About the tome:
The Tome of World Building is written by ENNIE-award winning author Matt Finch, author of the critically-acclaimed Tome of Adventure Design. Using the Tome of World Building, you can create fantasy worlds quickly and fill them out with a wealth of detail from the random-generation tables in this book.
This book contains advice, real-world facts, systems, and LOTS of random generation tables to help you create a fantasy world for tabletop adventuring.
The World: This chapter walks you through creating the pattern of continents in the world, and generating a historical cataclysm responsible for the fall of any earlier civilizations (plus some very good reasons for having such a cataclysm in the world’s past).
Other Continents: We don’t advise trying to create the whole world until your players have started adventuring in their “home” continent and you get a feel for their goals and capabilities. Therefore, this chapter lets you create quick snapshots of the continents where the players most likely won’t ever visit. What’s out there may affect the home continent, and this gives you seeds for lots of weird, high level adventures.
The Home Continent: Generate the map of the home continent, one cultural basin at a time. Cultural basins usually contain 3 to 5 countries which will share a cultural template, with each country varying from it in one way or another. Major historical events for each culture, and much more!
Countries: Details and unique features for the countries you generate.
Terrain and Borders: This is where we talk about wilderness of many types! All that isn’t part of a country is part of the wild and untamed land that the characters might explore.
Illuminarchies: Generating world-spanning or region-spanning conspiracies, societies, orders of knighthood, monastic orders, and cults that insinuate their way into politics and warfare.
Legendary Locations: Every world needs lots of odd places on the map for characters to look into. Strongholds, ruins, religious locations, libraries, and other types of legendary location can be generated with these tables.
AND MORE: The book also includes chapters on cities and settlements, deities and religion, personalities, mythic locations (even more metal than the legendary locations), and Monstrous Leaders, plus a selection of useful real-world facts!
