On Constructed Languages

Just as Tolkien gave us our modern definitions of Elves and Dwarves, he also gave us on of the best examples of fantasy constructed languages. Since the beginnings of tabletop roleplaying there has been a long tradition of GMs and world builders making up languages. I'm writing this article about my experience with the process of formally designing and building a language. I'm going to try and avoid using technical terms as much as possible.

Background

Articles about Drakoni
Drakoni Race
Drakoni Mythology & Religion
Drakoni Caste System

Years ago I embarked on the traditional language-construction quest to build a Drakoni language as an outshoot of my work on Drakoni culture. More recently I put some examples of romanized Drakoni words in articles on this blog.

Below is an example of formal edict written in Drakoni and Elvish (in Teredahar, Elvish is the primary language of trade, thus English is used for all Elvish writing) modeled off of the Rosetta stone.

 
The same message written in Elvish and Formal (boxy) v2 Draconic. Click for romanization.

I have used Drakoni for a few years in my normal Pathfinder group's stories. The Frozen Kingdom only has a few examples of the Drakoni language so I could have just stuck with the same version I have been using (version 2, technically). However, recently someone with a formal background in speech and linguistics joined my circle of friends. She has agreed to help rework Drakoni as a properly-modeled, internally-consistent, and usable language.

Physically Speaking

The first step was just working out what sounds a Drakoni can actually make. For Mac's concept art I described the Drakoni as having crocodile-like features. Typically dragons are drawn with shorter, more iguana-like features. Various other fractional-dragon races are portrayed with wildly differing facial structures and different kinds of tongues that impact what kinds of sounds they can make. We had to settle on the shape and position of teeth, lips, and tongue and how flexible they are. In the end we decided that:

• A Drakoni's tongue is in-between a crocodile and an iguana. It's broad, flat, and unforked but long and flexible enough that all Drakoni can touch their noses with their tongues. They can make a wide range of tongue and throat-based sounds.
• Their teeth are triangular, spaced out, and stand in two rows such that some sit outside of the lips when closed. This makes sounds that use the lips over the teeth like "f" and "v" impossible to cleanly make and requires using a stiffened upper lip instead of the top teeth to make sounds resembling "th". As a result, these sounds are rare and sound "lisp-y" when made.
• Their lips aren't able to make an "O" shape. 

Evolution

Just as lifeforms change and evolve over time, so to does language. I'm assuming you know English if you're reading this (Hello, users of Google Translate) so I'm sure you know that languages pick up features over time mostly from other languages. For Drakoni, it was previously established that it evolved from an older Draconic language (no surprise there) so we started with what that older language was like.

Dragons aren't the most sociable creatures so it was probably very simplistic. Lots of hissing and growls and forceful words. This gave us an evolutionary starting point for the language of their smaller, more sociable offshoot race. Drakoni have ancestry from lizardfolk who are commonly depicted as being social, living in tribes, and doing trade. Drakoni doing similar would have evolved their language include more diverse sounds and convey more information. The swear words probably stayed close to the original Draconic, though.

Selecting Sounds

The next part is a bit arduous. I had to go through the 80-ish words that exist in v2 of the language and try to sound them out based on the newly-detailed understanding of Drakoni anatomy. This often involved sticking fingers in my mouth or holding my lips in different places to try and tease out what sounds you can make with those teeth and lips. I used the International Phoenetic Alphabet and Wikipedia's interactive sound tables to take a first pass at classifying the noises and then my linguist friend helped clean the data up.

Having clear IPA classifications meant we could now agree on how a particular string of sounds would add up to a word and how to speak words written in Drakoni. Not every language uses all of the sounds possible for its speakers to make, so we looked at anatomy again and decided that any sounds that might be possible but difficult to make are only found in loanwords taken from other languages. For example, we decided native Drakoni speech has an "n" but no "m" sound. "Magik" for instance in Drakoni is a loanword from Elvish.

