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Creating a new World: Advices and Suggestions

All I really know about creating your own world (or campaign setting), is what I've done for my own D&D group. But I have no experience of my own of actually publishing a world or setting for others.

That said, I do know what I dislike about most published settings and worlds:

-Very few of them invoke a sense of wonder, magic, dread and curiosity. I want a campaign setting to have unexplored areas where amazing things can happen. And I want there to be enough room to insert my own towns and cities.

-Many of them have lots of gods, but don't give you much to use them in your campaign(s). Gods and religions tend to be very dull in published settings, and rarely give you any idea of what a religion based on the deities might look like.

-Many of them tick the usual boxes of elves, dwarves, halflings, orcs and drow. Which is terribly cliche and off putting to me.

-Very few of them actually describe cultures of people.
 

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Commissar

First Post
I'm really happy you liked the idea of the Time System. Thanks to the feedback I decided to split my setting into two PDFs.

  • The first would include essential world concepts to start a campaign, like maps, race traits, deity tables, a short pantheon description, magic weapons and spells, along with a description.
  • The second would be a supplementary stuff, such as mythology, artifacts, location and race demographics, economics and technology, monsters and structure.

Also, the feedback about the genealogy and mythology was very helpful to me, because I realized that the majority may never read to it. So, I decided to write it in a manner that it would be independent and available to be played in any Greek oriented campaign.

Finally, by splitting the lore of the races with their attributes, I can help other people to play them in other campaigns.

About the maps
As DM, I try to dodge creating my own maps, because I become a freak on details and symmetries. So, I decided to create several small maps of important locations and cities instead of a united world map. I believe that those maps would be more useful in practice, and easier to make.

About artwork and writing
Since I am willing to share it for free, I cannot afford to pay for custom artwork. Is ok to use pinterest and deviantart? Is there any website you would suggest for free artwork? Also, english is not my native, so it becomes difficult when it goes to induce epicness to my texts. Can I find volunteers here to help me with editing?
 

Commissar

First Post
All I really know about creating your own world (or campaign setting), is what I've done for my own D&D group. But I have no experience of my own of actually publishing a world or setting for others.

That said, I do know what I dislike about most published settings and worlds:

-Very few of them invoke a sense of wonder, magic, dread and curiosity. I want a campaign setting to have unexplored areas where amazing things can happen. And I want there to be enough room to insert my own towns and cities.

-Many of them have lots of gods, but don't give you much to use them in your campaign(s). Gods and religions tend to be very dull in published settings, and rarely give you any idea of what a religion based on the deities might look like.

-Many of them tick the usual boxes of elves, dwarves, halflings, orcs and drow. Which is terribly cliche and off putting to me.

-Very few of them actually describe cultures of people.

Thank you very much for your comments. The main reason of creating that concept of Ages is because I tried induce mysterious elements in my world through the concept of "lost history".

For example, my Incas like Tribe (human race) has been extincted long ago during in a mysterious catastrophic war against the "Oppressors". History is lost and so left vague the nature of the Oppressors. Their origins are lost, but the warrior's will was so strong that they became spirits and they reincarnate using human vessels.

On the other hand, the Elves migrated to an other plane during a cataclysmic event. Only 2 Houses left in my world and there is no mentioning if the other Houses are willing to come back sometime... Also, there is no explanation if that cataclysmic events are related to the war I mentioned above.

I have left a lot of lost legendary cities and locations there just to let some free space to breath.

Regarding the Deities, I'm going to spend a section on quest and campaign ideas using well known examples. Also, I'm going to explain how gods intervene to mortal lives and decisions and possible ways to do so as a DM. Greek Mythological beings resemble normal humans, where there is not a distinct line between good and evil, chaos and law. I will include alignment tables for the sake of mechanics, but I am going to let players and DMs to personify Deities as they imagine them. I'm against the current D&D deity system where the behavior of Gods is oversimplified and straight forward.

Finally, I don't think there is something more terrifying than a dark uncharted cave network with unknown creatures that ends to the underworld. Any wrong path decision may lead the heroes to the underworld and insanity, Cerberus or even the Soul Reaper himself. Who knows? Perhaps the Oppressors I mentioned above lost and the remainders are hidden in that network!!!
 


Mercurius

Legend
[*]I have implemented a time system that resembles Tolkien's Ages with a difference: Each Age has four acts that mortals often ignore; the acts resemble an ancient Drama i.e. A prologue/genesis (meta apocalyptic period), a stasima (development period), hubris (arrogance), and nemesis/catharsis (apocalypsis and cleansing). According the act, the technology levels and the rarity of magic items may vary. Between Ages, most of the knowledge and history are forgotten.

