Dungeon Master Tools – World Building

Let’s first start off by saying, read what I wrote on story arcs. It is here. And that is going to be the framework for this world building discussion going forward. Why, because it breaks it down and keeps it simple.

So let’s keep going with our example from there and let’s just recap it a little bit:

• Find treasure
• Fight Mid-level boss
• Learn about Big Bad
• Search for way to stop Big Bad
• Get information from wizard
• Find artifact
• Confront big bad

We start with find the treasure. And I broke that down even more.

• Find Treasure
  • Get party together and get quest
  • Find where the dungeon is and travel there
  • Explore dungeon

So now we’re down to “Get the party together and get the quest.” That is the point where you start your world building.

What Elements You Build

So, previously to this I talked about Session 1, you can find that here. And that gives a bit more context to this plan. The group gets a quest, they meet with the quest giver, they fight someone trying to stop them from going on the quest and they get more information about the location of the quest from an NPC. That is my plan for Session 1. And this is where I am going to pull out what elements I need to build.

I look at my description of what I want to do, I see two NPC’s in there. First there is the “Quest Giver” then there is the “Information Giver”. So I need to come up with stuff for both of them. I said in the Session 1 article, let’s have it be a bar where they meet the second NPC. So when I decide that location, that’s another thing for world building, what is the name of the bar. And I get a third NPC with the “Bartender”.

Next I want to ask myself some questions. Where do they get the quest? Where do they meet the “Quest Giver”? And finally, who do they fight? If I answer them with adventurers guild, their estate, and street gang, I now know a few more things for my world building, and that’s about it I need to do to get started.

Building The Elements

I’m going to give a couple examples of how to build. But we start at the top level and work down. And every element that I build is going to follow a standard format.

I want everything I do to have a pretty similar format. It doesn’t matter if it’s a location, country, NPC, they all are going to be pretty standard to try and make my life simpler as the Dungeon Master. I want to have name, defining feature, brief description.

Example – Quest Giver

Name: John Jacob Jingleheimer-Schmidt
Defining Feature(s): Snooty Aristocrat with too much time and money, also a triplet – all named the same.
Brief Description: He has a very fancy estate with lots of gaudy artwork, he himself is even more gaudy than his estate. And for a dwarf that looks out of place, but he doesn’t care and he is always talking about and showing off his wealth.

Example – Inn/Bar

Name: The Crooked Turnip
Defining Feature(s): Cheap as can be with a patronage that looks the same.
Brief Description: From the outside The Crooked Turnip looks like it shouldn’t be open and for a bar, it’s not that noisy. From the inside it looks like it’s just locals, people down on their luck, and the alcohol is the cheapest swill that you can get. If you order the pot roast, you’re pretty sure it’s just turnips.

And that is it. So let’s count, we have the quest giver, the information giver, the bar, the bartender, adventurers guild, estate, street gang, town, and country. I count nine total things that you need to come up with details on, and general details. I think a tenth might be the treasure’s location, but again, not in much detail. You don’t need to know what else is in town really. If you suspect your players will go shopping, as players do, then maybe a shop, and a shopkeeper.

Could you do more. Obviously, but the point is to do as little as possible. And to make it as easy for yourself as the Dungeon Master as possible. Plan what you need only and don’t overthink it.

Final Thoughts on World Building

You probably know the theme for these Dungeon Master Tools, keep it simple. And I want to keep on banging that drum. I love drawing out a good map, but is it needed for a town or country, not really. And if you want to draw a map, start the map with a shape of the country the town, and that’s it. As you add to the world each session build out more.

The final bit of advice for world building is let the player help. They decide to set-up their base of operations at an inn. They get to name the inn. Make your life simpler by only planning for what you know you will need. And everyone pitches in for those surprise elements of the game.

So what is coming next for Dungeon Master Tools?

• Combat
• Exploration
• NPCs/Social Interactions
• Meta Game and Players at the Table

And let me know if there are other things to cover as well that you want to know more about, or help with. I think that there are a ton of different things that new Dungeon Masters are curious about or that feel intimidating. So I hope that I can help make them clearer and simpler for you.