At the end of this process we had 5 vowels and 28 consonant sounds. Three of the consonant sounds are made in ways that are less natural for Drakoni to make, so those are foreign sounds added to the Drakoni language over time. Knowing which sounds are common in the language and which are not is important when it comes to creating the language's vocabulary and written components.

In Part 2

Now that we know how Drakoni speak, the next step is to turn it into an actual language. In the next part I'll cover how the grammar, syntax, and writing system for Drakoni v3 were created.

World Building: Weaving Plot Threads

A good story never has just one thing going on. To make the world feel alive and add depth to the characters you'll often find that two or more things are going on in parallel as a story progresses. You see this a lot in books, TV, and film where the action jumps between separate but related groups of characters and follows them for a short time while they do something important before the story's focus moves on to a different group. At certain points these threads intersect but it can be a long time in between and when they do it's usually because something important is happening.

In interactive storytelling this kind of narrative structure can be difficult to pull off. Your audience are active participants instead of spectators, so you can't have the action move away from them to go focus on another group unless you split the party. As any good GM knows you don't ever split the party lest a truly horrible fate befall your campaign. Instead of pulling the focus away to follow other characters, telling these secondary stories must be done more subtly. Players will likely never get the full story of what's going on outside of their view, but they can get windows into it through interactions with NPCs, active information gathering, and times when the action of another story thread intersects their own.

There's a great example of this in the movie Shaun of the Dead: The protagonist Shaun and his three friends are fleeing a zombie apocalypse on foot when they round the corner of a building and run into another survivor who is an acquaintance of Shaun's and three of her friends traveling in a different direction. They briefly tell eachother of their survival plans and then the other party go on their way. The story is told entirely from the point of view of Shaun and his party so we never see what happens to this other party before or after their brief encounter. You can't help but feel though that they're the heroes of another story running parallel to Shaun's and wonder what will happen to them. Events like this are spread liberally throughout the movie, often happening in the background as the action moves past them. They're never directly focused on but they give the viewer an impression that there are other forces at work, other events going on, and that the world does not revolve around the central characters.

A typical way to construct a story like this is to have two main plot threads, the "alpha plot" and the "beta plot" and a plethora of mostly-inconsequential background events that are loosely related to the two plots but serve primarily to add flavour and make the world seem larger. Additionally, these plot lines may tie into an larger storyline, often called an "arc". A very well layered story may have several arcs weaving their way through several episodic plots.

Alpha Plot - The Heroes' POV

This is the story your characters are in direct control of. The alpha plot is their story and most of the events that they participate in should contribute to advancing and steering this plotline. When planning a campaign this plot will have the greatest level of detail and have the most possible directions for the players to choose. If you're playing episodically, this plot starts at the beginning of an episode and the episode ends when this plot is concluded.

Beta Plot - The Under-current

This is the story happening just outside of the party's field of view. It's driven mostly by NPCs and the side-effects of events in the Alpha Plot. The party get glimpses of this plot from time to time at points where it intersects the Alpha Plot. Often NPCs that are important to the Alpha Plot will be important to the Beta Plot as well, and probably know more about it than the players. If your story has villains of the scheming type it's likely the beta plot will feature a gambit of some kind that only comes to the forefront late in the Alpha Plot.

Arcs

Most long-running episodic adventures will have story arcs. These are much longer running pieces of narrative that individual episodes' Alpha or Beta plot will relate to in some way. A highly episodic adventure may have one or more story arcs as the only thing linking individual episodes together. An adventure with longer episodes (or chapters) may have several arcs interacting within a single plot. For examples of different kinds of arcs, I'm going to use the movie Snatch (apparently I have a thing for British comedy).

Arcs: Character Arc

A character arc is simply how one individual grows and changes over time. A well-constructed character arc will spans several episodes and shows the audience how the events of those episodes have changed the character within the parameters of their persona. A character arc might follow a young, reckless warrior through a string of battles (episodes) where he learns restraint, honour, and strategy and grows into an accomplished tactician. A different kind of arc might follow a cunning and manipulative leader as she gains rapidly power, only to fall from greatness into madness as her scheming pushes away allies until she is left with nothing.

