The Ultimate RPG Game Master's Worldbuilding Guide: Prompts and Activities to Create and Customize Your Own Game World

by James D’Amato

Level up your Game Master skills with these fun, interactive prompts and activities to help your worldbuilding from RPG expert James D’Amato.Make your next campaign truly unique with the help of this interactive guide to world building! From RPG expert James D’Amato comes a fun new guide that teaches beginner and experienced gamers alike how to build and create their own game elements for customizing existing adventures or creating new stories from scratch. The Ultimate RPG Game Master’s Worldbuilding Guide includes dozens of activities for a wide range of genres from fantasy and sci-fi to horror and x-punk. This lively and interactive book helps Game Masters create dynamic destinations, powerful items, shadowy organizations, compelling villains, and more. Make the most of your gaming experience with these unique and personalized ideas for your gaming group’s next adventures!

Genres: Role Playing Games, Nonfiction, Writing, Gaming, Reference, Games, Dungeons and Dragons

268 pages, Kindle Edition

First published June 1, 2021

Reviews

[Nicholas Smeaton · Rating 4 out of 5]

For a Gamemaster, even an experienced one, world building can be a chore and can seem like an insurmountable obstacle. This book contains a number of exercises that allow you to build campaign settings and it does so by asking the reader a series of open ended questions. The idea is to clearly kick start your imagination, the questions are broad in nature and the reader is left to fill in the details of the world they've created. The book is organised by genre with chapters dedicated to fantasy, Sci-fi, Horror, X-punk (Cyberpunk, Steampunk, Diselpunk etc with a final chapter for world building ideas that are common to most genres. I found the exercises quite effective at getting my creative juices flowing.
Recommended for any Game Master - you'll need this book sooner or later or any writer of genre fiction.

[AkelaRa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Однозначно корисний посібник для світобудування :)

[Oscar Cecena · Rating 4 out of 5]

Worldbuilding has always fascinated me. Before I even discovered role-playing games or became a Game Master, I was already making up worlds in my mind; most of them were based on what I was reading at the time (read The Lord of the Rings).
But, even though I consider myself an experienced worldbuilder, I found this book extremely interesting, especially if you're delving into a genre that you're not too familiar with.
I'd recommend this book to anyone who plays RPGs or simply wants a more structured way to build your world. Honestly, I'm already using it to tune in some details of the world I'm creating for my novel.

[Riley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very cool exercises to help you world build. Worth reading if you're into genre fiction or GMing

[Kenneth Roland · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed the prompts to create and think about the history of worlds. Some interesting ideas on world building broken into multiple categories as well as a general section. Worth having as a reference while you create, however, a lot of the book is unnecessary fill in the blanks that could easily have been done on paper and the content can be found pretty much anywhere on the web. Glad to have it in my collection, but $10 seems like a more appropriate price.

[David Strašák · Rating 1 out of 5]

I've got to say, if you are looking for a book that teaches you world building, this is not the book for you.
The book has prompts - only prompts. Lots of them. They are great, but they take up a lot of space. Every prompt has tons of possible outcomes written, so every topic takes up 5 pages of this book.
Sadly because of that this means that the book does not cover so many topics. In addition to that the book has 5 subtopics that may not be relevant to the world you are trying to build (so if you are building a cyberpunk world, only two of 5 sections are relevant, which is suddenly just 40% of the book).
It is basically just giving you points to start from, but none of them are particularly good, so mostly I was just reading through all the possible prompts to hope to find one that was good.

I don't think I will use this book again.
If you want to learn how to worldbuild, there are better books out there. My personal recommendation would be ICRPG rules and if you want world building prompts, use AI - it will give you more for free.

[Justin · Rating 4 out of 5]

While not all-encompassing (there's nothing about mapmaking for example), this is still a handy resource for fleshing things out if you're looking to make a homebrew setting for your game. I've only used the fantasy section so far, but there are are also chapters on sci-fi, horror, cyberpunk (and other -punk genres), along with one for more general settings.

