Kobold Guide to Worldbuilding

By: Scott Hungerford, Jeff Grubb, Michael A. Stackpole, Chris Pramas, Keith Baker, Steven Winter

Narrated by: Ray Greenley

Length: 4 hrs and 42 mins

Publisher's summary

The essential elements for building a world.

Roleplaying games and fantasy fiction are filled with rich and fascinating worlds: the Forgotten Realms, Glorantha, Narnia, R'lyeh, Middle-earth, Barsoom, and so many more. It took startling leaps of imagination as well as careful thought and planning to create places like these: places that readers and players want to come back to again and again.

Now, 11 of adventure gaming's top designers come together to share their insights into building worlds that gamers will never forget. Learn the secrets of designing a pantheon, creating a setting that provokes conflict, determining which historical details are necessary, and so much more.

Take that creative leap, and create dazzling worlds of your own!

Essays by Wolfgang Baur, Keith Baker, Monte Cook, Jeff Grubb, Scott Hungerford, David "Zeb" Cook, Chris Pramas, Jonathan Roberts, Michael A. Stackpole, Steve Winter, Janna Silverstein, with an introduction by Ken Scholes.

Nominated for two Ennie Awards: Best Writing and Best RPG-Related Book.

©2012 Open Design LLC (P)2017 Open Design LLC

very well done.

Even though this is just a Collection of essays, the content of each is very useful for shaking things up in your own mind or how you might approach something going forward. I recommend this anyone who is just getting started in their world building journey.

Incredible Resource

Sooo much good advice in here. Well worth the short read.

But why does the voice actor put an “S” at the end of some of his words? Especially the word “And” - he says “ands”. I dont understand. Lol

Incredibly inspiring

This book and performance are brilliant. I’ve listened to several chapters five or six times. So much creative inspiration here, though it does follow a sort of DnD theme, you can apply the worldbuilding concepts to any creative style.

A must read for World Builders

The essays here are fantastic and well worth the time. many game concepts are discussed in detail, putting voice to some things that I had already been thinking.

Great for building a strong foundation.

Whether your project is a D&D game, a novel, movie script, or video game; if you are building a non-historical Earth for your setting this book helps you set a solid, realistic foundation to develop upon. Kobold Guide to Worldbuilding helps you consider details and situations that might not seem important at the beginning of your project, but may become tools for your players or characters to use upon later development of the story, such as; neighboring political systems and interactions, geography and the weather is creates, trade goods and local economies, and how magic or technology may change and interact with these systems. If you have a project in the works, this book is totally worth your time. Audible 20 Review Sweepstakes Entry

Great for a dm, player, or writer

World and character building tips from someone who has done it for years. You can always learn more.

Awesome world building tool.

This is a great tool for any word builder. I make home brew worlds for RPGs and while listening to this it just filled me with more and more ideas. I will continue to come back to this book whenever I am preparing to create a new world. The narrator was very engaging. The way he read kept my attention which, I'm my opinion, is what you need in a compilation of essays.

Insightful for writers, Gms, and designers

A short but sweet info packed book full of knowledge and experience from some of the game industry's finest. This book is handy for anyone looking to build and manage worlds- nor just gamers.

Not bad

This is a random collection of essays that's kind of targeted towards D&D dungeon masters, kind of targeted towards fantasy authors and kind of targets towards other types of creatives. There seems to be no single target audience or unifying purpose, an no single essay will apply well for everyone.

It's mainly to satisfy intellectual curiosity. It's kind of interesting to learn some tips on creating a world map for a fantasy world, or about trying to get hired to create a work for a licensed property.

But don't expect this to be a useful, thorough, how-to guide for any given creative endeavor. I wanted to get some ideas that could help me as a beginning DM. A few of the essays were somewhat relevant, but only a few. It wasn't terribly helpful for that purpose overall.

This would seem better as random blog posts on a website.

great tips on rpg worldbuilding

I thought there was a lot of good content. just wish it were a little longer.