In Snatch virtually every character undergoes some sort of arc, but the best examples are Mickey (the Traveller boxer) and Avi (the American jeweler). Both of them start off just living their lives, get wrapped up in either the Boxing Match Alpha Plot or the Diamond Heist Beta Plot, and end up significantly burned out and arguably worse off than when they started.

Arcs: Item Arc

An item arc happens when an inanimate object of some importance passes through several people's posession and impacts the story of those around it in some way. The One Ring from The Lord of the Rings is probably the best-known example. Its arc passes through the story of the War of the Ring, the history of Gondor, and The Hobbit, before finally becoming central to the Alpha Plot of The Lord of the Rings.

In Snatch the stolen diamond's story arc starts off in central focus but quickly becomes buried in the movie's tangled plotlines, driving the action only occasionally but always in a significant way, before ending up once again the center of attention at the very end of the film.

Arcs: Prophecy Arc

This kind of arc happens when something is foretold in an early episode and hangs like a shadow over the plot for many episodes to come. Often these arcs are the longest and can have profound influence on the plot as parties try to either cause or prevent the foretold event. When effectively used,  prophecy arc can fade entirely into the background but never leaves people's minds. Prophecy arcs are also the most likely type of arc to cause unexpected twists to happen.

World Building: Going to War

If story elements were a chess set, large-scale armed conflict would be the queen. It is one of the most versatile and potent tools available, able to provide background and framing or be a central driving force in the plot. This week I offer my thoughts on how to use war in a variety of ways and some of the pitfalls to be wary of when working it into your campaign. First, some words of caution:

Things to Avoid

PCs as foot-soldiers - Player characters do not belong with the rank-and-file of any nation's army. A character with 2 or more levels in a PC class is much more powerful than a conscripted soldier of any common race and will mop the floor with enemy footmen in battle.

Super-large battles - Going along with the above point, an infantry charge might involve dozens of combatants in the PCs general vicinity alone. Adjudicating a battle using the normal Pathfinder or D&D rules with that many participants takes an absurdly long time and puts incredible mental strain on the GM, not to mention crowding up the battle grid.

Hopeless Scenarios - Defeats happen. While a crushing defeat can be great for a dramatic storyline, being on the losing side with no hope of surviving isn't fun for players. Remember that as a GM your ultimate duty is to provide an enjoyable and engaging experience for your players. Your players should always be able to figure out a way to escape if they try. If your players give up hope, have an NPC or contrivance of luck ready to give them a way out.

Pointless Wars - Wars have causes. Armies have objectives. History may call a war pointless but for the people living through it on either side there is always a goal. Even an army of demons massacring everything in sight with no apparent goal or direction has someone at the top who knows what they're doing it for, and it's usually not "for the lulz".

Types of Wars

No two wars are alike, but they can be grouped into a few categories based on the scope of the action and the parties that are involved:

Border Skirmish - Two neighbouring states who are unfriendly start attacking each other. These conflicts are usually small compared to other wars and involve just two participating states. Often they are started by a perceived insult or provocation and end with no territory gained by either side. This kind of conflict is often used as a background element unless it grows into a full-on invasion.

Rebellion/Insurrection - Often called differently depending on which side you're on. This involves a small force attacking a larger force from within. It often lends itself to guerrilla warfare, espionage, and acts of terror by both sides. It can evolve into a regional conflict if either force gains allies. Of all the different types of war this is the one with some of the best potential as a central plot.

Invasion - One state attacks another state with a weaker army and manages to gain territory. The invaders may simply be seeking resources in some of the invaded territory or may be seeking to completely annex the state. This is often a very active kind of war with battles cropping up frequently as the invading army pushes into new territory. It can start as a looming background threat and suddenly surge to the foreground. A common dramatic plot shift is to have a sudden invasion completely derail the PC's plot train and have the fleeing for their lives until they get a chance to regroup.

