New to Sly Flourish? Start Here or subscribe to the newsletter. Listen to articles on Readings and Reflections.

Lazy World Building

by Mike on 4 August 2025

From the latest polls I've run, about half of GMs who responded run their own adventures in their own campaign world. I've argued before for running homebrew adventures in published settings but some GMs really prefer to have their own world for a few possible reasons:

They have full control over it.
They don't have to worry about a player's metagaming in a world they know better than the GM.
They know it better than any published world because they built every part of it.

But world building is far from a lazy style of GMing. A lot of work goes into those worlds.

Or does it?

What if there's a lazier way to build a world for our RPGs?

Worlds Versus Campaign Settings

First, it's worth drawing a separation between "worlds" and "campaign settings". Campaigns are large stories – even stories that haven't happened yet. They involve plots, villains, locations, adventures, and hooks for the characters. They might be big or small but they're often event-driven. Something happens or is happening – something that often must be stopped.

Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master takes one approach at campaign building called "spiral campaign building" – focusing a campaign around the characters and building outwards. That's the bottom up approach but in Return we also include a little bit of top-down campaign building:

Have a clear campaign hook we can say in just a few words.
Have a handful of villains with their own goals and quests.
Offer truths we share with the players to separate this campaign from others.

Then we focus on the next adventure we're going to run, with a thought about the adventures we might run after that.

And that's it.

Building Worlds

Worlds are different. Worlds are independent of the characters and their goals. Worlds are generally independent of the plots being driven forward by villains. Worlds include

gods & religions
factions
history
geography

and other stuff.

There's a reason I still promote using published settings – published campaign settings have all this stuff already baked into them. You can focus on the parts you want to use for your campaign and adventures and skip what you don't want to use. You can make published worlds your own.

The same is true even when you're building your own world. You don't need to focus on a single campaign world. You can take from lots of them.

Gods & Religions

One example is gods. Several great RPG books include lists of gods – some from our own world, some from fantasy worlds. We can use these lists of gods as a model for our own. Kobold Press's Midgard setting includes several real-world gods – there's no reason you can't do the same. But if including real world gods is too close to reality, reskin them. Rename them. Change genders and appearances.

If you want a good list of real-world gods and how they might fit into a 5e campaign setting, check out page 360 to 362 of the 5.1 System Reference Document (and be sure to download your own copy!). You can use these real-world deities as a model and change them to fit your own campaign.

You don't have to write pages of text for each god either. Usually just a few lines will do.

For any given god, include:

A name
Three alternative titles
Domains (light, darkness, death, life, nature, etc.)
A symbol (something you might find on a shield or a holy symbol)
A short description of the god.

Here's an example from a supplement available to Hero-tier Patrons of Sly Flourish called Scions of Light:

Elvenya

Alternative Titles: The Star’s Song, Lady of the Skies, the Astral Traveler
Domains: Travel, Light, Stars, the Astral Plane
Symbol: Finger pointed upward towards a multi-pointed star.
Description: Elvenya was the goddess of the star elves – a species no longer seen in the lands surrounding the City of Arches. The star elves were known to build great magical ships able to travel across the Astral Plane and visit many worlds. It is said they battled the Nameless King and lost – the king stealing knowledge to build his own armada of astral warships. Temples and shrines to Elvenya remain in and around the City of Arches. A new group of followers recently began worshipping the elven god again. Elvenya is often depicted as a silver- skinned elven woman with star-filled eyes and jet black hair set with pinpoints of light.

The alternative titles serve as "masks" – an idea I first saw in Midgard. Masks are another appearance of gods, other names they go by, or ways one god might disguise themselves. Different factions might worship the same god in different forms – even forms completely opposite in alignment.

How many gods do you need? Start with twelve and try to build gods around the characters. What domain does your cleric follow? Make a god for that. You can do the same for villains. Build gods around the arc of the campaign you're planning to run. You can always make more gods.

Factions

Factions are like gods. They have names, symbols, descriptions, and potential masks. Factions and their leaders great villains but they can be useful to the characters as well. You don't need as many factions as gods. Maybe three to five will do.

Geography

Here's where our lazy campaign building and lazy world building meet up. We don't need to build an entire world of geography. Where do you want to set your campaign? Start there. Where will your characters begin their adventures? Fill that place out. A town is good – just big enough to have some people to talk to but not so big you get lost in the details. What fantastic feature does the town have that sets it apart?

Then what adventure locations lie nearby? Think two horizons out. Three adventure locations within a day or two of travel works well. Use random tables to give you ideas for these locations.

History

Reveal history in secrets and clues as the characters explore the world. You don't need to write a giant book of history. Think about the history that ties to the events of the campaign you're going to run. Who ruled before? What villainy was thwarted in times past? You might just need a general historical outline and then, as you flesh out your campaign from adventure to adventure, you can write and expose more of that history as you go. Clear the path in front of the characters as they walk it.

Power Tip: Build a Faction List

All these elements work really well in a big random faction list. Write numbered lists of gods and factions. Roll on them to flavor locations, monuments, items, NPCs, encounters, and anything else the characters run into. Use these lists to build interesting scenes, unique to your world, throughout the adventures you run.

Focus On What's in Front of You

Above all, focus on the practical elements of your world to help you prepare and run games for your friends. Don't get overwhelmed building an entire planet and an entire cosmos above it. Instead, build each part as you need it for the next session. Focus on that next session – it's the most important game you're going to run.

More Sly Flourish Stuff

Each week I record an episode of the Lazy RPG Talk Show (also available as a podcast) in which I talk about all things in tabletop RPGs.

Last Week's Lazy RPG Talk Show Topics

Here are last week's topics with time stamped links to the YouTube video.

Patreon Questions and Answers

Also on the Talk Show, I answer questions from Sly Flourish Patrons. Here are last week's questions and answers.

Talk Show Links

Here are links to the sites I referenced during the talk show.

Last week I also posted a couple of YouTube videos on Run the D&D 2024 Beholder and Colosseum of the Red Sun – Dragon Empire Prep Session 32.

RPG Tips

Each week I think about what I learned in my last RPG session and write them up as RPG tips. Here are this week's tips:

Test boss encounters. Find in-story ways to run your boss multiple times and tune accordingly.
Use quest-based leveling – the characters level after completing a successful quest.
Each level, ask players what they got and what they're excited to use.
Use miniatures for abstract positioning and describe in-world location features.
Keep a character sheet or log with info on equipment, level features, stars and wishes, and campfire tales. Check it each session for ideas.
Give yourself plenty of time for big boss fights. Expect 90 minutes to two hours for big high-level multi-phase battles.
Don't presuppose how scenes and encounters end up. Be ready for the story to shift.

Share this article using this link: https://slyflourish.com/lazy_world_building.html

Subscribe to Sly Flourish

Subscribe to the weekly Sly Flourish newsletter and receive a free adventure generator PDF!

Get More from Sly Flourish

Sly Flourish's Books

Have a question or want to contact me? Check out Sly Flourish's Frequently Asked Questions.

This work is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International license. It allows reusers to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the material in any medium or format, for noncommercial purposes only by including the following statement in the new work:

This work includes material taken from SlyFlourish.com by Michael E. Shea available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International license.

This site may use affiliate links to Amazon and DriveThruRPG. Thanks for your support!