I started role-playing back in 1984, way before D&D was cool.
Luckily, I wasn’t cool either, and immediately fell in love. I remember flipping through the Dungeon Master’s Guide, finding the parasitic infection table, and being filled with strange delight at the thought of a world I’d never imagined before: a place of fetid bogs where the air and water themselves were perilous.
Since then, I’ve built so many worlds. Some for stories. One for a computer game I tried to write. Another for a high school novel. Many were for games I played with friends, or for games that never happened at all. Some of the worlds were no bigger than a single room, a town, a piece of river. Some were vast, fantastic, and thin as paper. Others were gritty, grounded, and apocalyptic.
In 1994 I started a new world and spent fourteen years expanding, refining, and revising it until my first book was published in the setting. And these days, it’s not odd for me to be brought in as a consultant for video game companies or movie studios, usually to help them build worlds for their stories to live.
What I’m getting at here is that I’ve been doing worldbuilding for a long time. It’s in my bones, and I do it the way other people knit or build model trains. If left to my own devices with nothing else to do, I’ll invent magic systems, doodle maps, create imaginary currency systems….
Jump forward to 2018. I’m scheduled to make a guest appearance on a gaming podcast. I don’t know much about the game, but I’m not worried. I’m pretty much a pro gamer. I’m OG with the RPG. I’ve thrown dice with Critical Role and the McElroys. I’ve played D&D on stage to cheering crowds of thousands (a fact that would baffle my younger self, and honestly still baffles me sometimes).
More embarrassingly though, I don’t know anything about the podcast. This has happened a couple times. I’m doing too many projects. I’m exhausted and behind on everything. But it’s too late to cancel….
I call in. Turns out the podcast is called One Shot. The host and game master is James D’Amato. And what follows is possibly the best RPG experience of my entire life. There were so many things I loved about that game. The system itself is a masterwork (it’s called Kids on Bikes). The genre speaks to my heart. The other players were amazing performers who made delightful characters, but what truly stunned me was how gently and deftly James helped us build the world together. A unique, fully realized world, perfect for the story, created in about fifty minutes. It’s a world I still remember and tell people stories about to this day. Since then, I’ve listened to more than five hundred episodes of James’s podcasts, many of them multiple times. They’ve brought me immeasurable joy and expanded my horizons as a player, and storyteller, and worldbuilder.
And now here you are, holding his book. I think of myself all those years ago, flipping through the Dungeon Master’s Guide, my imagination sparking. I remember that book fondly. It started me stumbling down a path I’d follow all my life. But it wasn’t a great guide to where I wanted to go. It was rough, opaque, full of harsh rules and columns of numbers charts more suited to war games than stories. You are so lucky. With this book as your stepping stone and guide, I can’t imagine how much easier your path will be. I can’t imagine how much further you’ll go….
—Patrick Rothfuss