Occupation - The part that happens to an invasion-type war after the invading army has passed through and claimed an area. Typically the invading forces will leave behind weaker numbers to quell any chance of rebellion. PCs in an occupied state may have to hide their identities and gather up forces to start a rebellion, or try to break through enemy lines back into their own territory. Resources in occupied areas are usually scarce as soldiers pillage the land for food and goods.

Regional Conflict - A war involving several states in a geographic region. These are the largest and most complex. Often belligerent states may have webs of alliances dictating who they attack and who they support, with the ever-present threat of backstabbing. This kind of large-scale conflict again belongs more in the background, as events are often simply too big and too spread out to give the PCs a significant part in them.

Player Character Roles in War

If you decide to have your player characters close to the action in a war, there are several roles they could take:

Elite Commandos - The most common role and for a good reason. Heroic characters performing daring operations behind enemy lines makes for an engaging and straight-forward plotline.

Lone Survivors - The opposite of commandos in a lot of ways; this role requires characters survive on their wits and skills. Stealth, mobility and subterfuge are key to evading enemy forces. Because of the power gap between high-level PCs and soldiers, this role is best reserved for low-level characters.

Messengers/Arbiters/Diplomats - The player characters act as go-betweens between important parties in the warzone. As messengers it is their duty to get valuable information to its intended parties in a timely manner. As arbiters or diplomats they must unravel the web of relationships between warring parties. These roles are best suited to roleplay-heavy campaigns as there tends to be lots of talking.

Neutral Parties - People not actually part of the war, but who choose to operate in a warzone. Arms dealers looking to make a buck, treasure hunters seeking to loot still-burning ruins, healers helping both sides, and scholars seeking to preserve culture and take records are some roles player characters can play as neutral parties.

Coming Up

I'm going to probably revisit the topic of telling war stories again at some point. Next week's article, At The Table - Big Battles, will be a counterpart to this one describing how to have a huge field battle if you disregard my advice and decide you really do want your characters charging across a battlefield with a bunch of infantry or cavalry.

World Building: Zoom out to Realm

A Realm is a geographic area that comprises several Regions. It may be the entire extent of an island or the territory of a single nation. Unlike a Region, a Realm's borders need not be defined by natural boundaries. Instead, a realm is usually defined by the people that live in it, their culture, politics, and the flow of resources. A single realm can be considered a self-sufficient territory that is able to produce food and common goods and consume those things within itself.

Gameplay-wise, the majority of a small-to-medium campaign can be played at the realm level. A typical realm is large enough to provide numerous adventure opportunities and a variety of terrains, while at the same time the cultural uniformity reduces the amount of time necessary to spend setting up new NPCs and settings. You can describe the look and feel of a town in this realm once and then while adventuring within the realm players can keep that look and feel in mind so that new towns don't require entirely original design. You may be tempted to make each town and location unique and that's excellent, but towns should be unique in ways that entice players to do things and explore them rather than just having a different style of buildings or different food.

Many of the principles that work at the settlement and region levels. Access to water is still a fundamental requirement for settlements, terrain types should still transition, and the speed of travel still dictates how large an area one government can control. However, as the map zooms farther out things become fuzzier:

Diversity of Resources

At the realm level the rules for deciding where settlements form start to change. Like any good game of Settlers of Catan or Civilization, access to a variety of resources is essential. People will go to amazing lengths to access valuable resources. Water still remains essential for survival, but it might not always come from coastlines or rivers. If there's ore in the mountains settlers may utilize glacier melt for water. Settlements in arid lands might tap underground aquifers or construct extensive viaducts to bring water to places where they want to settle. Areas in your realm that have resources like ore, lumber, or powerful natural magic will attract crafty settlers who make their settlements work somehow to tap those resources.

Trade Routes

The essentials of life circulate within a realm. Water, staple foods, meat, and building materials should all be produced and consumed within your realm. These goods usually won't all be found close to eachother though so they'll probably circulate by trade routes. Trade routes are the main arteries of any realm. They bring goods and information to and from far corners of the land. Usually there are a few large central cities that have markets that act as trade hubs. These will be the most populous and influential settlements in the realm.

