I dislike "worldbuilding"
Sea Planes by Jack T. Cole.
As I play through Arden Vul, I find myself confirming some of my premises on why I disliked most dungeons I've ever read. Put simply, I don't like a funhouse approach; an interesting dungeon to me is one where you have to put together what happened there, what this was, and learn about it to advance - along with actually playing the challenges and having cool fights of course. I've seen people refer to this as "archaeological dungeons", which have strata of history layered on top and which imply a wider world. Cool beans!
Something else I like is when the characters have a distinct place in the world which comes with its own duties, assumptions, and worldviews; a big part of my enjoyment of Pendragon is that you only have player-knights and you need to figure out what that means for yourself, as well as deal with the deep limitations of your role (knights can't simply accept a peasant's bed for the night!).
Both of these things are contrasted with the fact that I just do not enjoy "worldbuilding" for its own sake, both as a noun and as a verb. I don't like reading blog posts about it, or sections of books about the world at large, and I definitely dislike writing those portions of my settings out. I have done it for Hearts Aglow in large part because I thought I was going to have it be directly relevant to the game, but it ended up not being so.1
I have no principled reason for it either. I could say that part of it is that worldbuilding is most often done to literalise an urge to invent and other things mentioned in that article, and I believe that to a degree, but I also just find it quite boring to do.
Take Gokun's cheeky worldbuilding advice (and the GLOG in general is a scene that enjoys worldbuilding) for instance. I believe this probably is good advice, but I can't have a strong opinion on it, or adopt the method myself, because when I get to the "zoom out" portion there I go "I don't know, some wizard bullshit, I'll think of something when it comes up in the game".
This presents an issue, as the type of dungeon I most enjoy is the exact type of dungeon I can't make myself, because I would feel the need to iron out the inconsistent kinks so that the background is discoverable and able to be pieced together (since that is the ultimate goal), and would find myself once again doing that boring worldbuilding stuff.
I believe this is why historical settings appeal to me, and why most of my "worldbuilding" is just transposing real history within fantasyland (the Hearts Aglow political situation, for instance, would look very similar to the reign of Louis VII and Philip Augustus to those who know ball), as real history does interest me and I do enjoy reading about it on my own time, so it's much easier to reach for that instead.2
I don't have a neat way of reckoning with that either, I believe this is just something I have to accept about myself. I really like Glorantha, for instance, but to this day I never finished reading the Guide to Glorantha or the Glorantha Sourcebook cover to cover, because I mostly read what I needed to know to run and decided I'd get to the rest later, and then didn't. At one point in my life I wanted to like worldbuilding, I still have a degree of curiosity in it, but the fact of the matter is that I don't particularly care for the answer.
How do I square that with my deep love for something like The Flooded Tomb of the Aurochs Vikramarka? I suppose there are two important things there. The first, which is the most relevant for this specific dungeon, is that I find individual people way more interesting than anything else. It's why I turned one into a dungeon after all; learning about the life of a person through context is fascinating to me, and I have something cooking for Hearts Aglow which might touch on this. I enjoy Meg's setting and stuff, but none of it gets me as fired as that dungeon, exactly because it is personal.
The other thing, which applies more to Arden Vul, is that knowing about a thing and paying attention is rewarded through clever puzzles, and I think that's really what gets me going with that stuff. I love the videogames The Return of the Obra Dinn not because it has expansive lore on the kraken or whatever, but because I like the experience of getting a bunch of clues together and going "according to that, Johnny is guilty" and it being correct.
I suppose I dislike worldbuilding but quite like investigations, and these two things were melded together in my brain for a while, but now I think I've finally understood that they aren't. This is heartening as I think that, by keeping this in mind, I actually can make the sorts of games and dungeons I said I enjoyed at the start, I just have to frame them as clues of a greater mystery, or as elements of an individual's personality, rather than as a blog post on what wizards are like here, or cities are like there.
Fox Hideout by Jack T. Cole.
In the Hearts Aglow player doc, for instance, I have a "setting" side with how people dress, what they eat and drink, how justice works, etc. I suspect many people write these things because they find it fun to elaborate on a milieu, but personally I only wrote these things down so I could remember it later and be consistent. I found out I didn't actually need to do this, as consistency only truly matters insofar as it lays out a field of play that the players can understand - so if the players themselves don't remember it, and I don't remember it... then the setting being inconsistent does not matter, as it won't affect their experience. And if they do remember, then it doesn't need to be written down at all.↩
One of the mangas I most love is A Bride's Story, in large part due to how human it is. It is a sort of lodestar for what I would want out of a perfect RPG.↩