Very cool idea. I've always be interested in the idea of world ages, from fictional (e.g. Tolkien) to metaphysical (e.g. Rudolf Steiner, Rene Guenon, etc) to the prevalence in ancient cultures: India, Greece, Mesoamerica, etc. But your take is rather unusual...can you tell me a bit about how you came up with it?
 

GreenTengu

Adventurer
From the OP, it looks like the main problem here is that all the focus is on things that are on the macro-scale.

The problem is that things on the macro-scale tend to just plain never get used, especially if they are far too numerous.

I cannot think of any reason one could ever legitimately need 90 deities. Outside of Forgotten Realms where people just randomly made up new deities on the fly and they were all canonized leading to a complete mess, I don't think any official D&D worlds have that many.

You certainly are never going to be able to bring them all up in gameplay. You can't very well have functional religions for all of them in every conceivable city. And, more so, undoubtedly there are going to be ones that just blend together as it will be impossible to keep them all distinct-- especially without the spotlight to develop them.

It would be so much better for a world you expect a story to take place in to focus on only a small handful of "major" deities with perhaps a note that there are many different minor deities that are generally aligned with one of the bigger ones.

You write that you have decided how the planes work... but why?
At the moment you don't know who your protagonists are, you haven't decided what the factions are... nothing could possibly matter less than what planes there are or how they work.

What happens if you get a good character concept and it conflicts with your ideas on these things? You are either going to have to reject the character on the basis that you fixated on and locked yourself into a concept of the universe that precludes the idea even though those ideas are likely never going to come up in actual gameplay.

You also seem to have concocted a ton of subraces. While it may seem like this is increasing the options, it can serve to do the exact opposite. The reason for this is because when you have a only a couple races, then really there are only a handful of differences that set the races apart. So long as those differences exist, one can be considered a member of that race regardless of what other characteristics they have.

But the more and more subraces that get tossed in, the more and more you nail down and dictate what characteristics an individual has to have to be that subrace.
You have to have this skin color, you have to have this hair color, you have to have this eye color, you have to be this height, you have to be this build, you have to wear these clothes, you have to have this outlook on life, you have to have this moral code, you have to be this religion, you have to have this personality.... otherwise you don't quite match up to this particular subrace and you certainly can't mix and match traits from different subraces.

Imagine instead, if you will, a system in which there are no subraces. Where High Elf, Wood Elf and Drow are all considered perfectly fine as various cultures one could find among the singular race called Elves. And not just these extremes, but any given tribe/village/enclave of elves could express any given mixture of these characteristics. In fact, even within the most pure Drow society you'll have weird 'back to nature' hippies and in High Elf society it wouldn't be a shock to find a backstabbing social ladder climber as evil as any Drow.
Simply by erasing the mechanical constraints that dictate things nearly to the point that every member of any given subrace comes off the assembly line nearly a clone, you instead can create quite a bit more depth simply by allowing for the idea that while you may have these extremely different cultures among the race, not every member within the cultures strictly adheres to all these various different traits associated with the culture and might be a bit more like the people in the other cultures. And most certainly you can't take one glance at a person's skin color and deem them "good" or "evil" without needing to consider things further.


The other trap people fall into when creating way too many races, something I have seen again and again with every fantasy world that receives further development past its initial concept and adds more races into the mix....

Are these races actually even part of the world?

Here is where D&D royally screws up...
There are humanoids that one encounters constantly. To the point that if your party waked off in a random direction, it would be weird if you didn't run into them sooner or later.
Let's say.. Kobolds for example.

They are part of the world. An integral part of the world. They live everywhere, everyone knows who they are, there are thousands of them. The adventurers are likely to spend more time interacting with them, exploring their homes and seeing their culture up-close than they are ever likely to do with the elf, dwarf or halfling culture. Any development that is given to them can only serve to give more context and depth to all previous encounters with them.

So, is this race given development options, are players allowed to take on the skin of these people and understand what makes them tick and express that as part of the on-going story?
Well... no... because "dey's monstahs". The typical Grognard garbage.

So, what do we get instead? Well, as the designers generally have their heads so far stuck up their asses, they grab the only thing they can see. Their own personal hot, steaming pile of poop and drop it on the table.

Call it "Catfolk" or "Dragonborn" or "Deva" or "Goliath" or "Shifter" or "Shardmind" or "Wilden" or "Kalashtar" or "Revenant" or any number of the other special snowflake races that were introduced directly into the story as a PC race and have never once been anything but that and that alone.