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Making Simple NPC’s

When I started out my first big homebrew campaign, I wanted to create a big world. You can see from my article last Monday that I don’t do that anymore. Instead, I really focus on trying to keep my preparation as simple as I can. Why, because there is a lot that can be prepared and only so much time to do it. And I think a lot of preparation could be done on the fly. The same goes with NPC’s, you can make them simply.

• Name
• Looks
• Quirk

That is it that you need for making an NPC. Now, that might seem a little bit simple, and it is really simple, but I’m going to give you a reason why I keep it so simple. It’s because you don’t know which NPC’s your PC’s will latch onto. Nerdarchy, for example, use an example where there is a bakery with a “good bread”. That is something that set that apart and made it important to the PC’s even though it wasn’t something that was planned. So when that bakery with the “good bread” ran into issues, the PC’s cared about it. Again, this throw away thing became important.

So Why Only Three Things?

I actually started with a fourth thing on there, their occupation, but now I don’t have it there anymore. There is a reason for that, because not all NPC’s will have a job. A backstory is very likely, but a job not so much. That is fine, some NPC’s give quests, others run shops, some become rivals and some make good bread.

But you don’t need to know who does that right away. Create simple characters that can be used anywhere. You then have starts to characters that you can insert into your story on the fly or before the start of a session. If John the burly human with a grey beard and is missing a finger matches what I need for a blacksmith, I can put him into my story. But John could also be a city guard, or a gardener, or a mercenary. I don’t need to know his job right away because I don’t know what I’ll need him for, for the players.

How Many Do I Need?

This is up to you, but really, you don’t need that many. But for some people, it’ll be nice to keep a bunch around. In fact, you can just create list of them on your phone or in a notebook, or stored on index cards just to pull out. I haven’t done this yet, but it isn’t a bad idea. I create a bunch of index cards and put them in a recipe case with dividers by types of NPC’s and just be able to pull one out right away. And turning out those three things, that is simple and you can make a lot of them.

But to start, make them on demand. Maybe make them before a session and put them into the recipe box when you use them. That way you start building up a collection of NPC’s. Then next campaign you have a seeded base of NPC’s who you can pull back out, you might need to give them another name though. Just update the names and you can keep a history of all the NPC’s who you’ve made.

Another Option

This is why I don’t have the index cards done yet, there is another option. And that is, don’t make them up ahead of time. Players walk into a tavern in my game, I ask them, what is the name of the tavern, who is running it, who is all there. Now they are helping me create a nice roster of NPC’s that they use.

Why do it this way? Two reasons, firstly it takes pressure off of myself as the DM. I don’t always know how much story I’ll get through. And that is just fine, but that means I might not know if I go to a tavern when I start the night. The other reason is now the players have more connection to the NPC’s. They are their NPC’s, the ones they create, and they will care more about what they do.

This is a bit more advanced. Now because it is that much harder, but because you need to trust your players and improvisation. You don’t know if they will make a gnome named Tilda to run the tavern or a half-orc named Tilda. Can you handle the difference between those two characters? Now they don’t need to be fleshed out, but it is trickier.

The Best NPC’s

So, is this the only way create NPC’s, no, these two ways aren’t. In fact, for a one shot, I will go into more detail. Why, because there aren’t as many. The main point of this is to give you ideas of how you can make NPC’s without exhausting yourself. Even as a more experienced Dungeon Master, I want to put the best game together that I can. But how do you balance real life and the understanding that it won’t be perfect to get playing fast. Because, the best game is the one you play, not the one you plan out perfectly, and that’s the same with NPC’s.

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So, the easiest way you can do that is to threaten the NPC’s family or something that the NPC loves. And with Weasel Bob, we know that he’s motivated by money. Or that he wants to get money for some reason.

