This book was dense as hell, and I absolutely loved it. It has so much stuff to consider when building your own worlds, and it could as easily apply to short stories and novels as TTRPGs. It gives you everything to think about in developing a world from the government structure, to the economics, geographic considerations, history, etc. And like the character backstory book in this series, it breaks the worldbuilding down into genre-specific pieces with targeted advice for each one. For fantasy, for example, it walks you through some tips on how to go about creating a magic system, while the horror chapter talks about creating monsters, and the sci-fi chapter discusses how far into the future your story is set and how that affects the technology level of the world that you're creating.

Like the Game Master's Guide book, this is a book that I will most likely hold onto for worldbuilding now and in the future. It's probably not something that I will use all the time (since getting caught in the trap of spending more time worldbuilding than actually writing is a real issue for me), but when I am in the appropriate part of story development (either prose or when running a TTRPG campaign), I will almost certainly look to this book and its various suggestions, checklists, etc. to give me inspiration for what to develop and how.

I would definitely recommend this book for anyone who spends any amount of time worldbuilding fictional worlds (especially secondary worlds that are much different than our own).

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Created Apr 27, 2025 at 3:04pm • Submit your own review...