Build Your World like GYGAX | The 1975 Method

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I remember thinking long ago that your channel would be perfect if it were a bit more system agnostic or multisystem. Welp, now is perfect.

Gygax probably would have kept the map secret. Mainly, not to deceive the players but because there was always one designated mapmaker in any player group back in the olden days. It was expected that this player (in this meta-role) would draw all the maps as they travel to new locales, explore unmapped dungeons, and the like. Which, of course, made buying maps in-character a much bigger deal and made those maps a treasure in and of themselves... IF they were accurate, and inaccurate maps (especially the maps that some NPC intentionally made inaccurate to lure adventurers to their doom) were opportunities for new and unexpected adventures.

My heart goes out to all you veterans of the OGL Wars!

It's been quite a while since I've been exposed to anything written in High Gygaxian. Thank you for that :-)

For my own world I take a lot from Conan the Barbarian, Arthurian legends, Ursula le Guin, Fritz Lieber, and Bronze age History.

The Otis pitch is really stripped down, with just one species and two classes. Still, the idea that iron and magic are opposed like Order and Chaos, is interesting. Maybe “Mageborn & Ironsworn”?

"All a RPG town really needs is an Inn where characters can sleep with an Inn keeper who..." computer error noise "...AND an Innkeeper who can proved them with quest hooks." ¿Por Que no los dos?

A Gygax method that actually aged well and not antiquated? No way!

Ah, my favorite type of Bob World Builder video: a video about world building with Bob.

Your Gygax impersonations had my dying 🤣

I was inspired by the mappi mundi (the known medieval world map from around the 14th century) in how they would draw land features and then the kinds of creatures you'd find there. So some good advice is just like gygax says about drawing the locations to draw the eye of the players, and include a picture of what creatures or types of humans are there (only one or two, these would just be the most common in the area) but also be sure to leave lots of negative space between these locations so the eyes don't get overwhelmed.

The most impressive part of this video was that you were able to get Gary Gygax himself in for the video-- props to Grace for the talented necromancy!

Bob Gygax is a mood and is too powerful to go undefeated.

I'm so glad you shared this. My players just overcame their first plot arc, and I wasn't sure what to do next. This really sparks my imagination on building their path, not their destination, to see where the story goes.

The Gygax 75 challenge interests me far more than the Dungeon23 one. Bravo!

The Warhammer Old World is my favourite setting; grim, dark, and deeply silly.

Good one Bob! Nothing says going off on a tangent quite like using parenthesizes inside parenthesizes. 🤣🤣🤣

I love Gygax's approach to world-building and how it boils months of work down to a few easy to digest concepts. This really helped me understand why so many of my previous attempts at creating my own campaign settings have stalled out when I inevitably get bogged down in the details and end up feeling overwhelmed or moving on to a different idea altogether. I would love to see a series of videos putting these concepts into practice (and maybe the end of the series could culminate in a new official Bob World Builder campaign setting (I would buy the hell out of this, extra parentheses here for emphasis))!

I’d love to see some random encounter discussion. They’re one of my least favorite parts of DMing so some suggestions or even some complete tables would be really nice.