Buy it today at RPGNow!

And look for Character Workbooks for other classes as well, from Asparagus Jumpsuit!

The Character Workbook: Wizard for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game is a game aid designed for that keystone arcane spellcaster class, walking you through the process of character creation and help you keep track of all those changes as you level up. It’s not a character sheet – you’ll still need one of those – but it will help you make sure you’ve filled out your character sheet completely and correctly. You’ll never have to worry that your character has been short-changed. If you gamemaster asks how and when your character gained a certain ability, or how you calculated a certain bonus, you can show them!

Previously published as the Character Change Log, this new edition of the Character Workbook is also fully enhanced with live links to the Pathfinder System Reference Document at d20pfsrd.com! Most underlined words, when clicked on, will take you to descriptions and explanations relevant to that section of the workbook, saving you time you’d previously have spent flipping through rule books.

48 pages. PDF. $2.50 US

Buy it today at RPGNow!

The Character Workbook: Cleric for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game is a game aid designed for that lynchpin divine spellcasting class, walking you through the process of character creation and help you keep track of all those changes as you level up. It’s not a character sheet – you’ll still need one of those – but it will help you make sure you’ve filled out your character sheet completely and correctly. You’ll never have to worry that your character has been short-changed. If you gamemaster asks how and when your character gained a certain ability, or how you calculated a certain bonus, you can show them!

Previously published as the Character Change Log, this new edition of the Character Workbook is also fully enhanced with live links to the Pathfinder System Reference Document at d20pfsrd.com! Most underlined words, when clicked on, will take you to descriptions and explanations relevant to that section of the workbook, saving you time you’d previously have spent flipping through rule books.

48 pages. PDF. $2.50 US

Buy it today at RPGNow!

The Character Workbook: Roguel for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game is a game aid designed for that core skills-oriented class, walking you through the process of character creation and help you keep track of all those changes as you level up. It’s not a character sheet – you’ll still need one of those – but it will help you make sure you’ve filled out your character sheet completely and correctly. You’ll never have to worry that your character has been short-changed. If you gamemaster asks how and when your character gained a certain ability, or how you calculated a certain bonus, you can show them!

Previously published as the Character Change Log, this new edition of the Character Workbook is also fully enhanced with live links to the Pathfinder System Reference Document at d20pfsrd.com! Most underlined words, when clicked on, will take you to descriptions and explanations relevant to that section of the workbook, saving you time you’d previously have spent flipping through rule books.

31 pages. PDF. $2.50 US

Buy it today at RPGNow!

The things that my wife Katie and I create under the collective studio name Asparagus Jumpsuit are available at a number of places around the internet.

Art prints, including Torn Verse, can be ordered from the Asparagus Jumpsuit deviantART page.

Original art, including Katie’s dolls, clay figures, and jewelry, can be purchased from the Asparagus Jumpsuit Etsy page.

Roleplaying game material can be purchased from DriveThruRPG, RPGNow, and d20pfsrd.

The Character Workbook: Fighter for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game is a game aid designed for the core combat-oriented class, walking you through the process of character creation and help you keep track of all those changes as you level up. It’s not a character sheet – you’ll still need one of those – but it will help you make sure you’ve filled out your character sheet completely and correctly. You’ll never have to worry that your character has been short-changed. If you gamemaster asks how and when your character gained a certain ability, or how you calculated a certain bonus, you can show them!

Previously published as the Character Change Log, this new edition of the Character Workbook is also fully enhanced with live links to the Pathfinder System Reference Document at d20pfsrd.com! Most underlined words, when clicked on, will take you to descriptions and explanations relevant to that section of the workbook, saving you time you’d previously have spent flipping through rule books.

48 pages. PDF. $2.50 US

Buy it today at RPGNow!

The Character Workbook: Universal for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game is a game aid designed for any class or multi-classed characters, walking you through the process of character creation and help you keep track of all those changes as you level up. It’s not a character sheet – you’ll still need one of those – but it will help you make sure you’ve filled out your character sheet completely and correctly. You’ll never have to worry that your character has been short-changed. If you gamemaster asks how and when your character gained a certain ability, or how you calculated a certain bonus, you can show them!

Previously published as the Character Change Log, this new edition of the Character Workbook is also fully enhanced with live links to the Pathfinder System Reference Document at d20pfsrd.com! Most underlined words, when clicked on, will take you to descriptions and explanations relevant to that section of the workbook, saving you time you’d previously have spent flipping through rule books.

