Five RPGs To Play If You Want To Get Better At Worldbuilding
If you want to dig deep into worldbuilding for your RPG (or anything else, really) these games are sure to help you get better at it.
People love RPGs for a lot of reasons. Some love the social aspect. Others love to figure out the best and most broken combinations of power. Some just love to have adventures. And then there are those who love the worldbuilding of it.
Most often, these are the GMs of the world. But, not exclusively. Especially since these days, there are more and more ways to get into worldbuilding, or to flex your worldbuilding muscles. If you want to get better at that side of the hobby, here are some games worth trying out.
A Land Once Magic
A Land Once Magic by Viditya Voleti is a hot new example of what a great worldbuilding game can be like. Using a deck of cards, something to draw a world map on, and the inspiration and imagination of you and your friends, you will create a world that is designed to get its hooks into you. Because you’ll create the hooks.
It’s a cool approach to worldbuilding that gets you thinking about themes, tone, and ideas as a sort of palette to then explore from and paint with. Every game plays wildly different, but that’s part of what makes it so good for stretching those worldbuilding parts of the brain.
The Quiet Year
This one is a classic worldbuilding game. In The Quiet Year by Avery Alder, you play as a civilization that’s survived the collapse of civilization in some form or another, and attempt to build something good in its wake. How many fantasy worlds have some kind of major calamity (usually related to the gods somehow)? Well, this is a game about picking up the pieces and moving on in the wake of that.
It’s a great way to imbue a world with character and explore it. Plus, by the time you’re done, you’ll have a map to play with and treasure.
Ashes/Cities/Stars/Worlds Without Number
On the more traditional RPG side of things, the Without Number series of books by Kevin Crawford have an incredible suite of worldbuilding tools. There’s customizations for every genre in the series, from fantasy to post-apocalyptic cyberpunk. You’ll also find faction building tables, guidelines for how the world might turn in the background once you’ve built it. It’s all about making a D&D-style world feel much more deep and vibrant.
And if that wasn’t enough, there’s a whole worldbuilding guide, The Book of Unnumbered Worlds in the works. It’s on Kickstarter now.
Worldwizard
Worldwizard by Jason Lutes, is a game that understands full well that when you’re building a fantasy world, most everyone’s first instinct is to start with the very beginning, and then go through the ages of the world in some grand saga that often touches on cosmological questions. Well, Worldwizard can be summed up as part Civilization, part Silmarillion, and it will help you do just that.
You’ll create a world and take it through four different ages, from the prehistoric to the “modern day” all the while adding all the good fantasy appendix at the back of the book style features, like regions, and terrain features, and civilizations, demigods, heroes, monsters, and major/minor events. And then you’ll get to see what happens when all those things come crashing into each other.
Stonetop
Finally, if you want an RPG that gets everyone in the party in on worldbuilding, I can’t recommend Stonetop by Jeremy Strandberg enough. It’s not quite officially out for physical retail yet, but you can get a digital copy now (and can pre-order the gorgeous books and maps as well).
It is a PbtA fantasy RPG is a masterclass at showing how specificity can just draw you into the world. I recently played through just the character creation portion of the game as part of the first session and already I know so much about the sleepy little town of Stonetop and its surroundings. But it’s not just that the game is full of specifics, it has a way of inviting you (and everyone else at the table) to make those specifics together that is intoxicating.
What are your favorite games for worldbuilding?
