In this installment of my monthly writing-books review, I’m looking at a few different guides to worldbuilding. Several of these were designed for science fiction and fantasy novel authors, not for games writers, but some are useful in this territory as well.
Kobold Guide to Worldbuilding (free PDF) is indeed written by and for game designers — though sometimes about tabletop RPG design rather than video game design. Still, the tabletop context is relevant to video games.
As anthologized guides go, it’s more varied and less systematic than some. Some sections are essentially post mortems on past projects that might or might not prove particularly relevant to your own process. Others go into detail about the many different sub-flavors of heroic fantasy.
At some points, the contributors are even philosophically at odds. Contributor Monte Cook argues that game world design is fundamentally different from novel world design because you’re looking for enough setting material to drive dozens or hundreds of stories, not just to support a single one. (“…for an RPG, Middle-Earth doesn’t need Sauron; it needs five or six, all in different locales with different motives and goals…”) Later in the book, Wolfgang Baur disagrees, accusing Cook of Kitchen Sink Design.
Quite a lot of the content here is about why you need world-building — what it can accomplish, and how it contributes to genre and the generation of story possibilities — than the how. Steve Winter’s chapter even gets into the question of why monotheism isn’t a popular choice for RPG backgrounds even when so much of the rest is often loosely western medieval.
But there are how chapters as well. Jonathan Roberts makes a pitch for the value of a good map, but then also takes us through an illustrated step-by-step process for layering in geographical features, biomes, nations and smaller landmarks. Other chapters cover , topics as specific as “How to Design a Guild” and “Designing Mystery Cults.”
Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling 