Happy New Year, everyone. With the turning of another year, I guess it's natural to find yourself thinking about past and future creations, hence this thread:

Growing up with D&D, I remember a sort of unspoken presumption that each DM would have their campaign setting: A world they spent years making and running, and over time would build out until it was the match of a Greyhawk or Forgotten Realms. A herculean undertaking to be sure, but I remember almost thinking of it like a craftsman's masterwork, as if making your world was how you graduated from a journeyman to a true DM.  A lot of this is probably the naivete of youth talking, but the AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide seems to have been written with this idea in mind (not that TSR minded selling people settings to use), and things I've heard around the old school RPG space suggest that I was not alone in thinking this way.

More recently, it feels like this convention has fallen out of fashion. Rather than building a single setting which you run over and over again, building more detail in along the way, it seems like more GMs (including myself) either use published settings, or design one-off settings narrowly focused for use in a single campaign. But over the last year or two I've caught the bug again, and wanted to finally set out to make a full campaign setting from scratch and do it right.

So this thread has a few purposes. First, am I totally off in my perception, or was this really an expected thing for DMs back in the day?

Second, for those of you that have undertaken the task of building "your world" and running it repeatedly, any thoughts? Is it worth the work? What's your methodology? Do you keep it within the D&D structure (divine pantheons, elves, dwarfs, etc.) or aim to break that down? That sort of thing.

And finally, I guess this thread is an excuse for all of us to reminisce on the campaign settings we've designed over the years. Somewhere, I still have the first world map that I drew up on notebook paper in 7th-grade science class. If I can find it I'll scan it and throw it up here for a laugh.

The more I work on my fantasy setting, the less defined it becomes. 

That is to say: rather than map and detail every sauare meter of a world, I is easier for me to have some idea of what is where and then define it when the time comes so that I can better tailor it to what my game needs. 

Onething I have been doing in my world building is stealing stuff from real world history.  If I need a name for a town or a person I'll find the mangiage that best relrese ts that region in my world and then choose a word that is close to my description.  For example:

I needed a name for an insignificant settlement in the desert/mountainous region: I looked at the Armenian language for "un-named", found the word "An Annun" and named by little town "Anuun".

Likewise I needed a name for a magic flaming sword.  I pictured this weapon as a Deva, who was too lproud and was transformed into a sword to teach him humility.  I looked up the words "Flame of Truth" in Hindi, and eventually got: "Sachai Key Low".

Well, I've definitely got my own setting I'm using for my game books, but in terms of developing a bespoke world I think my best example would be my long running Mage campaign.

The gist is simple... I started with a small area of the city and a small cast of NPCs (I think it may have been less than six at the time), but as the years went by and players came and went it became a tradition to shift every former PC who hadn't died to be shifted into NPC status, continuing on whatever their established goals were when the player released control.

Fast forward two decades and there are now dozens and dozens of realized and established NPCs with goals, allies, enemies and history. The last campaign I didn't even need to have any sort of detailed plot as GM; I just needed to ask the players about what their PC's goals were and then went through the past PCs to see who else would have interest in or be affected by this goal... the rest took care of itself.

I will sometimes use the same home brew setting for multiple campaigns. However, I've never really had the itch to have "a" setting that keeps growing.  Part of it is that I like my settings rather restrained, but still want to explore different things.  Sufficiently different means that the previous settings might not even be a good fit.  I'd rather make another one than force it.

Most of the players I've had really appreciate mysteries within the setting itself. Once they unravel some of the key mysteries, they'd rather move onto another setting with a different set of mysteries.  Naturally,  that compounds with my own inclinations.

I'd like to think that my later settings are better than my earlier ones.  I don't change everything from setting to setting.  So lessons are learned. 

This is something of a longstanding fad that fell out of favor. I think there are two reasons for it; the first is because the publishing field has grown up a fair bit and player tastes have matured, but your average GM's skills as a worldbuilder have not kept up. Homebrewing for the 90s/ 2000s market was pretty reasonable, but it is somewhat unreasonable today in the 2020s. To worldbuild today I would suggest you need to actively pursue some informal creative writing training rather than pulling things out of thin air.

The second is that worldbuilding is a creative process and bad politics like Wokism interfere with the creative process because you have to filter the work through another layer of public perception. This additional filter displaces at least one and more likely two of the drafting stages, which tends to mean that the final product's quality tends to be raw.

When you combine these two factors, you wind up with fewer GMs doing custom worlds. It's definitely still a thing, but it isn't as much of a thing as it used to be.

Quote from: Fheredin on January 01, 2024, 10:28:49 PM
This is something of a longstanding fad that fell out of favor. I think there are two reasons for it; the first is because the publishing field has grown up a fair bit and player tastes have matured, but your average GM's skills as a worldbuilder have not kept up. Homebrewing for the 90s/ 2000s market was pretty reasonable, but it is somewhat unreasonable today in the 2020s. To worldbuild today I would suggest you need to actively pursue some informal creative writing training rather than pulling things out of thin air.

