended as major players in the politics of the world. But somehow that never really got fully abandoned and eventually pretty much forgotten, which makes notes on imports and exports seem random and out of place. Eberron is a highly industrialized setting and trade surely plays a huge role in that world, but the style of the setting focuses on activities that have nothing to do with it. You have robots jumping from airships on speeding trains because of McGuffins. It doesn't matter what things which governments and megacorporations are after and nobody cares. While industrial infrastructure is super important for the ordinary people and everyday business, it's irrelevant to the activities of the players. Someone wants to kill a businessman or diplomat because of some planned contract signing? Doesn't matter what that contract is actually for, it's just an excuse for fantasy James Bond exploits.

For my Ancient Lands setting, I feel having the most traded goods explained does matter directly to the players. It's a setting where civilization is just starting and has not yet fully reached most people. The default player character is expected to be a warrior of a clan living on the frontier and the longterm goal of the players is to make sure that their clan becomes stronger and one of the power players in the region instead of a pawn. Salt and bronze are the primary fuels that are needed to make a clan strong and to keep it strong. If you don't have it, you need to get it, and once you have it you need to keep the supply coming at any cost. And if possible in any way, you want to deny them to your enemies.
Or take a post-apocalyptic desert setting where everyone is looking for water and fuel. Yes, you could have the players find an old abandoned fuel truck that miracoulously has not been discovered by someone else yet and has no leak. But by the third time you do that it has become a joke. It's much more interesting and offers a lot more options to both players and GMs if you have some established facts about where water and oil can be found in the landscape and what things are needed to get it.
Dark Sun would benefit greatly from having some elaboration on how to find water, but as far as I know it simply says "Look, an oasis! We're saved!" Which is a major missed opportunity.

[Corneel]

Availability of certain goods and as a consequence their prices can affect players. An example from your own description of trade goods would be chainmail, made by only a few cultures that might or might not trade them with others. And trade routes can be temporarily cut by bandit activity. Certain weapons might have similar restrictions.

Other things that might be subject to varying (geographical) availability might be spell components, it might even lead to certain spells being difficult to find in certain parts of the world as no one bothers to learn or research them because you can't get the components anyway (maybe the real useful bat guano is not that easy to come by, most of it getting easily spoiled in more humid climates, thus rendering fireball casting rare outside the drier climates and/or a precious substance to bribe spellcasters with).

[B9anders]

I think one problem here is that you are applying modern spectacles to fantastical issues.

How did humans evolve to this point? They didn't. They were made. In my 'brew, they are close to the top of the pile because they have the backing of the gods - Who currently rule the cosmic roost (bit like the aesir bit down the vanir and Jotunn, essentially usurping the cosmic order), albeit highly precariously and with many 'unconquered' territories.

My immortals, except for the four imponderable elder gods, all have sources and reasons for existing. Just make them up.

The material plane hasn't been overrun thanks, again, to the gods who currently rule the roost. They set up the Great Seal to keep all the others out.

Dragons, although they do rule some territories in my brew, are not as grand as they used to be because they struck a bargain with the gods to kick out the other factions and basically ceded the current Epoch to them and their mortals.

There is a common language because the gods wish humanity to be more coherent and together, so they have prevented the balkanization of language.

Trying to fix implausible set-ups with scientifically plausible solutions isn't going to be a good fix to my mind. Go fantastic.

I'm having trouble coming to terms with how a D&D world even works. There's too many things in it for it to even begin to make sense.

Ageless immortal evils and goods (gods, powers, planes, etc) that apparently have no source or reason for existing (though we can't answer how our own world exists or why). Demons and angels have been fighting since forever, yet neither has won yet, and for whatever reason the material plane hasn't been completely overrun yet. Dragons have existed since forever, yet somehow the smaller races have come up from under them. Speaking of which, in a world of monsters, undead, demons and dragons, how the hell does a human come into being? How would they evolve up in a world full of scary evil monsters?

In most settings, in their present time, you have nations or empires of various races, all with their own territories, all dealing with invading armies of other races, plus undead, dragons, monsters, demon incursions, etc....why hasn't any one side come out on top and wiped the others out? That's how our world works.

