Setting in Worldbuilding: Global, Regional, Local

Setting: Turning Your World’s Idea Into a Place You Can Explore

Genre + Theme is your foundation. Conflict is your engine. Setting is the stage that makes the engine matter.

If you haven't taken a look at the previous blogs I've written about genre, theme, and conflict, I'd highly recommend it before reading about setting. If you're still interested in reading about setting, I'll give you a quick summary of everything else to help you get caught up. Genre is a tool that sets expectations for tone, scale, rules, pacing, and visuals. Theme is the idea your world keeps asking questions about. Conflict is a force that creates friction in your world. Once you've decided on your genre, theme, and conflict, it would probably look like this:

• This is a [genre] world about [theme], where [core experience]. A [force/group/event] threatens [something people need/value], causing [a clear kind of pressure].

Example: “This is a dark fantasy world about faith, where the gods left their chosen faithful to govern the world in their stead. A spreading blight threatens food supplies, causing migration, riots, and violent control of farmland.”

From here, you can start working on your setting.

Previous: Genre + Theme: The Foundation of Worldbuilding

The TLDR if you want to just get started:

• Setting is where the conflict becomes real. It’s not just geography—it’s the stage for pressure, choices, and consequences.
• Build setting in three scales: Global → Regional → Local.
• Global = the promise and rules of the world (power, politics, what’s rare, what’s true).
• Regional = how those rules move in the background and shape a wider territory (ripples the protagonist/players can feel).
• Local = the most detailed layer (reusable places where hooks happen and growth can branch outward).

What “setting” actually means in worldbuilding

Setting is the answer to:

“Where does this conflict create the most usable story?”

Setting will always include a place, but it also includes who controls what, what people can and can't do, what's rare, restricted, or forbidden, what threats are normal, and what daily life looks like under pressure. If conflict is considered the engine of your world, then the setting is the road. It will determine what movement looks like.

The 3-scale method: Global → Regional → Local

This is the easiest way to create a setting that can support a full story or a full game world without drowning yourself in details.

Global is the promise of the world

Global is the high-level layer that explains why everything works the way that it does. It doesn't need to be considered as a giant map or a travel guide. At this scale, all you need to do is answer a handful of questions and move on to regional. Remember that you aren't building a comprehensive Wikipedia for your setting. Of course that is possible if you would like to do that, but it's often unnecessary.

Global answers:

• Who holds power, and what kind of power is it?
• What’s the political shape of the world (even broadly)?
• What’s rare, restricted, or dangerous?
• What do people believe (legends, myths, “common knowledge”)?
• What are the world’s basic rules (magic/tech/faith/law)?
• What’s the simplified history of the world (3 sentences)?

This is where you expand on your genre, theme, and conflict. I also want you to think about it as what will inevitably be your world's operating system. The following is a simple checklist that shows you what global looks like in practice. Remember that you want to keep it short and usable:

• Power Map (1–2 lines): who runs things, and how
• Rules (3–5 bullets): what’s possible, what’s costly, what’s forbidden
• Rarity & Restriction (3 bullets): what people fight over or hide
• Myths & Truths (2–3 bullets): what people believe vs what might be true
• Three-Sentence History: beginning → shift → current situation

When it comes to writing a book or creating a full setting for a TTRPG, this is all that you'll need. You don't need to write your own Silmarillion about the setting you're building.

Regional is the moving area of the world

This is where you show that the world is alive outside of the main characters. This is the layer where trade routes shift, alliances form and break, threats migrate, policies change, and shortages spread. Regional should feel like a background machine that keeps turning, whether anyone is watching or not.

Regional answers:

• What territory surrounds the local stage?
• What powers influence this area (and what do they want)?
• What changes are happening right now because of the conflict?
• What “ripple effects” can be felt locally?
• What’s the larger, usually solvable problem behind the local troubles?

Something important to note is that the regional layer often contains the “real solution” to the local troubles. It should always be unreachable at first, but not impossible. It should be gated by time, risk, knowledge, permission, or capability. There needs to be some kind of barrier that prevents the protagonists or the players from reaching it immediately.

You'll also want to make regional unreachable without feeling forced. The following are some examples of good gates that feel natural:

• distance and travel danger
• cost and access (permits, status, resources)
• knowledge (you need a clue, a map, a name)
• trust (you need allies, reputation)
• timing (windows, seasons, events)

Gateway Examples: The Lord of the Rings

The Lord of the Rings is basically a masterclass in making the regional solution feel real and earned, especially because the protagonists start off as hobbits. Hobbits are small, unknown, under-resourced, and out of their depth.