Points of Authority

Cities exert influence over the territory around them. If you're building a nation-state there will be usually one capital city and usually a handful of provincial seats-of-power that follow policy from the capital. These provincial powers handle the actual administration of their surrounding regions and are usually the same cities as the major trading markets. If you're building a collection of related feudal states there isn't a capital dictating policy but the noble rulers may still share customs and values that dictate how people act. In the presence of external threats people from across a realm will usually band together to resist and preserve their common culture and way of life.

Evolution & Conservation of Detail

Evolution and conservation of detail go hand-in-hand. A realm is large enough that it's impractical to fully populate in one sitting. Additionally, you want to have lots of low-detail space to fill in with new adventures you come up with. Start with the region the players started in and add progressively less detail the farther from that realm you get. Regardless of how far from the players they are, you should have all major cities, trade hubs, and seats of power drawn on the map with major trading roads joining them.

Drawing a Realm Map

I don't have a super-simple grid-based system for this.

1. Figure out roughly the distances you want your realm to span and determine a map scale that works for you.
2. Draw large terrain features such as ocean coastlines, mountain ranges, and major rivers
3. Determine where resources like lakes, forests, farmland and mines are. These should be consistent with your starting region.
4. Place major trading cities in areas that are:
• On the coast if you have one
• Located very close to one one resource and not very far from others
5. If you're building a nation-state, choose one trading city to be the capital
6. Place adventure sites, towns and smaller settlements in the area around your starting region. Leave plenty of blank space to populate later as players explore the area.

Upcoming Articles

At The Table - Complex Skill Checks: Performing large, complicated tasks with a fistful of dice
World Building - Going to War: War is the backdrop for a great many stories. Bring it to the foreground.

World Building: Adding Racial Variety

Variant races are something that shows up a lot in various campaign settings and splatbooks. Sometimes they have different stats and special rules like the Drow Elves and Duargar Dwarves. Both of these races are adapted to the Underdark in D&D and more powerful (and evil!) than their surface-dwelling counterparts. Adding racial variety isn't just about making a more powerful variant of an existing race, though. It's also about adding flavour and variety to your world. People of the same race living in different environments thousands of miles apart are quite dissimilar in the real world, why should they be identical in your setting? This post is guidelines for adding variety without necessarily changing stats.

By far the simplest way to make a racial variant is to take an existing race and move it to an environment that's drastically different from what players expect. Elves are typically portrayed as living in woodlands and being in close touch with their homelands. What if instead they're living on arid steppes as nomads? These elves may have never seen a tree. Similarly, Dwarves are generally portrayed as living in elaborate stone fortresses carved underneath mountains, but what if instead they lived in grasslands? Maybe these dwarves have never seen a mountain larger than a small hill. Do they still live underground? Do they still build mighty cities or would they live in shallow underground dwellings more like Hobbit holes from The Lord of the Rings? If they don't live in mines do they still covet gems and precious metals? You probably get the point. This kind of free-form thinking is a great way to evolve a new subrace. Just start with one simple idea "Dwarves without mountains" and jump to whatever idea comes next. Maybe draw out a graph showing all the decision branches. Brainstorming exercises like this often benefit from writing every idea down no matter how poorly it fits.

Subrace Brainstorming Example

What follows was written as it came out of my head, as an example of brainstorming a subrace.

