When it comes to creating new things, ideas are a dime a dozen. Everyone has an opinion. Yet, it is easier said than done to create something that's logically coherent. Furthermore, the well of ideas tends to run dry too after a while. This is where the KOBOLD Guide to Worldbuilding comes in. While not exactly "meaty", it has plenty of advice covering a wide range of topics. Each topic takes up about 5 pages of information, but it's concise and to the point. If I had to nitpick though, it's that not all the topics are equally well-written, but that's to be expected from having so many contributors. Art in the book is also a little sparse. It would have benefited from having more accompanying visuals.

Some fantastic articles in the book. I was really enjoying it when I got to an article about basing your world on real world cultures that just felt awful. The author argues that your audience wants a world based on European mythologies because that's what they know, and that you can make your setting more exotic by adding Asian tropes and stereotypes. Considering how I got this book to hopefully get some good advice on building a world based on a real-world non-european civilization, I found this advice very insulting and problematic. I checked the author of the article to avoid any other articles by him and found that literally 1/3 of the book was written by the same person. I had been enjoying the book up to that point (hence the 2 stars rather than 1) but that article really took all the excitement of the rest of the book away from me.

This is a really great resource. Rather than a how-to manual, just a collection of essays by authors with very different perspectives. There are many points I can take from here in my gaming (I GM a fantasy game in a custom setting) and the nature of the works means each time I read an essay again I get some new insight.

I just picked this up as part of a post-christmas mass-purchase treat for myself. It is an exceptional worldbuilding supplement, dealing less with the crunch and more with the thought processes of world building. I've been doing this for a while, and I knew quite a bit of what is in here already, but it's great to see those practices layed out by experienced designers in an easy to digest way.

The Kobold Guide to Worldbuilding is a very good and useful book. It contains essays written by the top professionals of the tabletop gaming industry, and it does deliver on it's promise, which is to help you make your own world. But I think that the book could benefit from a bit deeper insight on many of the topics, although some (religion, for example) are already excellently covered. Also the first essay makes it look like a detailed history for your world is unnecessary, but the later essays seem to contradict this. All in all, a good book, and I recommend it to all who are currently in the process of worldbuilding, or soon will be.

The Kobold Guide to Game Design is an excellent resource for any game designer or GM. It offers over 100 pages of essays by 11 industry-leading professionals such as Wolfgang Baur, Monte Cook, Chris Pramas, and others.

Topics cover a wide range of worldbuilding advice, from basic overviews like "what is worldbuilding?" to more in-depth analysis about different kinds of worldbuilding, how to build a "world bible," considerations when developing a pantheon of deities, mapmaking, and more.

As someone currently working on a new world, I found this book immensely helpful. It helped me think of my world in new ways and consider things I hadn't before. I came away with several pages of additional notes that I can now put to good use; I've considered the setting's geography, technology/magic level (and how the two interact), the nature of the gods, how guilds and secret societies interact, etc.

I can see this book as being a valuable reference -- something to come back to time and again as you continue to flesh out a setting. You may read it cover-to-cover like I did, but as you start to focus on one area of your new world you may find yourself coming back to individual essays for inspiration.

The book is simply laid out and logically designed. In general, each of the essays flows logically; "What is worldbuilding?" comes first to explain what the book means by the phrase, and the end of the book contains information about building on a world that is already part of a licensed property (this essay contains some really unique industry information about dealing with licensers). Three essays about religion are all grouped together, and everything else just seems to fit into place.

As a primarily text-based book, the layout is simple. There is little art, but the book doesn't really need any. The essays are really what count, and they all hit home in their own way.

Definitely check out this book if you're a game designer or GM who likes to build homebrew settings (or even build on existing settings). It's a top-notch book from start to finish.