Worldbuilding and the world of The Ruins of Murkhill campaign 001

Worldbuilding and the world of The Ruins of Murkhill campaign

I approach worldbuilding from two directions at the same time. The part of the world that the PCs see is created from the bottom up approach as they move about the world and explore it and at the same time I also do some top down worldbuilding to a limited extent. The top down portion the PCs for the most part do not see and is done by determining how large the world is, how many moons it has, the percentage of land to ocean, does it have an ice cap or two and many of the macro details.

I do the top down portion for myself so that things can be somewhat consistent about the things that the PCs will notice such as weather, climate, how many moons they see in the sky and etc.

The world of The Ruins of Murkhill campaign is very large and has two other campaigns (at the present time) on the same planet although they are widely separated. The planet will eventually have at least 30 or more unique campaign settings


This planet is considerably larger than Earth and is approximately 20,000 miles in diameter instead of 7926 miles. The ratio of land to ocean is 35% to 65% and it is more geologically active than earth. Gravity, atmospheric pressure, axial tilt and many other factors are the same as or very similar to the values for earth. The length of the day is 30 hours and mean temperature is the same. There are three major moons in the sky and they range from the size of Venus to the size of Earth and all are habitable. There are an additional 30 moons in the sky that range from twice the size of the earth's moon to half that size and they are not habitable.

Now if I had the time and were so inclined I could do calculations to establish at any given moment how many moons would be in the sky at the same time and many other things. While it would be fun to have complete statistics for the planet and the moons, I do not have the time or the inclination to do the calculations myself. But the above gives me enough information to add some color to descriptions I give the players PCs from time to time.

In addition, it allows me to calculate the surface area of the planet - 1,256,637,061.436 square miles—giving 439,822,971.503 square miles of land and 816,814,089.933 square miles of ocean. The land area of earth is 57,308,738 square miles and this means I have 7.7 times the land area to play with and areas can be separated such that many completely different campaign areas that are highly unlikely to ever meet.