So, you want to start your very own campaign.
Perhaps this is your first “world-building” impulse and you don’t know where to start, or maybe you have tried to build out a setting before and gotten overwhelmed. This section answers some of the basic questions and fears that may in your way. If you are an old hand at world-building, this section will help set your expectations correctly.
That is correct! This is a creative exercise, a way to get a campaign started. Hopefully it is just the beginning of something much larger. The results you get from working through the exercises each week will neither be perfect nor complete – and shouldn't be. The intent is for you, the GM, to develop the basic ideas and one small area of a new campaign world, then to stay a few paces ahead of the players – building the world out in the direction of their interests and needs as they telegraph them to you in play.
No one is standing over you with a headman’s axe. At the end of each week, if you aren’t finished, simply highlight the tasks you didn’t achieve and/or make a quick list of things you still want to do. Then, move on! There will be time to revisit the loose ends from earlier weeks after the final week.
I’ve heard that Ernest Hemingway stopped writing each day in the middle of a sentence – not because he ran out of ideas, but because he knew exactly how he intended to finish that sentence. When he sat back down at his typewriter the following day, there was no agonizing over where or how to begin. No blank page syndrome. He just finished the sentence and kept going.
The loose ends you leave behind will give your project energy and serve as scaffolding or spurs for future construction. Don’t think of them as things you didn’t get done; think of them as opportunities.
One of the keys to just about any creative effort is to make multiple passes over your material, each time layering on fresh ideas or adding the clarity that comes with hindsight. As you return to these loose ends/opportunities, you will find things coming into focus that were previously hazy. You may also find that you now have the perfect ideas with which to fill the holes you left behind. You will find that your world becomes richer and richer as you incorporate ideas from actual play events or newly discovered sources of inspiration.
Don’t. Choose a pace up front. Gygax seems to suggest a fairly tight timeline for doing all the steps – presumably a matter of days. If you have the energy to work in a focused manner for long hours at a time, go ahead and change the time-scale to 5 days instead of 5 weeks.
It’s more likely that you are working around the demands of a day job and will need five weeks. Or maybe you just want to spread out the work so that you don’t burn out and have time to really explore each step. If you find yourself finishing each step early, then do the “extra credit” assignments or review and tweak the work you’ve already done to make it better instead of moving to the next week. You might also invent your own exercises. Visit a museum. Take a hike in an area that reminds you of your setting. Do some extra reading to gather inspiration. What you shouldn’t do is flex your timeline. A flexible time scale can lead to treating deadlines as optional, which could in turn lead to failure to finish.
You will need this booklet and some place to store your ideas. I recommend a tough, physical journal. There is something really satisfying about working in the old school, low-tech mode of physically making marks on paper. Working digitally is also acceptable of course, and is easier in many ways. On the other hand, your workstation will be somewhat less portable and visceral than a journal and a grip full of pens.
Whatever medium you use, allow the process to be messy. Don’t try to make your first pass complete, fully organized, or even totally readable. Instead, commit to getting ideas down quickly and then revising them as needed to bring depth and clarity. There will be time later to make your notes presentable, if that’s your goal.
Get that idea out of your head for now. These exercises help you create a world for play, not for publication. Publishing is beyond the scope of the steps and advice in this booklet. However, the more you invest in this creative stage of the process, the more your material will find its “best form” for being communicated to others. Knowing which elements resonate with players, which things to introduce first or emphasize, and what ideas need further expansion are important steps in the journey towards a published setting. In the end, it’s largely your choice when and how you share your work. A better question is probably whether you have the drive to get from a set of campaign notes to a published setting. The “last 10%” of any project is 90% of the work!
The first stop for your creation, however, should absolutely be the gaming table. Play in your world for a while before you try to write it up for others to use. Actual play will make your setting far stronger.
The instructions in this booklet are based on the aforementioned article by Gygax. However, the steps for each week are self-contained and should be clear without any previous knowledge of the article, specifically, or world-building in general. Even so, I would encourage you to read the article. Actually, right now is the perfect time, as it will give you a bird’s eye view of the project before you begin.