I've been running tabletop games for over 12 years. D&D, Mage the Ascension, Werewolf, Blades in the Dark, and a handful of systems I've probably forgotten about. In that time, I've started more campaigns than I can count. Some lasted years. Some died after session two. But every single one of them started the same way: staring at a blank page with an idea and no idea where to put it.
That's what Worldbuilding Wednesdays is about. Starting from nothing and building something real.
What Is Worldbuilding Wednesdays?
Worldbuilding Wednesdays is a new weekly video series on the ScriptoriumGM YouTube channel. Every Wednesday, I'll be working through the actual process of building a campaign from the ground up, using ScriptoriumGM as the workspace. Not a polished showcase. Not a marketing demo. Just me, a concept, and the tools, figuring it out in real time the way you would at home.
I wanted to make the kind of tutorial I wished existed when I was first trying to organize my campaign ideas. Something that shows the messy, iterative reality of worldbuilding. You don't start with a perfect map and a 40-page lore document. You start with a feeling. A single idea. And you build from there.
Episode 1: Setting Up a New Campaign
In this first episode, I'm starting completely from scratch. No prep, no pre-built world, just a concept I've been kicking around: what happens when magic starts dying?
Here's what I walk through in about 12 minutes:
Choosing a system. I went with "Contemporary Homebrew" because the setting I'm building draws from Mage the Ascension. Modern-day, hidden magic, factions with competing philosophies about how reality works. ScriptoriumGM supports a bunch of systems out of the box, but the homebrew option gives you full flexibility when you're doing something that doesn't fit neatly into one box.
Creating the campaign. The onboarding process asks you for a campaign name, subtitle, story type, and setting type. I named mine "The Slow Death of Magic." A world of high magic where magic is fading, and the mages who depend on it need to figure out why before it's gone completely. Walking through the setup takes a couple of minutes and gives the AI a foundation to work from.
Adding initial notes. Once the campaign exists, I start dropping in the first notes using the built-in editor. Formatting options, headers, the basics. Nothing fancy. Just getting ideas out of my head and into a place where I can find them later. If you've ever lost a campaign idea because it lived on a napkin or in a text message to yourself at 1 AM, you know why this matters.
The whole process takes about 12 minutes. By the end, you've got a campaign workspace with your first worldbuilding notes and a clear foundation to build on. It won't be finished. It shouldn't be. But it's a starting point, and that's more than most campaign ideas ever get. Source uploads, the AI assistant, and the RAG-powered knowledge base are all coming in future episodes.
Why Start With Mage?
Honestly? Because I'm tired of every tutorial using D&D as the default.
Don't get me wrong. I love D&D. I've run it for years. But the TTRPG hobby is so much wider than that, and tools like ScriptoriumGM work for all of it. I picked a Mage the Ascension-inspired setting because it's unusual, because it's a system a lot of GMs are curious about but haven't tried, and because I wanted to show that you can build any kind of campaign here. Not just dungeon crawls and dragon slaying.
Mage is also a game where worldbuilding does a ton of heavy lifting. Your setting IS the gameplay in a lot of ways. The political factions, the philosophy of magic, the tension between hiding and revealing. All of that comes from the world you've built. So it's a perfect fit for a worldbuilding series.
If you've never looked into Mage the Ascension, the short version: it's a World of Darkness game (same family as Vampire the Masquerade) where reality is consensual. Mages can reshape the world by believing hard enough, but do it too visibly and reality itself fights back. Different factions disagree about whether technology or tradition is the path to Ascension. It's wild, it's philosophical, and it produces the kind of setting where every faction has a genuinely compelling argument for why they're right. That tension is what makes it so fun to build around.
What's Coming Next?
This is episode one. The campaign barely exists yet. That's the point.
Over the coming weeks, I'll be fleshing out The Slow Death of Magic episode by episode. Every step of the process, recorded and shared so you can follow along or use the same approach for your own campaigns. Here's a taste of where the series is headed.
