Collaborative Worldbuilding and The Editor

02 Feb, 2025

As mentioned in another post, I recently had two successful sessions of collaborative worldbuilding using (a slightly modified version of) SammyJ's method for collaboratively creating a subsector for Traveller. I wanted to reflect on why I thought this went well, as opposed to my other experiences with collaborative worldbuilding.

I have some reservations about collaborative worldbuilding in general. I've played games like Microscope and done semi-collaborative worldbuilding exercises. They might be fun enough but when it came to creating a compelling setting, they always left me unsatisfied.

Advantages of Collaborative Worldbuilding

Which is a shame, because there definitely are advantages to collaborative worldbuilding.

Simply put, there is no way a single human mind can come up with the number and quality of ideas that two or more people can generate in the same amount of time.¹ During my few collaborative worldbuilding exercises, the others always found connections that would have eluded me forever, or gave prompts I would never have thought of in a hundred years. Each person brings their diverse mix of influences, experiences, and perspectives to the stew. This is fertile ground for innovation. Beyond the individual ideas, the combination of these ideas also produces wonderful

Even if the ideas are not that innovative, the speed is also appreciated. Over the course of five-ish hours, my collaborators and I filled in eight systems with rich detail, interesting adventure hooks, and even some NPCs to use during the game. I could not have done that on my own, in the same amount of detail, in nearly the same amount of time.²

Maintaining Vision

The main disadvantage of collaborative worldbuilding is the erosion of cohesion and vision for the world. I've written about why cohesion in a setting is important in a previous post.

Vision is also important. I am drawn to works (RPGs and otherwise) with strong, coherent vision. Vision, when executed well and without hesitation, is what gives a work its soul. In an imagination-based medium like RPGs, where actually imagery at the table will be sparse and static,³ a strong vision is what allows players to immerse themselves in a setting and lose themselves in a world. It's much easier to communicate a strong vision on your own. A team can have a vision and execute on it well (just look at any team-based artform, like film or television), but it's much harder, and it's not something examined by RPG-related worldbuilding materials.

Collaborative worldbuilding, for all its advantages, can often lead to a loss of vision, especially if ideas are thrown in willy-nilly with no regard for what came before. You can see this happen even in published works and settings - as more detail gets fleshed out by writers and editors, different visions get mixed in. These areas don't become fruitful voids of creativity and melding, but jarring tonal shifts or even incoherent contradictions. They fit together poorly and it shows on the page. Worse still, in a worldbuilding game or exercise, players can decide to use narrative or creative control granted to them to run roughshod over the ideas and vision of others.

The Editor

During collaborative worldbuilding, one person needs to act as the editor. They need to place down the boundaries of the world/setting being developed, and they need to have a sense of when to reject a suggestion. This does not mean they should be dictators - the default response to an idea should be yes.⁴ Further, these bounds should be as wide as possible. Different people will generate ideas in different tones or genres, and only those which vary too greatly need to be shepherded back into bounds.

Sammy's method preserves the GM in an editor/facilitator role. The GM can lay out the bounds of the sandbox to play in, and as long as they keep a gentle hand, preserve a vision while taking advantage of the collaborative process.

In my own worldbuilding session, I had one player developing an Ork planet with a perpetual psychic Yu-Gi-Oh tournament arc, while another player was working on a planet of devastated over-grown jungle-cities torn apart by bloodthirsty invaders and a third was working on an alien empire full of subtle political intrigue and cultural conflict. Because the tonal scope of Warhammer 40,000 is wide,⁵ all three could theoretically coexist in my version of the setting. However, there will be some adjustments I'll make in the execution. The Orks, for example, might be doing something objectively silly, but I am going to present them to the players (should they discover the system) as a completely serious threat. Had I wanted to focus more on the tragedies of the dark future or the complex process of conquest, I might have focused more on the second or third planet idea, and rejected the other two.

Additionally, each of these planets resided in a whole separate star system, perhaps weeks or months apart. It was fine for them to vary widely, since the tonal shift could be handled by the physical and narrative distance. On the other hand, when the aforementioned devastated jungle-choked city planet was determined to be in the middle of the home system of a large starfaring empire, I worked with the players to massage the ideas until they were coherent and matched the overall vision. Clearly, the invaders had devastated one of the gems of this system, though it had failed to topple the whole thing. Now the empire was on the back foot - working doggedly to maintain its holdings, and with no room for reconquest. Yet.

Having an editor to smooth out the ill-fitting edges and unify the whole is likely the best way to make collaborative worldbuilding work well. To the extent that your process or game doesn't have one, I recommend using one. This allows for all the advantages of collaborative worldbuilding, while suppressing the great disadvantage.