Looking for suggestions in a homebrew setting

[Ayrek]

I've been working on setting for a campaign that I hope would be interesting and immersive enough for my experienced players, but easy enough to explain for new players. I finally decided on a parallel Earth setting, where the standard core races populate the lands and, with a few twists, more or less mirror real-world civilizations, so that the basic idea can be simplified to a short sentence, and get the full idea across.

The campaign takes place in the 15th Century, and the peoples of the 'Old World' have just discovered the 'New World.'

The major civilizations of the Old World are as follows:

• Gnomes cover most of western Europe, and are the most technologically advanced civilization, having harnessed the power of steam.
• Humans populate the area of Greece, with a Rome-like civilization.
• Dwarves control northern and northeastern Europe
• North Africa contains many loosely-affiliated tribes of Humans.
• In the far east, Elves have developed a civilization not unlike the standard RPG interpretation of an eastern culture; flavorful but not exactly historically accurate.

The hook is simple. The PCs are enlisted to go to the newly discovered west, to explore and map the area, and meet the natives, which include mostly peaceful tribes of Orcs and Humans in the east, and belligerent tribes of dinosaur-riding halflings in the West.

I have some basic ideas about what I want, but I think having the input of others is always helpful. So if anyone has any thoughts, questions, suggestions, criticisms, or simple musings, I'd love to hear all of them.

 

[tylermalan]

It seems somewhat interesting, though I've always preferred my fantasy to stay totally fantasy. Never really been a fan of historical fiction, so-to-speak.

Anyway, make sure you don't develop too much! Your players won't see half of it.

 

[Ayrek]

Anyway, make sure you don't develop too much! Your players won't see half of it.

I have a bad habit of over-developing settings, so what I'm trying out this time around is to have only the vaguest idea of what each faction is like until I know how I want the story to develop; that's actually where I decided to draw easy parallels to recognizable concepts, rather than create wholly new places.

What I'm trying to do is have a world as versatile as, say, Forgotten Realms (though maybe not as developed, obviously). I have an actiony, urban steampunk area, I have traditional medieval fantasy, I have jungles to explore, mysteries of the far east to unravel, and even frontier lands that will either fight or be conquered. So while I know it can't be perfect, I'm trying very hard to hit on something for everyone.

I really appreciate the input.

 

[kitsune9]

Bat in the Attic has a really great series of blog posts on developing your own campaign setting and even maps. Here's my thoughts.

1. Identify all the major areas in just one or two sentences so that each continent, nation is covered.
2. Think of the campaign that you'll be wanting to run for the players. Develop the campaign synopsis and then break it down by each piece with a good outline.
3. With the outline of your campaign, focus on developing the areas in which your players are going to be interacting with. For example, you mentioned going to visit the New World, so in this case, you don't want to spend hardly any time developing material about the Old World or Africa. You won't be using it and your players won't be playing in it.
4. With your campaign synopsis, identify the mysteries that will exist for the players to solve in order to keep the campaign engaging. Detail the secrets that will be revealed at some climactic moment in the campaign.
5. Identify all the major NPC players in the campaign, particularly the ones the PC's will fight and loot their corpses. Stat those guys out, the rest can be just fluff descriptions.
6. Always, always break your setting down into manageable components and indicate how much effort you want to put into each piece. Writing something like two or three sentences goes a lot farther for one piece than trying to tackle the whole project and get bored after one or two pages.

Good luck with your setting!

 

[Ayrek]

Bat in the Attic has a really great series of blog posts on developing your own campaign setting and even maps. Here's my thoughts.

1. Identify all the major areas in just one or two sentences so that each continent, nation is covered.
2. Think of the campaign that you'll be wanting to run for the players. Develop the campaign synopsis and then break it down by each piece with a good outline.
3. With the outline of your campaign, focus on developing the areas in which your players are going to be interacting with. For example, you mentioned going to visit the New World, so in this case, you don't want to spend hardly any time developing material about the Old World or Africa. You won't be using it and your players won't be playing in it.
4. With your campaign synopsis, identify the mysteries that will exist for the players to solve in order to keep the campaign engaging. Detail the secrets that will be revealed at some climactic moment in the campaign.
5. Identify all the major NPC players in the campaign, particularly the ones the PC's will fight and loot their corpses. Stat those guys out, the rest can be just fluff descriptions.
6. Always, always break your setting down into manageable components and indicate how much effort you want to put into each piece. Writing something like two or three sentences goes a lot farther for one piece than trying to tackle the whole project and get bored after one or two pages.

Good luck with your setting!