The first, obvious spot would be to focus on the business. Burning it down, having it robbed of some particularly unique items are definitely good options. I think that a theft makes the most sense because you end up with the players still having a long term reason to keep Weasel Bob happy, to do more business, plus get back this item that will be important to the larger story somehow. But if you destroy the business, that might just cause Weasel Bob to drop out of the game, which would be a shame.

The other spot you can hit an NPC is family. And with Weasel Bob, I’m not sure that he’s married or that he has any kids. But in my version of him, he has some family that is left in a gnome town. His brother and sister-in-law were killed, and he has a niece left who is living with a family friend in a gnome village near the town, probably 4 days away by horse. Weasel Bob didn’t have that money in the gnome town, but he was good at spotting the true value of things, so he set his shop up in a big town where he’d be able to discern what more things are, and he sends money back to the gnome town to support his niece a couple of times a month and goes back to visit a couple of times a year.

There are a number of different things you can hint at to this story with the players, they can come back to town to find that Weasel Bob is gone for a couple of weeks, and maybe that’s when the store is robbed. It would cause the players to wonder where Weasel Bob is going, and probably lose some trust in him, but if they still like him, then, you can drop something happening to the niece, make the players feel bad and get a ton of buy in, because the players are going to want to do something better for Weasel Bob. I also think that there’s another story hook, and that’s what happened to his brother and sister-in-law. Because maybe they weren’t killed, maybe they just went missing or were presumed to be killed, but their bodies were never found, you can now create a story out of that.

So, while Weasel Bob might not have a wife and kids, there are ways that you can still interact with the idea of family or those close to him, so I think that having the niece there provides nice story hooks. Now, you don’t need to fully flesh this out, but it’s something you can think about when creating an NPC. It’s useful because you can start to work towards things. If you want, you can do two quests with Weasel Bob, the first being to find the item that was stolen from him and get it back, and start to hint that Weasel Bob leaves to go somewhere to do something he considers very important. Then you can drop the niece bombshell on the players and make the players have to deal with something having happened to the niece. Finally, you can loop back in what happened to the parents to the story. Though, you can really deal with the parents at any point in time as long as you don’t give away that they are Weasel Bob’s relatives. The reveal that the PC’s have met two gnomes named Mabel and Arthur when Weasel Bob finally tells them about his brother and sister-in-law, that would be a fun moment.

The main thing to get out of this, is that you can pretty quickly flesh out NPC’s and when the players have an NPC that they like, you can use them as quest givers and pull them into the story, and the players are going to be more apt to take those hooks. It’s not something I’ve been amazing at always, but it’s something that I hope to do more and to develop more in the games that I run.

So, what do you think of Weasel Bob, how would you use Weasel Bob? And how do you create NPCs?

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Or maybe by that, I mean, what race is Weasel Bob, how tall, what body type, does he have any distinctive physical features? Does he have any unique mannerisms. Now, these are things that I said in my first article about NPC’s that can be come up with on the fly for role playing the NPC in the moment if the players want it. But it’s also something that you can plan for if you know you have an NPC that you want to be important, like Weasel Bob.

Weasel Bob is going to be a fairly unique character, we’ve already gotten that he’s motivated with money and likes to have unique items. But he himself tries not to stand out. He spends his money on food, but that’s about it, and as a gnome, he’s a smaller person with a pot belly. So that also helps me know that he’s going to move slowly. He also has grey hair, so Weasel Bob has been around for a while.

His clothes are generally brown or grey, probably because that’s the color they were originally, not because they are dirty, but it’s hard to tell, because whenever you come in, he’s always dusting or sweeping. His store might be spotless, but he is not. That also means that he’s fairly particular about the people in his shop, and while he won’t openly say anything about anyone who is too dirty, he’ll pay more attention to them than if the person looks like they are neatly dressed.

