I love to build worlds on Friends and Fables, for many reasons. The main reason is because I like to create games that I would like to play. So far I've found that my taste in games is the same as many others. I've build a lot of popular games on the platform and love to inspire others to do the same, so I'm going to share with you some of the tips that I have for building games. The tips that I'll share with you will help you build games not only on the Friends and Fables platform, but also for other TTRPG games that you might be playing with your friends.
When you finish reading this blog, you're going to know where to start with your world building, how to build memorable locations and NPCs, how to create different races, classes, and spells, how to make monsters and items that fit within your world, and how to go beyond fantasy worlds and pull your games into a different genre. A lot of what I'm going to share with you will have to do specifically with the Frames & Fables platform. Whatever you build will still be set up in a way that is organized, making it easy for you to access information about your world whenever you need it.
When Building The Lore
Let's talk about lore. For lore, I like to start off with a simple idea first, and then expand from there. But when I expand, I always think about the biggest things first related to that idea. To give you a glimpse into my thought process, I'm going to talk about one of the games that I'm currently building right now. I'm building a game set in a galaxy far, far away. Now, this isn't a Star Wars story or a Star Trek story. This is a Space Odyssey-style adventure, completely unrelated to the movie, because I've never watched it. I had this idea sitting in the back of my head for several weeks now because I was finishing up building my Dungeon Break game.
The main idea was some kind of space odyssey adventure that had a Cowboy Bebop feel to it. I took that idea, and then I started with the biggest part of the game. Most people would start with a galaxy when I say I'm starting big, but I actually started with the idea. I went to ChatGPT, and then I sat down and talked with it for about 15 minutes, explaining my idea and what I wanted for the game. I asked it to create a basic starting lore page that I could use as the foundation for all the lore that I was going to generate from there on. One important tip is to turn ChatGPT on to thinking mode whenever you do this, and be sure to read everything that it spits out. I have to admit that sometimes I've gotten random AI barf. But there are other times where the AI surprised me and gave me exactly what I wanted.
After getting the starting lore, I took that and I put it into a text file and then I plugged that into ChatGPT. When I finished that, every single one of my queries to ChatGPT included referencing the lore text file in order to make sure that all the generated lore would stay consistent and not contradict itself. I would go on to build lore for the galaxy, alien species, and planets from there and updating the lore file as I went along until everything was built out. That lore is now sitting comfortably and organized in the game I am building. Now that I have the lore, we can move onto the next step.
When Building The Map
Let's talk about the map. One of the things that I do when I'm starting to build out the map is I'll use the lore text document that I created in ChatGPT to help keep everything put together correctly. I do the same thing that I did before, which is, I'll start off big, and then I'll go smaller from there. So if I'm building a world, I'm going to start off with the entire world, and then I'm going to go smaller. So I might do continents, then I'll go smaller and I'll do countries, then I'll go smaller and then I'll do cities. If I'm building out something that isn't the size of a planet, and let's say it's just the size of a city, then I might do something where I build the surrounding lands around the city and any of the major areas in the surrounding lands first. So I might start off with mountains, lakes, rivers, forests, and the city, and after that I'll go smaller. I might do districts within the city next, or I could do bandit camps out in the forests, or possibly mining shafts into the mountains.
One of the reasons why I continue going with the biggest areas first and then graduating to smaller areas is because it helps me organize my thoughts. I'm sure that'll be the same for most other people as well. If you're able to see the bigger picture, it helps you create the smaller points of interest with the bigger picture in mind. If I'm building out a continent, and I want to make sure that the cities are interacting with each other in an interesting way, then I would want to build the city at the same time, instead of one at a time so I can have them reference each other. This will give me a better idea of trade routes and what kind of imports and exports different cities have. I could have a better idea of how these cities should be behaving with one another before I start flushing them out. If I build the cities out entirely one at a time and then move onto the next city, and then the next one and so forth, they might have no references to each other and I'll have to come up with them later. It's better to get things done correctly early on, than to have to correct yourself later.
When Building Characters
Building characters is something that I like to do after I build the map. The reason why I do it that way is because I'd like to know where to place those characters first. I don't want to just have a big pile of characters that have backstories that aren't grounded in a physical location in the world. What use is having a hundred characters done, but no where to put them? Another reason why I like to wait until I have the map flushed out, is because I can take the area descriptions and plug those into ChatGPT where I have my bore file put in. I can then tell ChatGPT to help me generate a character that belongs in that location.
Let's say I want to have a special elf NPC bartender working at a particular tavern. All I would need to do is I can tell ChatGPT what the elf looks like, how they act, where they come from in the world, and then plug in the description of the tavern. ChatGPT will generate lore and backstory for that character that fits the world and the prompt that I gave it. This makes it a whole lot easier for me when I want to create characters. I don't have to sit down and manually write out every single description in a very eloquent way anymore. I can just give the general idea of what I'm looking for to ChatGPT after creating all the lore and all of the locations, and then ChatGPT will do it for me. It streamlines the process and makes it easier for me as a world builder to just keep moving on and building things the way that I want it. By doing things like this, I have build up an immunity to writer's block.
Memorable Locations
To build memorable locations, you want to start with a purpose. You want every place to matter. Why are players going to go there? What's the reason for that place? Is it a trade hub? Are they sacred grounds? Is this some kind of outlaw refuge? You also want to include some kind of conflict. What problem is this place dealing with? You also want some kind of depth to the location's history. What kind of history does this location have, and how does it relate to your lore? Here are some other questions that you might want to ask yourself. Who lives here? What kind of guilds or factions are attached to this location? How does this location tie into the overall story that you're trying to tell here? What kind of connections does this location have to other locations in the area?
