Back in the origin-time of the hobby we made up our own "worlds" because we had to. It was part of being a DM, and there weren't other options at first. It may have started organically around a dungeon and its village or town. Or the DM may have basically sketched out an area and expanded as necessary. Inspiration came from Appendix N sorts of sources, along with history.

My very first DM used the Judges Guild Wilderlands maps for his campaign. As my fellow elders know, this was very, very sketchy and every DM's Wilderlands would have been very different. When I finally started my own campaign I followed his lead. I used the Wilderlands maps but came up with my own cultures and "nations." My campaign ran for twenty years until I and my players had all gone our separate ways. I never thought of a campaign as anything but open-ended; I can't relate to a "campaign" that runs on a timetable and has a pre-plotted "end." I just don't see the point.

Also note that in JG's City-State book there is a portal to "Venus." (My assumption being the Burroughs version.) And Bledsaw had his version of Wilderlands connected to Middle Earth. Not uncommon to visit our literary heritage.

One of my first DMs had a degree in Anthropology and his world had cultures lifted from history, with tweaks and amalgamations. My other DM ran his campaign in the world of Midkemia, at my request. He took the books and the few available gaming publications and expanded the whole thing. I doubt his campaign ended up much like any other Midkemia DM's.

When the Greyhawk folio came out it was pretty much just a map with country names. The few lines of description were inspiration but easily ignored, and every Greyhawk would've felt different.

I remember that Anthropologist DM dismissing others as "module lords" if they just used published products. Obviously this was in the 80s when we saw a lot of modules published.

IMO, the more we saw detailed published settings, the more we lost overall creativity in the hobby. It's not at all hard to make a campaign world of your own. It's just a game to play with friends, and we all know the tropes.

But today? The bulk of young gamers I've met are all for having a VTT that handles everything for them, with pre-written resources. The DMs I've talked to don't have any prep time at all – they just make their purchases and schedule the game.

One downside with pre-published settings, particularly indie ones, is that they often have a metric ton of lore and backstory to master.  In some cases this has real implications for character design and gameplay, which is fine, but I have little interest in doing that these days.

Quote from: Persimmon on January 03, 2024, 01:39:07 PM
One downside with pre-published settings, particularly indie ones, is that they often have a metric ton of lore and backstory to master.  In some cases this has real implications for character design and gameplay, which is fine, but I have little interest in doing that these days.

Yep.  At first, I was in that "more time than money" camp and did my own.  Then it flipped, and I used the bought ones.  Now it takes less of my time to do my own than to absorb the details on someone else's.  The money gets spent on maps and handouts. 

Quote from: Captain_Pazuzu on January 03, 2024, 11:17:07 AM
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.

I think on a practical level there's not much difference between creating your own world whole-cloth, and "settling into" an existing setting and making it your own. Obviously if you want to do something wildly different than Forgotten Realms, you're going to have to made a setting to fit, but for most fantasy gaming, Greyhawk or Forgotten Realms or whatever will work fine. And then you carve out a corner of it, tweak a few things, and build up a history around the player characters adventures.

I didn't really answer the question of how I manage my world.

First, yes, it's perpetual.  Any changes I make on my side of the screen I make sure doesn't invalidate previous player experiences.

Second, I have major NPCs occasionally make moves in the world but I rarely allow anything but PCs to upset the balance of power or reshape the cultures.

Third, I keep track of major PC actions and stitch into the world lore.  One group of PCs could run into things shaped by previous PCs.

Quote from: Steven Mitchell on January 03, 2024, 01:47:12 PM

Quote from: Persimmon on January 03, 2024, 01:39:07 PM
One downside with pre-published settings, particularly indie ones, is that they often have a metric ton of lore and backstory to master.  In some cases this has real implications for character design and gameplay, which is fine, but I have little interest in doing that these days.

Yep.  At first, I was in that "more time than money" camp and did my own.  Then it flipped, and I used the bought ones.  Now it takes less of my time to my own than to absorb the details on someone else's.  The money gets spent on maps and handouts.

That is an interesting way of summarizing the problem, but I've noticed something tangentially related. DIY Worldbuilding in some capacity is almost inevitable for RPG play just because players explore parts of the world you can't expect, and the less creative I am during actual play, the harder I find it to switch back into a creative state. If I am running a minimalist setting I can effortlessly switch between running the game and making crap up because I do that all the time, but if I am creative less often I have to consciously try to remember if there's a canon answer and then make something up. That extra step can really slow down the process, especially if the setting has a lot of lore, and I wind up having to consult the internet or multiple players at the table only to determine that there isn't a canon answer.

