D&D Worldbuilding: Ambiguity
When telling your D&D campaign’s story and describing it’s setting, it’s important to remember that being vague or ambiguous can not only be okay, but important to creating an evocative world.
Legends and Myths. Your setting has a history, and being ambiguous about the details can help hint at it without exposing it discreetly. When you are ambiguous, a statement can have two or more different interpretations. When you use this with a legend or myth, it creates something of a mystery for players. Did the event actually take place or is it a fable? Is there something else behind the story? What other stories are there? It makes the world seem bigger and more full despite being objectively LESS full by you giving the players less information. The players fill in the blanks mentally and you have less work to do to make the world seem fantastic.
Furthermore, you can use your ambiguity to allow… not a loophole, per se, but a bit of flexibility to your world. If you aren’t sure what to do with the legend or what it means, you can present it to the players and let them draw their own conclusions. Then later, the players’ suspicions can either be confirmed or turned on their head, depending on what you need for the story.
Dramatic Encounters. Ambiguity creates tension. Think about the Dark Lord trope in fantasy stories. How much do you know about this Big Bad? It’s often very little. You learn about them through the ripples of their influence or about ancient evil events that took place or cursed rings they’ve created. You don’t have all the relevant information. You might not know their powers, their plans, or even their identity, but it looms like a shadow over the protagonists’ shoulders.
You can utilize this ambiguity to create drama for future encounters as long as you place the seeds early. Also take care not to explicitly define an encounter by a specific creature that can be looked up in the Monster Manual. If you tell the PCs the big-bad is a Balor named Gelvanox that leads an army of fiends, the players know “okay, we need to be like level 16 and need to avoid fire magic, got it.” If, instead, you tell the players the villain is named Gelvanox and commands an army called the Red Legion that has already destroyed the kingdom of the elves, players pause. They don’t have any mechanical info anymore. They don’t know the species of the villain, they don’t know what forces they command, but it was apparently enough to wipe out a kingdom. They still have names to attribute to the enemy (red legion, gelvanox) so they can begin to gather information. Until they discover the nature of the villain, there is tension.
Create Landmarks. Use ambiguity to establish footholds in the setting. Normally, landmarks are things people can use to find their bearings in an environment. Here, they do the same. An ambiguous piece of information about the setting helps players find their place in the world. Players don’t have to ever visit a location or ever meet a person in your setting to learn about it. They can learn about the influence that person or place has on the setting from afar. Once the PCs have some ambiguous information, they can decide what it means in their own story. There is a dwarven kingdom to the southeast that trades ores with this city, therefore this city lacks in ore and any dwarves here may have come from there. The world now seems bigger, more connected, and we can draw implications from the information. That dwarven kingdom becomes a mental landmark for the players to reference and help situate themselves.
Ambiguity without Context. Without enough information, player don’t know how an ambiguous statement about the setting affects them or affects the story. Without context, players can’t draw any conclusions about the setting and no tension is created. Players have to know certain facts to make ambiguity work:
How it affects the players: is it a threat to them? is it something they want or need?
How it affects the world: what implications does this information have on the setting? How does learning this information help the players?
How it affects the story: How does this information further the overarching plot? Does it alter or increase the tension, stakes, or agency for the players?
False Tension. Ambiguity is defined by on bit of information having multiple plausible implications or truths. If players can’t draw conclusions from your ambiguous hints, then they are just vague or nonsense. Hiding something just for the sake of hiding it doesn’t help the story if the players can’t draw anything from it. Even if you are hiding a big revelation for your mystery story, you can’t just not tell the players anything about the revelation until the very end! Players won’t know what they are looking for or what they are trying to figure out. If you are ambiguous, the players will have multiple leads to follow, but only one is correct. Then you can add a twist after they follow said lead if you must have something to raise the stakes.
In my online D&D campaign, I have a vague and mysterious cult that I wanted to be pulling strings beneath the surface. The only problem is that if the cult is too good at their job the players won’t even be aware of their influence. I had to come up with something ambiguous to plant. So the players were sent by the city to investigate cult activity. There were no real leads in their swamp temple, but on their way back to the city they found a body. The body was wearing cult robes but wore signs of being from the city they were sent from and signs they died from stabbing before they donned the robe. This was VERY ambiguous. Is the cult being framed by the city, or are the cultists themselves from the city? It’s vague enough to know there’s shady shit going down. Now the players just discovered a cultist in the city beneath a brothel filled with succubi, apparently their summoner, so the tension has paid off and the stakes are higher; they have indeed infiltrated the city.
So use ambiguity to help define your setting, set up drama, and make your world seem more epic than you have time or energy for, just be sure the players get enough information and can draw meaningful conclusions from what you’ve given them.