Memorable NPCs
When it comes to building memorable NPCs, you want to think about similar things to the locations. You want to give NPCs a goal, even if it's a simple one. Why is the NPC at a particular location? Where are they going to next? Memorable NPCs should also have a personality quirk. Something that makes them unique, like a nervous laugh, or obsessive note-taking. Maybe they're overly polite, or they speak in third person. I know for a fact that when I create NPCs with very funny voices or very unique speaking patterns, my players pick them up right away. You also want to be thinking about strong visuals that are attached to the NPC. Maybe a distinct feature, like they're wearing a white eyepatch, or they're missing a hand, or a couple of fingers. Just make sure not all your NPCs are unique in this way, because when everyone has something unique about them, then none of them do.
Now I'm going to talk to you about creating races, classes, and spells. This section is a little bit different than the others because it's more about your own personal creativity and what your world is about. But let me give you an idea of my thought process behind creating races, classes, and spells.
Races
With races, you always want them to be tied to the genre. If I'm building a fantasy world, I'm always going to want fantasy races that belong in a fantasy world. If it's a classic fantasy world, then it's definitely going to feature orcs, and elves, and dwarves, and humans. However, if I'm building a sci-fi world, I'm going to be creating unique races that don't belong in a traditional fantasy setting. I'm going to be creating alien species, because that is typically what you would find in a Sci-Fi game.
There are a lot of different genres of games out there, and depending on your flavor of game, I'm sure that you'll be able to find a lot of examples for race ideas. I always use ChatGPT when I am coming up with brand new races that don't belong in a traditional fantasy setting. I will give ChatGPT ideas of what I'm looking for, and it'll help me narrow it down bit by bit until I find exactly what would fit in the world that I'm trying to build. Just to give you an example of how it might work, let's say I'm building a science fiction game and I need a brand new race. I would probably start by going to ChatGPT and I would give it a general idea of the kind of race that I'm looking for.
So for example, I might ask:
The response I got was:
For the sake of this example, I asked ChatGPT to keep the responses no longer than two sentences each. That way, I wouldn't bore you with very long alien descriptions in this blog. In those short descriptions, I already see areas of my universe where these particular alien species would belong, and I can edit them to match perfectly after letting ChatGPT do the heavy lifting for me.
Classes
I do classes about the same way that I do races. I make sure that classes match the genre of the world that I'm building. If I was building a cyberpunk-themed world, which I have built before, I might want to base a lot of the classes that I'm using off of Cyberpunk 2077. I would ask ChatGPT to give me some ideas that are similar to the ones that are presented in the particular genre. Some class ideas I could think of off the top of my head for a cyberpunk-themed world would be things like engineers, scavengers, or hackers, just to name a few. I could plug in those ideas into ChatGPT and then ask it to give me ideas just like how I did for races.
Something that you might want to keep in mind is that you want to create classes that are available to every race in your game. You might have some that are available to just one or two races, or maybe to a specific caste or royalty, but just know that if you do something like that, you might be building out classes that take a lot of effort on your part that very few people are ever going to use. A couple examples of that, if I were to point to D&D 5th edition, would be the Battlerager and the Bladesinger. These are two classes that are traditionally built for specific races. The Battlerager is built for Dwarves and the Bladesinger is built for Elves. I have never once played a Battlerager, and I have only once played a Bladesinger, because I had a DM that was okay with me using a different race for the class.
Of course, using ChatGPT to help streamline the process and make building a balanced class easier and faster, but at the end of the day it would be best to do anything unique like this towards the end of your world building. I always like to focus on general class ideas first, and then go from there. When I'm building NPCs and placing them into a world, I want to make sure that the class options are general, so it's easier for me to just pick, choose, and move on.
Here are some questions that you could ask yourself when building classes:
Spells
For spells, I'm going to try and keep this short. What I share here is specifically related to worldbuilding on the Friends & Fables platform, but I do use some of this guide to build homebrew spells for D&D games that I run for my friends. I use ChatGPT for creating spells, but I always set up parameters for them. Making sure that they're balanced is always going to be difficult. If you create a very well-written prompt explaining in detail how ChatGPT should generate spells level by level, you'll find that creating functional spells becomes a whole lot easier and takes a lot of the load off of you as a world builder.
Whenever I'm making a new world with custom classes that need their own spells, I create block descriptions for each of the classes to give to ChatGPT whenever I'm using the spell balancing prompt. By doing it this way, each of the spells that I create is tailored to the specific class or type of character. If I have a group of 15 different classes that I'm generating spells for, I might have some overlap on purpose for all of the melee, magic, and support classes. Some classes might have the same type of spells, but they should all have a separate set of unique spells that set them apart from other classes. For example, all magic based classes might have the same reflavored Mage Hand cantrip, but one magic based class could have dozens of necromancy based magic that the other magic based classes don’t have.
Worldbuilding isn't magic. It's just a trail of small, clear choices guided by one strong idea. Just remember to think big, and then go smaller from there. If you've had trouble worldbuilding before, hopefully this blog has helped you out a little bit. These are just my thoughts when it comes to worldbuilding. I've built a lot of games, and I really enjoy it. If you have a passion for world building and you want to see your worlds come to life, then you might want to try out Friends & Fables. The reason why I play here and build games here is because not only can I build games and put them together in a really organized way, I can actually test them out and play them for myself using the AI.
I really love this platform because I can take any kind of adventure idea that I want and manipulate the idea until I have a workable game for it. Not only would I have a workable game for it that I could play for myself, but it's something that I can use for the future if I ever wanted to run a game based in the worlds that I'm building. I've mentioned this before, but I'm going to be running games for my friends based in worlds that I've created on Friends and Fables just because of how easy it is for me to access all the lore I need. Not only that, but I can become more familiar with my world by playing in it myself, which is a game master's dream come true.