How to start a Homebrew?

[Greybar]

I'll throw out a little something that I use when I'm putting a game idea together: an Encyclopedia. Yeah, maybe I'm weird. But here's what I mean:

Open up ye olde boring text editor and start throwing in your ideas in one or two lines. Sort them alphabetically and now you have a encyclopedia of ideas. Keep adding stuff until it hits critical mass. You'll find that seeing the old ideas will help spawn new ones. When you're done all you need is a bit of pruning to remove the "GM only" material, and now you have a quick way to introduce the players to the world. Just throw it up on the web and point the players to it.

The real key here is that you're not sitting down and trying to make the complete world in one long night. You think of something on the drive home from work and throw it in. If you're like me, you have a half-dozen encyclopedias half done. Then you can buckle down and make any one of them into a campaign with some more concentrated work.

On a different tack, I also agree with the "use the WOTC fantasy setting search template" advice. It made me re-evaluate my world in a wonderful way. I'm not sure how well I would have been able to use it from scratch though. I need the creative pile of ideas first, then smash them into shape.

John

 

[Kamard]

Note that the use of alcohol while forming campaign ideas should only be done by those of legal drinking age, and no varmints should be injured during the brainstorming.

Yar! My head done explodered!

 

[Kamard]

When I was writing my world, I basically went through everything from Fantasy and the games I owned that I liked, and wrote a one or two line blurb on that.

Then, I went back to the blurbs and asked myself questions. Why does Event A happen? Why is race B like they are?

Then I answered the questions. If I got new ideas from the smatterings of Q&A I had done, I added those and repeated the process.

Then I started taking things out of this big list and fleshing them out. If I thought of good ideas from the fleshing, they went back into the Big List.

Eventually, I had expanded on everything I wanted to expand on, and had plenty of ideas for the periphery.

And I have to second or third or tenth the opinion that the World Builder's Guidebook is an essential. Its the only book I brought with me from my collection of 2e material when I moved from my parents house, because its essential.