How do you build your campaign worlds?

[Psion]

I've never been big on the "bottom up" approach. Even my first fledgeling worlds in 8th grade had me drawing region maps and nations first. None of this "start an adventure and build out" stuff for me... no sir!

As I've grown older, I've refined my top-down technique. I generally go in this order with my world tinkering ideas:

- Major Concepts: Ask the big questions before you even start drawing a map:

• What feel do I want? Cultures, campaign style, etc.
• What types of villains do I want there to be?
• What other types of major powers do I want?
• What are the major races
• Are there any "world hooks", i.e., major notable features of the campaign.
• What is the general cosmology and history of the game like

Then I make a map. I do the above first to give me an idea of what to look for in a map, otherwise I am just randomly searching. Of course, once you make the map, you can naturally be inspired with other items, but I generally find it helpful to have a few ideas going in.

For my maps, I use Profantasy's Fractal Terrains to provide a basic world map, and then export things to CC2 to flesh it out. There is not a better tool or easier way to do your geography than this.

After I have a map, I start to flesh out who is where, and start to work out the history and relationships. History and location are strongly linked, and location is sometimes hard to pin down without a visual represenatation. So the two are sort of linked.

As I am developing that, I try to keep an eye to PC activities, and make as many regions as possible that would have activities for the players.

After that, I generally jump to some more specific regions (a limited amount at first... the more detailed you get, the more time it takes) and start to flesh them out with playable aspects of the game. Cities, towns, local conflicts and recent developments, etc.

Then I sort of return to the top and do it again, jimmying things around to make things fit better, explain things better that happened at lower levels, etc. It may take a few passes this way before I consider a world playable.

I have tinkered with a few worlds this way. My mainstay world like this was made about 15-20 years ago, and I was still working on it. But I have run games in other worlds as well.

I find the AD&D 2e World Builder's Guidebook an extremely useful reference for world building, as it has lots of idea seeds and really helps you flesh out a world with details.

Edit: Here's my latest world building project, sort of on the back-burner since I have been running my Second World campaign:

http://members.tripod.com/~sangrolu/newworld.html

 

[AFGNCAAP]

I'd say that before you build a campaign world, consider the level of detail you want to incorporate in it. Then, determine if you have enough time to work on the setting in order to achieve the level of detail that you want.

I'd also recommend considering the group that you play with when building a campaign. Sure, you may want high fantasy, but the players may enjoy a grim-&-gritty style. You may have a great campaign world idea, but it just may not "click" with the players if it differs from the kind & style of game they want to play.

Otherwise, all of the replies in this thread give good ideas for how to start. I'd recommend determining a few things before delving in campaign-building:

1) What are the core concepts of the setting?
2) Will these core concepts call for a modification of the rules?
3) What impact will these rule modifications have on gameplay?
4) Are there elements in the game that will call for "crunch" instead of "fluff"?

After these 4 questions are answered, you may want think about how the game will work. Determine if there are any optional rules that you'll want to implement. Also, see if there are any existing rules for things that you may want to implement IYC (for example, like including a noble/aristocrat PC class--you could check Dragonlance or WoT to see how their versions of the noble class could work).

 

[fusangite]

Nifelhein says,

Finish? Why? Did Forgotten Realms ever finish changing? Did Dragonlance ever finished?

But these are not examples of good campaign worlds. I suppose that if one went about trying to build campaign worlds like these, they would also be campaign worlds that do not finish. However, my experience has been that the best campaign worlds I've played in do finish.

 

[Aristotle]

I have to wonder how a campaign world can ever be "finished". It can be playable. It can have an extensive history. But I can't see it as being finished.

That is like saying the English language is finished. New words are constantly added, old words are given new meaning, and so forth. It won't ever be a finished product, but one might consider it to be vastly more complex and useable than it was a hundred years ago.

Just my opinion of course. I do have a campaign world I've been working on, and I might put it online eventually (more for myself than for others). I generally use a top to bottom approach very similar to what Psion posted.

 

[Sir Whiskers]

As others have said, I start with a concept I'm interested in. My last world was based on the idea of a living world in which how people use magic affects the world (too much evil magic, the world becomes a dark and dreary place). Add some Thomas Covenant (Earthpower, the Clave) and go from there.