Are they all separated by time and distance? Do the undead only pop up for a period of time every once in a while? Like, is the negative energy plane closer during some periods (ala eberron)? How come dragons haven't wiped us out or been wiped out by us (and how does a giant, flying, intelligent, fire-breathing lizard come into being in the first place)? Are they stuck on one continent for some reason, and occasionally come over to screw with us, but haven't done so in enough numbers to wipe us out for some reason? Can demons not get to our world on their own, yet somehow mortals can summon them? How? Gods exist, basically as powerful people, and are roughly balanced with each other, and have been so for a bajillion years, yet even they can't seem to beat each other? Then there's the aberrations down in the underdark. Yeesh.

How do we answer these questions?

I can handle one or a group of similar ageless evils bent on screwing up the world or any worlds that they come across. I can't handle the fact that they've been here a bajillion years and neither of us have won yet. What's the deal?

[Tzi]

I think one problem here is that you are applying modern spectacles to fantastical issues.

How did humans evolve to this point? They didn't. They were made. In my 'brew, they are close to the top of the pile because they have the backing of the gods - Who currently rule the cosmic roost (bit like the aesir bit down the vanir and Jotunn, essentially usurping the cosmic order), albeit highly precariously and with many 'unconquered' territories.

My immortals, except for the four imponderable elder gods, all have sources and reasons for existing. Just make them up.

The material plane hasn't been overrun thanks, again, to the gods who currently rule the roost. They set up the Great Seal to keep all the others out.

Dragons, although they do rule some territories in my brew, are not as grand as they used to be because they struck a bargain with the gods to kick out the other factions and basically ceded the current Epoch to them and their mortals.

There is a common language because the gods wish humanity to be more coherent and together, so they have prevented the balkanization of language.

Trying to fix implausible set-ups with scientifically plausible solutions isn't going to be a good fix to my mind. Go fantastic.

Linguistics is probably the one that irks me the most. Everything else is something I can reasonably handwave as "Well you simply don't know the inner workings of the universe."

The simplists solution for me was to have sort of 3-4 clustered race groups whom all share a common origin but are different. For me this is simple as my homebrew takes on a Sci-Fantasy element of being set upon 4 earth/venus sized moons that orbit a big gas giant. Each equally habitable and each different enough to be a cradle for each type of humanoid. With Humans, Elves, Orcs and Giants being the four core races. Thanks to magic and portals each world is somewhat reachable and thus populations form, split off, and there are legions of languages and ethnic groups.

I've even done this with other races. There are no longer Dark Elves, High Elves and Wood Elves, just Elves that adapted to each moon they settled, and they have intermixed, and appearances vary from area to area. Thus there is a race of Astyri Elves, or nation of Astyri Elves whom look much like Dark Elves from Warhammer, and whose language is closest to that of the Drowish looking Tynerki Elves of another moon.

[BootStrapTommy]

why hasn't any one side come out on top and wiped the others out? That's how our world works.

No, it's not. I don't know if you are aware, but there are 196 countries on Earth. Which is a pretty good sign that no one has yet come out on top...

[BladeofObliviom]

No, it's not. I don't know if you are aware, but there are 196 countries on Earth. Which is a pretty good sign that no one has yet come out on top...

I don't know if that's necessarily the right comparison to be making. Homo Sapiens has done a very good job destroying/outbreeding/breeding out all the other members of the Genus Homo. The context refers to the various species involved, and the mention of Empires appears to be incidental.

[Gwyn chan 'r Gwyll]

Linguistics is probably the one that irks me the most. Everything else is something I can reasonably handwave as "Well you simply don't know the inner workings of the universe."

The simplists solution for me was to have sort of 3-4 clustered race groups whom all share a common origin but are different. For me this is simple as my homebrew takes on a Sci-Fantasy element of being set upon 4 earth/venus sized moons that orbit a big gas giant. Each equally habitable and each different enough to be a cradle for each type of humanoid. With Humans, Elves, Orcs and Giants being the four core races. Thanks to magic and portals each world is somewhat reachable and thus populations form, split off, and there are legions of languages and ethnic groups.

