Homebrew – Where did you start?

[ravencried]

I find that for my campaigns I usually start with a huge world event that gets the ball rolling. For example, in my current world five huge gates open to other planes and all kinds of things started to pour in. If that doesn't get people to adventure...I don't know what will.

 

[AIM-54]

Lotsa good stuff here. I've used several different methods, usually starting with some concept I want to drive the world, whether cultural, climatic or something else. I tend to get a bug to world build every 1 1/2 to 2 years because it's something I really enjoy. Most of them I never get to run anything in, but I keep doing it anyway

This time round I started with the map. I love drawing maps and from them I can generally get a sense of what races, political relationships etc I want. Then I create the pantheon and get a sense of their role in the world. This is generally the point where I realize the calamitous event that had a significant effect on the geography of the world and begin trying to explain that, which leads me to further refine political relationships on the planet and the deity-world relationship. Then I get into the history (I'm a huge history nerd, so writing my own is always a blast) trying to explain why the world is the way it is in the period I would, conceivably were I to ever run anything in it.

This time round I've really gotten into the mapmaking thing, so I have different maps for the various eras, with terrain changes over time, as well as the changing "homelands" of the major/PC races. These maps are then a guide for continuing the history. I'm having fun with it.

That's probably much more than anyone wanted, but there it is...I kinda get into this kinda stuff..

 

[Mr. Kaze]

Well I suck at drawing maps.

So the first thing I did was sketch out a simple cosmology which borrows shamelessly from a TV show that can recap it in under 5 minutes. This ensures that it doesn't drag down the storytelling even if people need a refresher on how the universe works every month. I add some history to the world to give it a place in the cosmology (and help define boundaries on races and classes), sprinkle religion so that everybody can have some without knowing about the big outer cosmology, crop the magic system to fit the world/cosmology better and we're ready to put a campaign in it. At that point, I sketch a local area map featuring any place the adveturers might want to go within the next game session, its distance (marked on a line) from each other place (there are only 4 of them in the current campaign, each about 7 walking days apart) and we're ready to add characters. Then send them out on their quest.

HiH,
::Kaze

 

[RichCsigs]

I had a whole bunch of ideas for campaign settings, and then realized that if I spread them out over time, I could put them all on one world. That's what I'm working on right now.

 

[Estlor]

I'm actually working on a new homebrew right now. I'm not very far, but it all started with a concept. In this case I wanted to create a setting where the world is high tech with psionics as the dominant form of "magic" and true magic being a dead art.

After I have the concept, I usually try to refine it alongside the selection of base classes for the world. I always ask myself why a class exists and how it fits into the larger world. Since magic is a dead art, that means the wizard, sorcerer, cleric, druid, paladin, ranger, and bard can't exist as written. What do I want to do to replace them? How do their replacements fit as logical career paths in the world?

In this case, I'm trying to decide if I want a multi-world setting or a single world setting. If I go the single world route (and I'm leaning that way), I need to explain why this technologically advanced culture has no access to space travel. With psionics being the spell-like power of the setting, I don't have to worry as much about the presence of gods and extraplanar travel. Psionics typically revolves around the Astral, and I'm thinking "Astral Ships" were how the cultures got from one place to another. But I want to tie the illithid and githyanki/githzerai populations together as a sort of Astral terrorist group that prevents extraplanetary travel.

Once I get the concept refined and the classes set, I work on the races I want to be available to the PCs, then start on a map and metaplot that fleshes out the history. After a while I have some nations and basic history, and at that point it's time to select a specific region and get gaming. The rest gets developed as needed.

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

I am curiouse where all you Homebrew GM’s started fleshing out your world?

For example; did you start by creating an Uber-Plot? Or maybe just a simple map and let your imagination run rampant? Did it start as an add-hock improvised game session?

With Urbis, it started with two "big ideas": The first one was that I wanted to create a setting that explained all the weird bits of the D&D rules - where all the magic items come from, how spells like raise dead affect society and spells like fireball and invisibility affect warfare, and why there are so many weird critters running around that look like they couldn't have possibly evolved in a terrestrial environment. The second idea was that I wanted some really big cities - not just with a few thousand inhabitants, but hundreds of thousands, or even millions crammed into a single settlement.

