D&D General How many pages of info do you have for your homebrew setting? (+)

[el-remmen]

because I only expect people to actually read/know a couple of pages

I don't expect the players to read or memorise big documents,

Oh yeah, I wasn't referring to player-facing stuff but to the DM's world/regional/cultural info from which some player-facing stuff might be drawn.

 

[el-remmen]

Do you count notes made during sessions? Campaign logs?

Oh and whatever you think "counts" counts. As long as it is info you might refer to better run the setting.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Oh yeah, I wasn't referring to player-facing stuff but to the DM's world/regional/cultural info from which some player-facing stuff might be drawn.

I just haven't bothered to write a lot of that down. I already know it after all.

 

[ichabod]

Oh yeah, I wasn't referring to player-facing stuff but to the DM's world/regional/cultural info from which some player-facing stuff might be drawn.

I don't really make a distinction between the two. The distinction for me is more coherent/incoherent, and I try to keep the incoherent stuff to myself. I think the only coherent stuff I don't share with my players (besides NPC plots and such) is the stat blocks for home brew monsters. And that's not even about metagaming, I just keep them more in data for my combat assistant program.

 

[jgsugden]

My campaign information is stored in several formats - DNDBeyond/Roll20, Word, Excel, Handwritten Notes, Homemade Maps, etc... It spans 40 years and several editions. It contains lore/history, setting specific homebrew (rules, monsters, spells, items, races/heritages, classes, etc...). They have been slowly connected over the past few years to turn them into an offline Wiki.

If I had to guess, turning it all into a single useful Tome would result in a book of well over 10,000 pages (maybe 20K?) of unique content. If we count redundancy it is easily 30,000 pages - maybe up to 50,000.

• I have about ~3,500 pages of recaps, timelines and other notes from prior sessions going back to 1982.
• I have writeups on each of my 101 major Powers/Gods, as well as on thousands of major NPCs. These are spread out, but there has to be 4000 pages there at a minimum.
• The descriptions of areas is rather insane - probably 5000 pages?. The setting of my campaign primarily is located on a world with a surface area that is 12 times the size of Earth - and has an Underdark (Dyson Sphere like) 'surface' that is nearly as large - and then there are hundreds of detailed locations throughout the planes and on other planets (though nothing is as detailed as the surface areas, and there are large areas of that world that have much lower levels of details). The biggest megadungeon that I've run several times in different instances of my world (there is a time travel / multiverse element to my setting) contains over 700 'rooms'. The document I used the last time I ran it was over 800 pages - and that is just the one megadungeon. I have other megadungeons I've run, as well as plenty of 'adventure' sized dungeons that have between 40 and 100 locations described.
• My spell, monster and magic item binders have spells from many editions. Some are digitized. Some are written on character sheets I filed away. Some are written on binder paper I took from my 4th grade classroom. They fill two bankers boxes filled with manilla envelopes. When I go back into the envelopes and I find something worth brigning back out, I digitize it (retype, photo->PDF/OCR with editing, etc...) and make it part of my digital world.

Most of this is specific to my primarily homebrew world. However, I have a few other settings that are documented in there as well, plus a number of standalone things. My christmas one shot files are expansive all by themselves.

I have two full (deep, wide, 6 foot tall) bookshelves oh physical content, and then a growing digital version that is distributed in many folders and documents.

And none of that counts the physical terrain, maps, miniatures, dice, tools, etc...

 

[Blue]

The main player handout is 43 pages. I've got all sorts of scraps and notes floating about on top of that, but it's not what I would call coherent. And I could probably dig up more about specific areas that I've run campaigns in.

That's much larger then I've seen. Can you give a breakdown of active vs. reference?

How much does a player need to know by Session 0 to talk with the other players about the party and come up with character concept?

How much of it is primarily focused on character creation that's not part of the above. (In other words, the above could tell you about your undead ancestor worshiping elves, this would be about the game mechanics you need to create them, and yo can ignore other parts of it.

How much of that do players need to actively remember? Like major movers and shakers, names of the main factions, religions and nations, that sort of thing.

How much of it is a reference that they could never read until they are traveling somewhere/interact with a faction, etc?

 

[el-remmen]

These five binders represent all the print material for my old homebrew, Aquerra. The first two binders are basically gazetteers, describing places and people (and history). The other three are info used in three main campaigns played there, so include session notes, stat blocks, plot idea, NPCs, etc.

Once upon a time there would have been a 6th book a "Player's Guide to Aquerra" which was basically a homebrew character creation manual including a ton of homebrew material, but in converting everything from 2E to 3E I moved to a wiki for that and I stupidly dumped the book in the recycle bin thinking "I'll never need that." A move I regret deeply.

While the setting is currently defunct, I do steal from it for my current setting, reusing places I never got around to developing much or places that I love to much to never revisit again, even if a bizarro version.

My current homebrew does not live separately from my campaign notebook.

 

[ichabod]

That's much larger then I've seen. Can you give a breakdown of active vs. reference?

How much does a player need to know by Session 0 to talk with the other players about the party and come up with character concept?

Very little. There's 15 pages on the races available to play. But if they want to play a PHB race, there's paragraph to a half page about naming conventions and lore changes. There's a page listing the available languages, but it's more clarification of what's in the official sources, and a couple paragraphs of rules about language trees. If you want to play a cleric or follow a faith, there's two pages of tables, one with the main deities, one with some of the common deities. Each deity has three paragraphs of explanation about that. There's two pages with summaries of organizations they might want to be a part of.

How much of it is primarily focused on character creation that's not part of the above. (In other words, the above could tell you about your undead ancestor worshiping elves, this would be about the game mechanics you need to create them, and yo can ignore other parts of it.

How much of that do players need to actively remember? Like major movers and shakers, names of the main factions, religions and nations, that sort of thing.

None of it. It's not there to give my players homework. If something comes up that they are not familiar with, I am happy to explain what their characters should know about it. They've been dealing with Chippick cultists. They're like, "What's a Chippick?" I explained he was the god of rats and deserts, and while not normally evil, there are cults that worship an evil and destructive aspect of him. Then they interrogated a Chippick cultist, and got way more than they wanted to know about Chippick and the inevitability of his dominion.

How much of it is a reference that they could never read until they are traveling somewhere/interact with a faction, etc?

They can read any of it, any time they want to, otherwise I wouldn't give it to them. There's about 10 or 12 pages detailing specific areas of the dome that they may or may not be in, depending on the campaign. Their characters would probably have heard of some of the places, like the Tripelago, the Fractured Cities, and the Spire of the Ancients, but not the details. There's three pages on the Spheres of Existence, but no one has traveled to those yet.

I write it because I like world building. I give it to my players because some players like to read world building. But like I said, I'm not here to give my players homework.

 

[thirdkingdom]

I'm probably at about 1.2k pages of published material. Two hexcrawl books, each around 300 pages, 28 issues of a monthly zine that has around 12 pages of new content each month, plus an assorted 10 or so published hexes that average about 30 pages of content. Plus some implied setting stuff, to, scattered throughout some other books.