I've even done this with other races. There are no longer Dark Elves, High Elves and Wood Elves, just Elves that adapted to each moon they settled, and they have intermixed, and appearances vary from area to area. Thus there is a race of Astyri Elves, or nation of Astyri Elves whom look much like Dark Elves from Warhammer, and whose language is closest to that of the Drowish looking Tynerki Elves of another moon.

Linguistics is important for me in creating my world, everything has to be given a proper name that a) suits it's situation, and b) suits it's culture. So there are 8 main cultural groups, some of which multiple species share.
Germanic Humans (and Gnomes), Romance Humans (and Tieflings), Finno-Ugric Elves, Magyar Halflings, Slavic Orcs, Arabic and Persian Goblins, Caucasian (Georgian and Armenian) Humans, and lastly Welsh Dwarves.
Within each group there are also variations. So the Elven Kingdom of Vaike is part of the Southern Elvish group, who speak Estonian, whereas the Northern Elves of Valtakunta Harmaa speak Finnish. The Men of Awascan speak Old English, those of Reikkenorr speak Swedish, those of Grense speak Norwegian, Fjallriki Danish, Inseln German, and the Gnomes speak Dutch.

Does this say anything about how such people came to be? Well, a little. It Is Known that Elves and Humans migrated to the land, and that they brought Orcs with them as slaves, and it is possible that interbreeding with the native Dwarves and Goblins led in various ways to the other races. Did interbreeding between Dwarves and Goblins lead to Gnomes? Elves and Goblins to Halflings? Humans and Gnomes to Tieflings (in my world, they weren't demonic-looking originally)? Perhaps. Perhaps not. I have these ideas in my mind, but it doesn't really matter to get them hashed out unless a player wants to spend a session delving into a library for arcane secrets hidden in the racial make-up of the Tieflings, as a random example.

[Mechalich]

In most settings, in their present time, you have nations or empires of various races, all with their own territories, all dealing with invading armies of other races, plus undead, dragons, monsters, demon incursions, etc....why hasn't any one side come out on top and wiped the others out? That's how our world works.

Interestingly standard AD&D actually provided several meta-setting answers to this particular question.

First, one side does come out on top and rule an entire world unopposed fairly often. However, those worlds are boring so we don't set adventures there. Your world is just one world in one crystal sphere in a vast cosmos anyway, it just happens to be part of the X% (pick a number) where conflict remains unresolved. Examples exist in published material of worlds ruled by a single race or planet searing scourge like the Clockwork Horrors or Formians.

Second, back in the day, the Illithids (TM) conquered most of the known galaxy and spent tens of thousands of years ruling pretty much everyone as their mind slaves. Then Gith happened and they weren't doing that anymore. Most of the worlds were populated by a mixture of freed slave populations and eventually settled by additional migrants from other worlds and everyone started out at roughly the same technology level of scattered illithid leavings. It's only been about 32,000 years since then, which isn't really a lot of time in evolutionary terms, and given the relatively equal standin start, things are still shaking themselves out. Many worlds acknowledge a gradual decline of dwarves and elves based on birthrate for example, but it might take a while longer for them to go extinct.

Third, worlds generally exist in a state of balance between the various alignments. The destruction of any particular race tends to upset that balance (tilting towards good or evil depending on the dominant alignment and reducing chaos outright). Powerful outsiders don't want that to happen. Not only are there ones that enforce the balance directly Rilmani/Aeons and are likely to get rather irked at major attempts at global genocide, doing something like slaughtering all the hobgoblins is going to make the devils really angry and they will try to stop you. The various forces of the Outer Planes are rather invested in the status quo and don't like it changing out of their favor.

This sort of thing is of course almost ridiculously fantastical. Attributing things to an ancient empire of brain-eating tentacle monsters is no less ridiculous than saying 'the gods did it' though it is perhaps slightly more flavorful, but once you wrap your head around the concept that the Illithid Empire - as far out as that is - serves as a foundation explanation for several concepts in both D&D meta-settings (Spelljammer and Planescape) you realize how deep down the fantasy rabbit hole this sort of thing can go.

