Start With One Town, Not One Continent
Build the village the party can walk to in a day. Everything past the horizon can be a name and a rumor.
The most common worldbuilding mistake: drawing a world map before the first session. Your players will spend months in the starting area — they don't need to know about the distant empire until they book passage there. The community's rule of thumb: prep one detailed settlement (what do they eat, who's in charge, what do they fear), three nearby adventure locations (dungeon, ruin, monster lair), and five rumors the party can overhear in the tavern. That's 6-12 sessions of content.
The "spiral method": start at the center (starting town) and only build outward when players show interest. They ask about the mountains to the north? That's when you build the mountains. They ignore the forest you prepped? It stays in your notebook for later. This isn't laziness — it's efficiency. Every hour of worldbuilding you do before the campaign starts is an hour of content your players might never see.
Making Cultures Feel Real Without Writing Anthropology Papers
One cultural rule that affects gameplay is worth more than ten pages of history that doesn't.
Players engage with culture through mechanics. The community's most effective technique: give each culture one rule that players interact with. The desert nomads mark their dead with tattoos visible only under moonlight — the party rogue has such a tattoo from a forgotten pact. The mountain dwarves consider written contracts spiritually binding — breaking one requires an atonement quest. One rule, one gameplay hook.
The deeper point from the community: cultural specificity beats generic fantasy pastiche. A city where magic is taxed and all spells require a government license creates more memorable interactions than a city that's just "generic medieval fantasy with wizards." Pick one way your world is different from default fantasy assumptions, and build outward from that difference. Everything else can be borrowed from history, mythology, or other settings.