worldbuilding blog: RPG posts
Worldbuilding Stack Exchange is a site for writers, gamers, and others who build settings and have questions about getting the details right. Questions cover a wide variety of topics -- astronomy, biology, chemistry, sociology, urban planning, creature design, magic, and more. Last month we launched a blog for the kinds of posts that don't really fit the Q&A format so well.
One of the requests from the community was posts about how, as a writer or GM, to effectively reveal the interesting details of your world, so you're not just presenting big blobs of exposition or confusing the heck out of people. Some years ago I played in a D&D game that did this really well (run by ralphmelton), so I've started a series of posts about what I learned from that.
Here are the first two: Revelation for RPGs 1: Setting the Stage and Revelation for RPGs 2: The Written Word. Future articles will cover NPCs (there are lots of people in the world who aren't your players' characters; use them well), player meta-game contributions (in this case an in-character journal), prophecy & visions, and geography, at least.
One of the requests from the community was posts about how, as a writer or GM, to effectively reveal the interesting details of your world, so you're not just presenting big blobs of exposition or confusing the heck out of people. Some years ago I played in a D&D game that did this really well (run by ralphmelton), so I've started a series of posts about what I learned from that.
Here are the first two: Revelation for RPGs 1: Setting the Stage and Revelation for RPGs 2: The Written Word. Future articles will cover NPCs (there are lots of people in the world who aren't your players' characters; use them well), player meta-game contributions (in this case an in-character journal), prophecy & visions, and geography, at least.