Once the concept is done, I put 90% of my effort into the starting area (villages/towns, npc's, local enemies, dungeons, local history, etc). Once the player characters are ready to move beyond the starting area, I tend to develop as needed.

 

[S'mon]

Nifelhein says,

But these are not examples of good campaign worlds. I suppose that if one went about trying to build campaign worlds like these, they would also be campaign worlds that do not finish. However, my experience has been that the best campaign worlds I've played in do finish.

Do you mean finished as in "now it's ready for us to play with!" or finished as in "Now the story's done, time for a new world"? I thought you meant the latter.

I think there's a place for both open-ended and closed campaign worlds. Open-ended worlds are like Forgotten Realms or Hyborea, settings for endless possible tales, close-ended are like Middle Earth or Krynn (as it was conceived) - they're there to tell a particular story, once that story is told there's not much else to do.

I think both types have their advantages. I have a primary open-ended campaign world, but especially when running deity-level play I'll bring in new worlds with strong themes and particular 'stories' - the flat world based on Norse myth being overrun by the Wolfen hordes of Fenrir, the fantasy-1940s Earth where medieval Nazi Storm Knights invade a Britain led by Excalibur-wielding Winston Churchill, and so on. Sometimes these worlds are returned to for later stories (with the Wolfen defeated, the human alliance breaks down and war breaks out between the goodly cities and the Surt-worshippers of Sunderhold; in 1950s fantasy Earth's Cold War the Steel Tsar plots to destroy the free West...), but they're not intended for generic campaign play.

 

[Darth Shoju]

The campaign I am running now (which is ending in the next couple of sessions) was created from only the vaguest idea of what I wanted from the setting and plots. I basically had a one sentence concept and then drew a map based on Austria-Hungary region of Earth and then developed one kingdom and a Baron's holdings in particular.

This is what I had when I started the campaign, and after about 3 sessions I prepared a 25 page handout on the setting for my players. The end result was that I was pretty satisfied with the main kingdom and it's surrounding lands/nations, but the overall plot was rather haphazard and occasionally required a fair amount of railroading on my part. I found that aspect to be rather frustrating, so after this campaign is done I'm taking several months (maybe even a year) break from DMing and will be very casually working on future campaign ideas. After that break I'm gonna run Kalamar for a while and develop two homebrew campaign ideas I have. One is going to be a futuristic sci-fi/space fantasy campaign (in the vein of Halo, Aliens and some anime influences...and of course Star Wars vaguely ) and the other will be the fantasy D&D campaign I always wanted to do. This time I'm getting an idea of the cultures, themes, races and plots I want to convey-as well as the overall flavour of the campaign-before I start getting into detail. I'll have some rough map sketches but I won't start getting into the detailed cartography unitl I really know what I want to do with it. And I'm going to spend plenty of time to make sure I'm satisfied with it before I run it. Hopefully I'll be able to avoid the frustration I'm feeling with my current home brew (although it has been quite fun for myself and the players-or so they say-, it still has it's annoying bits to me as a DM).

 

[Desdichado]

You could also check out the Dungeoncraft articles in my sig for my latest project. Normally I don't follow so formalized a process, but I do tend to stick to the same general strategies. I'm overdue for an update on that, by the way...

 

[diaglo]

i start with 3 booklets from a white boxed set and go from there.

 

[Estlor]

I'm in the process of designing a world right now, and the entire creative process got started from two lines in a Bon Jovi song:

"I'm a cowboy, on a steel horse I ride
And I'm wanted (wanted) dead or alive."

That got me to thinking about how cool it would be to have a post-apocalyptic world where horsemen road the open plains on steamwork horses with black powder handguns at their sides. The entire concept grew from there into something that is more of a mix of 16th, 17th, and 19th century history with a healthy mix of steamwork and magic.

What I did was build the concept first. Then I thought about whether I wanted to stick close to the PHB or drift away from it like Midnight or Arcana Unearthed. Since I wanted to shake things up, I desided on the kinds of races I wanted and the kinds of classes I needed to fill the standard roles in a post-apocalyptic 19th century reniassance. Once I got all that done, I started borrowing from historical cultures to fill out the races, and most of the close geography grows out of that such that the landmass hints of Europe with the American Southwest and northern Mexico tacked on to it. That's all the farther I've gotten.