• Dwarf
• Lives underground in stone fortresses
• Often very insular and untrusting of strangers
• Covets gems and precious metals
• Loves beer 
• Speaks with Scottish or Gaelic accent

• Dwarves without mountains
• Do they still have mighty cities?
• More single-dwellings
• Above ground?
• Squat stone houses
• Underground?
• Burrows like Hobbit Holes
• Are they still insular?
• No. They're friendly and trade a lot.
• Do they still build with stone?
• Yeah
• They quarry it in open-pit mines
•  No
• They build from mud brick and timber
• Dwarven lumberjacks!
• Do they still covet gems?
• No
• What motivates a dwarven adventurer if not shiny things?
• They're a culture of storytellers. Young Dwarves are encouraged to see the world and return home with tales and artifacts of different cultures

I'll stop there. From this I can generate a subrace that I'll call Traveler Dwarves

• Traveler Dwarf
• They live in the grassy plains of central Ashdar, but a few scattered members of this race can be found in any city
• Their houses are similar to Human houses, made from mud brick and occasionally wood.
• They have frequent contact with outside races. They probably trade a lot.
• Living in the plains, they farm a lot. Maybe they export wheat to their beer-loving mountain-dwelling counterparts.
• Young Traveler Dwarves often join passing adventure parties to see the world, hoping to return with a wealth of stories and treasure.
• Communities are often protected by seasoned adventurers who have returned home

For this race I'd probably also change the stats to give them more charisma and make their favoured class be Bard. The key thing here is that culture decides stats, not the other way around. If they need no stat modifiers they wouldn't get any.

World Building: Zoom out to Region

If you followed the basic rules for a starting location described in my previous article, you should have a simple starting town with one or two adventure locations. You should also have named but not yet described a small set of nearby settlements to make the world feel bigger than it actually is. After one or two sessions, your players will probably have exhausted this small-scale starting location and be looking to visit some of these places they've heard about, or generally set out on a quest following the plot hook you've been dangling. Now it is time to zoom out the map and populate more of the world beyond.

The same rules as the starting-town still apply at the broader region level:

• Consistent access to water is essential for enduring settlements.
• Adjacent regions will have similar climates (though you can start transitioning to different ones at the region level).
• Conserve detail to just the areas near where the players are and where they will be going. Keep surrounding regions vague, but give them names and refer to them occasionally. 

Defining a Region

A region is an area defined by natural boundaries with a similar climate and terrain. Often a region will have one controlling power but it is possible for a region to be contested between powers or neutral and anarchic. A region could be as small as a single county or as large as a nation, but power isn't what defines a region; nature is. Example regions are The Shire and Mordor from Lord of the Rings, and County Cork in Ireland.
 
At the edges of a region the terrain and climate will begin to transition into that of the adjacent region. These borders can be distinct, like a river or the point where trees give way to plains, or fuzzy like the transition from foothills to low mountains. You may be tempted to create regions in a square or hexagonal shape, but remember that regions can be long and narrow or have long fingers reaching into their neighbours. For example a long mountain chain or fertile valley may be form a thin region between two others or protrude its neighbour, respectively.

Building a Region Map

At any scale beyond the starting town, it's beneficial to have a map. I'm going to describe one map-making technique here but feel free to experiment and find what works for you.

1. Start with a hexagonal grid. The centers of each hexagon are one hour's walk (approximately 3 miles for most characters) apart. If your players have access to faster means of travel (horses) and/or the region is sparsely populated, you may want to make the distance between hexes greater.
2. Place your starting town in the center of the grid. 
3. Figure out how large your region will be. This is purely a matter of taste and how much time you want to pass as your characters travel. In real life dry, flat regions such as plains and deserts tend to be much larger than mountainous or rainy regions because there are fewer natural barriers. A messenger on horseback riding from the seat of power to a county's farthest outpost might take three days, but how far he travels in that time depends on the terrain and climate. Often a lord's ability to rule an area is directly impacted by how long it takes for messages to reach the entire area. 
4. Decide what the natural barriers and neighbouring regions will be, and mark them on the edges of the hexes that will be the border. Remember your starting town doesn't have to be in the center of the region.
5. Starting from the edges, mark each hex with what biome it is (forest, plains, swamp, etc) and any distinctive features or settlements. Remember settlements are usually near water. This is the step where you decide where those named places from before are actually located. They may be located just outside of this region's borders as well.
6. Create a network of roads. Typically roads radiate outwards from cities towards other cities (even in other regions), with forks going to smaller towns, castles, etc. Roads go around obstacles such as bogs and hills, potentially veering significantly.
7. Remove the hex grid and add as much detail as you like. 