48 pages. PDF. $2.50 US

Buy it today at RPGNow!

This post originally appeared on Asparagus Jumpsuit

For the past four years I’ve been having my Leonard Nimoy “I am not Spock” moment. For various and sundry reasons, I have tried to put distance between myself and the “Uncle Bear” persona for which I am perhaps best known on the internet. Some of that has been personal. I am no longer the person I was when I first started blogging under that name. My life has changed, my tastes have changed, my interests have changed. That name, in my mind, is connected to a certain period of time that wasn’t especially good for me, a hobby that still holds my affections but is no longer quite an obsession, and some dreams and goals that I’ve in many ways outgrown.

On a professional level, it seemed important to rebrand under my own name, because that’s how I’m marketing myself in the real, non-online world. As a real person with a real (albeit unusual) name, it’s okay if my tastes change, my interests change, and I branch out to do other things. Uncle Bear is forever about tabletop roleplaying games, period. Uncle Bear isn’t allowed to be a poet, a homeless advocate, or a ranting maniac when it comes to topics like education reform. Shut up, roll dice, and tell gaming stories already. That’s all people want from Uncle Bear.

I’m happy with the time I’ve spend working on my own website. I’ve got nearly as many people following me for me free verse as I used to have following me for my roleplaying game blog. I have people telling me that the affirmations I write, and the rants I lay down, have inspired them or encouraged them to do positive things in their lives. I’m very proud of that. These are things that I wanted to do, but never dreamed I would get that level of response for.

And yet, on my recent return to Facebook, I was regaled with messages saying “Hi Uncle Bear! Welcome back!”. Warm wishes from many, many people who identify my with that persona, that role. Really, really nice people who aren’t so much against my branching out but unfamiliar with it, unaware of it. They know me within a context, and they like me within that context. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

Since I started writing a weekly tabletop roleplaying-oriented column for Asparagus Jumpsuit, it’s been well recieved. I do enjoy roleplaying, and I do enjoy writing about it, even though it’s not my only focus, or even my primary one these days. So I’ve decided, much in the way Leonard Nimoy eventually learned to embrace his alter ego, to just relax and be Uncle Bear. Going forward, my weekly roleplaying game column will carry the Uncle Bear name. Even though I’ve never really gone away… I’m back!

When I first started playing Dungeons & Dragons, my friends and I had no idea what we were doing. As players, we weren’t particularly clever in our spell choices or our tactics. If it did a lot of damage, that was what we wanted. Every encounter was pretty much a direct frontal assault against whatever monster we came across. As a gamemaster, I hadn’t yet learned to hold back or fudge die rolls to keep from killing player characters outright. That was considered a sign of weakness by many back then, rather than a means of prioritizing story or keeping the game going.

Our characters, needless to say, tended to die a lot.

It was irritating to have to stop in the middle of a dungeon and do what seemed to be the logical thing: have the surviving characters leave, go back to town, and pick up a party member so those unfortunately players could get back into the game, and the party didn’t have to do without a certain character class. I remember rolling for wandering monsters as they made their way back out, because even though the path between their current location and the entrance had been cleared, you just never know. While they were doing that, the players whose characters had fallen were rolling dice and generating new ones.

After a while, this got annoying. We wanted to play, not have to keep starting the dungeon over. Without consciously thinking of video games (because I’ve never really been a big video game player, so many tropes elude me even now), I started letting players just re-used the same character statistics and join the rest of the party in the next room. Keep the same character sheet, but erase the name and give him a new one. Oh, and lose all your magic items. Some hand-waving excuse for why this new character was alone in the dungeon and joining up with the party without pause or suspicion would be made, and we’d play on.

That became standard operating procedure. In the event of mass casualties or the occasional total party kill, we’d sometimes trade character sheets. If my thief and someone else’s fighter died, I was now playing the fighter and he was the thief, albeit with different names. Sometimes we’d take over playing henchmen or hirelings are our new player characters, because something about that made sense. A lot of those NPCs were dead player characters with new names on the character sheets.

Over time, dead player characters became my prime source of ~NPC statistics. I kept all of my fallen heroes, but most of my friends didn’t want them any more so I collected them. It saved me tons of time in game prep, because I didn’t need to write people up. As we got better, of course, we died less (and I killed characters less often), so that file dwindled. I learned to throw NPCs together on the fly, and honestly, creating characters in 1st edition D&D wasn’t all that time consuming compared to what it takes to put together a character for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game.