The second is that worldbuilding is a creative process and bad politics like Wokism interfere with the creative process because you have to filter the work through another layer of public perception. This additional filter displaces at least one and more likely two of the drafting stages, which tends to mean that the final product's quality tends to be raw.

When you combine these two factors, you wind up with fewer GMs doing custom worlds. It's definitely still a thing, but it isn't as much of a thing as it used to be.

That's an interesting take. Particularly regarding that second point, it occurs to me that a major component might be the fact that as Svenhelgrim noted, almost all fictional worldbuilding starts from building off current or historical cultures in the real world. That's kind of a no-win scenario if you follow a woke mindset. Recreate a real culture inaccurately and you're being "culturally insensitive". Recreate it accurately and not only is it "cultural appropriation", but you're probably going to be including quite a lot of "problematic" cultural traits.

Still, the idea makes me more inclined to embark on the venture. We all owe a duty to do our little bit to stymie the wave of creative stagnation in the mediums we love. 

Quote from: Steven Mitchell on January 01, 2024, 06:48:32 PM
Most of the players I've had really appreciate mysteries within the setting itself. Once they unravel some of the key mysteries, they'd rather move onto another setting with a different set of mysteries.  Naturally,  that compounds with my own inclinations.

That's something I've struggled with a bit. I'm inclined to think that big world-shaking secrets are something that just can't work in an RPG setting designed to have any longevity. I've been working towards the approach of a setting which includes a big known mechanic that can produce a semi-infinite array of medium-sized secrets to be uncovered in one campaign after another.

We jumped systems and setting frequently. Play some RIFTS or Robotech, some AD&D, some Deadlands, some Cyberpunk 2020, back to AD&D for a while, etc. Most premade settings were good enough for us.
We did switch GM for each game, so everyone got a chance to play a PC eventually.
I do love the idea of every campaign and/or GM having their own, consistently played campaign setting, but in practice none of us ever really did it.

Quote from: ForgottenF on January 01, 2024, 02:45:54 PM
Second, for those of you that have undertaken the task of building "your world" and running it repeatedly, any thoughts? Is it worth the work? What's your methodology? Do you keep it within the D&D structure (divine pantheons, elves, dwarfs, etc.) or aim to break that down? That sort of thing.

And finally, I guess this thread is an excuse for all of us to reminisce on the campaign settings we've designed over the years. Somewhere, I still have the first world map that I drew up on notebook paper in 7th-grade science class. If I can find it I'll scan it and throw it up here for a laugh.

I'll skip the first questions since I wasn't around to really know, but I'll give what I can with these two (really showing my age here xD).

I think that running and creating your own world is always worth the work, and it's always as much fun as its made out to be. In the end, you'll have a world you can repeatedly return to and flesh out with every campaign you run in it. In a sense it'll take on a living feel as you add more and more details, and if you run it with the same group, or a cohesive group of players it will feel real.

I find the best way to start is to start off small. If this is the first adventure of the first campaign, just detail the local area and hold onto the vaguest details about the world in question. What kingdom are they in? Where is the dungeon? What is the name of town they'll be in? I find it's always best to throw out details as they're needed, rather than having a codex of information to rely on. That being said, keep a notebook of ideas, cool names, interesting things you've heard, etc so you have a resource to pool your ideas in. Just be sure to write down whatever you tell the players afterwards, so if they ask again later you've got consistent information. That being said, it's good to keep some details set in stone right from the start. Essentially I've found you always want flexibility and consistency.

Now here's the part where I can gush about my totally original campaign setting I've run a few games in. It was more or less a conglomeration of shit that I found really cool, and a lot of its inspiration came from a combination of my own reading and books I read for schoolwork. It's basically 9th century Europe, with a big focus on the Frankish Empire during its height, and split, in 843. It had a standard, but small, pantheon of gods which included names such as Mannanan, Ehlonna, Morrioghain, and some others as well as some mysterious cults that popped up. My groups' favorite always seemed to be D'yer, the god of pragmatic and honourable battle, whom I named after Led Zeppelin's D'yer Maker.

The campaigns usually started right as the Empire's civil war is about to begin, and involved the players trying to stay out of the way or fleeing to adventure as a means to escape the wars, or sometimes becoming directly involved. The original campaign took place in Varremheimr, which was home to the Varrenfolk (vikings) and it was the edge of the empire. I ran B2, and it was a hit. The party fled the civil war, and ended up taking on an old lich named Seer Torval. This all spawned as a result of a random tower I placed on an island in B2. Another saw the players travel to Rus', and the final campaign started in Italia and ended in England (later renamed Albion after I read Pundit's Dark Albion) as the players were investigating the elves there.

