Hi, I’m Andrew! I’ve been playing and running tabletop role-playing games (TTRPGs) for over a decade. Primarily, that has been Dungeons & Dragons, though I have also played other games such as Pathfinder, and a smattering of other TTRPGs in the form of one-shot sessions. In that time, I have become enthralled with the blend of creativity, collaboration, and chaos that comes with building worlds together. I created Phenomenal Worldbuilding as a space to explore TTRPGs through the lens of phenomenology—partly to sharpen my own world building process, and partly in the hope that it might offer others a fresh way of looking at the games they participate in.

Phenomenology is a philosophical tradition which studies conscious experience: passive, active, imaginative, or any other kind of experience one might have. TTRPGs are wonderfully complicated and are shaped by the people at the table (proverbial or otherwise), the emergent story, the mechanics, the imagined world, and the lived moment-to-moment experience of play. As a game master, it’s easy to get lost in details that may or may not matter to your group. As a player, it can be easy to focus on only whatever is in front of you that has been put there. That’s where phenomenology helps. By refocusing attention on what’s most meaningful, most felt, most relevant, or most worth spending your limited preparation time on, phenomenology focuses on where we always find ourselves: in the middle of things.

If you’re like me and spend an extraordinary amount of time with the medium, you’re looking for ways to make better use of your creative time, or just curious about phenomenology—I hope you’ll find something here that will shape a new perspective.