All of this feeds into my reasons for putting together the Instant Character series for Asparagus Jumpsuit. Need a character on the fly? Put a name on this pre-generated one. A new player needs to get into the game quickly? Pick a pre-gen. Need stats for an ~NPC? Pick a pre-gen. Put a lot of time into creating a character, only to decide you and that character class aren’t a good fit? Have a pre-gen.

And in the event of a total party kill, hand out pregens, give them new names, and game on!

The first four classes are as follows. They’ll also be released in a bundle, called the Instant Party Pack!

Coming Soon from Asparagus Jumpsuit!

The theme of this month’s RPG Blog Carnival, sponsored by Elthos RPG, is GMing for a Ship of Fools. We all have stories of players coming up with great ideas, allowing their characters to do amazing, heroic things. Most of us also have stories of players who just make bad decisions, to the detriment of the rest of the party and sometimes the whole campaign. Here’s one such tale, as experienced by my group…

Our group is made up of casual gamers, folks who don’t follow the hobby or industry, don’t read blogs or forums, and don’t generally buy a lot of game material or accessories. They’re still a dedicated bunch for the most part, making the effort to get together regularly, play their characters to the best of their ability, and have a good time. All except one guy. He was the guy that could care less about the game. He just wanted to hang out with his friends. This would have been cool if he’d even made a half-hearted effort to feign interest in the game. All he really did was bring the party down.

See, if he had tried to screw over the rest of the party intentionally, he couldn’t have done a better job. He just had no interest in doing what seemed logical for the character. If he was playing a rogue, for example, and combat erupted, he’d jump right into the action. He didn’t try to backstab. He didn’t try to do anything tricky. He just lept right into melee as if he were a fighter. Then he’d whine about how badly he got his butt kicked. If he was playing a fighter, though, and a fight broke out, that was when he’d wander over and try to figure out the trap, or unlock the door. Never mind that he’s the tank; the wizard and the cleric can hold off the attacking monsters while he looks for a means of escape. But he wasn’t malicious, just clueless. Painfully, painfully clueless.

Our group also rotates gamemasters, so that we all get a chance to play. One of us runs for a while, then when an adventure or a storyline concludes, someone else takes over. He never ran a game, of course. That would be too much like work, and he was only there for the social contact. Through three different gamemasters, we tried to get him to play his last character better. We had long talks about his abilities, and the tactics he could use both solo and with the rest of the party. We gave him interesting (and easy-to-us) magic items, to try to spark something. Nope. You could give this guy a +5 vorpal sword, and on his turn he’d try to punch the lich in the mouth.

I feel a little guilty for saying that I was greatly relieved when we had a falling out for reasons other than the game. He quit the group, although he did ask to rejoin later was told no, and again, for reasons other than the game. But man, did it help the campaign. Unfortunately, his character’s disappearance left some unresolved plot holes. most had to do with NPCs that everyone liked — we never gave him his own subplots, because he wouldn’t do anything with them, but we tried to tie him together to supporting characters’ tales to try to drag him in. We tried to work around his character’s absence for a while, but the loose plot threads were nagging us. I was the gamemaster at the time, so I had to do something.

It turned out, within the game, that the character had been a spy for the party’s enemies all along. That’s why he disappeared, simply walked out, right in the middle of an adventure, right before a big boss encounter, when they really needed him. It explained a lot of his strange behaviors. I came up with explanations for what he was really doing. I wasn’t trying to throw the ex-player under the bus, although if that’s how it came across I didn’t care. I was just trying to tie up some loose ends, and explain why a character who’d been in this campaign for two years had suddenly vanished.

Eventually, I let the party find him. I wove his involvement as a spy into the plot I already had in motion. I had a copy of his character sheet, so I got to play his character as a villain. And using every class ability, every feat, and every magic item at that character’s disposal, I played him as effectively as I could. The one character who was basically worthless suddenly handed the rest of the party’s asses to them. He did things that they didn’t even know he could do. I kept pointing out that it was on his character sheet all along. It did a good job of selling the idea that that character had been a spy, and was being ineffective on purpose to screw with the party.

It also cemented the idea the none of us will ever try to game with this guy, ever again.