It was a pretty standard setting otherwise. It had scattered city-states of elves that were remnants of the last great elven empire, growing human states, and a great dwarven conclave in Switzerland, and the halfling homeland being shires in the general Benelux states. It was very Tolkien, but I tried to throw some of those tropes on their heads to keep it fresh. The elves, for example, lost their longevity and rather than going west to Vallanor to die, they'd journey to The Black Spring in Wales and go to the bottom, wherever it went to die in peace (it's a real cave in Wales, but I made it into a weird megadungeon with the caveat that once an elf enters, they can't leave).

Pretty much all of this was done on the fly, with little prep work to tie it all together. I just up and thought a viking game sounded fun one day, and ended up creating a world out of it. Whatever you do, don't get your inner fantasy novelist ticking away because most of those details won't matter until a player asks for it. If that's the case, then just provide info as needed.

Various things have occurred and, as of this evening, I am developing an underdark campaign setting based on the Black Sea area.  The Sea of Marmara and the Sea of Azov are going to be separate caverns controlled by the Drow and the Aboleth Aliance respectively.  Crimea will probably be controlled by the duergar with Sevastapol as their capital.  I haven't decided who will be where Odesa is in the real world or where the starting town will be.  The town will be loosely based on Saltmarsh but mainly populated by dissident Drow who have left the Drow Empire for a wide variety of reasons. 

For my fantasy world, I figured out a long time ago that I cannot make something original that it's easy to game in so I leaned into old tropes.  I borrowed deeply from Norse, Celtic, and Greek mythology.  Almost everything anyone runs into in a fantasy game I'm running comes from one of those three sources interpreted by my understanding and tweaks I make to fit it all together.  It keeps evolving and I've stitched in things from other material over the years.  Pundit's stuff had been coming in a lot stronger lately.

What I was delightfully surprised by is that a lot of things were very alien to my players.  I get to see guys in their 30s and 40s that want to unravel the mysteries of my world with the glee of 10 year olds.  These moments are probably the most fun in gaming I've ever had.

I run a far future scifi setting that's a blend of my thoughts of where Frank Herbert would have gone if he'd wrote more dune books before he died, the kind of stuff I thought Disney should have done with Star Wars, and influence from the scifi books i read as a kid from Asimov, Heinlein, and the like. 

I also run a near future/cyberpunk setting heavily influence by some of the more gritty 80s scifi films like Aliens and Outlander.  A few years ago I discovered Hostile by Zozer Games and I couldn't believe how close it was to my own setting.   

Quote from: ForgottenF on January 01, 2024, 02:45:54 PM


Second, for those of you that have undertaken the task of building "your world" and running it repeatedly, any thoughts? Is it worth the work? What's your methodology? Do you keep it within the D&D structure (divine pantheons, elves, dwarfs, etc.) or aim to break that down? That sort of thing.

All right, now that I have a moment I can wax on about my own work because I suppose it is relevant. Bear in mind that this is notably more ambitious and aggressive than making a custom homebrew setting within an established setting; this is how you homebrew a completely novel experience.

I have three questions I tend to ask while building worlds, each by asking questions. Instead of following a rote formula of doing X, then Y, then Z, I instead prefer to answer one question, then step back and ask what question sounds easiest to answer next. As this is a process you learn through example, I will walk you through the process I used to do the worldbuilding for Selection: Roleplay Evolved.

Question 1: What did this popular world get badly wrong? For me, that was XCOM Enemy Unknown (or Enemy Within) and the answer was that they badly botched the motivation for the alien invasion. The motivations revealed at the end were shockingly poorly thought out because it doesn't make emotional sense to most readers.

Question 2: Can I tweak the worldbuilding formula in a slight, but subtle way that produces a completely different result? This time, I started with Call of C'thulu, and I asked myself what if an Elder God became a patron of sorts for the Player Characters. The easy explanation may be that the Elder God is manipulating the PCs to summon themselves, but I think that you shouldn't bake lies into the worldbuilding of a Roleplaying Game. Players become savvy to them in metagame too easily. But what if, instead, the Elder Gods are not getting along and so an Elder God who perhaps doesn't have any human cultists at this moment but who is desperate to stop another Elder God could conceivably form an alliance with the Player Character investigators. At that point it stops being Call of C'thulu, but that's kinda the point.

