Help Create My Campaign Part One - Forests

[humantorch40]

Hey Everyone,
I have just started a new 4th edition game and my players are just four sessions into Keep on the Shadowfell.

I have jsut started to think about creating the campaign setting and world around them and thought it would be a lot of fun to get the help and experiance of the guys here.

This is what I want to do, Over the years ive bought and owned nearly every fantasy setting you could nameboth D&D and beyond.

Gloranthia, Warhammer, Talisantia, Forgotten Realms, Greyhawk, Midnight, Scarred Lands, Pathfinder, Dragonlance, you name it ive got a copy of it sitting around somewhere. The only one I have never got round to picking up is Eberron.

And here is my quandry, I like them all, well elements of them, But my creative bone always wants to change them and add my own spin.

So I thought I would take the bull by the horns and create my own setting for the campaign but stealing liberaly and totally from any setting or idea that I loved or fitted both from current settings or your ideas here.

I want a setting drawing from all the influences of fantasy with a lot of elements from LOTR, Conan, Narnia, The Wheel of Time, reflected through the campaign settings listed above and you guys.

So im going to post a topic at a time and get your thoughts and suggestions and build the setting slowly and so you can see the results of your help post my final choices as a wiki.

I want to start with the physical geography of the setting as I like to draw a map pretty early on. Ive decided on one large continental mass ala middle earth with the twist of many islands on the edges of the map and a large inner sea.

My first question to you guys is about different forests and woodlands types in fantasy. I dont want to be like forgotten realms where the continent is so large that every country has multiple forests and to be honest they cease to be distinct, i want each one to have its own flavour and be distinct and original.

I want the following suggestions.

1. What types of forest or wood, both in physical make up of trees and size of forest and more importantly what type of forest in character of why its there in the campaign world and the distinct type of denizens that live there.
for example the different types of elven forest, other good race types such as ents, unicorns or satyrs or plain old woodsmen or evil types of forests such as haunted ones or filled with spiders or beastmen.
(one tip for me is i hate overloading a place with too many races or creates at once, unless its a huge place).

2. What is its overall purpose in the setting, this hopefully should e original and distinct (not five seperate types of haunted wood or forest where good bandits robbing the rich hide out, only one of each).

3. Some suggestions of names (my naming convention for the setting will very much be descriptive english names such as forest of shadows, spiderhaunt wood, the old forest etc. if you want to suggest names from other campaign settings all the better.

4. If you feel your idea has a great example already written out in a campaign setting for example a grreat forest of spiders being the spiderhaunt wood from forgotten realms pls mention it because if i can lift or use something more or less whole as an idea it will reduce my workload a lot.

5. give me a twist with each idea a little creative wrinkle or change with I can use to make it more original for my players

6. Lastly point out any ways i can fit it in easier with the current 4th edition points of light implied setting either in whats been produced so far in setting for example the feywild or monsters produced for 4th.

Thank you guys hopefully this will be a fun ongoing project and stir my creative juices.

 

[buzz]

I have jsut started to think about creating the campaign setting and world around them and thought it would be a lot of fun to get the help and experiance of the guys here.

Not to be a wet blanket, but instead of talking to us random folk on the intarwebs, maybe you should start by talking to your players. They're the ones who are going to be interacting with this world every session. Brainstorm a cool concept with them and figure out a starting situation that's pregnant with crisis. Then, roll up some PCs together and get adventuring.

And not to be a wetter blanket... but if you want to embrace the "points of light" concept, don't build your setting from the the top down. There's no need to map out and detail locations that the PCs may never see. Start with where the PCs are now, and build outward as you play, tailoring the setting to the adventures the PCs are having.

I say both of these things in the interest of saving you some work, and encouraging you to give the players a vested interest in your world. Both of these aspects will better sustain your game over the long run. There's noting worse for a DM than coming to a game with a fat binder full of setting data, and then having players react with disinterest and then wander off to play Xbox.

That said, if you're doing this purely as a world-building exercise, keep going.