To give you an example of what to expect, the fantasy chapter gives pointers on developing magic systems; fleshing out the gods of your pantheon and their relationships to each other; tables for detailing legendary items; building broad-stroke factions; and creating a few places of interest. Again, it's not exhaustive: you'll have to chart out where all this stuff is in your world, and go more into depth on the various kingdoms and nation-states yourself. But it's good for creating a baseline, or adding details to certain aspects of your world.

[Lio Leeuwerink · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book has a lot of amazing exercises and thought provoking questions that will surely enhance your RPG campaign. Once again James d'Amato proves he is a master at understanding storytelling.

This book will not help you create a vast, intricately designed world such as the Forgotten Realms or Middle-Earth. Instead it will guide you in creating something better: a world with meaning, that adds to the themes of the stories that you want to tell. A world filled with locations and people that matter to you and your players.

My favourite part of the book is the fantasy chapter, especially the exercises concerning magic and gods. It inspired me to add new ideas to the world I'm currently running a game in.

[Holly · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Ultimate RPG Game Master's Worldbuilding Guide: Prompts and Activities to Create and Customize Your Own Game World by James D’Amato deftly leads game masters (GMs) through the opening stages of creating their world. It is packed with prompts which may directly or indirectly inspire GMs. The book is helpfully divided into genres so GMs can easily find relevant sections for their world. But of course, mixing and matching the genres is also allowed and quite doable with this guide.

For new GMs or those looking to hone their skills, The Ultimate RPG Game Master's Worldbuilding Guide: Prompts and Activities to Create and Customize Your Own Game World by James D’Amato is a great resource.

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wonderful tool for channelling creativity. The book is full of prompts and exercises to build your own setting in intricate detail. I really like how it is formatted and structured, with a comprehensive guide to build living worlds. I'm looking to combine this with Troika ttrpg to make a setting for that system.

[Willow (Taylor's version) · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 rating rounded up to 5 stars.

This was really entertaining and well thought-out! I can actually picture people using this to help them with their D&D games, which I felt the RPG Character Backstory game didn't have. I can also see people using this book to help them with world-building in general, not just D&D games.

Recommended.

[Kay · Rating 2 out of 5]

I know the title said this was "prompts" but I thought this book would have content other than prompts to help game masters out. I was wrong. Great if you're looking for a few prompts to help you flesh things out, less great if you're like me and just kind of wanted to hear someone break down worldbuilding at a more big picture and technical level without as many prompts.

[Jordan Dant · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting read, lots of great questions and exercises to chew on for creative work, RPG or otherwise. I particularly liked the inclusion of other genres besides fantasy. More a workbook or reference, I will keep this handy for future projects.

[Jdetrick · Rating 4 out of 5]

This isn't a book you read so much as one you use. Its hard to tell how good it is since I haven't used it to create any RPG elements yet, but it seems like it would be very helpful in that regard, laying out clear steps and ideas on how to create everything from entire worlds to villainous foes.

[Logan Streondj · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was pretty mediocre at best. Focus is on godless service to self worlds, something like a cross between star wars and some kind of horror flick. Pretty vulgar to be honest. Barely managed to finish it.

[Dave Leroux · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing resource and super helpful for RPG world building. DMs need this 100%.

[Jenny Wilkins · Rating 3 out of 5]

A lot of handy tools to help worldbuilding, but nothing, like, mind blowing. Worth the read if you feel stuck, but it's not gonna overhaul how you view your game table.

[Erin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Really a 3.5 - doesn't work for everything but some of the charts and thought exercises were great for getting you thinking outside the box and building a fuller world.

[Mateusz · Rating 3 out of 5]

Jak na coś, co ma pomóc stworzyć ŚWIAT, to nie przyniosło dużej inspiracji. Kilka fajnych promptów, ale na pewno nie jest to "ultimate guide".

[Deana Armstrong · Rating 4 out of 5]

Useful story building tools

Useful, but sometimes limited world building tools. The random generators sometimes lack an obvious roll, e g. 5 options instead of 4, 6, 8, 10, etc.

[Kevin · Rating 3 out of 5]

⭐️⭐️⭐️💫