World Building Quickstart
You cloned a system compendium: complete rules, bestiary, gear, perks, species, and a full Living World Engine — with no factions, no timeframe, and no world state attached. That blankness is the design. Every world you build is yours to write, and this chapter is the map for building it without fighting the system.
The build loop
Open the assistant in your new project and say "let's build a wasteland." It runs a setup conversation — timeframe, region, canon vs. custom, tone, starting hub, factions, world clock, and your player-facing pitch — then creates the records that make the world run. You can do the same work yourself; the assistant is a shortcut, not a requirement. Either way, the goal is a small set of high-quality records, not a hundred half-written ones.
The one rule that keeps a world coherent: start with the clock and the state, then the factions, then the places, then the threats. Time anchors everything; factions move the world between sessions; locations give the factions somewhere to collide; pressures and missions give the players something to do about it.
What each blueprint is for
| File type | The intent behind it |
|---|---|
| World Clock | The calendar and weather. Every session touches it; it is the anchor all other records hang off. |
| World State | Broad truths — wars, laws, disasters, leadership — that the whole region would know or feel. |
| Faction | An organized group acting off-screen. Its turn system is how the world changes when the players aren't looking. |
| Location | A place with routes, danger, and faction control. Its memories and problems make it feel lived in. |
| Mission | An objective with stakes and a deadline the players have chosen to pursue. |
| Pressure | A threat that worsens if ignored. Pressures are how the world makes urgency without railroading. |
| Bonds & memories | Relationships and recollections worth tracking — friendship, rivalry, romance, betrayal, mentorship, promises, debts, what an NPC remembers about a player. |
| Public Reputation | How witnesses and rumor shape the way a community treats someone. |
| Legacy | An event significant enough that future characters will reference it. |
| Collateral Incident | Damage — physical or social — with lasting fallout. |
Conventions that keep a world coherent
- Reference, don't duplicate. When a faction holds a settlement, link the location file to the faction file rather than restating its description in both places. The compendium's gear, perks, species, and bestiary already exist — point at them.
- Public truth and secrets are separate fields. What players can learn (
playerFacingTruth,publicKnowledge) is not the same as what's true underneath (gmSecrets,hiddenTruths,falsePublicTruth). Keep them honest to each other — a secret only works if the public layer is believable. - Use the lifecycle fields. Set
lifecycleState, updatelastMeaningfulChangewhen the record changes, and archive or supersede records that stop mattering. A dead faction entry left in "Active" will confuse the GM months later. - Stay consistent with tags. Tag everything with the campaign's own tokens (region, era, theme) in addition to the generic ones, so you can search your world the same way the compendium's own catalog is searchable.
- Match the existing voice. The shipped entries are concrete, lived-in, and darkly funny when they can be. A dry wiki paragraph reads wrong next to them.
Extending the system
- Archetypes and backgrounds are per-setting. A neutral starting set ships — 20 archetypes and 5 backgrounds (vault survivor, wastelander, ghoul, super mutant outcast, synth, reawakened robot, Brotherhood roles, Enclave remnant, and more) — but the creation flow does not force any of them. It ships as a minimal skeleton: cover, name, appearance, backstory. When your campaign has its own roles, write setting-specific archetypes and backgrounds with their schemas and rebuild the flow to offer them.
- New species and gear follow the same schemas as the shipped ones — copy a close entry, change the values, and note what makes yours different in
notes. - Genre adaptation (sci-fi, fantasy, noir on top of this engine) is covered in the Genre Adaptation Guide in GM Instructions. The system is designed to be reskinned, not rewritten.
Ready to play
A world is ready when the project page says what it is, the World Clock has a date, three to five factions want things, the hub location and a handful of sites exist, one or two pressures or missions are active, and a World State document records the era's big truths. That is a Session 0 waiting to happen — tailor the creation flow to your campaign (it ships as a skeleton), make characters with it, and start the clock.