The first couple of months are structured tutorials. Each episode tackles a specific part of the worldbuilding process and a specific ScriptoriumGM feature. Next week, I'll be setting up my folder structure and teaching the AI how the magic system works by uploading sourcebooks. After that, I'll be using the AI to brainstorm the inciting incident and start sketching out geography. Then we get into locations, NPCs, factions, loot tables, and eventually stress-testing the whole thing by asking the AI questions that require pulling from months of accumulated notes.
By the end of the tutorial phase, we'll have a fully realized campaign world built entirely on camera, one layer at a time. Not a pre-planned wiki dump. A world that grew organically the way your campaigns actually grow.
Then the format shifts. Once the foundation is solid, I'll be moving to live Discord streams where the community drives the creative decisions while I drive the software. Chat builds a city. Chat invents a spell. Chat decides what happens next. The best moments get cut into shorts, and the full sessions go up on YouTube. If you've ever wanted to backseat-GM someone's worldbuilding in real time, that's your chance.
The long game is a full campaign. By the halfway mark, we'll be doing actual session prep: generating plot hooks from months of accumulated notes, drafting player handouts, designing dungeons, building a session dashboard. The series ends with a six-month review of the massive wiki we've built together, showing what a living campaign world looks like when you've been building it consistently.
The order might shift depending on what feels natural as the world takes shape. That's part of the point. Real worldbuilding doesn't follow a checklist.
Keep an eye on our Discord for stream announcements when we get to the live phase. For now, the schedule is simple: new episodes drop on Wednesdays. Subscribe to the ScriptoriumGM YouTube channel so you don't miss them.
Why Does Starting From Scratch Matter?
There's a reason I didn't begin this series with a pre-built world or a finished campaign bible. Most worldbuilding advice assumes you already have everything figured out. "Here's how to organize your factions." Great. What if you don't have factions yet? "Here's a template for your pantheon." Cool. What if you're not even sure your world has gods?
The blank page is where most GMs actually live. You have a vibe. Maybe a single scene in your head. Maybe just a genre and a feeling. The gap between that spark and a playable session is where people get stuck, and it's where a lot of campaigns die before they ever reach a table.
That's what I wanted to show in this series. Not the finished product. The actual messy process of taking "what if magic was dying?" and turning it into something I can run for real players. If you've ever stalled out on a campaign concept because you didn't know what step came next, this series is for you.
Worldbuilding doesn't have to be a 200-hour solo project. Start with what excites you. Write it down somewhere you won't lose it. Build outward from there, one piece at a time. That's the workflow I'm showing in every episode, and it's the same workflow that kept my longest-running campaigns alive for years.
Try It Yourself
The best way to learn worldbuilding is to do it. If the episode gave you ideas for your own campaign, open up ScriptoriumGM and start building. You don't need a finished world. You don't need 50 pages of lore. You need one idea and 15 minutes.
Pick a concept. Something you've been thinking about in the shower or during your commute. "A city that moves," "A world where gods are dying," "Space western but the horses are real." Whatever it is, create a campaign and start writing it down. Upload whatever reference material you have. See what happens when you ask the AI about your world.
That's exactly what I did in episode 1. The Slow Death of Magic started as a sentence. By the end of 12 minutes, it was a campaign with notes and a clear direction.
Your campaign can start the same way.
Get Involved
Worldbuilding Wednesdays is a community project as much as a tutorial series. I want to hear what you're building, what questions you have, and what you'd like to see covered in future episodes.
Drop by our Discord and share your campaign concepts. Subscribe to ScriptoriumGM on YouTube for new episodes every Wednesday. And if you're new to ScriptoriumGM, sign up and start your first campaign. Check out the getting started guide if you want a written walkthrough, or just follow along with the video. The free tier gets you everything you need.
See you next Wednesday.
Sources
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Mage: The Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition - Onyx Path Publishing's definitive edition of the Mage the Ascension system, the primary inspiration for The Slow Death of Magic campaign setting.
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ScriptoriumGM YouTube Channel - Home of Worldbuilding Wednesdays and other ScriptoriumGM tutorials and walkthroughs.
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How RAG-Powered Knowledge Base Saves Your Campaign Memory - Details on the RAG-powered knowledge base, document uploads, and AI assistant features coming in future episodes.