No one in any game world has ever seen this thing before-- and they are never going to see it again. Not unless it is specifically a PC or some super special NPC that deserves all the attention. They will never appear as villains, they have no particular overall culture or goals or motivation-- after all, the number of members of this race that will ever appear within the story can be counted on your fingers. Any development is a complete waste of effort because there is no culture of hundreds of nameless level 0 NPCs of this race that need some general defining characteristics.

And that is why every race introduced into D&D is an absolute stinking garbage fire.

So avoid that. Look at your list of races and seriously ask yourself...

Is this a race that the PCs are ever likely to encounter? Is this something that I would describe there being a group of? Would it be fine to include one of these sitting in a tavern or other social setting without any need of giving it a name? Could the PCs come into conflict, either social or physical, with this race without having to be "evil" aligned or this race having to be wildly mischaracterized? Does the race allow for a wide range of physical and personality characteristics while still having some core characteristics that define it?

If you said "no" to any of these, cross the thing off the race list. It doesn't belong there. Make it some unique monster to be encountered somewhere.

Also, whatever the most likely sentient humanoids that PCs are likely to be fighting, particularly if they have comparable size to PCs... those are races. Think of them as such. Develop them as such. Whenever you think of a cool feat or special class to give to one of the generally "good guy" races, come up with a cool feat or class for one of the "bad guy" races, even if the PCs aren't encouraged to play them, having a villain being able to do something cool means the game will feel less like a bunch of guys beating up a punching bag and instead like they are actually being engaged.


Finally, the biggest mistake I see you making here is the last thing...
You are outright refusing to develop the actual things that the players will encounter from session 1 while spending all your time and effort developing things that they are very likely to never actually see.

Figure out where your adventure is going to be starting. Name the place. Create some NPCs in that initial town or city that the PCs are likely to encounter right away. Decide on the size of this community, decide on the struggles and threats to this community, decide what allegiances the community has and who their major allies or enemies are. Decide on what major resources the city relies on and how they get those resources-- think lakes, rivers, woods, mines, etc.. Decide where the roads that lead out of the town go to. Decide on what the local religions and superstitions and customs and holidays are.

Think of a few historical events that affected the local area that support the theme you want to express with the game. You don't need the full history-- it is often better to stick additional events in there when you think of them and leave plenty of room for such things.

In terms of the people-- if there are different races, kind of figure out why there are multiple races. If they all live in the same general area, right on top of one another, why haven't they entirely wiped one another out or interbred so thoroughly over the last 10,000s of years that there is still a distinction? How do these interact with one another and why?


Basically, in terms of the game world, you shouldn't be handing your players a packet on how the universe works and the dozens of gods...
Instead, what is necessary is to be able to tell the players where they live, how the people who live there manage to get by, what things happened in the area that likely affected their family's last couple generations, who else lives there and what their people generally think of those other people, what troubles their community and how long has it troubled it and what the hook for the initial reason for them to go out there is and what they should hope to accomplish.
 

In terms of the people-- if there are different races, kind of figure out why there are multiple races. If they all live in the same general area, right on top of one another, why haven't they entirely wiped one another out or interbred so thoroughly over the last 10,000s of years that there is still a distinction? How do these interact with one another and why?

Yeah, I think a lot of settings try to be just as inclusive as possible to every race ever introduced in D&D. But that doesn't always make for a very compelling or convincing world. Many of these flavor races are never really integrated in the world. And I feel that it is unfair to expect the DM's to figure out a way to integrate all those races, when the setting itself doesn't.


Basically, in terms of the game world, you shouldn't be handing your players a packet on how the universe works and the dozens of gods...
Instead, what is necessary is to be able to tell the players where they live, how the people who live there manage to get by, what things happened in the area that likely affected their family's last couple generations, who else lives there and what their people generally think of those other people, what troubles their community and how long has it troubled it and what the hook for the initial reason for them to go out there is and what they should hope to accomplish.

And I think even more importantly, I think the world needs something that makes it different from all the other generic fantasy worlds. Something that sets it apart from the rest, and justifies its existence. It needs its own mood, that resonates in every detail. Running a campaign in this world should feel very different from running an identical campaign in a different fantasy world.
 

ART!

Deluxe Unhuman
The first things I would look at in a book or pdf of a new setting are, in no particular order:

1. sub-genre (is it low fantasy, high fantasy, is there Spelljammer-type stuff going on, are there guns, yadda yadda yadda)
2. tone (gritty? swashbuckling? heroic? moral ambiguity?)
3. the art (which will inform everything else on this list, really)
4. the map (the quality/artistry of the map, the place-names, how much of a world is being laid out, etc.)
5. the races (are they original, interesting, goofy, over-powered, fresh takes on traditional races, etc.)

I can take in the above in just a few minutes of flipping through a book.
 

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