This article is a transcript of a seminar on world building put on during the Kickstarter campaign for Labyrinth Worldbook. (Out now!)
Hosted by Kobold Press Social Media Manager Zach Newbill, the panel featured Kobold Press CEO, Wolfgang Baur, designer Richard Green, and gaming luminary David “Zeb” Cook, who was instrumental to many AD&D releases in the ’80s and ’90s, and invented the Planescape setting.
The transcript has been edited for clarity and concision.
Wolfgang Baur: Let’s move on to to another area—choosing a theme. We’ve chosen an inspiration or historic period, or used the Hollywood filter. But what is the one thing you want people to walk away with? Why are they playing it? How do you answer that, Zeb?
Zeb Cook: I always start from: What do I want to do? Because I have a low boredom threshold, and I don’t want to spend six months writing a book that doesn’t excite me in some way.
So I start from that. But then it’s the next important filter is, “I think this is a great idea. Will anybody else agree with me?”
Wolfgang: Well, it depends on who your anybody-else is. Are you opening up a game for your local group? Or are you doing it for a broader audience? For some kids at a convention to have a good time?
Zeb: If I’m writing something just for my friends, I can get away with just about anything. Tell them, “Yeah, trust me, this will all work right.”
But if I’m doing something for publication, you always have to remember that you’re not writing a book for yourself. You are not creating a world for yourself. You are creating a world for a whole bunch of other players to play in, to take and use.
I’ve always wanted to do a steampunk or dieselpunk kind of thing. And every time I get started into it I realize I don’t know if I can get this to where enough people are going to think this is great. It’s such a small genre. Consequently, never done one.
Wolfgang: For me, what makes a world memorable is often the core conflict or the biggest threat. Like, who’s the big bad?
If you go back to compelling settings, often it’s the the villain or the threat to the world that is the part I get to play, because forever game master. If the villain’s not interesting, the setting’s not that interesting.
Zeb: What about you, Richard?
Richard Green: I like the villains to be to be interesting, and I like a good hook. I think also, when you pick up a new game or a new setting book, it needs to be super clear what kind of adventures take place in that world, and what the characters are going to get up to. What do they do?
When you pick up a new game or a new setting book, it needs to be super clear what kind of adventures take place in that world, and what the characters are going to get up to. What do they do?
I remember years ago buying Skyrealms of Jorune and thinking, “I don’t know what to do with this. It’s too weird.” And I think, having stuff where there are things for people to explore and interact with, and villains to fight is so important.
Zeb: I don’t focus as much on creating a singular villain, because then things can become too focused on that. Then you kill the villain, and . . . now, what do we do?
Wolfgang: Well, my favorite villains are cults and societies. Harder to kill.
Zeb: But also I always want to think about, what’s in it for the player as the character? What’s the character’s role in this world? Where do they fit? And what are they? What are the expectations that they can quickly see?
Wolfgang: I ran into this not that long ago in a computer RPG, Dishonored, which is a stealth game. It’s all about sneaking. I had just been playing all the first-person shooters in the world, and was used to blowing stuff up.
So my expectation going in was that I could fight my way out. However, my gameplay experience was not rewarded for for being bold and heroic. In fact, I was punished for being bold and heroic. I got arrested and killed.
But the minute I started sneaking stealth and climbing walls and stealing stuff. Oh, my goodness! That game started to shine.
So, spelling that out for the players, making it clear to them, “Oh, you will grow from pauper to merchant prince, or you will become a master of the arcane and rule the underworld—or whatever it is that the expected arc is—you should be explicit about it. Don’t be coy.
Zeb: Skyrim was was really horrible that way. “Hi! Hey! Here you are! You’re a complete blank slate. You can be anything, do anything.”
And then I realized that I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. The first time I played I spent like the first, four days of play wandering around, like, “Well, what what am I? Where do I go? What should I do?”
Wolfgang: That takes us beautifully to our next point, which is about conflict and what you do. The Midgard solution to this has famously been called the stacks of gunpowder.
We put hooks all over the Midgard Worldbook. Here’s conflict. Here’s something to do. Here’s something going wrong. No matter where you are in the world, you know what to do because it’s blowing up in your face. The spark of conflict drove those adventures, no matter where you were.
And I think Skyrim eventually gets to that, too.
Zeb: Yeah, there’s conflict there. It’s just a matter of digging it out.
The worst world building books that I have read, and I will not mention any names, are ones that are literally just lists of places and people. Here’s a town. Here’s a town. Here’s a town.
People get very proud of it. “Wow! I filled out a whole giant space!” But there’s nothing going on. They don’t spend any time saying like, this town hates this town over here, or whatever.
Wolfgang: You make a really good point. Conflict is the place in world building where it’s smart to design emotion into it. Who loves who? Who hates who? Who is jealous of who? Who wants to outdo their rival?
A lot of this is, is human emotion brought in. I want to show that I’m better than them, or I want to be the best at such and such, or I want the elves to return, because I love elves. All those kinds of motivation lead straight to conflict.
Zeb: And when you do that, when you come up with a guy who wants the elves to return, you should also think about who is opposing him? What is opposing him?
Then you’ve got conflict. You can send the players off to either group, and they can heroically help one group, cut shady deals, or whatever.
Richard: I like the possibility of players being able to join or ally with all these different groups, and and have some as patrons, or be enemies of others, or on the run from them.
The more connections you build between groups and nations and things, the better. I think in the Labyrinth Worldbook, we spent a lot of time building these factions that you can join, or be the enemies of.
Wolfgang: Vampire: the Masquerade is where I first became aware of how useful factions are in world building. But Planescape is where it really entered the fantasy space. And at Kobold, we’ve got a whole book called Demon Cults and Secret Societies, just because they’re so darn useful as antagonists, and hard-to-kill villains.
There’s a lot more to the seminar, but it was only for Labyrinth Worldbook backers, so it isn’t available on the Kobold Press YouTube channel.
If you want to see more of the transcript, let us know in the comments or in our Discord community!
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