Pitch your homebrew!

[jdrakeh]

I get in a rut every now and a gaion when every published setting just starts to look and feel like a tired, old, retread of every other published setting — so I start looking at fan-created settings for inspiration.

The problem I'm running into currently is that the two sites online that I once visited to track such things have pretty much up and vanished over the last year. So, here I am, asking you directly:

What's your homebrewed setting all about? What makes it awesome? What makes it different from commercial settings? Do you have a website? Care to post a link?

 

[Rel]

You're familiar with mine already, right?

 

[jdrakeh]

You're familiar with mine already, right?

No, actually, I can't say that I am. I probably should be, though.

 

[Rel]

http://www.enworld.org/forum/genera...homebrew-setting-ill-use-d-d-4th-edition.html

 

[Gilladian]

Well, I don't know that it is particularly unique; in fact I'm sure it isn't, because I'm not exceptionally creative, but I love my world: Vishteer Campaign / FrontPage

I've been using it, or variations of it, for 25+ years of gaming... It is definitely 3.5 ed now, though.

The heart of the world is Greenvale, a human and half-elven kingdom, mostly settled by farmers and woodsmen, surrounded by mountains, forests and deep waters; beset by orc hordes, wild woodsmen and evil remnants of ancient fallen empire.

There's an extensive underworld, and a few large cities, but it is mostly "edge of the wilderness" exploration and travel.

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

What's your homebrewed setting all about?

Urbis - A World of Cities

The basic idea of the setting could be summed up as: "Take a fairly ordinary D&D fantasy world, and then assume that instead of stopping at a pseudo-medieval paradigm, magic continues to advance until the world enters a magical industrial revolution."

What makes it awesome?

Lots of material (I've probably written about 150,000 words for it by now - all of it available online), lots of recycling of familiar fantasy D&D tropes in a new context (and often subverting them in the process), lots of real world references (the setting is consciously modeled after society and culture of 19th century Western Europe) lots of really big cities (many of which have populations exceeding one billion people).

Oh, and newspapers - including tabloids. Every RPG setting should have newspapers - they are one of the most fun setting elements a DM can use...

What makes it different from commercial settings?

The most similar settings are probably Eberron and Iron Kingdoms. It differs from both in that the focus is more on individual city-states instead of nations and wilderness, and it differs from the Iron Kingdoms that the industry is driven by magic items alone, instead of being powered by steam in addition to magic.

Oh, and the way the people in Urbis accumulate magical power is also a bit more disturbing...

 

[Dyson Logos]

Urbis is very, very cool. I've been reading that wiki for years.

My own homebrew is very Melnibonean in feel. Basically take Dragon Lords of Melnibone / Stormbringer / Elric! and swap out the melniboneans for elves and the world is covered in the ruins of their cities and leftovers of their ancient magical pacts. All the "goblinoid" races are descendents of one of their old slave races that they brought to this world from another plane, and their most recent slave race prior to the collapse of their empire are like the Thrulls from magic the gathering's "Fallen Empires".

It's a world in the midst of a major paradigm shift from the empire of the Kale (the elves) to the time of Man. But there's a lot of cleaning up to do and a lot of parts of the world that are no longer in communication, but are tied together vaguely by their memories and tales of a common enemy that is basically no more - everyone has tales of the end of the first major rebellion against the Kale empire and how Kale armies crushed the human forces.

 

[Jack7]

Mine is here. The World's Apart.
Some of it is on my blog. Or in other threads.
I'm trying to link it all up over time though to my setting thread.

I haven't had much time to do an internet write up on it lately though due to work and personal matters, and a missing person's case I'm just starting to work.

There is another good thread I think about What Makes Your Homebrew Special, or Unique, or some such title. It had some good ideas too.

I do wish though that more folks had more detailed homebrew write-ups on their work, or that there was a single Thread you could go to find all the Homebrew Write-Ups. You know, not a homebrew Q&A on this aspect or problem or that, or a storythread, but more of a home-brew link thread to actual write-ups. To real descriptions. Maybe there is but I don't know about it.

Well, I gotta go take the little woman out and buy a new chainsaw and ladder and axe and whatnot. She thinks she's putting me to work.

HAPPY MEMORIAL DAY to my fellow countrymen.
And to all my buddies and family still in service, Goodspeed and Godspeed, and proud of ya.

If not my countrymen, then a good day to ya anyways.

 

[Silvercat Moonpaw]

If you want another site of fan-created settings the Campaign Builders Guild has a lot of dedicated people and some really funky settings.

 

[Bumbles]

No website, so no link, but...here's a brief description:

A prison-world, long-term, built by a galactic empire that collapsed a long long time ago, and the inhabitants are their descendants.

The whole thing was supervised by a computer that has not aged well, with the gods being some of the programs, such as gods for sanitation, reform, punishment and grounds maintenance. Magic itself is effectively nano-technology.

And yes, I did get a bit of my ideas from existing sources, but I like to think there's some unique part of it that's mine.