Help us create a world from scratch...

[bobcat_grad]

My play group and I have had discussions in the past about growing our own world from scratch. Something that we all contribute to an we all use as a setting for our adventures. When one of us picks up the mantle of DM, we would have a world to work with where we are writing the history, cultures, events, politics, heroes, villains, etc. With Eberron and Forgotten Realms (and other settings) much of this is already written and locked in stone. And if those settings (or others) appeal to you - fantastic. But some of us in our group wanted to shape a world from the ground up; picking and choosing what appeals to us and adding elements of our own to make it our own.

This is something we kicked around for a while now, but I decided to take the first step to get it going. But shortly after starting, I realized that as much fun as I was having with letting my imagination run, there was a vast, untapped resource for good ideas out there: everyone else who plays D&D.

So, I created a blog site to start tracking the progress of this project at Help Build A D&D World and would like to open up the project to everyone interested.

Included there are maps, rough descriptions of continents and nations, a rough layout of the pantheon, a listing of the races in the world, and more. There are forums set up waiting for ideas to be tossed out and discussed.

If you have an idea about a place or setting you've always kicked around or something you've been using for years and think it should have a permanent place in a world, let us know. I want this to be a community effort to build out a world that we can all contribute to, play in, and watch grow.

Stop by for a minute and see if there is anything that catches your interest. Creative minds are more than welcome and encouraged.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I don't know if you've looked around here, but there are lots of threads about race and world design. Check my sig and you'll see one such thread.

Is there anything in particular you feel your world is lacking?

 

[bobcat_grad]

I don't know if you've looked around here, but there are lots of threads about race and world design. Check my sig and you'll see one such thread.

Is there anything in particular you feel your world is lacking?

Content.

Here's part of the first post I have there:

I had read the advice out there about world building. Don't take on too much at once. Start small and expand out. Much of what that advice said made perfect sense (and I intend to follow). But I wanted the place to be cohesive and not just a hodgepodge of places stitched together. So I set out to create a framework of a world. Something to be used as a guideline around future details.

The approach I took was as follows:

• I made a map and named the continent and seas.
• I came up with countries. This included names, a rough idea of attitude and government type.
• I come up with basic themes for the countries. For example, L'antico Impero Roman themed, while Yut is a mixture of Egyptian and Indian themes, etc.
• I chose the races (and renamed a few, but kept them identical mechanically) and came up with rough ideas for some racial variations. For example, Sun Elves (Eladrin) may belong to the Rising Sun Sect or the Setting Sun Sect. It's to be determined if this will have any mechanical benefits or just flavor for the game.
• I built the pantheon - made up of 34 gods -, using new names applied to gods from Eberron, Forgotten Realms, and core D&D.
• For some of the maps, I have added city names (the continent of Halawala, the Celestial Empire, and The Oaken Duchies).

That's it. Now, I am going to start (as will members of our play group hopefully) fleshing out a few details about some of the places, but I want to get ideas and suggestions from the community. Places, people, history, culture, events, politics, religion, and other details that make a world a living place are needed.

In other words, it's a clean slate right now and I'm looking anything and everything that people feel like throwing out there.

 

[Hand of Evil]

Start small -- first build a campaign area then expand to a world.

I you have not see it, check out: Fantasy Worldbuilding Questions

But some things to think about:

• Timeline -- just because you have a world does not tell you why it is like it is, take the timeline back a few hundred years and think about what happened in history to make the current campaign area. This does not have to be detailed, just highlights, examples: X empire settled the new world, X empire fought x race and pushed them north, that forced x race to come into conflict with y race. The merged to become the z race. X empire fell and became independent states. Now the z race is moving back south to grab lands that they see as theirs.

 

[Amaroq]

That's good advice, oh Evil one. That's actually how I wrote most of the plot action for my current campaign: rather than starting with a map, I started with the gods, and decided what Machiavellian schemes they had running .. from evil gods double-crossing other evil gods to why its a low-magic world to the remnants of an empire in the middle of a collapse ...

The fun part of that has been watching my players put two and two together to reconstruct some of what's been going on, while also getting other parts absolutely wrong.

 

[Phyon]

I like that advice evil starting off like that can lead to a lot of different things in a campaign.

This sounds like a pretty interesting thing to making a community world I will have to look a little bit more at it but i might help some it sounds pretty interesting.

 

[bobcat_grad]

Start small -- first build a campaign area then expand to a world.

I you have not see it, check out: Fantasy Worldbuilding Questions

But some things to think about:

• Timeline -- just because you have a world does not tell you why it is like it is, take the timeline back a few hundred years and think about what happened in history to make the current campaign area. This does not have to be detailed, just highlights, examples: X empire settled the new world, X empire fought x race and pushed them north, that forced x race to come into conflict with y race. The merged to become the z race. X empire fell and became independent states. Now the z race is moving back south to grab lands that they see as theirs.

That's a good idea, and something I'm going to touch on a little - already kinda did with the history behind The Oaken Duchies:

"Centuries past, this area was known as The Oaken Kingdom. The dukes of the kingdom suffered greatly under the tyrannical rule of three generations of the Rathburn royal family. They deposed the grandson, King Liam, and replaced the monarchy with government based upon a ruling council of dukes. "

I'm starting with just a few sentences and then expand on it from there.

Also - started a wiki (Tangia - A D&D World Wiki) for the world (in conjunction with the blog) and already getting some feedback and contributions on the wiki and forums.

 

[aco175]

I am not a wiki-master, as you can see by my poor atempt to add a few pages and some text. I do like the idea of building something like this.

I'm not sure on any legal problems associated with things like putting pictures of material from sites like Wizards, or even text of a monster to go with something made. On one hand you are not making profit on it, but neither are they on the other.

 

[bobcat_grad]

I am not a wiki-master, as you can see by my poor atempt to add a few pages and some text. I do like the idea of building something like this.

I'm not sure on any legal problems associated with things like putting pictures of material from sites like Wizards, or even text of a monster to go with something made. On one hand you are not making profit on it, but neither are they on the other.

No one needs to be a wiki master to add ideas. If you're the guy that added the stuff about the Kingdom of Torland and the Pirate Lords, those are great ideas. I put what you had in the format I came up with for the nations an at some point, when I get working on those two maps, I'll add the places you came up with (I like the giant wall on the south border).


Regarding the images - so far, I've avoided WOTC anything. And all of the images that fit the world area they are set with have been marked with the "I don't know what the license is with this image" identifier when you upload an image. They can be pulled down at any point.