Chaotic Worldbuilding

 

  I have been playing Dungeons & Dragons for more than 7 years now, playing through multiple of the D&D campaigns. I had never played any tabletop role playing games before, and seeing all the maps, magic items, monster, and reading so much lore made me realize that there were people out there who's job it was to come up with these fantastical things. This realization was the spark for me to start creating my own homebrew content, but it was also the start of a long lasting struggle to keep organized. In this blog post I want to show the method I found to keep track of all the stuff I am creating, but I do need to get into a little background first. 

 

 Hex map created with Hexographer

 

 

 

 

 After my group finished our first campaign I took over the role as our Dungeon Master, and I decided to immediately start playing in my own entirely homebrew campaign setting. This was a mistake. Mostly because said setting was at that point almost entirely non-existent, and I vastly underestimated the amount of time it took to create literally everything in this world. 
 I started the campaign of strong (I'd like to think so at least) with a dungeon I had created. A large stone tower that suddenly grew out of the ground the previous night, including puzzles, lava pits and several monsters. It was a good hook into the adventure, and the tower was a small enough project to keep me from feeling too overwhelmed. However, having to create the whole world and playing regular sessions in it at the same time proved to be too much pressure. I think we played a couple more sessions in this first attempt at world building, but the lack of coherent story and the the mountain of prep work for each session made it clear that I had to find a different way.

Aftermath of a fight with an evil tree.

 For my next attempt I decided to make it a bit easier on myself. I started running a Curse of Strahd campaign and I planned to adept the adventure where I thought necessary. In my opinion, a lot of the official D&D campaign books have a lot of room for improvement. I understand that they are written for as wide an audience as possible, but this leaves the adventures very bland and random at times. I wanted to practice my worldbuilding by working on these issues by adding lore, maps and items that would make sense for my adventuring party. This was still quite a lot of work, but the fact that I had a whole book to fall back on made it a lot more feasible than my first attempt. Something else that helped me out a lot was the Curse of Strahd Reddit page, and more specifically this guide written by MandyMod. This guide talks about where the original story falls short, how it can be improved and more importantly why it needs to be improved. This wasn't just useful for me running the campaign, but I learned so much about the thought process of making your own homebrew content. So much so that I felt confident enough to continue the work on my own setting again. Someone else from my group took over the mantle of Dungeon Master, leaving me with more time for homebrewing.  

A town I created for the Gygax 75 Challenge

Now that there wasn't any pressure from upcoming games to keep me working on this I was scared that my motivation would fizzle out. I came to the conclusion that I needed some sort of tool or method to help myself in creating this campaign setting. Looking around online I stumbled on a rather neat booklet called The Gygax 75 Challenge written by Ray Otus. It's based on an article by Gary Gygax on how to create your own world to play D&D (hey! that's exactly what I need!) and Ray Otus transformed this article into a 5 week challenge where you create a part of the world each week. The first tasks are about writing down your sources of inspiration and a pitch for your players to "sell" the world to them. In the following weeks the tasks slowly get more specific and granular, and I found that in the fourth week I was very happy with the progress I was making. The tasks really helped me to find structure in this daunting project and striking them off my list was very satisfying. 
 But then came the fifth week. I remember reading through this week's tasks and feeling completely overwhelmed. One of the tasks was to 'Develop a pantheon of gods and powers'. I closed the booklet and didn't touch it until now when I'm writing this post, a good three years later. I am partially joking obviously, because I really do like the booklet. I just felt the fifth week was a bit more work than I could handle at the time. I would still highly recommend it, because it really is a great tool to help you get started. It helped me to do just that.

 At this point in time in real life I had just learned that I have ADHD and one of the symptoms is having difficulty with organizing. This certainly has been the case for me for as long as I could remember, and it was a big reason for me not finding the right way to organize my worldbuilding. Whilst being diagnosed for ADHD I stumbled upon an organizing system called Bullet Journaling. It's basically an agenda, to-do list, a journal and tracking tool all in one notebook. I decided to give it a go, because I read a lot of people with ADHD found it very helpful. At the time of me writing this I have been using this method for 3 years, and I honestly think it has changed my life. My life had never felt more structured and the fact that I was doing all the organizing myself was incredibly empowering. So, I decided to use this Bullet Journaling technique for my setting to help me keep track of everything.

I added a colors for different themes
 (maps, magic items, NPCs, etc.)

I'm going to try to explain the technique briefly. You start with an empty notebook, I am using an A4 sized

 book with plain paper (no lines or grid). The first thing you create at the very beginning of the notebook is an index. Every time you start using the next page of your notebook you number it, and write down whatever you created in the index. Do not think about what order your notebook should be. If you have an idea for a cool dungeon, go to the first blank page in you notebook and make it. The index will help you find it whenever you want to use it or expand on it. 'But what if I want to continue working on something, but the page is full and there is no empty page directly after it?' I hear you asking. On the page of what you want to work on, write down the page number of the first empty page and continue working from there. Like this you are creating the analogue equivalent of hyperlinks in your notebook. There might be a crazy multi-layer dungeon followed by a description of a funny NPC shopkeeper, or a list of cursed magic items to torment your players followed by the map of a small coastal town, but with the index you will always be able to find what you are looking for whenever you need it. 

The orange dots are links to other
entries in my notebook

 Flipping through my notebook it might look like it is absolutely random, but I can find what I need in a heartbeat. But that isn't even the best part. The best part of this system is that I can work on whatever I want to work on. My ADHD let's me get into hyperfocus, where I can work for hours on one very specific topic. However, I cannot control what subject my hyperfocus latches onto, and a rigid system can completely block me from working on anything at all. This is why 'Chaotic Worldbuilding' works so well for me. Ideas can pop up at the most unexpected moments, and the ability to put them to paper immediately and still be able to find them with these 'hyperlinks' is extremely valuable.
 These 'hyperlinks' can come in handy in another way too. Let's say you are writing a dungeon where your players can find a magic item you created. In stead of writing the description of the item on the same page, you can just write down the number of the page where you elaborate on it (probably on the same page with other homebrew magic items!). I am adding these links al throughout my notebook, so that I don't have to repeat my writing, and I can flip through the notebook and find more information if I need it. 

I am absolutely in love with this system, and I hope I am doing it justice with my explanation. It is a very analogue system, and it might seem very quaint in this digital age, but I am a very analogue kind of person and it just works very well for me. I have tried so many digital organizing tools and they did not work for me. I have used countless of notebooks that ended up in some cupboard never to be used again. This system allows me to keep track of all my homebrew stuff, and it is working so well for me. If you want to give it a try and need more info, look up Bullet Journaling. 

Thanks for reading all the way to the end of this very long post. I hope you enjoyed it, and I promise you not all of my posts will be this long. See you next time,

Arjan