While I no longer really do reviews or plug many products that I’m not directly involved with, I do need to give a shout-out to Open Gaming Monthly. I’m old enough that I still like magazines. I like print magazines, but I’ve learned to make due with PDF and eReader version. I like the sort of curated, edited content that you don’t get with blogs. I like looking at advertisements. I like tabletop roleplaying magazines. And I especially like that Open Gaming Monthly is not trying to be like some past iteration of Dragon, and is working hard to do its own thing.

This issue, for example, has a whole section devoted to currently running Kickstarter game projects. It’s become an important segment of the hobby and the industry, so it’s good to see organized coverage. Nicole Lindroos, of Green Ronin, has a cooking column. When I had a cooking column on my old RPG blog, I got crap for it, but I’m also not Nicole Lindroos. I like seeing gamers talk about things other than gaming, especially things many of us have shared interests in. More like this, please.

Most of the content is geared toward Pathfinder, which makes sense because it is the largest “open” system at the moment and the magazine is produced by d20pfsrd.com. There is also material for Swords & Wizardry, as well as a lot of generic content. There’s a good interview with the ubiquitous Wolfgang Baur, which benefits from not being exactly like every other interview with him that I’ve ever read. Wolf is an interesting guy, and it’s good to see him asked some different questions for a change.

What I like best, though, is that I don’t recognize the names of most of the contributors. One of the things that I found off-putting about the premiere issue of Gygax magazine was that it felt like an old boys’ club (and one to which I do not belong). OGM proves that you can have great articles from people other than the half-dozen usual suspects. I want to see some new talent develop, and bring new ideas to the table.

Open Gaming Monthly is available at d20pfsrd.com

This post previously appeared on the Asparagus Jumpsuit blog

For those who missed the announcement, Katie has had her final interview for a graduate school program in Jÿvaskÿla, Finland. We won’t find out if she’s accepted until April 19th, but even if she doesn’t make it this time around, she’s going to reapply. It’s something we’ve been planning since last summer, something we want to do, and something we’re going to do. I

The people who are most broken up by us moving away for a couple of years are the members of our gaming group. They’re probably our closest couple friends, and we’ll all miss each other for reasons other than the game. Since I’m a lifelong tabletop roleplayer, I’ve been asked if I’m going to try to keep playing once we hit Scandinavia. Try? There is no try! There is only do! Of course we’re going to keep gaming!

We would be fools not to. Tabletop roleplaying has always been the way I meet people in new places. When I left high school and went off to college, when I moved from the East Coast to the Southwest, as I’ve moved from city to city, one of the first things I do it check out local game shops, game days, game clubs, game blogs, anything and anyone I can find. I spent five weeks on an extended business trip once, and found a group to hang out with for that short period of time. Tabletop roleplaying is how I met Katie, and we’ve been happily married for two years now.

We’re moving to a university town where nearly everyone speaks English. The program Katie will be in (if she’s accepted, she requires me to say; when she’s accepted, I have the faith in her to say) is geared toward international students, is taught in English, and will have people from all over the world. Serious, we could end up with a game group consisting of Finns, Swedes, Russians, Brits, Somalians. Mexicans, anyone. How could I possibly pass up an opportunity to gamemaster for a group like that? If there’s not already a gaming scene there when we arrive, well, we’ll just have to make one, won’t we?

The upside/downside of this equation is that we’ll be divesting ourselves of the majority of our possessions prior to the move, and that includes game stuff. As I pretty much only run the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game and Risus: The Anything RPG these days, and as all of the material I have for those games is in PDF format, everything I need is already on my laptop. The downside for me is that I have a ton of games that, while I haven’t played them in years, I will have to part with. I’m not paying to move it or store it for two years, and the money I get from selling it will go toward financing the trip and getting set up in an apartment once we’re there.

The upside for you is that I’m selling off my roleplaying game collection. More on that as I figure out exactly how I’m going to do it.

The things that my wife Katie and I create under the collective studio name Asparagus Jumpsuit are available at a number of places around the internet.

Art prints, including Torn Verse, can be ordered from the Asparagus Jumpsuit deviantART page.

Original art, including Katie’s dolls, clay figures, and jewelry, can be purchased from the Asparagus Jumpsuit Etsy page.

Roleplaying game material can be purchased from DriveThruRPG, RPGNow, and d20pfsrd.

A few months ago I had a crazy idea. I would write very basic game mechanics, no more than 10 pages long but usable with any sort of setting or genre. Then I would put it up for sale with a $50 price tag on it. Yeah, fifty bucks for a ten page PDF.

