Review: Kobold Guide to Worldbuilding

The Kobold Guide to Worldbuilding by Jeff Grubb, Janna Silverstein, Chris Pramas, Steven Winter, Wolfgang Baur, Jonathan Roberts, and others.

This book is a well-written collection of essays about world-building. While the main focus is around fantasy TTRPGs, the advice is also applicable to novel-writing or game design of any type. In fact, many of the essays call out that their advice is useful in those other domains. Everyone invited to write an essay is an industry veteran and there are a few of them written by Wolfgang Baur (CEO of Kobold Press) that reveal the philosophy of his design, especially as it pertains to his Midgard setting.

While I never intend to create a game, I found much of the advice to be applicable to the TTRPG DM/GM/referee. As I read each essay I was getting ideas for my next game and coming to an understand on why some of the things I’d tried in the past failed. So I would also recommend it to people running Tabletop games.

The only reason I gave it four stars instead of five is that I did find one or two essays a little boring (they were outliers, I mostly devoured each essay). Strong recommendation to those interested in world-building.

• TTRPG