World building from the bottom up.

My past few attempts at building a campaign setting have all sort of died right out of the chute. I realized that I end up getting hung up with large scale details and world wide histories. Essentially I'm too fucked up thinking about the forest to see the trees. I typically try to do a mix of small and large scale from the start, a brief world history some large assumptions about things and then flesh out a continent in brief and a kingdom in detail.

I just bought a copy of DCC though and it really got the creative juices flowing for me, so I've got the itch to build another setting. This time though I want to start small, like really small. However I have never really done that before.

How many of you start at the village level and work up from there?

I want to start at that level but I keep worrying about keeping the whole thing consistent if I don't have a larger picture of the world. Any particular pitfalls of this approach? Advice on building from the ground up?

World building from the bottom up.