Today, we’re getting complicated. I’m going to talk about the history and politics of our world here in this video, and both of these world-building aspects can be exceedingly complicated. It can be a lot of work, but I often find it to be well worth it. When you spend a lot of time on the history and politics of your world, it saves you a considerable amount of work and effort later down the line as you plan out your campaign. You’ll have a lot of information to draw from that you prepared in advance, so drafting the campaign arcs becomes much more doable. Additionally, having a solid idea of your world’s history and politics can make improvising during a session more feasible than it otherwise would be.

We’re finally here! The session I’ve really been looking forward to… writing copy for your players. Today, we’re going to create something we can give to our players that they can use to build the backstory for their characters. I’m going to talk about the different things I include in this initial handout and I’ll even be giving you access to the handout that I’m creating for you to review. I’m eager to get started, so let’s just dive in!

In this session, we’re going to take what we developed in the previous session and really flesh it out. I’m going to break down how I write my arcs and talk about what I do to ensure successful, cohesive improvisation during a session. At the bottom of this post, you’ll find links to download the template that I use for writing an arc. If you have your own that you’d like to use, feel free to use that! My template is also fairly focused on Dungeons and Dragons, but it can easily be modified to any other system.

In this session, we’re going to zoom into the map and focus on one of those regions and one population center within it. You should select a region that has a few interesting features to it, rather than something that is less interesting like a grassy plain or desert. Those can be made interesting, of course, but we want to pick an area that’s interesting right from the start, for this. Note that this is going to be where we write the first arc, too, so keep that in mind when selecting the region you’re going to focus on for this.