But what most people notice as unique about him, is that his beard is long and braided in a Dwarven fashion, and that he speaks with a bit of a Dwarven accent. Though, you speak to everyone in the town, and he’s been around there for a long time, at some point in time before he must have been around Dwarves more then a mixture of races. But no one really knows, because he won’t talk about it, or talk about his life or anything all that much, but he loves to listen to stories about the items that he’s getting in. Those stories he’ll remember well and then pass along as he tries to sell an item, but ask him how his day is going, and you’ll just get a grunt in response.

So we’ll wrap up Weasel Bob next week, talking about family or relationships. This might not be information that the players get about Weasel Bob at first, but it is something that you can leverage later on if you plan it out now.

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In that article, I mentioned an NPC that the players had named Weasel Bob in my hypothetical situation. He’s a shop keeper, but beyond that I didn’t go into fleshing him out in that article at all. And that’s because I wanted to start fleshing him out here, and explaining the process that I’ve used, sometimes, for creating more meaningful NPCs.

When I start creating an NPC, first need to come up with a concept for them. A little bit of their information, but mainly focused on the key motivations of the character that you’re creating. We’ll delve more into their backstory as it becomes needed in the game, but for the start, you want to consider why a character acts the way that you want them to.

For Weasel Bob, I think that I’d make his main motivation is money. As a shop owner that makes sense, and with the name Weasel Bob, people are going to assume a little bit of a shady business character. But, Weasel Bob is instead shrewd with his money and always looking to make that little bit extra and finding ways to cut costs and save time so that his money goes a little bit further. He’s very much a no nonsense character when it comes to dealing with customers and haggling just doesn’t interest him.

I think to go with that, Weasel Bob is really motivated by having a lot of unique things. He’s running his business in such a way that it might not be as obvious as some of the big shops in town, but he gets people in his doors by having unique items and odd things that you won’t find in other shops. Whether those are all good things, that’s questionable, but if you want something that is rare and odd, Weasel Bob is more apt to have it, so people come to him first.

That’s enough to get going on creating some of the eccentricities of the characters that will make them even more unique. You could start with a mannerism or look, and I recommend doing those first on the fly, but if you’re planning out the NPC more so, I’d recommend that you focus on motivations first.

We’ll continue more with Weasel Bob probably later in the week or a little bit longer. Let me know what you’d do for your first steps in creating a well developed NPC. There are a lot of different ways to do it, so definitely find out what works for you, but this is a spot that you can at least start when creating more developed NPCs and fleshing out the world that you’ll be playing D&D in.

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This is a topic that I believe that I’ve touched on before, but I wanted to revisit it, because it’s been a while, and I think I wrote about it a bit more generally. Like I did with Greenfang and building out a town in Dungeons and Dragons, I want to go through the process of building out an NPC when I do it on my best days.

So let’s start out with, what is an NPC? An NPC is a non-player character. The players at the table are playing the PCs (player characters), and the DM is controlling the rest of the characters whom they interact with, whether it’s a shop keep, a quest giver, a priestess, or the BBEG (big bad evil guy/gal) of the campaign. Anyone whom the players are going to interact with and hear what they have to say is an NPC.

What do you have NPCs in your game? I touched on this some already, but the big reason is that it helps flesh out your world. If you have interesting NPCs in your game, you are going to have a world that feels more real and it’ll make the stakes of the story seem like they have more meaningful consequences. If the BBEG kidnaps the daughter of the shop keeper who the players always shop with and have gotten to know his family, that has weight for the PC’s.

Do you need to flesh out all of your NPCs? Yes, and no. You never know who the players are going to decide to follow and make important, so it’s smart to have some idea, but it takes work to make a fully fleshed out NPC. So, no, not everyone needs to have a full backstory, only the ones who are important. And that might mean that you have to come up with some of it on the fly, but when you see who the players are interested and interacting with, you can flesh out that NPC between sessions. And if there is an NPC that is going to be important to the story, you can flesh them out ahead of time as well. It would be too much work to flesh out an NPC every time.

