Building Merithaya: Part 1 - Big Picture

This is the first in a series of posts where I build a new world from scratch. For now, as I haven't decided on a name, I shall call it Merithaya for ease of reference (this was the name of the first ever world I built when I was young, so it's nice to throw back to it as a placeholder name!).

Approaches to Designing a World

In my experience there are two approaches when starting out like this, both with pros and cons.

• Detail First
• Big Picture First

Detail First

In this approach, pick a small unit of the world (perhaps a town, city, or even country) and design that first. You can then increment outwards, designing nearby features, until you have a big enough world for your purpose.

I think Detail First world building is really great for a one-off D&D campaign, or a short story, where the entire narrative and adventure is going to be focused on a relatively small area, and it's unlikely that the wider area will be interacted with much more than in passing comments or vague mentions. It lets you avoid getting distracted by aspects of your world that your players or readers will never see.

However, it can make it tricky if you want to expand your world later - you can make decisions that work for the small scale you need them for at the time, but that become inconsistent or clunky when scaled up to a full world. Arguably the world I built for my current D&D campaign has been affected by this - I designed one half of one continent for a previous campaign, then tried to expand outwards to a full world later, and it left me having to make some convoluted story explanations for why no-one had ever heard of the other half of the continent before...

Big Picture First

This is the exact opposite of the Detail First approach - in this case, the broad strokes of the world (like continents and other worldwide phenomena) are considered before then focussing on more and more specific pieces. You can think about what theme or style you want the world to be, and have more cohesive connections and relations between areas and countries, as well as considering the impact of elements like religion and gods on a global scale. This can make very immersive worlds that can be explored across multiple stories or campaigns.

This comes at the cost of a much bigger upfront workload and investment of time before it can be used, as well as the risk of pursuing rabbit holes of design that ultimately may not even feature very much in the narrative of your campaign or story.

Merithaya - A Big Picture First World

Now back to the project at hand, though. For this world, I'm going to take a Big Picture first approach - I hope to use it for multiple D&D campaigns (and maybe even some writing projects), so I want that depth of detail that comes from considering the whole. Also, there is little time pressure on me to complete this project, so I have the time to get into the weeds a bit and really consider what we want the world to be like.

So, given that, let's begin!

The first step in this approach is to consider any features or themes I want to build this world to include. I have a few ideas of things I want to build around for Merithaya:

• I like the idea of several of the countries on one continent being laid out around a large inland sea (maybe with one or more islands in it), that is contested between the nations surrounding it. This would give a nice way for the nations here to interact, and comes with some built in conflict that would make for good story hooks.
• I don't want this world to be too huge - two or three larger continents, with some smaller island chains, would be enough - I think it is better to have less places with more details that lots of "low resolution" places. These should be close enough for people to travel between them, again to provide interesting mixes of cultures for story and character purposes.
• I have an idea for a pantheon based around the seasons - I'm still forming this in my mind, but I want the pantheon to be global this time (contrasting the regional gods I have in my current campaign), so any areas I design should have some representation of this global pantheon (with regional variances).

That leaves a lot to be planned, but there's some good things to work with here. Already from that we have a rough idea of what the landmasses might be like, and I can sketch out a vague outline of some initial continents to work with.

It's worth noting at this stage that a lot can change in this process - I don't regard anything as set in stone until the story is written! - so expect this vague plan to be significantly different from what we end up with eventually. That's part of the fun of world building, to see where the design takes you!

This is already a pretty long post, so I'll pause it here. Next time, we can plan out some basic continents!