Want to create an entire world?

Sounds intimidating, doesn’t it? Particularly if you look at published campaign settings: Hundreds, often thousands, of pages dedicated to describing a fictional reality. Your first session is on Saturday! You don’t have time for all that!

Of course, you don’t need to do all of that to start gaming in your own setting. A detailed breakdown of the dialects spoken on the Triskan sub-continent might be really fun to explore, but are probably not strictly necessary for a new campaign taking place in the Sasharran archipelago.

But what’s the minimum amount of stuff you’ll need before the game begins?

In my experience, three to six pages.

Let’s break down what those look like.

THE MINIMAL PREP PACKET

Start with 1-2 pages of broad detail about the world. The goal of this high-level summary is to provide context for whatever local scene your campaign will end up starting in. The exact nature of what this overview looks like will vary based on the setting, your preferences, and probably the campaign you’re planning.

For my first D&D 3^rd Edition campaign, for example, I wrote one page summarizing the five major empires of the Western Lands (one paragraph per empire). Then I wrote a one page timeline of the setting’s history.

For an urban fantasy campaign, on the other hand, you might do one page on the true nature of magic and another page on the major fey factions.

Whatever this content ends up needing to be for your campaign, though, keep it to no more than two pages.

Tip: Make sure to include a calendar, if the setting needs that sort of thing. You’ll want to be able to talk about the passage of time in concrete ways.

Next, what do the players need for character creation? In D&D, for example, this includes the gods (because clerics need to pick their deity) and languages (because everyone needs to pick those). So do another 1-2 pages on that.

Finally, we’re going to aggressively zoom in and focus on the local setting. Obviously, you’ll need to start by deciding where the first adventure of the campaign is going to be set.

• A major fantasy metropolis?
• A village on the edge of civilization?
• A lunar space station?
• A lich-infested Rome?

Exactly what you’ll be prepping here will depend on the exact nature of the setting, but once again your goal is 1-2 pages of broad context that will give you a foundation for developing and improvising as needed.

Some things that are often relevant:

• Enough detail to describe local navigation. For a city, this might be a breakdown of neighborhoods. For a village, it might be the local roads (where do they go?) and terrain features (the Old Forest, the Trollfens, etc.).
• Who is politically in charge? Whether that’s a local authority (e.g., the mayor) or a distant one (e.g., Tsarist border patrols periodically pass through the region).
• What are the local factions? These might be businesses, criminal organizations, social organizations, ethnic groups, civic institutions, etc.

Your goal here is not to be comprehensively encyclopedic. It’s okay to say “there’s a city council,” for example, without specifying every individual councilor. Or to name one or two councilors while leaving the rest as a tabula rasa for later development.

Check to make sure that you’ve provided common resources that the PCs will go looking for. In D&D, for example, that would typically include:

• The local store(s) where they’ll be able to buy supplies;
• An inn or other place for them to stay; and
• A tavern, as a default social destination and/or rumor distribution center. (PCs just love going to taverns.)

A quick way to make your setting feel unique is to look at the essential functions being provided here and, instead of using the generic solution (general store, inn, tavern), coming up with creative and unusual solutions. For example:

• There is a strange, steampunk machine in the middle of the village. Insert gems or precious metals and it will deliver, within 2d12 hours, the items you request.
• The village doesn’t have an inn, but the PCs can find beds in the abandoned — and very, very haunted — military barracks on Blood Hill.
• The locals socialize in a dreamhouse or nobhill, gathering at night in their dreams while they sleep.

With these three parts in place, you’ll have your 3-6 pages of prep. From this point forward, the setting will continue to expand as:

• The players create characters and you/they need to start answering specific questions about where they’re from, etc.
• When you create your first adventure.
• When you create your second adventure.

And so on.

MAPS

While working on this initial material, you may find it useful to do some maps. To keep things brief, I have a couple of tips for this.

First, if you can get away with NOT doing a map, skip doing the map for now.

Second, if you’re doing a map, keep it sketchy and try to keep it at roughly the same level of detail as your minimal prep packet.

For example, when I did the first map for my Western Lands campaign I sketched a coastline, a couple mountain ranges, and the borders of the Five Empires. I eventually added regional maps with more detail, but I was still using that original map with very few additions more than ten years later.

You need less than you think.

THE PLAYER PACKET

The other thing to note is that the 3-6 pages you’ve written up can almost certainly, with perhaps just a teensy bit of editing, double as the players’ briefing pack for the setting.

Not only does it cover everything they need to know, it’s conveniently almost the exact length (5 pages) that I generally find to be the maximum amount of extracurricular reading I can rightfully hope that players might be willing to do before our first session. (Or, failing that, it’s short enough for them to parse at the table.)

THE FIRST ADVENTURE

An important thing to understand is that none of the material I’ve talked about here is part of your first adventure. What you need for that first scenario is separate from this foundational setting material.

If you’re a first time GM trying to figure out what your scenario should be, you might want to check out:

• Prep Tips for the Beginning DM
• Prep Tips for the Beginning GM: Cyberpunk
• How to Prep a Module

There are a wide variety of scenarios you might choose to launch the campaign with. Regardless of what type of scenario it is, though, it’s virtually certain that it will add more detail to your setting. For example, if it’s a murder investigation involving the Hephaestus Corporation… well, you’ll be adding a lot more detail about Hephaestus to your faction notes.

This is good! As I mentioned above, your homebrew setting will naturally expand through the scenarios you run in it. This is, in fact, the most efficient and arguably the best way to build a setting.

Of course, the amount of setting material you’ll need to prep for this initial scenario (and later scenarios) can vary quite a bit. For example, if you’re setting up a hexcrawl for an open table campaign, then you’ll prepping A LOT more setting material before the first session. If it’s a simple 5-room dungeon, then you might be adding very little.

Either way, you’ll have taken your first steps into a brand new world.

Your world.