I am six month into a one-year subscription to World Anvil, and have barely used it. I was checking the software out to see whether I would like to use it for my next D&D campaign, to build a corner of a fantasy world. But in practice it turns out that a world building tool isn't all that useful; the sad reality of fantasy worlds is that only a tiny portion of each of them ever gets used.

Take a well-known fantasy world, like Westeros from Game of Thrones. If you watched all the episodes of all the seasons, you might think that you know that world pretty well. From the wall in the icy north, through the seven kingdoms, from Winterfell to King's Landing, and onto Esteros, with its city states in the desert, you have seen a lot of it in the series. How? Well, Game of Thrones uses a clever trick of having a huge number of characters, and you've seen the world of Westeros through the eyes of all of them. But now try a thought experiment: Pick a single character in Game of Thrones, and imagine you only saw all the scenes of the series in which that character takes part. Even if you pick a "major" character, you will have seen a lot less of Westeros. Some minor characters stay in one location all the time. And for all intents and purposes, the parts of Westeros you don't see, might as well not exist.

That is an old problem for D&D world building. Is your group really going to see all the places you created? If you created a history of the kingdom your group is in, where does that history actually matter for the adventure you are playing? Yes, World Anvil allows you to create a full Wiki-style encyclopedia of the world you created with hundreds of articles. But unless you want to bore your players with hours and hours of exposé, you can play a campaign for a year and only touch a small handful of those articles. Your fantasy world is a Potemkin village, and any work you put in beyond the facades is wasted.

Instead of preparing every detail of your world, you can simply make up those details on the spot once you need them. The smith in the village doesn't need a name, until the players decide to visit him. A random fantasy name generator will help you make one up quickly, and then you just need to note that name down, in case the players ever come back. That method is a lot more efficient than having pre-determined all the names of all the villagers, only for your players to decide that they are not going to visit the village at all. Honestly, nobody was interested in the genealogical tree of the king anyway.

Of course, you could use World Anvil to write down the most necessary information about your world, and then add notes from the information generated during your play session. But do you really need a subscription service for that? Generations of Dungeon Masters have managed to keep their fantasy worlds in a binder, because frankly, if you have more than one binder of information you already way overdid it. I like World Anvil as a concept, but practically I don't really need it for my campaign.

Labels: Dungeons & Dragons

- posted by Tobold @ 11:57 AM Permanent Link