Models for World Building: The Inside-Out Approach

“The purpose of your prep is to give you interesting things to say.”
-- Apocalypse World, “Threats”

A GM fills a lot of roles: storyteller, writer, actor, adversary, referee. One of the most fundamental, though, is that of creator. Whether you’re using a setting that’s been around for half a century or making a world from scratch, there’s a lot of creativity involved in setting up a game and populating it with locations and NPCs.

Two fundamental methodologies of world creation that get a lot of talk are the outside-in and the inside-out models.

Outside-in world building involves starting with the big picture: Cosmology. Mythology. Continents and history. Civilizations and races. From there, you establish a framework and then extrapolate details in a progressively narrower scope until you reach the area of your setting you actually need. This kind of world building is crucial because it gives context and logic to your location and NPC descriptions and backstories.

Inside-out world building, on the other hand, starts with one specific detail and then interpolates new elements and frameworks to build on that detail until you’ve made it to the outer world at large. It focuses on the specifics of your campaign: the town where the party is. The government of that town. Its power bases. Its important NPCs. This kind of world building is vital because it provides the nuts and bolts you’re going to use to build the encounters and adventures in which your PCs are going to act.

Some people talk about ‘outside-in vs. inside-out’ as if the two approaches are somehow inimical. Don’t be fooled. Despite how some people present them, these approaches are not exclusive, any more than sketching with pencils and pens is mutually exclusive: most often, you’re going to find yourself using a little of each approach to make a well-rounded creation.

Today, we’re going to consider the inside-out method of world building.

STRENGTHS OF INSIDE-OUT CREATION

Inside-Out world creation is concerned with where the characters are right now. It’s how you bring your focus down to the character’s point of view. It deals with the nitty-gritty, ground-level details that will stare your PCs in the face every day: commoner NPCs like shopkeepers and waitresses, watchmen and cutpurses, sergeants and captains. It deals with the markets, the inns, the town gates where the party will spend their time searching for their latest quest or their next tankard of ale.

If you neglect the details of your setting, your PCs are going to ask what the best inn in town is called and you’re going to have to pull out the random name generator. That’s not necessarily wrong, but it is the sort of thing players notice, and it messes with their immersion worse than a minotaur with a machine gun.

On the other hand, if you take the time ahead of time to work out the core concepts of the primary locations and NPCs your players are likely to encounter or look for during play, you’ll have an answer ready when the PCs ask which shops they see on the main square.

The temptation here will be to come up with a backstory for every serving wench and every beggar on the street, but avoid doing that--in fact, during this process, try not to come up with backstories for anybody or anything. Instead, for any characters, places, or objects you need to write up to fill out vital details about your setting, concern yourself with hooks: three- to five-word descriptions that will make the element intriguing. In place of a detailed description, write one or a few of these taglines about each NPC, location, and artifact your setting requires. This will save you hours of writing, but it will still give you shortcuts for your story elements that will provide fodder you can use later to flesh them out. If you’re fleshing out the character in preparation for an adventure, you can use the Triple-Why rule Silhouette Core proposes*: (They didn’t create the process, but I haven’t seen anyone else that applied it to RPGs.) You take your hook or motivation or description, and you ask why; then you ask why that is for a second answer; then you ask why that is for a third level of introspection. Otherwise, if you’re fleshing out the character on the fly, your hook will give you a solid jumping-off point for quick, engaging ideas. This way, you’ll be able to create compelling, memorable story elements with which your players will enjoy interacting, instead of putting your standby “Tired Bartender #2” or “Jade McGuffin #9 3/4” in front of them.

By concerning yourself with the actual streets and people of your cities and towns, you’re storing up a wealth of options when it comes time to plan your next adventure or come up with a random event on the fly. Even when you use a random encounter chart, knowing the details about your town lets you interpret the result in a meaningful way: ‘Let’s see. A 47 is... a necromancer and 1d6 zombies. But we’re in the merchant’s district right now... Hm. Maybe the necromancer has set up shop in one of the storm drains underneath the Flying Market. That means the corpses are going to be thieves and urchins--aha. Maybe one of the zombies is a kid Lissaneth pays for secrets.” And with that, a purely random encounter suddenly becomes a personal encounter tailored for one of the PCs.