Example Region

Here is a map of the Red Hills region in the nation called Din from my Teredahar setting.

Upcoming Articles

At The Table: Agile Fighting - Let your agile characters perform tactical acrobatics and parkour-style movement in combat.
World Building: Adding Racial Variety - Surface-dwelling German-accented Dwarves? Hell yes.

World Building: Starting a World Book

A World Book (often called a Campaign Bible) is exactly what it sounds like. A book of your world. It describes the people, places, and things in the world and provides a way to organize your thoughts. It's not something your bring to the table (usually) but rather a resource for preparing adventures. The structure of a world book should be well-defined, with sections divided by subject matter and a regular template within each section. You don't want to spend all of your planning time rummaging through disorganized notes.

A World Book can take many forms. It can be a simple notebook with pages between sections left blank to fill in later, a 3-ring binder, or even an online wiki. What medium to choose largely depends on personal preference and how much exposition and detail you want your world to contain.

Sections of a World Book

There are four major sections of a World Book: People, Places, Things, and Events. Each of these sections can have subsections, but try not to divide any deeper. Nothing needs to be written out long-form; every section can just be full of bullet-point notes. See the examples section at the end of this post for some excerpts from my own World Book.

People

There's going to be two definite subsections to People. The first is Peoples. In the Peoples section you describe each race's ethnic traits, religions, and cultural history. The second section is Important Individuals. These are the important players in your world, past and present. Describe their physical traits, achievements, and legends that may have appeared around those achievements.

Places

Primarily this section is interested with describing the regions of your world. Focus on background details like climate and geography and then start thinking about territories. At the highest level of detail a page in this section might outline a nation-state including its climate, people (referring to the People section), imports, exports, and political/military situation. This section is part of a feedback loop with your world map. The map creates natural barriers and biomes that form the basis of territories, which in turn inform where on the map you draw borders, roads, fortresses, etc.

Things

This is a bit of a catch-all, but most importantly this section describes technology. How does the complex interaction of magic and technology play out in your world? Who makes the best weapons in the world? What do the armies of the richest nations equip their soldiers with?

Events

History should be spread throughout your World Book where appropriate to help describe things. This section is for describing the world-changing events that shape the course of your world's history and influence everything that happens after.

Examples from Teredahar

Example of a detailed cultural history

The Psionic Peoples
Sometime around TR 8000 the Illithid race began expanding their domain in the deep subterranean of Tereredahar. Their conquests brought them a vast number of new peoples to consume or enslave. They already had Gith slaves since before coming to Prime. The Drow make poor slaves, but the dwarves and humans they found in their midst proved quite suitable. Modern Illithid society in The Deep and on the Astral Plane was built on the backs of legions of human and dwarven slaves.
In addition to simple slave labor, members of the Prime-native races were subjected to scientific experimentation. It was the survivors of these experiments who became the first psionics. They would come to be called Wilders. The trauma of their ordeals became a source of power then turned to rage against their captors.
Together with a force of natural-born sorcerers, the wilders staged a slave uprising and overthrew their masters. They fled deeper into The Deep to hide from reprisal and there began to study their powers and form a society. They called themselves the Deep Covenant.
With the help of the Deep Covenant more slaves where freed and more psionics joined their cause. The generation of formally-trained psionics were called Psions. In time they became the majority among the Deep Covenant. In time different ideological groups broke off from the Deep Covenant and chose to live elsewhere in The Deep and on the surface of Teredahar. They are Dal'Hellum, The Deepstalkers, and the Wind People.