 

[humantorch40]

Not to be a wet blanket, but instead of talking to us random folk on the intarwebs, maybe you should start by talking to your players. They're the ones who are going to be interacting with this world every session. Brainstorm a cool concept with them and figure out a starting situation that's pregnant with crisis. Then, roll up some PCs together and get adventuring.

And not to be a wetter blanket... but if you want to embrace the "points of light" concept, don't build your setting from the the top down. There's no need to map out and detail locations that the PCs may never see. Start with where the PCs are now, and build outward as you play, tailoring the setting to the adventures the PCs are having.

I say both of these things in the interest of saving you some work, and encouraging you to give the players a vested interest in your world. Both of these aspects will better sustain your game over the long run. There's noting worse for a DM than coming to a game with a fat binder full of setting data, and then having players react with disinterest and then wander off to play Xbox.

That said, if you're doing this purely as a world-building exercise, keep going.

Traditionally, my long term group of players always start off in quite a lazy frame of mind until I hook them into the setting over a few months. Then the attitude changes markedly and they become setting junkies.

So at the moment world building is my core objective here.

 

[ExploderWizard]

Speaking as someone who has designed campaign settings from the ground up I offer this suggestion first: Start small.

Instead of trying to design all geographical features at once, focus on an area where the campaign begins. If a forest is an important element that you want to define for this area then do so, just for that forest.

Decide what elements of your adventures will take place in the forest setting and the forest begins to design itself. As for other areas of the world, ask your players to describe where thier characters are from and have them help design some places and cultures. If your players have no interest in helping create the world then you can decide where they are from.

Creating a whole world from scratch is a lot of work and also a lot of fun. A world that will be used for game play is best left only partially defined until it is needed. Thats the secret to avoiding work overload and keeping your world interesting and relevant to campaign events.

 

[Engilbrand]

I recommend checking out the articles on Mordain the Fleshweaver on the Wizards website. There's a phenomenal forest that they use. Very dark.

 

[humantorch40]

Yep, I appreciate and agree with what your saying to start small and local and to an extent ive done that in designing Apple Lane (a runequest classic) as a homebase for the pcs.

For me though an overall map is very important in seeing where everything can fit and to spark my imagination. So the enxt step is deciding on the big geographical features.

just works for me.

Then I can go back and design other important issues like the pantheon and races.

 

[ExploderWizard]

Yep, I appreciate and agree with what your saying to start small and local and to an extent ive done that in designing Apple Lane (a runequest classic) as a homebase for the pcs.

For me though an overall map is very important in seeing where everything can fit and to spark my imagination. So the enxt step is deciding on the big geographical features.

just works for me.

Then I can go back and design other important issues like the pantheon and races.

Fair enough. For the World you have in mind, what type of climate does the main campaign area have? Will the majority of these forests be temperate, sub-tropical, tropical?

 

[humantorch40]

Temperate for the vast majority. a couple of artic types and steaming jungles at either end of the scale, but will prob do the jungles under another thread when the time comes.

 

[Treebore]

I took every setting that was not a world of its own (like I didn't use Oathbound) and put them all together on one world. Their maps even fit together relatively well. What finally gave me the key to put them all together on one world and explain certain "problems" away was Erde by Troll Lord Games. Having a resident evil god whom was recently banished gave me a nice "in campaign" way of explaining away inconsistencies and making things fit.

The presence of Unklar can even explain the presence of ideas from the Midnight and Wheel of Time series, even though I didn't personally use anything from those settings.

I used GH, Faerun, Blackmoor, Wilderlands, Ravenloft, (its kind of like the island of King Kong, its in this massive black cloud bank in the middle of an ocean), Erde, my own setting, and a few others. The biggest thing was having them all in the Northern hemisphere, so to have some fit I had to reorient them to the south pole and still have their geography/biology still work by having them still be in an appropriate latitude.

 

[Tonguez]

Don't forget the pleasures of temperate rainforests - mountains, towering podocarps, a middle storey of beeches and undergroth made up of ferns, mosses, strange fungus and trickling streams. What indeed lurks in the deep green and behind the rocks in these moist cool conditions