Details matter!

LIMITATIONS OF INSIDE-OUT CREATION

As crucial as details are, they have little meaning outside of context. If the context of your world is nothing more than “a high-magic fantasy world with elves and dwarves”, it’ll be challenging for you to weave the details of your setting together in any kind of meaningful story.

Let’s say the farmer gets robbed by bandits while he’s in the next town buying an ox.

If you’ve only ever detailed the town in which the PCs are adventuring, you have to come up with a reason for the bandits to be there. Maybe they’re just after money. That means you have to decide how the bandits are dressed, what their level of training is, what kinds of tactics they use. You have to create their motivations and reactions from scratch. Will they ambush the PCs in the wild? Will they talk if the PCs want to negotiate first? Who knows?

On the other hand, if you know that the empire in which the PCs’ town is located has just been through a messy expansion campaign, you’ll be able to surmise that a bunch of out-of-work mercenaries might be plaguing the countryside. At least some of the bandits will have ragtag weapons and armor of their own, and they’ll be well-trained. You’ll also have a good idea about their motivations and background before you even stop to consider a single character. If the PCs want to talk, it’s pretty sure that the bandits will be willing to negotiate--in fact, if the PCs have enough coin, they might be able to hire the bandits to work for them.

Local details are essential, but it’s the big-picture facts that will stitch your stories together into a tapestry that makes sense. Even if the PCs never make it to the next town, knowing that the Emperor’s trade tax to fund the next pyramid he’s planning is squeezing the local farmers will enrich your stories and inform your NPC farmer’s reaction when the bard asks her for more cash after they rescue her sheep from the goblins. (“My taxes are due next week. Can I pay you in eggs instead of cash?”)

That’s why inside-out world design, by itself, isn’t enough to create a fully-realized setting. At the very least, you need to know elemental data like how many hours are in a day, how the calendar works, local deities and worship practices, and how the local government relates to the regional or national government. Without big-picture data like this, you won’t be able to ground your campaign in your setting in a believable, consistent fashion.

INSIDE-OUT AND THE ONGOING CAMPAIGN

For campaign maintenance, inside-out is an undemanding method to keep up because it deals with only the details you need to push your story forward.

To help you decide which elements are worth paying attention to during your planning sessions and which ones are safe to ignore, I’m going to borrow wisdom from a book I enjoy. I admire the campaign tracking system Baker & Baker detail in Apocalypse World. I’m not saying I use it as written, but it has a lot going for it: it’s quirky, strange, and irreverent, and you may find that it challenges your assumptions about how to DM. At the very least, reading it gives you some food for thought.

In the “Threats” chapter of that book, they’re talking about writing down the central issues (in their phraseology, ‘Stakes’) that will make a story element (as you may have guessed, they call these ‘Threats’) unique. They advise, “Stakes should be concrete, absolute, irrevocable in their consequences... Resolving the outstanding question means that nothing will ever be the same for them.”** By focusing in this manner on what you find worthwhile about the stories of your NPCs and locations, you’ll tend to infuse those characters and places with interest that your players will tend to notice and follow. (Except the curmudgeons. There’s nothing you can do about them. lol) It’ll also give you ideas for solid storylines.

If you keep up with your world’s elements using story hooks and personal stakes instead of individual histories, you’ll be sifting through characters you’re interested in and the plot threads you’re keen on pursuing instead of juggling the personal schedules of encyclopedia entries like a glorified personal assistant. This will keep the focus on the main bits of your stories instead of getting you mired down in peripheral details you don’t need, and that will help you in the essential business of giving yourself interesting things to say.

How do you feel about inside-out and outside-in world building? Do you use one of these philosophies in your campaign creation, or do you have another method you prefer? Let’s talk in the comments!

Game well,

Jonathan Andrews

* “The Triple-Why Rule”; Silhouette Core Rules, Deluxe Edition p. 179

** “Stakes”; Apocalypse World, Second Edition p. 116