Dal'Hellum

• Comprised almost entirely of Duergar (deep dwarves)
• Largest population is under Ashdar in the Upper Deep and in some mountainhomes, most notably Kor's Geode, where they overthrew the Mountain Dwarf ruler in TR 10080
• They're known to be sneaky and cunning
• They practice an ordered, logical training regimen that makes them good soldiers when they choose to act openly (which is infrequent)

Example of a Nation-State

The United Republic of Din

• Boundaries (neighbours): The Pale River (Kurudar), Balsom River (Koldar), Koldar River (Ashdar), The Dragon Ocean
• Primary inhabitants: Plains Dwarves, Hill Dwarves, Humans
• Biomes: Coastal lowlands, swamp, volcanic wash, damp coastal islands
• Climate: Temperate with humid summers and rainy winters
• Political: Elective representative republic. One of the few democracies on Teredahar.
• Largest Settlement: Dolvan Keep, a large city built around an old fortress. It is the seat of government and a major north-south trading hub, particularly for the export of refined metal ingots.
• Exports: Raw and worked metal, lumber, fish
• Imports: Food, textiles, magical goods

Example of a piece of technology

Powerstone Cannon

• A typical powerstone shell is a rough sphere, about 8" wide. Some are larger or smaller.
• Powerstone shells are very prone to breaking (and exploding) if damaged
• They handle blunt impacts ok, but if hit on a point will shatter
• Before the invetion of metal jackets for the shells, the cannon barrels had to be completely smooth to avoid breaking the shell in the barrel
• Metal jackets have led some weaponsmiths to experiment with rifled-barrel artillery pieces

World Building: Where to Begin

Start Small

You probably have grand ideas in your head about what your campaign world will be like: cities floating in the clouds, fierce battles, golden plains of wheat stretching to the horizon, things like that. That's good but thinking about such things before pencil hits paper is just going to give you too much to worry about too soon.

Focus on just a single location where your first few play sessions will take place. The GM guides are a great resource for setting up a single coherent location. I recommend this location be a settlement with a nearby adventure. This kind of "starting town with a haunted mine" seems cliche but there's a simple reason it turns up everywhere: It's easy for both the GM and the players. Everyone knows what to expect which means you can focus on getting used to your players and new players can get used to the game. The guidebooks will help you handle the mechanics of a town and the first adventure site, but the look and feel of the place is still up to you.

A Basic, Believable Settlement

...Just add water. Seriously, assuming your setting is using the pseudo-medieval background expected by most game systems then access to water is an essential first step in creating a town. A river or lake provides drinking water, irrigation for crops, a way to move goods, and a source of food.

...Heat/chill until ready. The next consideration is climate. Human civilization springs up in virtually every place with sunlight and access to fresh water, so this is mostly just a flavour decision. Choose carefully though, because no climate exists in a vacuum and when it comes time to zoom the map out and create surrounding areas it will be your job to make the terrain believable.

...Season to taste. Now that you know the climate of your settlement you can actually create the place. I highly recommend basing your settlement on real-world examples from similar climates. Earth has examples of people living in virtually every environment imaginable and reading about places like yours will help you get a clear mental picture of what the place looks like. Once you have that picture in your head you can shape it to fit what you have designed on the mechanical side (races, population, etc) and use that image to describe it at the table.

Conservation of Detail

Now that you have your anchor town as a dot on the map, it's going to be very lonely without some more dots. Good storytelling makes the world seem bigger than just what's on the page. Consider some of the dialogue from the first act of Star Wars: A New Hope. On Tattooine the characters throw out location names like "Anchorhead", "Toshi Station" and "Mos Eisely" in casual conversation, but only one of those places is ever visited in the main storyline. It's good to have such places just for some NPC to say they're from there, have news arrive about there, or just give the players new places to think about once they're settled in your starting village. Just don't get carried away.

Conservation of Detail is about making the areas near the players feel alive and populated without having to design everything up-front. Travel in medieval settings is usually very slow. Few people ever travel beyond the borders of their own county much less to the next nation. What this means for you is that only the area within a few miles of your settlement and adventure site needs to be fleshed out. If there are mountains in the distance, draw them, and if you want a well-known major city in the same region as the players you should know which road leads there but not necessarily where it is.

That's all that's needed to start a new campaign setting. If your players like it there will be more work to finish when they leave the first settlement & adventure site.