One of the biggest thrills of tabletop roleplaying games like Dungeons & Dragons is the ability of participants to collectively create and define a fictional world filled with new people, communities and (generally fantastical) forms of life. The brunt of world-building in most RPGs is borne by the game designers and Game Masters, who create descriptions of locations and NPCs, draw maps, and create threats and story hooks. These tabletop RPGs, in contrast, all let the players in a gaming group collaborate to design fictional locales – communities, cities, dungeons, and lands filled with interesting people and challenges.

The archetypical western fantasy novel invariably has an exotic fantasy map slipped in somewhere before the first chapter, drawn in an archaic style and filled to the brim with looming mountains and dark forests. Dungeons & Dragons and other tactical fantasy RPGs are also frequently paired with diagrams of dungeons – mysterious chambers drawn on square or hexagonal grid maps filled with treasure, traps, and horrors. When creating a fictional world with foreign geography and different laws of physics, a well-designed map can anchor the world in the minds of creators and viewers alike, making it feel more tangible and more real.

Related: Creative Tabletop RPGs That Can Be Played Solo

The collaborative tabletop RPGs below are centered around the activity of making maps – maps of cities, communities, dungeons and desolate terrains. They're also games around creating histories – how these towns, dungeons, and lands were built up, shaped, and given character by different generations of inhabitants. Most intriguingly, these RPGs can be very useful tools for game groups already invested in a different RPG system, letting them create new locales their favorite characters can discover in their primary game.

Great Tabletop Games For World-Building: The Quiet Year

Pencil Drawing of A Windmill Surrounded By Birds With A Boy Walking Toward It

The Quiet Year is a post-apocalyptic map-building game about a community struggling to survive in a post-apocalyptic world. 2 to 4 players collaborate to tell the story of this isolated settlement, rolling dice and drawing from a 52-card deck to flesh out their world's landscape and introduce plot developments that occur each week in the life of the community's people. After a year's worth of story has been told, The Quiet Year ends with the arrival of the extremely enigmatic Frost Shepherds: whether these "Frost Shepherds" bring salvation, destruction, or some other fate to this community is, by and large, a mystery left up to the players to resolve.

Great Tabletop Games For World-Building: Beak, Feather & Bone

Tabletop RPGs Map Making World Building Beak Feather & Bone

Beak, Feather & Bone, inspired heavily by both The Quiet Year and Powered By The Apocalypse tabletop RPGs, is a world-building and map-making RPG about designing a city populated by crow people. During a session of Beak, Feather & Bone, players take turns creating buildings in their city, drawing from a 52-card deck to determine the building's purpose, then describing the building's layout and purpose. As the city takes shape, players also create noteworthy NPCs, and simmering conflict between factions, resulting in a vibrant community of marvels, troubles, adventure, and crow people.

Great Tabletop Games For World-Building: Ex Novo

Tabletop RPGs Map Making World Building Ex Novo

Ex Novo is a city-building game designed by Sharkbomb Studios for 1 to 4 players. In this game, players collectively take on the role of a newborn guardian spirit, the genus loci of a newly founded settlement; through creativity and the rolling of dice during different gameplay phases, players describe how their guardian spirit shepherds and fosters their community's development. Ex Novo is one of two map-making games designed as a construction tool for players of fantasy RPGs; the other map-making game in this franchise is Ex Umbra.

Great Tabletop Games For World-Building: Ex Umbra

Tabletop RPGs Map Making World Building Ex Umbra

While Ex Novo is a Sharkbomb Studios game about creating fictional cities and towns, Ex Umbra is about sketching out maps of underground tombs, labyrinths, caves, and ruins capable of being used in dungeon-crawling fantasy RPGs like Dungeons & Dragons. Players of Ex Umbra work together to design the core concept of the dungeon, then use dice-rolling rules, the exchange of tokens, and the playing of Dungeon Cards to sketch out the different chambers, threats and rewards within. Near the end of the dungeon-creation process, players generate a "tremor," a momentous event that alters the nature of the dungeon, along with a "Heart," the literal and thematic center of the dungeon.

Next: Tabletop Games Where Players Create Their Own New Languages

Source: itch.io/Dicebreaker/Drivethru RPG