Although I still have the mechanics bouncing around in my head, and will do something with them at some point, it was more of a stunt designed to make a point. If you buy a $50 game and put it on a shelf and never play it, I’d argue that it’s not worth anything. The value of an object comes from its utility. If you don’t use it, you’ve wasted money. If you pay $50 for a game, and you and one other person play it for an hour, you’ve each received entertainment with a price tag of $25 per hour per person. If four people play, you’ve been entertained for $12.50 per person per hour. If you play for two hours, that price drops to $6.25 per person per hour. The more you play, the cheaper the game actually becomes, because you keep getting more value out of it.

The reason I didn’t do it is because I deal with far too many humorless, literal-minded people on a regular basis, and I could picture the arguments and problems that would arise from otherwise nice and well-intentioned folks who simply didn’t “get it”. Those people probably wouldn’t have shelled out $50 for a 10 page PDF themselves, but they would be screaming around the internet and calling for my head as if they had. Not that it probably wouldn’t turn into some good publicity, but that’s not how I want to make a splash in the world. The people who already get the point would understand the product; the people who didn’t get it will likely never get it. From a cost/benefit perspective, it just wasn’t worth the hassle.

That said, I want to take a look at products that I have actually released, and some of the feedback that I’ve received. Say I create a product that is, by design, a collection of cold statistics. The value comes from the time it will save players and gamemasters in preparing for their game. It is not meant to be shiny and sexy, it’s supposed to be utilitarian. The only art is in the form of stock illustrations used to fill white space. There is no benefit to the reader in adding illustrations. There are no monsters to depict, no maps to include. The only thing full-color original art could do is pad out the page count and raise the price of the product.

And yet, inevitably, someone will bag on the product for being nothing but a collection of cold statistics, and complain that it has no original art. They will state that the product does what it says on the tin, and even praise it for doing that things very, very well, but in the end they’ll say that it just isn’t worth the price. It’s nothing they couldn’t have done themselves, had they been so inclined and had they had the time to invest, and, well, it has no art.

The problem was that I started accepting their logic. Since my products, which didn’t need art, didn’t have art, I lowered my prices. Since I wasn’t doing anything that anyone who had experience with the rules couldn’t do themselves, I lowered my prices. Then, because my prices were so low, people perceived that the products just weren’t worth much. Catch-22.

Now, here’s the thing: reviews don’t automatically turn into sales. I have products with 5-Star reviews, where multiple reviewers have heaped glowing praise upon the wonderful work that I have created, that don’t sell worth a damn. I have products with less-stellar reviews, on the other hand, that sell steadily. Which, in the end, is more important to me? Take a wild guess. Here’s a hint: writing and publishing isn’t my hobby, it’s my business.

So, when I release the Instant Character line for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game, I’m going to charge $5 a piece for them. Someone is going to say “All you’re doing is creating a character and put it up for sale”, and while there’s a little but more to than that, yeah, that hits the heart of the matter. Instant Fighter will be a fighter character, represented from level 1 through level 20, inclusive. If you’re a player and you need a 1st level fighter, there you go. If you’re a gamemaster and need a 5th level fighter, there you go. Instant Rogue will be the same thing for that class, Instant Paladin will be the same for that class, and so on. I’m doing it so you that if you don’t want to, or you don’t have time to, you don’t have to.

The question in this case isn’t what the product is worth. The question is, what is your time worth? If you’re a hardcore Pathfinder player who likes creating characters and has the rules memorized, this product probably isn’t for you. If you’re a casual gamer that just wants to show up, sit down, and start playing with your friends, you’re the person I’m writing these for. Want to play a rogue, and need a new character for the game Friday night? Don’t bother flipping through a 600+ page book making decisions and crunching numbers — spend $5 and download Instant Rogue. When it’s time to level up, it’s already done.

Five bucks to avoid spending at least an hour in character creation. The same five bucks will carry you from 1st level through 20th level, if your character lives that long. Five bucks is a freakin’ bargain.

I’m thinking of doing bundles for gamemasters, eventually. If you’re a GM and putting together an adventure where you need a 12th level wizard and a couple of 8th level fighters, you can use the same Instant Characters as the players. Even if you tweak them a bit, most of the work is done. Players, though, probably won’t want the whole bundle. If you like playing a certain class, you’re going to want to buy that class, and maybe buy another class at another time for another campaign.