Question 3: What obscure work of inspiration fits into this? I generally feel that one of the key reasons games can circle the game of all feeling the same is that many of the creative people making them are sticking too close to  mainstream experiences. At some point in the creative process, you should leave mainstream and try to find something obscure just to be sure you are providing a novel experience. In my case, that was the video game Parasite Eve, which has a unique modern found biohorror aesthetic, with many of the monsters being mutated animals, and Aya is subtly worried about loosing her humanity to her new-found abilities (the antagonist is in some ways Aya's dead twin sister, so her connection to her sister is pulling her away from the rest of humanity). The transhuman loss of humanity can replace the standard Call of C'thulu insanity with needing to adapt yourself to a situation.

Putting these together, the final world for Selection is an alien invasion where a few survivors of the Protomir Civil War come to Earth, destroy most of the technology they arrived with so it can't be traced back to them, and become human to assume human identities. The Arsill approaches the PCs with alien abilities and information, asking for help, and the Nexill just wants to kill the Arsill by any means necessary and making Earth uninhabitable is a great way to make sure you didn't miss.

Cool topic.

I think the presumption definitely used to be that everyone would build their own world, at least with D&D, though they started selling supplements like Greyhawk fairly early on.  But I thought it was cool that you often had fairly minimal info in these settings so that you could make it your own.  Then, from the mid-80s, it seemed like TSR was more into creating settings, which really proliferated in the 2e era to the point that there were simply too many competing ones.

I started out with just a few place names and vague notes inspired by history and fantasy literature I read, first and foremost, Tolkien.  After several years I finally drew a map of a small part of the world, which I call Krysonia, the named being derived from these little figures my mom bought me in the 80s called Krystonians, which also had stories attached to them.  It was originally a sort of mash-up of northern european cultures and mythologies with your classic fantasy elements in.  Certain places and names were taken from various D&D modules or pop culture references; others were original.  I later decided to add an Asian analogue (centered around the Mysterious Celestial Empire of Leng) since we used Oriental Adventures.  But I decided to (gasp) put those lands to the west of the main region, beyond mountains, desert, and steppe.  I eventually created a broad timeline for events and set different campaigns in different eras, so I could tinker with factions, states, and the like. 

In terms of influences, it's remained connected to all kinds of personal references for me, including books, history, popular culture, music, etc.  So the Chthulhu deities are in there and we've got recurring villains like the Starry Wisdom Sect, the Blue Oyster Cult, the Union of the Snake, and the like.  A couple years ago I even decided to get Glynn Seal from Monkeyblood Design to redraw my old hand-drawn colored pencil maps.  He did them in color and black and white and I laminated a couple copies for table use.  They look fantastic.

And I still drop in other settings, like Hyperborea, in spaces off my main maps, which allows for different flavors in adventuring, bringing in exotic classes, spells, races, etc.  So it's a real hodgepodge, but we have fun with it.

I created the skeleton of my own world when I was younger and even designed a campaign for said world.  However, as I got older (and lazier) I started just shoehorning/meshing my campaign into the Forgotten Realms.  The Dark Cabal became the Zhentarim, the desert became Anauroch, etc...

Now I have a pretty polished campaign that takes about 2-3 years to run through.  I've run it Four times now from start to finish adding and subtracting bits here and there.

My first D&D world lasted maybe four years before we had a great world war and ended the campaign.

It grew very organically. Started with a dungeon, and then a town near the dungeon where we would go to buy stuff to go back into the dungeon. Then a local area map, so that we might have adventures on the way to and from the dungeon. Then a bigger scale nation-map so that we might travel from one town to another, with adventures along the way. By this time I had a Judges Guild subscription, so places like the CSIO and Thunderhold and Modron and Tegel Manor got placed on my map. As time passed and the characters wanted to adventure farther from "home" I slowly built more of my map until I had a whole continent.

Nowadays when I build a new world I decide upon a theme first. Maybe I want something like Middle-earth or something like Ravenloft. Without using their world directly, I like to steal place-names which will tell me what is where. Places like Rivendell or Helm's Deep from Tolkien, Paranor from Shannara, Aquilonia and Stygia from Howard. Sometimes a nation in the other author's world becomes a city in mine, but still similar enough that I know what is found there.

I'm okay with stealing names because doing this has the advantage that players often have clues in advance as to what they can find there, too. In the real world I've never been to Paris, yet I have a mind's-eye vision of what Paris might be like. I figure if the players have some insight it's easier than me making up totally new names and having to teach myself and them what is there.

Building your own world made a lot more sense back in the early days of D&D.

For one thing, there were not all that many premade settings in 1982. Oh, there were modules, and even campaigns, but there was a pretty good chance that if you had an idea of what you wanted to do, there was not something out there that did that exact thing.

Also, most of us were a lot younger then, and we had more time than money. I couldn't afford to buy a lot of modules, and I certainly couldn't afford to buy them on speculation.

Plus, making a dungeon was pretty easy, and it was part of the fun.

Nowadays, I definitely have more money than time, and being able to buy a campaign book that is nicely put together and playtested seems like a good idea.