You and your friends are eager to embark together on the grand adventure of world building. Perhaps you’re a game master homebrewing a world with the players input on the setting. Or a group of students or game developers looking to pool story ideas. There are two big questions; how do you start, and what tool do you use to get going?
Well, fear not! … Tons of options await, and they’re right at your finger-tips.
Of course, the thought of managing creative ideas from numerous people seems like heading cats, doesn’t it? Once you start, you realize that it is a rather “people-centered” process; a hogepoge of brains doing idea conjuring, concept wrangling, and problem-solving. Thats why I’ve taken it upon myself to throw together a quick guide on what tools exist out there, and how to get the most out of them.
I’ve personally used every one of these for one project or another, both solo and with a group. There’s no wrong option to go with, but every project is different, and its up to you and your team to figure what combination works best for you!
Choose Your Tool
1) Whiteboard or Bulletin Board
Democracy at its finest. It brews images of great figures standing before a congregation of their peers and hammering out an article of their collaborative efforts. Imagine you and your friends immortalized in some 16th century renaissance painting, gathered in front of the cradle of their collective accomplishments.
Traditional Board - on location
An old-school approach to planning is getting everyone into a room with a physical white-board, grabbing some markers, pens, and post-it notes, and having an organic, social-facing world building session.
Even from someone as digital-friendly as myself, I can tell you that theres no substitute for hashing out the details with your compatriots in real time.
Granted, there are some obvious obstacles to this approach. First is the existence of an actual white board, as they aren’t the cheapest thing to obtain, and the smaller ones aren’t great for this process.
Fortunately, you can travel to a communal location with a whiteboard, as you can find them at most any school, community center, public library, or private meeting space. However, its availability may be limited or non-existent most of the time, so you’ll have to co-ordinate a reservation with the local owners.
If you do manage to get everyone there, at the established time, and secure a reservation to it, there is an outstanding risk: what if you don’t complete your work? What if you need to take a break and walk away for hours? Days? Weeks
If you leverage post-its, and photograph your results, it may not be super hard to rebuild, but chances are, that’s still a bunch of drawing and post-its to re-do for later. So your choices are you make it a full afternoon, half-day, or all-day engagement, or to break it up into separate days and deal with the reassembly.
However, if you do want to pony up your own cashola for a white board or bulletin board, you’ll have your choice of size and price point. Here is a 2024 ballpark of flat wall board pricing as reviewed online.
| Board Type | Size (H x W) | Cost |
|---|---|---|
|
White Board or Cork Board |
24 x 36 inches |
$20 - 35 |
|
36 x 48 inches |
$50 - 80 |
|
|
40 x 72 inches |
$80 - 150 |
Digital Ideaboard - Cloud Software
Of course, digital tools may be best for people who might be more apt to use computers, or simply don’t have a physical whiteboard available.
The downside, speaking as an app developer myself, is that software options change all of the time. Chances are one or more options suggested here will either change business model, go from “free” to paid, or disappear entirely. So, as timestamped as these suggestions are, here are some digital whiteboard options that may do the job.
How to Approach Whiteboarding
Thousands of methods exist for using a whiteboard. However, here are a couple of favorites that my groups have used in the past. I’m ad-libbing their names, as they are inspired by real and popular methods pulled from other places.
Snowflake-ish Method
Inspired by Randy Ingermanson, who made popular the Snowflake Method for writing a novel. Much of its lessons translate well into whiteboarding.
- Decide on the Big Ideas First
- Split off into Smaller and Smaller Parts
- Ask Questions Along The Way
- Draw A Diagram of Connections
- Flesh Out the Details the Further Down You Go
Design Thinking-ish Method
Inspired by one of the many big-brained methods used by creative engineers, developers, and architects. Also super fun, and I stand by it personally!
- Take a Single Topic
- Throw ALL Your Ideas at the Wall!
- Gather Like-Ideas Together
- Identify Themes and Categories
- Discuss Additions, Subtractions, and Changes
2) Collaborative Wiki
Narratively focused. … Interconnected. … Fun to dig through!