• Distance & travel danger: The regional problem is far away and, the path is full of escalating danger that the hobbits aren't built for. The Hobbits start locally at the Shire, where they are safe, sheltered, and intentionally disconnected from the outer world. The regional issue is reachable for them, but it's gated by the difficulty of survival.
• Cost & access: Hobbits don't have the money, gear, authority, or reputation that makes the big world easy to access. They're far from being recognized as players in the larger game.
• Knowledge: The Hobbits don't even understand what the regional problem is at first. The story naturally forces them in the direction of Gandalf's research to identify the ring and Elrond's council to clarify what even has to be done.
• Trust: The Hobbits can't survive the regional lair alone, so they need to build relationships to move forward. The best example of this is Strider, because the Hobbits don't have any reason to trust him, but they also can't proceed without someone who's competent in the wider world.
• Timing: Even when the path exists, timing keeps it from being a straight line. Gandalf doesn't identify the ring instantly. His delay creates urgency because once the ring is confirmed, the clock starts. At this time, the Nazgûl are already moving. Timing makes the regional problem feel like it’s advancing with or without the protagonists.

Local is the immediate area around the protagonist

Local is where you spend your entire budget on detail. It's where the conflict naturally produces the most hooks and where the protagonist or players can actually go.

A strong local layer usually has two parts:

• A base location (a town, city district, settlement, or hub where things start and return to)
• A cluster of reusable places (locations that generate multiple scenes and stay relevant over time)

Local also benefits from an open surrounding area that can be populated with lighter supporting locations as needed.

Local should be built to support:

• Repeated visits (people return here often)
• Escalating problems (things get worse, weirder, or more costly over time)
• Branching paths (multiple ways to approach the situation)
• Visible consequences (choices change what happens next)
• Growth that points outward (eventually leading toward the regional layer)

The base location

The base location is your starting hub. It's your home ground where the story begins. There are several things that make a base location work best. You always want it to have a clear identity that matches the genre and theme. It should immediately be clear how it feels to be living here. It should also be close enough to trouble so that hooks can be easy to introduce. There should be familiar faces and routines that can be disrupted by conflict.

There should also be a reason to return to the base location. There can be a promise of safety, accessible services, important relationships, or obligations that have to be fulfilled. It should also be easy to expand the starting hub naturally as the story grows. New areas can open up, and new problems can surface that bring the protagonist or players back.

The base location is where you can anchor:

• recurring NPCs
• flow of information (rumors, requests, warnings)
• recovery, trade, planning, or downtime (whatever fits your world)
• the “normal life” baseline, so conflict has something to push against

Local answers

• What is the base location (and why does the story start here)?
• What are the reusable places people will return to?
• What does each place do (function), not just what it looks like?
• What is the conflict doing here, right now?
• What can be solved locally, and what clearly can’t (yet)?
• What paths lead outward toward the regional problem?

A strong local layer is a story machine: it keeps producing meaningful choices without you having to invent everything from scratch.

Reusable places

You want a handful of locations that could generate multiple scenes. A common target would be somewhere around five or more, but the real rule is just enough places that you can keep returning without it feeling repetitive.

Aim for places like:

• A power center (official or unofficial)
• A resource choke point (something people need, controlled or contested)
• A social hub (gathering, gossip, recruitment, deals)
• A dangerous edge/boundary (where safety drops off)
• A secret or forbidden place (risk + discovery)
• Optional: neutral ground (where enemies can’t openly fight, but tension stays)

You don’t need dozens. You need a small set with depth and repeatability.

The open area

This is where supporting locations with lighter detail can be found. Local shouldn't only be major set pieces. You also want an open area around the hub that is easy to extend. The surrounding space should be close enough to reach without major barriers, support quick hooks (deliveries, meeting people, sightings, strange changes, etc), and allow you to add supporting locations that don't require a lot of time and effort to come up with.

Supporting locations can be simple:

• a risky route, a minor ruin, a small outpost, a temporary camp, a weird landmark, a short-lived market, a damaged facility, etc.

They exist to:

• vary scenes without bloating your core
• introduce clues and consequences
• build toward the “unreachable” regional layer gradually

Local growth

Locals should always be designed to grow outward as the protagonist or players grow. The growth is how local branches toward the regional layer.

A clean structure looks like:

• early problems are solvable in the hub or nearby area
• later problems require alliances, resources, or knowledge gained locally
• eventually, local choices unlock access to the regional issue (permission, travel safety, leverage, proof, reputation)

This keeps the regional layer present without letting it be skipped.

The Setting Ladder: build it fast without missing essentials

The setting ladder is kind of similar to the conflict ladder, where you start at the largest scale and work your way down. Use the setting ladder to keep things complete enough for a real setting:

1. Global Promise: what the world is, how it works, who holds power
2. Regional Motion: how the conflict changes a wider territory over time
3. Local Stage: where people live with the pressure and make choices
4. Branch Paths: what leads outward toward the bigger regional problem

If you can do those four, you have a setting that supports long-form storytelling.

Next: Global Setting: Rules, Power, and World Promise