Asherion

Organic Worldbuilding

12 min read

Introduction

There are two general approaches to worldbuilding. The first is a top-down methodology, where you plan everything before writing a story or creating an adventure. The second is a more bottom-up approach, where you start with smaller things such as, perhaps, individuals, a small village, a type of flora or fauna, and expand from there.

But there’s a third way that combines the best of both. I call this mixed plan organic worldbuilding. With this approach, it’s like you are managing a garden. You plant seeds in fertile soil and let them grow, pruning and shaping as needed rather than forcing a predetermined structure. Sometimes you have to plan ahead and prep for the garden to expand, but only as much as it needs and in the directions that make sense.

This post explores when to let content grow naturally versus when to plan ahead, based on lessons learned building Maelstrom, and how to organize as you go in a file system.

The Traditional Approaches

Top-Down Worldbuilding

In what I’m calling “Top-Down” worldbuilding, you’re starting out with the big picture. Continents, nations, perhaps the geography or characteristics of a planet, a moon, ecology, major settlements or species. Then, you work down to smaller and smaller details. This approach is perhaps almost universal, to a degree, and it gives you a concrete structure to work with.

However, worldbuilding this way can get overwhelming. The worldbuilding itself can feel somewhat detached from the story you plan to tell. You may end up in a bit of a perpetual worldbuilding era. That’s good, if that’s your joy; for me I go through phases where the worldbuilding is for its own sake. But if you’re trying to tell a story, or lay the framework for a Dungeons and Dragons campaign, building out the entire world first is not going to be the most sustainable approach. It’s not practical, and you’re setting yourself up to fail.

Bottom-Up Worldbuilding

On the other hand, people often like to start very small. A single character, a small village. The encounter location where their TTRPG session will begin. They expand out from there, slowly building the world out from that seed.

This has an obvious immediate advantage. You can immediately use everything you build for whatever project you’re working on. It’s a greater immediate reward for your inner worldbuilder. But you’re lacking the larger-scale systems thinking of the top-down approach, and that’s going to show. It’s going to get hard to maintain consistency, eventually.

The Organic Approach

If neither top-down nor bottom-up worldbuilding are the “Goldilocks” approach, with one being too large scale and tedious and one being too scattered and unfocused, perhaps, then what is a worldbuilder to do? I’d suggest a more organic approach to worldbuilding paired with a very specific organizational method to keep yourself organized.

Manage Content by Density

The approach is simple. As you build out content about your world, from whatever starting point you’d like, let the information accumulate in one place until it becomes unwieldy, then split it off into its own space. Don’t create organizational structure preemptively, beyond the basics. Let it emerge from actual content.

Example

  • Start a note about “The Storm Court”, an organization of fey creatures. Perhaps my worldbuilding vault has directories for People, Places, Things, Creatures, and Systems currently, so I’ll choose to put the note in “People”.
  • Next, add sections as you develop ideas. Perhaps I’ll add “History”, “Key People”, “Territories”, and “Culture” as I have ideas for each.
  • When the “Key People” section grows beyond, say, 500 words, it starts to feel as if it deserves its own note.
  • Now, I split off the Key People note into a new one. Perhaps in this case, I’ll add a layer of structure. I’ll make “The Storm Court into a directory, move the main file inside that, as kind of an index, and add a “Key People of the Storm Court” or “Storm Court - People” file, add proper metadata, copy the info over from the main note, and, importantly, link between them if you’re using a system with wiki-style links like Obsidian.

When Does Content Need Its Own Note?

When should you split off pieces of content into their own notes or files (notes is the Obsidian terminology)? Well, there are a few signals that might indicate that a section should become its own file:

  • It’s longer than other sections around it by a substantial amount
  • You reference elements of this section from multiple other notes
  • It has its own distinct sub-headings emerging that have significant amounts of content themselves
  • You find yourself scrolling through the parent note to find it repeatedly
  • Set an arbitrary length rule, like I did above, but generally I like to let this happen more naturally (organic!)

I used to believe just the opposite of this rule, but here we are:

Don’t create links to content that doesn’t exist yet.

I used to love the idea of anticipatory links in a wiki link system. It’s delightful! I’ll link all dozen of the dwarves I mention in this article about a princess, that way when I get around to… and a year later, those links are still dead, and when I click one excitedly to recall something about them, nothing happens, or a new blank note is created. Imagine the repeated disappointment and annoyance.

Seriously, though, avoiding anticipatory links prevents:

  • Forests of empty placeholder files or dead links
  • The guilt/obligation of “I should fill this in” even if it isn’t th best use of your time at the moment
  • Premature structure that might not fit eventual content

Instead, just make note of ideas inline or in a general “seeds” or “ideas” document. You can make an ideas file for your world, or for various sections inside your worldbuilding files. I often label them. “World Ideas”, “BBEG Ideas”, “Campaign Ideas”, or in a novel project, “Arc Ideas”. Create the actual note only when you have substantial content to put in it.

Balancing Growth and Planning

As with any system, there’s balance involved. You grow organically, but then you have to pause and add a little structure. And there’s some benefit to a little up front planning for any system.

What to Plan Ahead

Some elements benefit greatly from having structure ahead of time, such as the foundational constraints of your world, or the systems with which your organize your information about the world.

Foundational Constraints

These create the “soil” for organic growth):

  • Core physical laws: Maelstrom is a tidally-locked planet.
  • Major magical rules: Magical power must be drawn from one of the three (definitely not four) Circles of Power, energy fields that literal wrap the planet.
  • Basic political/power structures: The fey Courts and their areas of dominance, the basic ideas of the governance of the human city, Landfall.

