When discussing world building online, I think a lot of the advice is a bit myopic for Game Masters. While I do think it’s interesting to think about the way your magic system works or how your governments are structured, I think these don’t do anything for your players. Having a good base of knowledge about how your world works is useful; however, constantly building new gods that your players don’t care about can lead to GM burnout due to the amount of work you’re putting in with little to no return. When we think about ways we can engage our players, the first thing we should be thinking of is the main method they can interact with the world. For TTRPGs that is almost always the conflict of your setting. From that conflict, you can then start to build the world out from that.

The only thing you truly need to work on before a campaign starts are your major conflicts. The rest of your prep work for the setting should flow out from that. For example, NPCs exist in the location to either be proponents of the conflict or victims of it. We would also consider the history of the location and how that informs the conflict that the players are experiencing. We need to be thinking about each of these conflicts and their locations symbiotically, thinking about how the current villain or situation is causing the location to change in a way that our NPCs would either agree or disagree with. We can then build out NPCs and factions that fight in the conflict.

The conflict is the defining factor in helping us navigate how our setting and adventure should look and work. Let’s use a published adventure as an example. In Curse of Strahd the main conflict for the players is that they are stuck in Barovia. The only way to get back to their normal lives is by leaving Barovia, the only way to leave Barovia is to kill Strahd. The problem is that when the players arrive, Strahd is too strong to fight. This conflict is at the heart of Barovia, the location, not just the character’s personal journeys. Barovia is a sad and horrifying place to live. If Barovia were a paradise where nothing bad happens then the players may not want to leave. If the players don’t want to leave, then they don’t want to defeat Strahd. Now, there are other reasons to dislike Strahd and want to stay in Barovia to defeat him. But that one decision, forcing the players to be in Barovia with no way out, informs how Barovia is built. If we want to build a location where the conflict has a lich who is starting to kill people for his undead army, we can use that to inform the location that takes place in. The people in that location might be honest, kind, and warm-hearted individuals so that when the lich takes them it’s all the more heartbreaking. It could be a brand new town, where the people are free to pursue a more subdued life, but the population being murdered demoralizes them. Making them believe that they can’t make it on their own and everyone needs to go back to a bigger city but to a worse life. The conflict drives the world building to ensure they both exist in harmony.

Understanding the conflict’s affect on the location is important. Another thing to understand is the people responsible for maintaining that conflict. In Curse of Strahd the answer is obvious, Strahd made Barovia like this. He has the power to make Barovia a better place, but he doesn’t want to for various reasons. When writing him, it’s important to understand the way he’s driving the conflict forward in the setting. Understand how involved he is in maintaining the gloomy atmosphere and trapped feeling people have in his country. Writing your villain is almost never wasted world building. Your players will be interacting with them at some point and feeling their affect on the setting is a great way to ensure your players still think about them, even when they don’t talk to them. When we go back to our small-town example, we might think of a few reasons a lich would attack this town in particular. Perhaps he sees the continued expansion of humans as something to be reviled. He could also have an attachment to a burial ground or a family who once lived in that area and seeing people use it to farm upsets him. What’s likely though, is that the town is close to where he does his business and it’s small enough that if everyone disappears no one will come to save them. Unless, of course, there might be some heroic players around.

Another thing to consider is what barriers stand in front of the NPCs in solving the conflict. These barriers can help us world build further. Curse of Strahd’s main barrier for NPCs is that they are not strong enough to fight Strahd on their own. They are also not strong enough to fight Strahd’s minions and the monsters in Barovia. The players have unique tools at their disposal to handle those barriers. We want to build conflicts that highlight what our player characters are good at. Putting specific barriers in front of NPCs from resolving the problem will help our players feel even more heroic. When thinking of our town that’s terrorized by a lich, we can think of a few things that make it difficult for the townspeople to stop the lich. Obviously, many of them are too weak to stop the lich by themselves. Another thing could be that the lich is actually hidden in a religious temple and has a town person working for him to help hide his presence. You can have this temple be for a god that one of the player characters worship, then they can easily recognize where the teachings are false. Another thing that might stop the townspeople is that the lich’s soul cage is locked in his chambers requiring someone who could pick such a lock to even have a chance at defeating him. Putting in these barriers can help us gather some ideas of how this town works. With the religious example, we could see a town that’s been overtaken by a new religion and believing the teachings of such a religion brings the people joy, so when the players arrive they have conflict of what to do about this false religion that the people like, but will lead to the town disappearing. Focusing on the barriers to resolving the conflict can lead to a lot of interesting ideas for the players to chew on between sessions.

The last thing I want to talk about regarding conflicts is that you should know what the resolution of the conflict looks like for your players and for your location. I feel it’s a very important and underrated bit of prep to understand how the NPCs react to the way the conflict resolves. It’s key to making sure the players feel the conflict has ran its course properly. Without it, I fear it may feel like the player characters were just fulfilling an obligation and the world didn’t care. Having NPCs give gifts or even simply thanking the player characters would go a long way to ensuring everything feels properly wrapped up. You also need to consider what the NPCs have planned next for the location, now that the conflict has been resolved. They should have been impeded by the conflict from reaching some other goal and now that the conflict has been resolved its important for them to show that more can still be done. If we think to our lich example, the people in that area would want to continue to bring more new people into the town. If it were a situation where the lich was hidden in a fake temple, the NPCs might have more conflicted feelings toward the player characters or they may ask the player character who worships that god to teach them the correct doctrine for a while. Either way, the NPCs should feel like they are more than the conflict they’re in and their goals should adjust accordingly.

Conflict can be a very powerful tool for world building and GMs should use that tool as the basis of creating an interesting and unique world for their players. There is merit to focusing on lore, the magic system, or the pantheon of gods you have in your setting. Those aspects can be important. In my experience though, the most important thing to focus on is the way the conflict we want informs the world we end up building. As such, I humbly ask that you consider giving this conflict first approach to building an adventure a try.