What do you need to plan for a fleshed out NPC in the moment? Alright, so your players decided that the shop keeper Weasel Bob was going to be important and their main spot to do business, because he seemed like he was cool. They start asking you what Weasel Bob looks like and if there’s anything interesting about him. The important things to get started in developing your fleshed out NPC in the moment are going to be something about their look and something that they do or is unique about them. And you don’t even have to do all of this.

You don’t? No, you can ask the players to help flesh out an NPC in the moment. If they make the decisions for that NPC, it’s going to create more of a connection to that NPC as well. If you even have a generic shop keep who runs a generic shop and the players ask what the NPC is named, you can ask them to give you a name and what they look like and probably end up with a pretty good Weasel Bob. That also helps you know when fleshing out the character, based off of what the players said in the session, how to create a Weasel Bob that they are going to enjoy.

This technique works well in the moment when you want to have a bar with a number of people in it or to create a few important people in the bar. Have every player at the table go around and tell you about one person or one table full in the bar. Soon you’ll have a lot of characters that you can bring back into the game later and use again to create that richer and more vibrant world. And it means that you don’t have to generate as much content on the fly, because the players are helping to populate your world with NPCs.

So, now we’ve created a bit of a character on the fly in Weasel Bob, he, like I did with Greenfang is going to be the character that I spend some time fleshing out in future articles so demonstrate how you can spend some time and build out interesting and more fulfilling NPC’s in your game. Hopefully there’s been some useful information to grab from the article thus far on why we use NPC’s in D&D and how you can start to generate more meaningful NPC’s on the fly.

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Do I want to do another epic story like the first season of Dungeons and Flagons where things are going crazy in the world and there are plenty of plane hopping and epic travels around the world and seeing new places?

Or, do I want to do a tighter more defined story that takes place in a single location over a shorter period of time?

That’s somewhat what the second season of Dungeons and Flagons was going to be, though I was adding scope to it to tie it into the previous season.

Now, I’m not going to say that there are either of them better than the other in terms of gaming, but they are both two very different things. And I would say that you should check with your group or give some game ideas, but I’ve been liking the idea of running that tighter more defined single location or small area story.

Why might you want to do one or the other of them?

For the smaller story it’s easier for the DM and the players to keep track of what is going on. There are fewer crazy things happening, and fewer places to really track. There are also going to be fewer NPC’s. In a larger game you are going to have NPC’s from each city and town that they visit. With that though you are going to see a greater variety of characters for the players to interact with and are going to have to plan the story less, in my opinion, because you can always create a new location for what you need.

The advantage of a bigger game is that you can play the fantasy that people think of. People think of Lord of the Rings and Kingkiller Chronicles when they think Dungeons and Dragons and fantasy. They aren’t really thinking about a game that might be more similar to a Dresden Files book where it’s a more tightly contained story. However, if you think about it, Frodo and Sam’s journey to Mordor and getting rid of the ring would make a pretty boring D&D game, what Legolas and Gimli are up to would make a better game, so there’s a balancing aspect so you don’t have to rush through everything to make your characters the main story of the game.

So what do I want to do in my next game?

I think that I want to do a smaller scope game. I liked parts of what I was doing in Season 2 of Dungeons and Flagons, but parts I didn’t too well. The part that I didn’t love too well was the fact that I wasn’t always prepared enough for a small story game. I think that a small location game, I guess I should say over story, requires more planning and focus as I’ve mentioned above. And I was very used to winging it as I had some general beats through the first season I knew I wanted to hit, but beyond that, they could do whatever. The tighter game is a bit more focused and some might call it a bit more rail road, I would disagree with that assessment, but some people might say that. There’s a difference on limiting the location for the story and making the players doing certain things in certain order so the story progresses as expected.

What sort of game do you enjoy? Do you like the big epic game or the smaller game?

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First, I would say that you can’t truly make those moments happen. It’s going to happen naturally in your game, but you can try and encourage those situations. Whenever you have a huge aha moment, that might get remembered, but the ones that are going to be talked about are going to happen more organically.

Now, like any good organic garden, you still have to plan the seeds and tend it, this stuff doesn’t happen on it’s own.

