Are We There Yet?

When I started playing tabletop roleplaying games back in 1982, there wasn’t really a campaign setting. At least not in the way we think of one today. There were dungeons. There were monsters. There were traps designed by people who clearly disliked adventurers. Most importantly, there was treasure waiting somewhere in the darkness for those brave, foolish, or desperate enough to go looking for it.

Our games followed a simple rhythm. Descend into the dungeon. Fight what lurked below. Solve a few puzzles. Grab whatever loot wasn’t nailed down. Then retreat to the surface before something unpleasant ate you.

For a while, that was enough.

Then my players started asking questions.

Questions that weren’t covered in the rulebooks.

“Where do we spend our gold?”

“Can we buy a better sword?”

“Is there a tavern nearby?”

“Who rules this place?”

At first I answered these questions the same way every young Game Master does. I invented something on the spot and hoped nobody asked a follow-up question.

Naturally, they always asked a follow-up question.

Before long I realised I needed somewhere for these answers to live. So I bought a hex map and started marking locations on it. Looking back, I couldn’t tell you exactly when that map became a world. There was no grand moment of creation. No master plan. No carefully crafted history stretching back thousands of years.

There was simply a growing collection of places that needed to exist because the players kept travelling somewhere unexpected.

Published adventures became landmarks on that map. Whenever I found one I liked, I would find an empty hex and place it there. The Green Door appeared in one region. Axel’s Tomb emerged somewhere beyond the frontier. Other adventures found homes wherever they seemed to fit. The wilderness between them remained largely unknown, waiting for curious adventurers to wander off the road and force me to invent another piece of the world.

At the time, I thought I was building a setting.

Years later I realised I was actually discovering one.

Each session revealed something new. A nameless village needed a mayor. A mayor needed a history. A history implied old rivalries. Those rivalries suggested forgotten battles. Forgotten battles required ruins. The ruins attracted adventurers. The adventurers created stories.

One idea led naturally to another.

The City of Diamondstar emerged in much the same way. It wasn’t planned. It wasn’t designed according to some elegant vision. It simply grew because the campaign needed a city, and once the city existed it demanded merchants, guilds, politics, rivalries, noble houses, and a thousand other details that slowly accumulated over the years.

Before long it stood proudly within The Southern Most Realm, a place that had become far larger than anything I had originally imagined.

The years rolled by.

Players came and went. Campaigns ended and new ones began. Characters became heroes, villains, rulers, legends, and occasionally cautionary tales. New players would join the table and hear stories about events that had happened years before they arrived. Sometimes they would encounter the consequences of decisions made by adventurers they had never met.

The world gained a sense of history because it had one.

Not a history written in a sourcebook, but a history written by the people sitting around the table.

Some of my favourite moments came from those unexpected connections. A ruined tower explored by one group might become the stronghold of another years later. A throwaway joke could evolve into local folklore. A merchant invented to fill five minutes of conversation could somehow survive three campaigns and become one of the setting’s most recognisable personalities.

Nothing was wasted.

Everything became part of the story.

The Southern Most Realm was never truly finished. It simply expanded whenever our adventures carried us somewhere new.

If I found a creature I liked, it appeared somewhere beyond the next hill. If I discovered a magic item that sparked my imagination, it eventually found its way into a treasure hoard. If a new adventure landed on my desk, a road appeared leading to it.

The world grew because we kept playing.

Then, many years later, our local Magic: The Gathering store decided to start running organised D&D games. Around that time, Storm King’s Thunder had just been released, and the opening adventures took me along the Black Road, through the Dawn Pass, and eventually into Parnast. Through those adventures I discovered the Sword Coast and, with it, one of the richest campaign settings I had ever encountered.

Up until then I had spent decades building my own worlds, so stepping into a setting with such depth was both exciting and a little intimidating. Everywhere I looked there were maps, histories, novels, adventures, sourcebooks, and decades of accumulated lore. Every road seemed to lead somewhere interesting. Every village appeared to have a story attached to it. Every ruin felt connected to a larger history.

For the first time, I found myself adventuring in a world that seemed almost limitless.

If the players wanted to know what lay upriver from Daggerford, I could look it up. If they decided to leave the planned adventure and ride off in a completely unexpected direction, there was a good chance someone had already written about wherever they were heading. Entire campaigns could be built simply by following threads buried in old sourcebooks.

I was amazed by it.

I still am.

What surprised me most, however, was how much freedom that depth provided.

People often assume creating your own world gives you complete freedom, and in many ways that’s true. Yet it also means every question eventually lands on your desk. Every village needs a name. Every noble house needs a history. Every river crossing requires an explanation. The work never stops.

Suddenly I had a foundation beneath my feet.

Instead of spending my preparation time inventing every detail from scratch, I could focus on the adventure itself. I could spend more time helping players develop their characters and less time wondering who owned the tavern three villages away. The setting carried part of the load for me, and it did so with remarkable generosity.

For years I happily wandered through that shared world.

Sometimes I followed the published adventures closely. More often I borrowed the parts I liked and quietly ignored the rest. The players certainly helped with that process. They had an uncanny ability to become fascinated by the one person, place, or rumour that the adventure barely mentioned. Entire campaigns emerged from details that had originally occupied no more than a single sentence in a sourcebook.

I discovered that even while using an established setting, I was still worldbuilding.

The difference was that someone else had already drawn the coastline.

When I eventually began publishing my own work, I expected the technical challenges. I expected to learn new software. I expected to spend evenings wrestling with maps, assets, packaging, and distribution. I expected a steep learning curve.

What I didn’t expect was how often I would pause halfway through writing something and ask myself a very different question.

“Can I actually use that name?”

At the gaming table, nobody worries about such things.

If the players travel to a famous city, they travel there. If they meet a well-known character, everyone smiles and gets on with the adventure. Around the table these places become part of our shared language. We borrow them freely because we’re simply telling stories together.

Publishing changes the conversation.

The other day I was writing a post when a reader kindly pointed out that a few names I had used might belong to someone else. They weren’t being critical. Quite the opposite. They were being helpful.

And they were absolutely right.

I remember sitting back from the keyboard and laughing.

Not because the observation was wrong, but because it suddenly highlighted how thoroughly that setting had become woven into my thinking. After so many years adventuring there, I had stopped noticing where its history ended and my own additions began.

The warning didn’t frustrate me.

Instead, it made me nostalgic.

Quite unexpectedly, I found myself thinking about that old hex map from 1982.

Back then there were no established kingdoms waiting to be borrowed. There were no encyclopaedias filled with lore. If the players asked what lay beyond the next hill, I had to decide. If they followed a road beyond the edge of the map, I needed to discover where it went before the next session.

The Southern Most Realm wasn’t created because I wanted to become a worldbuilder.

It existed because my players wanted somewhere to spend their gold.

Everything that followed grew from that simple beginning.

A town became a city.

A rumour became a legend.

A road became a kingdom.

And after forty years, I find myself standing in a strangely familiar place.

I still love rich published settings. I still admire the enormous effort that goes into creating them. I still enjoy wandering through worlds built by talented writers and designers.

But once again there is a blank space on the map.

Once again there are roads that have not been named, towns that have not been founded, and stories waiting to be told.

Perhaps that’s why the question “Are we there yet?” has never quite made sense to me.

Because in all the years I’ve spent running games, I’ve never really felt as though we arrived anywhere.

Every answer leads to another question.

Every map has another edge.

Every campaign leaves behind loose threads that deserve to be followed.

The destination was never the point.

The joy was always in discovering what lay beyond the next hill.

Forty years later, I’m still looking.