Unless you’re planning to use a setting sourcebook - like Dungeons & Dragons’ Eberron: Rising from the Last War - or an adventure module such as Baldur’s Gate: Descent into Avernus, you’ll be worldbuilding your own setting and storylines for your tabletop roleplaying gaming sessions. Giving your worldbuilding efforts the time and attention they deserve, is important for several reasons - whether you’re simply passionate about worldbuilding or want to ensure that you’re able to run the best tabletop RPG campaign possible.

Have more creative control over your TTRPG storylines

Creating your own roleplaying game world, rather than relying on an existing sourcebook for dnd or an equivalent, will grant you much more creative control over your campaign/s. 

If there aren’t any sourcebooks or setting books for your chosen game system that focus on the kind of elements you like about fictional worlds - from a certain type of magic system to a favourite influence - then you can just make it yourself. Maybe you and your player group have always wanted to play in a campaign world inspired by the Inheritance Cycle series by Christopher Paolini, but have never found anything that works: you could just make that playable world yourself. 

You can also just tweak the likes of d&d’s own Forgotten Realms or Pathfinder’s Golarion to include the aspects of worldbuilding that you do like, whilst changing the ones you don’t. Imagine playing in a version of the Forgotten Realms where all magic is derived from a single source - such as a pantheon or enchanted relic - and the entire world’s culture, economy, political system and religion is centred around it. 

Create an immersive world your players want to discover

By worldbuilding your own campaign setting, you can ensure that it has a strong enough foundation and enough unique details, to make it an immersive experience for your players. 

By crafting a real world from the ground up, Dungeon Masters can include history, cultures, NPCs and places that players want to investigate and learn more about. These can serve as the catalysts or prompts that drive the story of your tabletop roleplaying game forward, as well as offer elements for your players to build their characters’ backstories and narrative arcs around. 

This is the ideal scenario for any TTRPG - from D&D to Daggerheart - as this is what makes for great roleplaying: when the players are invested enough that they are driving the story, with you then able to react to that as the game master. 

Craft a world that shifts in response to your players

Worldbuilding doesn’t just begin and end with the initial creation of your homebrew setting, but continues for as long as you and your group are playing within that fantasy world.

During your gameplay sessions, you won’t just be taking notes so you can keep track of where your players are and what they’re doing. Your dming notes can also serve as a reference point to use for when you’re adding or changing anything about your world. 

Your worldbuilding can shift and change in response to your players’ interactions within it, making for a setting that feels much more organic and believable. For example, your players’ actions towards one particular side to a conflict, could then result in that side getting the upper-hand over their opponent, with the player characters returning in several months time to find that the region is now controlled by a different ruler. 

Another way to go about doing this, is to pay attention to the way your players are reacting to certain elements of your existing worldbuilding. Maybe you can include new things that fit with what your players seem to be interested in, or possibly tweak something to make it work better with their playstyles. This kind of flexibility can turn a good dnd or RPG playthrough into something great. 

Provide a rich sandbox for your players to explore

Besides enabling memorable character interactions and challenging moral quandaries, good worldbuilding is also about providing a sandbox for your players to explore. 

Worldbuilding your roleplaying game setting will allow you to make your own collection of fascinating and wondrous locations, which you can then witness your player characters exploring themselves. This usually involves creating maps - either using physical materials or digital tools like Legendkeeper - that can serve as a reference point.

Doing this yourself, rather than using anything premade, will give you control over the locations and the way they’re mapped out. Did you want to put an idyllic island paradise in the middle of a lake of lava? - you can by making your own world maps. As your campaign progresses, you can reflect any major changes to the landscape on your map, as well as build it out to include new places for your players to explore.