And then I have to use my creative abilities from a cold start. If you've ever worked with creative people (and most people here are at least somewhat creative) you know that most creative people perform better when their creative skills are warmed up, often with a ritual. Calling on creative skills from a cold start is just not how most creative peoples' brains tick. It can be done--in fact it seldom actually causes problems--but it isn't particularly pleasant.

Quote from: Lurkndog on January 03, 2024, 12:40:47 PM
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.

This is all very true. When I started there weren't any worlds you could buy, so we had to make our own. Judges Guild changed that, and later TSR released "Greyhawk" (which wasn't actually Gary's campaign, but probably close) and there weren't any modules at first, either. Making worlds, and making dungeons, was clearly part of the fun! 

Quote from: ForgottenF on January 01, 2024, 02:45:54 PM
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 1st Edition AD&D DMG implied a lot of expectations, upon the DM.

I am already getting demands for thing like the removal of any depiction of slavery or to run a different setting.  I am thinking about how to respond to this.   

Quote from: yosemitemike on January 04, 2024, 02:51:29 AM
I am already getting demands for thing like the removal of any depiction of slavery or to run a different setting.  I am thinking about how to respond to this.   

I have some suggestions... ranging from the use of fingers to the possible discharge of firearms....  (It's a joke, people.)

In all seriousness, people that make the demand "the removal of any depiction of slavery" are not good people to game with.  It's one thing if they ask you not to use it in a callous manner or expound upon it's virtues, it's quite another when they demand control over your setting.

Quote from: BadApple on January 04, 2024, 03:12:41 AM
I have some suggestions... ranging from the use of fingers to the possible discharge of firearms....  (It's a joke, people.)

In all seriousness, people that make the demand "the removal of any depiction of slavery" are not good people to game with.  It's one thing if they ask you not to use it in a callous manner or expound upon it's virtues, it's quite another when they demand control over your setting.

Also, none of them are addressing any of this to me directly.  They are all going to the discord serve admin.

Greetings!

Yes, have even more slavery. Show the slaves being crushed, trampled, and beaten down by the Masters. Naturally, many people are natural-born slaves. Just look around at our own current culture. Millions and millions of people yearning, begging, to get on their knees and serve the powerful and elite. Lots of people *want* to be slaves. They know, deep down, they are inferior, and worthless, and they *need* the strong hand of the Master to run their lives for them. These people are born for the yoke. They are like animals, needing to be trained and supervised constantly.

Left free to themselves, many of these people would simply wallow in savage chaos and degenerate cesspools.

So, yes. Have slavery firmly established in your campaign. Let them REEE and sob like the crying children they are.

If they get "Triggered" let them jerk themselves a soda. Tell them to get fucked, and find a set of different players that are mature, and functioning firmly in the real world, and not drifting along in some hazy candyland, like a bunch of 10-year old children.

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK

Quote from: yosemitemike on January 04, 2024, 02:51:29 AM
I am already getting demands for thing like the removal of any depiction of slavery or to run a different setting.  I am thinking about how to respond to this.   

One nice thing about a campaign with slavery is that it gives bad guys for the players to overthrow. "You don't like slavery? Your characters should try to change the system!"

Isn't that half of the purpose of evil druglord bad guys in so many TV shows? The good guys feel like drugs are bad, so they want to thwart the druglords. Or gun runners. Or any of a number of bad people. A campaign without bad people would be pretty dull, I think.

Quote from: yosemitemike on January 04, 2024, 05:49:26 AM

Quote from: BadApple on January 04, 2024, 03:12:41 AM
I have some suggestions... ranging from the use of fingers to the possible discharge of firearms....  (It's a joke, people.)

In all seriousness, people that make the demand "the removal of any depiction of slavery" are not good people to game with.  It's one thing if they ask you not to use it in a callous manner or expound upon it's virtues, it's quite another when they demand control over your setting.

Also, none of them are addressing any of this to me directly.  They are all going to the discord serve admin.

Dude, that sucks.

You're always welcome to sit at my table as either a GM or a player.  At least you'd get an adult conversation if material isn't a good fit.

Quote from: SHARK on January 04, 2024, 06:52:21 AMYes, have even more slavery. Show the slaves being crushed, trampled, and beaten down by the Masters. Naturally, many people are natural-born slaves. Just look around at our own current culture. Millions and millions of people yearning, begging, to get on their knees and serve the powerful and elite. Lots of people *want* to be slaves. They know, deep down, they are inferior, and worthless, and they *need* the strong hand of the Master to run their lives for them. These people are born for the yoke. They are like animals, needing to be trained and supervised constantly.

What the fuck is wrong with you.