So you can lay the groundwork, starting in session zero to encourage those fun moments. In session zero, when players are creating their characters, don’t just think about combat and what you’re going to do with that. Your character is a whole lot more than just swinging a sword for a lot of damage or shooting some crossbows for damage. And while you might have a martial character who really cares about combat, put ore into your character than that. They can easily not know social norms because they grew up with the sword being their best friend. Or maybe they have a very unique set fighting moves and sword preparation, but let your character be unique and don’t create Joe Soldier who has no personality except for hitting stuff with a sword.

Also, consider giving the character a signature move. Now, it might be in combat or it might not be. But in combat, maybe you are a rogue who uses a crossbow. So your special move is a dive and roll while firing and getting yourself in hiding. Or maybe you are a hopeless flirt and every single bartender that you meet hoping to get information from them.

Why would those things give you cool moments?

Because as the rogue, you roll behind the pillar and find a surprised enemy who is also hiding behind the game pillar, now what do you do? Or you are in a dark cave and you roll behind a rock outcropping and find that there are stairs going down, as you slowly roll and bounce down them. Or for the character who flirts every time with the bartender for information, it will be a running joke that they never get any good information and maybe you end up on wild goose chases (literally) because of some information that you’ve gotten. Or, what happens when the bartender flirts back, or when the bartender actually has some real information. The cheer that will go up around the table because it was actually worth it, people will remember those moments.

So, those are some things that are more player focused, what can you do as a DM?

First, keep combat interesting. While you don’t need to do something super special every time, make it unique from time to time. Also go with alternate objectives. Combat doesn’t just have to be about knocking heads. I’ll touch a bit more on alternate combat objectives, but if you want a good podcast on it, check out this one by Total Party Thrill. Alternate objectives in combat can be things like stopping a sacrifice from happening. Sure, you might lop off a few heads of the acolytes guarding the cultists, but will you get to the cultists before they finish their chanting in four rounds of combat. Or are you having to try and keep the villains away from the caravan that you were hired to protect. These alternate objectives will give some memorable moments and keep the combat feeling different.

Likewise, it doesn’t have to just be an alternate way to beat the combat, it can be a unique combat setting. Maybe you are fighting on a narrow ledge next to flowing lava. Now, you could give advantage for having the higher ground, because as Star Wars Episode III taught us, that’s important. Also, don’t take any more life lessons from Star Wars Episode III than that. That one has a clear idea of pushing someone into the lava, but you can make unique terrains. Recently I ran a combat where there were two different levels of the combat. A barbarian jumped down into a pit to fight some monsters while two other character stayed up top, however, some of monsters crawled up to them as well. That gives a combat moment that is different than it would have been before.

Then, there are ways you can do that out of combat. And the easiest way is to just have interesting characters. I need to be better at this personally, because a lot of the NPC’s, I’m coming up with them on the fly, so they aren’t always the most unique. Thankfully, I have a player who is good at giving me a lot to work with in terms of dialog and lies that he is telling the NPC’s, so that gives me time to build out the character that I came up with. But we had a fun situation, one time, that players will likely remember, where one of the characters had gotten to the shore of a pirate island, found a very flirty dwarf pirate captain, and they had to figure out as a player and for their character, how not to insult the pirate captain so that they didn’t lose their head. It ended up being pretty memorable, because fake in game flirting can be hilarious a lot of the time, just make sure everyone is comfortable enough with it.

What are some other ideas that you have to help those more organic moments of surprise and stories that people remember happen in your game? Have you used any of these before? Keep in mind, if you do use some of these ideas as a player or as a DM, there is no guarantee that you will have those really memorable moments, but some of these ideas might tease out more. And find what works best for your group, maybe you have modules that you like to run, and what your group really remembers is the big boss battles at the end, that is equally as good a memorable moment for your group, but figure out if it’s social interactions, weird combats, big combats, or shocking twists that your group remembers most and go from there.

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