Wikis are powerful because of how useful they are in taking articles of information and interconnecting them with other articles. Its like a diagram of post-it’s, if the post-its were actually pages of content with multiple paragraphs and images. Impossible to do with a white board unless you are Charlie Kelly in the mail room, … though I don’t recommend that level coffee, cigarettes, and psychosis from overwork.
Thankfully, Wikis can be used for more than just bad sources for school projects. .. They can be essential knowledge-bases for your entire world. They function as an amazing vessel for fully written and contextualized information about anything from settings, factions, cosmologies, monsters, legendary items, important events, cities and settlements, and so much more!
Of course, its important to choose one that best fits the group and the project. Here are a few apps to get your wiki started!
- WorldAnvil – A full-featured app for storytellers and world builders with tons of page templates and world building prompts to help build your world from the ground up.
- LegendKeeper – Lighter than WorldAnvil but no less powerful. Leverages markup language to give you a quick way to go from blank page to full wiki writeup.
- Obsidian Portal – More geared towards fantasy game mastering and tabletop RPGs. Great app to bring your campaign to life!
- Notion.so – A cloud-based note-taking suite thats basically a swiss army knife for organizing and sharing pages.
- DokuWiki – If you’re a web admin and want to self-host on a website of your own, this is a great content management system for creating a wiki. Best to pair it with a web hosting site.
3) Kanban Boards and Workflow Tools
Pulling a feather out of my project manager hat, imagine your team of creators are at the point of designing and organizing your overall project into steps, tasks, or stories that ultimately build up to something larger.
Perhaps it is a bigger endeavor than what a white-board can handle at this stage. Or, imagine the wiki needs a sense of direction over the course of time as to what needs creating, at what stage, and by whom.
Well, my friends! If you dare to exercise your organizational and collective teamwork skills into a tool that can track your project through stages of progress, then I have just the tool for you!
What is a Kanban Board?
In a nutshell, a Kanban board is a visual organizer for tasks that goes left to right through a workflow of columns, beginning to end. Each item in the board represents a problem to be solved. Each column is a state in the problems lifecycle. Every item is assigned to one or more people to complete.
Imagine a school project without the chaos, and where one or two people aren’t doing five to ten peoples work. Of course, using this tool does require organizing the team into roles, specializations (or interests), and running with them. Its a great way to keep everyone on the same page as to whats happening.
Of course, this tool requires a bit of leadership, and everyone taking a moment to ground themselves and being willing to control the chaos of creation, rather than the chaos controlling you. This is best used AFTER all the big ideation is done, everyone has got their voices in, and are ready to get to work on building the thing.
Quick Glossary of Terms
Since were stepping into the project management world just a smidge, let me shotgun a few terms to help better know these tools.
- Kanban – A Japanese word that means “visual card”. Think of a post-it note that flows from column-to-column as it moves toward completion.
- Workflow – The stages that tasks and stories move from idea to completion, step by step. (Example: To-Do, In Progress, Under Review, Done)
- Story – Not a book or TV show, but a “user story”. An informal expression of need from a persons perspective.
- Bug – More of an IT phrase, but it also means any conflict or issue that was discovered in mid-creation that needs to be solved.
- Task – Less of a story, and more of a direct and fully-realized course of action that needs to be taken.
- Subtask – Sometimes, breaking larger things into smaller bit is extremely helpful. Don’t be afraid to do so!
Great Tools I've Used!
Here is a list of popular workflow tools I’ve used myself, suggested for creators:
- Trello – The lightweight alternative to Atlassians bigger app, JIRA. Fantastic for non-corporate projects that need a bit of organization.
- KanbanFlow – Super simple tool without a ton of frills. Good for small projects that don’t sprawl out of control.
- Taskworld – Alternatively, this one provides multiple kanbans to work across if you need to sprawl, or drill down into a ton of more bite-sized chunks.
Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this article, please consider subscribing to the weekly newsletter!
Also, tell us what you think about the guide by writing up a comment below. And check out some of the other worldbuilding guides here:
- 5 Awesome Fantasy Map-Making Tools on Steam - September 9, 2024
- Fantasy+ by Monument Studios (Kickstarter Live!) - August 27, 2024
- 2024 Biggest TTRPG Winners of the ENNIE Awards - August 9, 2024