Organizational Systems

These provide structure without dictating content):

  • Metadata taxonomy: For any note, I have frontmatter indicating the type of note, the date it was created, and for some types of notes, the location that is the parent of this location, or relevant people, etc. I always include tags to allow me to have more freeform correlations between notes, too.
  • File organization conventions: I have conventions (templates, really) for each type of note. “People” notes might have an H2 for Description, Mannerisms, History, Relationships, and then a Notes section as a catch-all. At a directory level, I try to use the organic growth described above, but then mirror the same patterns I create in other places.
  • Tagging systems: I often try and follow patterns with tags, but they’re unique to the system I’m working with. In Maelstrom, some tags mirror other metadata fields (creature but some are trying to give me subsets to filter on later undead or intelligent or bone-court or such things).

What to Let Grow

Let other things emerge naturally, either as the story develops, or as byproducts of the constraints you’re creating (because Constraints Make Better Worlds). Things that are often good to let grow on their own are aspects that require depth and detailed thinking and ideas, or connections between various parts of your world and the things within it.

Details and Depth

  • Individual NPCs and their relationships: Tertiary characters that you mention when outlining a scene, but realize later mater more because of context building around them.
  • Specific locations within regions: That inn in the middle of Landfall that you really want to bear down on and develop as a reusable location in campaigns.
  • Historical events and their implications: When you run into a system that exists, but you’re unsure why, like a governmental body, you can begin walking backward in a more natural way, outlining events that might have led to that result.
  • Cultural practices and traditions: The cult that grew around the worship of a tree that seemed to (and did) grant magical powers to some individuals in the past. And the faction that grew to hate them, and attempt to destroy those that used that magic, and the tree itself.

Connections Between Elements

  • Don’t force how different parts of your world interact: If I have developed the human city of Landfall, and the Twilight Court on another continent, it’s all right if those two locations and peoples are not particularly attached.
  • Let connections emerge as you develop content: However, if a Nimble campaign or a novel plot begin to wind adventurers working for a trade organization into the Twilight lands, all of a sudden, it’s worth considering past connections, economic or political interactions, if any, and how they would receive one another.
  • Some areas will naturally interconnect; others won’t: Geographic proximity, shared history, shared religious ideology, things like that help provide natural bridges between individuals, populations, or places. But sometimes, there just isn’t any such bridge, and again, that’s fine. The world is a big place.

Organic Worldbuilding in Practice

Here are a few tips on actually implementing the organic worldbuilding approach in various scenarios.

Handling Multiple Campaigns or Stories

If you’re running multiple campaigns, or if you’re writing multiple stories at once in your world:

  • Different storylines will develop different areas
  • Let each deepen its relevant regions, cultures, and other context
  • Don’t feel obligated to develop areas no story uses
  • Some parts of your world can remain sketched out, outlined, or entirely unknown

Dealing with Inconsistencies

Organic growth may naturally create contradictions. That’s all right:

  1. Recognize it as a feature, not a bug, because sometimes, real worlds have competing narratives
  2. Decide which version fits better or serves story needs
  3. Update existing notes as needed
  4. Document if the inconsistency is something that actually works for the story (competing accounts, etc.) or if you need to align the discrepancies

Positive Indicators

If you’re seeing these sorts of results, you’re probably on the right track:

  • You regularly use the content you create
  • Notes grow naturally during play/writing sessions
  • You discover new connections you hadn’t planned
  • The world feels alive and surprising even to you

Warning Signs

On the other hand, if you’re seeing these outcomes after some time trying this out, it’s possible you need to adjust things:

  • Lots of stub files with < 100 words
  • Perfect organization but little actual content
  • You spend more time restructuring than creating
  • No one section is notably deeper than others

Example Scenario: Maelstrom

What Was Planned

I planned a few major constraints and systems ahead of time for Maelstrom. Some examples are:

  • Tidally-locked planet physics
  • Fey courts as major political structure
  • Landfall as human city in fey territory
  • Metadata taxonomy for organization in Obsidian

What Grew Organically

There are many things that were shaped by the things I needed before them, and then by each other as I wrote about more and more topics:

  • Specific court characteristics emerged from campaign needs
  • Individual NPCs developed into reusable documented characters after single encounters
  • The notes content for the human outpost called “The Roost” split off from the note about the ruins of Silverthorn as it became its own location
  • Directional navigation (stormward/rimward) developed from practical play needs and a lack of solar, easily usable lunar, or magnetic compass based directions

Structure That Emerged

After all of that, here are the patterns that emerged in my worldbuilding:

  • Directory organization based on content types
  • Distinction between note types (creature vs. individual, location vs. settlement)
  • Linking patterns between factions, places, and individuals
  • All of this emerged from organizing existing content, and expanding into what was needed next, not planned upfront

Practical Exercise

For readers just starting their own world, I would suggest these practical steps to start:

  1. Define 2-3 core constraints for your world (the “soil” for your garden).
  2. Create a single starting location with some amount of detail (perhaps 300+ words).
  3. Add to it organically as you use it in play/writing.
  4. Split off content only when sections grow large or begin to need to be referenced elsewhere (if you use a system like Obsidian you can link to specific headings, but the point is that if you need to reference the section it’s possible it should be its own topic).
  5. After 10 sessions/chapters, review what’s grown vs. what you initially imagined. Consider whether you need any more structure or plan around what comes next.

Conclusion

Organic worldbuilding isn’t about avoiding planning. It’s about planning the right things. Plan your constraints, your organizational systems, and your metadata. Let the actual content, the specific details, and the connections between elements grow from use.

Your world will develop depth where it matters most (the parts you actually use) while avoiding the trap of meticulously detailing regions that no one will ever visit. You’ll be surprised by what emerges. It’s likely to turn out better than you would have planned.

The best worldbuilding isn’t imposed from lofty global ideas. It’s cultivated from seeds of ideas that you let grow in fertile, well-structured soil.