Then I hit on the concept of the Nexus Tower, which justified the latter and helped explain quite a few things of the former. From this I slowly developed the ideas for a quasi-Victorian society where vast magical prowess and urban dystopia live side by side.

Then I started brainstorming - I kept a notebook (the traditional paper version) in which I wrote down ideas for different regions, cities, locations, and other cool concepts (every would-be world builder should keep a notebook with him at all times!). Now the various regions of the world have pretty much taken shape, and a few of the regions are fairly fixed now. But there's always more things to add, and much to do before I eventually publish it...

 

[Galethorn]

About five years ago, I started with a single character, by the name of Galethorn. From there, I started thinking about writing a story about him, so I started thinking about where the story would be set, who the other characters would be, and so on. The story ultimately shriveled and died, but the characters and setting remained in my mind.

Zoom forward three years, to when I got the 3e DMG, and started preparing to DM a game. I read over the World Building section and realized that I already had a world, and all it needed was fleshing out. I worked on it for quite a while, and ended up with a half-decent bare-bones basis for a world. Sure, the map was terrible, I hadn't named all sorts of places, and I wasn't quite sure what various places looked like, but it was a world none the less.

My friends and I played a campaign in that setting the following fall, winter, and spring, but ultimately gave up on it in favor of a Forgotten Realms campaign with a more experienced DM. This lasted most of last summer, and ended around the point that our characters were too powerful to be fun.

After that, we spent a while with me DMing an LOTR game, which is still 'going', but is on hiatus. We also played a few games of D20 Star Wars with the same DM who did the FR campaign.

In the mean time, I was working on a new incarnation of the story that had gotten my setting started, and in the process managed to make a really nice world map, name everything, flesh out the various regions, and come up with a deep and interesting world history. Some time early this year, I realized that I was ready to start a new campaign, as I had gotten quite a lot of DMing experience and learned a lot about my players since the last campaign I had started.

So far, things are going well. I've done two introductory adventures (a mystery in the forest, and a tourney), and I'm working on getting the campaign part of it started in the next session. I'm working on player handouts as we speak.

 

[Sir Elton]

I am curiouse where all you Homebrew GM’s started fleshing out your world?

For example; did you start by creating an Uber-Plot? Or maybe just a simple map and let your imagination run rampant? Did it start as an add-hock improvised game session?

October 15, 1974. That was when I started fleshing out my D&D world. It also happened to be the day I was born.

 

[Sir Whiskers]

I always start with the hook: some idea that I can get excited about and that (hopefully) the players will find cool. A living world where the use of magic (for good or evil) affects the world in tangible ways. A world invaded by a horde of demons. A campaign set only in the Underdark. And so on...

After that, I put in a ton of work on the local area where the PC's will spend most of their early adventures. I've found it's usually a waste of my time to plan out much of the rest of the world, as the players always surprise me with where the story goes.

 

[Lonely Tylenol]

It's all in the hook...

Unless you're trying to write another generic Greyhawk or Forgotten Realms, you have to have some concept that drives and motivates the design for the world. A previous hook was "a world made of floating islands with no earth below." My current hook is "dragons took over the world." Pretty simple to start with. The design method is to ask yourself questions.

Where did the dragons come from? How did they take over? How long ago? Why couldn't they take over before that? How did society react? How does this race or that race fit into the grand scheme of things? How did geography affect the scenario? Etc.

I always try to throw in a few odd things to add a signature feel to each world. In my current world, clerics don't exist, replaced by specialized classes called white mages and black mages, which are themselves specialized sorcerers dedicated to the gods. There are other changes, and this gives an interesting twist to the world that means that the players don't know what to expect going in, which is a key feature to a compelling world, IMHO. There's something new to discover and feel out, which means they can't just sit back and roll dice without paying attention.

The map is important, but you're better off knowing what the map is supposed to hold first, and then figure out geographical and political details after you know what kinds of things you expect to find, in a broad sense.