[VoxRationis]

I'm having trouble coming to terms with how a D&D world even works. There's too many things in it for it to even begin to make sense.

Ageless immortal evils and goods (gods, powers, planes, etc) that apparently have no source or reason for existing (though we can't answer how our own world exists or why). Demons and angels have been fighting since forever, yet neither has won yet, and for whatever reason the material plane hasn't been completely overrun yet. Dragons have existed since forever, yet somehow the smaller races have come up from under them. Speaking of which, in a world of monsters, undead, demons and dragons, how the hell does a human come into being? How would they evolve up in a world full of scary evil monsters?

In most settings, in their present time, you have nations or empires of various races, all with their own territories, all dealing with invading armies of other races, plus undead, dragons, monsters, demon incursions, etc....why hasn't any one side come out on top and wiped the others out? That's how our world works.

Are they all separated by time and distance? Do the undead only pop up for a period of time every once in a while? Like, is the negative energy plane closer during some periods (ala eberron)? How come dragons haven't wiped us out or been wiped out by us (and how does a giant, flying, intelligent, fire-breathing lizard come into being in the first place)? Are they stuck on one continent for some reason, and occasionally come over to screw with us, but haven't done so in enough numbers to wipe us out for some reason? Can demons not get to our world on their own, yet somehow mortals can summon them? How? Gods exist, basically as powerful people, and are roughly balanced with each other, and have been so for a bajillion years, yet even they can't seem to beat each other? Then there's the aberrations down in the underdark. Yeesh.

How do we answer these questions?

I can handle one or a group of similar ageless evils bent on screwing up the world or any worlds that they come across. I can't handle the fact that they've been here a bajillion years and neither of us have won yet. What's the deal?

Our world is home to 500-lb. animals that run at 50 miles an hour, specialize in pinning animals to the ground and suffocating them by crushing their windpipes, and bear retractable claws on all limbs, and were present in the areas before we even developed our modern intelligence. Other animals on our planet can cause a human certain death within an hour with a single bite, or are covered in armor and leap from bodies of water to ambush and devour those forced by their metabolic requirements to approach the waterside. Our continued survival was not due to the ability to consistently defeat the top predators of our world for most of hominin evolution.

[Stellar_Magic]

Our world is home to 500-lb. animals that run at 50 miles an hour, specialize in pinning animals to the ground and suffocating them by crushing their windpipes, and bear retractable claws on all limbs, and were present in the areas before we even developed our modern intelligence. Other animals on our planet can cause a human certain death within an hour with a single bite, or are covered in armor and leap from bodies of water to ambush and devour those forced by their metabolic requirements to approach the waterside. Our continued survival was not due to the ability to consistently defeat the top predators of our world for most of hominin evolution.

Worst... We evolved in a world where the following existed alongside us.

• Smilodon - Sabre tooth cat didn't go extinct until 10,000 years ago... meaning we coexisted with them longer then we haven't.
• Short-Faced Bear - A bear that makes the Grizzly and Polar bear look small... and didn't go extinct until 11,600 years ago.
• Dire Wolf - A bigger meaner wolf... didn't go extinct until 10,000 years ago...
• Gigantopithecus - A 10 ft. tall upright gorilla.
• Megalania - A 20 ft. long Komodo dragon (twice the size of today's Komodo).
• Mammoths - Not just the wolly mammoth either, but the Columbian mammoth which averaged over 10 tons (5 times the weight of the average African elephant).
• Other Hominids - Modern humans are a combination of three distinct gene pools that blended together over time (Neanderthal, Denisovan, and Cro-Magnon [primary ancestors of modern man]) in addition multiple other human species were contemporaries with modern man: Homo erectus and Homo floresiensis (the Hobbit). This means that for a time there were at least 5 distinct sapient groups that could be classified as a 'race' in DnD on our planet... at the same time. At least three of them could interbreed.