And you’ll still get your money’s worth.

Because what I’m selling is absolutely worth the amount I’m charging.

A friend of mine, who is also a gamemaster, throws me a private message on Facebook. “Do you have a 9th level paladin already written up? Do you know some sourcebook where I can find one? She was writing her own adventure, was running out of time, and was looking for something that she could either use as-is or even tweak a little bit. I happened to remember an adventure that had a character that might do, and I cut-and-pasted the stats into a word doc and emailed them to her.

In my own campaign, there is a temple that the player characters had a connection to, occasionally got adventure hooks from, and frequently returned to for healing. I reached a point where I not only needed a list of names and titles for all of the supporting characters in and around the temple, I needed to write up about a dozen of those characters. I wished that I could have pulled out something like the Bestiary, or the NPC Codex, that had just a basic, generic, vanilla selection of characters. Nothing exciting, but covering all classes and all levels. A generic 5th level adept. A generic 7th level alchemist. A generic 12th level witch.

Instant Characters are coming from Asparagus Jumpsuit. They will be exactly that. Stay tuned.

While I’m friends with a lot of hardcore tabletop gamers on social media, most of my face-to-face RPG friends are casual gamers. They get together once a week to roll dice and have fun. They’ve got jobs and kids and other responsibilities, and not a lot of free time to spend pouring over RPG books, reading blogs, and keeping up with the industry.

The friends that gamemaster use packaged adventures that they’ve purchased online and downloaded. Occasionally, they might make it out to a store that carries game stuff and buy a physical book, but they often don’t even have time for that. They tweak the adventures to fit the game world, the player characters, and existing supporting characters, but most of the work is already done. They have a plot, they have the NPCs they need, and they have all of the statistics already prepared.

The friends that just play — and that category includes my beloved wife Katie — don’t have those resources. They can’t buy a character off the shelf and tweak it. They need to crack a book, start making decisions, and start writing things down. Feats. Skill points. Spells. Equipment. If you’re a hardcore gamer, that stuff is fun, and you’ve got it memorized. If you’re a casual player, it’s a chore. If you’re a new player, it’s a potential barrier to entry into the hobby.

Instant Characters are coming from Asparagus Jumpsuit. They will be exactly that. Stay tuned.

You play the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game to hang out with your friends and blow off steam. You work hard, and gaming is your “me” time. But your boss has had you working overtime, you’re being crushed by your class load at school, your DVD is bursting with shows you want to get caught up on, and you’d still like to spend some quality time with your spouse and your kids. Creating a new character is fun, but the absolute last thing you have the time and patience for right now is flipping through a 600-plus page book trying to nail down all of the fiddly bits. Software helps, but seriously, do you need more time planted in front of a computer screen?

To make it worse, it’s not a brand-new game starting at 1st level. The gamemaster wants the characters to be a little more meaty, so you’re all starting at 3rd level. Or you’ve joined an existing group, and the other characters are already at 7th level. More levels, more fiddly bits to add, more decisions to make. All you really want to do is show up, sit down, and play.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could just download a complete character, give it a name, and add your own back story, describing his or her appearance and developing a personality? To just be able to be creative and have fun and not get bogged down in the crunchy numbers stuff? And would it be great if that pre-generated character was already “statted out” for levels 1 through 20, so that when the time comes to level up all you need to do is print out a new sheet and look it over?

Instant Characters are coming from Asparagus Jumpsuit. They will be exactly that. Stay tuned.

This post originally appeared on the Asparagus Jumpsuit blog.

In working on the revised and expanded Official Series Bible core book, I’ve been thinking about the different between worldbuilding and setting creation. The first is a long tradition in tabletop roleplaying, going back to fantasy literature. You draw a map of the world, you figure out the cultures and the overarching, big picture storylines that serve as the backdrop for the tale you want to tell. You can start big and drill down to the little details, or you can start with little details and grow them into a whole universe, but you typically end up with more than you need.

When I talk about setting creation, I mean starting with the absolute bare bones, the way a television series bible is created. It starts with the story you want to tell, and you add details to the world only as they support the story. You create and expand the setting as you go. You might add flourishes to make it feel more real, or to create interesting twists, or (and this is the bet reason) to set up possibilities for future stories.

The difference is creating the world and then mining it for stories to tell, or telling stories and mining them for the setting that’s implied. That’s going to be the difference between the Official Series Bible core book and other excellent, useful treatises on worldbuilding.