Well, I've got step one pretty solidly down, but it seems like I'm finding step two to be the difficult part! Haha really great advice though, thank you very much.

I forget where I read it, I found some advice once that suggested writing everything about the story and setting in a sentence or two, reread it, and then zoom in a little and add a couple sentences of description, then zoom in again, etc. I'm going to give that a try and see where it takes me. I just need to fight the urge to focus too much on my favorite parts, before they need to be focused on

 

[Xorial]

Get a copy of Goodman Game's Xcrawl RPG. Then steal the history of that alternate fantasy Earth for your own.

 

[kitsune9]

Well, I've got step one pretty solidly down, but it seems like I'm finding step two to be the difficult part!

Well, Step 2 will be important for you because that will determine how much time and effort of detailing the parts of your setting and more importantly what parts of setting that is worth detailing.

Okay, so let's back up and consider the campaign with the basic statement that it involves exploring the New World. So what can our party do in the New World? What missions do they have?

Well, let's think of some actual historical reasons:

1. Find gold
2. Find slaves
3. Find resources
4. Find fertile land
5. Open new trade routes
6. Establish colonies in the name of the king
7. Find more gold and so on.

So the PC's are before the King/Merchant Prince/Powerful Patron/Captain and they have a mission to cross the dangerous seas to the New World to help establish a colony. There will be six ships crossing the seas with the PC's own ship.

Part 1. This is the journey itself across the ocean. The PC's will have to deal with sea monsters, pirates, island of terrible madness, disease and mutiny before they reach the New World.
Part 2. They land and they must search out an area for a good colony. Instead they find a ruined ziggurat or an ancient city. They explore it, find monsters, learn the history of great and powerful group of people that lived here, but fell into demon worship, wiped themselves out, but the demons still stayed. The PC's got to clean out this place before the colonists can take over it.
Part 3. Defend the colony. The PC's meet other natives who are friendly (your humans and orcs), but they discover there is a mutual threat--those dinosaurs roaming around. Except they are intelligent on the east coast. The PC's must delve further into land to contact the halflings to deal with these powerful monstrocities before the colony is overrun with them.
Part 4. Find Resources. The colony is in trouble. A bad famine has hit it and the PC's need to find a source of food and game before winter. Trading with the natives is not going so well because they have problems of their own. The PC's need to explore further west to find a magical pool that will cause crops to spring forth and livestock to become fertile. Of course, getting there is having to deal with the ancient guardians of the place, not to mention the friendly humans and orcs who also want the chance for their communities as well.
Part 5. Schism. More colonists come, many of them zealots of a fanatical religion where they were persecuted in the Old World. This time however, they were able to influence and sunder the colony toward their aims. These religious zealots want to make war on the peaceful natives so the PC's must find a way to diplomatically deal with the situation or lead a rebellion.

So what do we have to detail now?

1. The area where the new colony is located-a map and a paragraph.
2. Who runs the colony.
3. The Patron from the Old World funding the expedition (fluff writing).
4. Who is the native human leader.
5. Who is the native orc leader.
6. The region where the magical pool is located.
7. The intelligent dinosaurs threatening the colony.
8. The ruined ziggurat or ancient city and the demons there.
9. The halflings.
10. The fanatical religion and the colony leaders.

Now we have our list, our campaign synopsis, and now we detail out how much we're going to put together for each part. After that, you're done.

 

[Ayrek]

(A TON of awesome ideas.)

I buckled down and got a little into part two last night; what I came up with is actually structured more like a Zelda game. Also I should point out that I'll be playing this in e6 pathfinder. So, my five acts go roughly as such, as I drafted them last night.

1. The boat ride, with a sea based encounter it two. Then, arrival at the existing colony, where they get their orders. The party is basically meant to be Lewis and Clark; they are looking for a waterway west in the name of a gnomish shipping company. But they're also approached by a second company and offered more money if they also complete a second objective, which I've yet to determine. They follow the rivers west.
2. The party will be encouraged to explore a dungeon near where the Ohio river meets the mississippi (or in world, Couatl) river. It will be the reason the river is named such; its the tomb of a couatl. They also encounter the halflings for the first time.
3. The party explores the Poison Swamps in what we know as Florida.
4. The party must head north to Bear Lake (lake Michigan).
5. Final dungeon, and dealing with the halflings.

The idea is, the party is collecting items of some sort that, when used together, have a powerful effect.

But I love love love the suggestions of demon worship (which will be the halflings motivations, perhaps), a magical pool to help grow crops (I'd originally thought of looking for El Dorado, but scrapped that idea because I thought it would either be short, or would get repetitive), and intelligent dinosaurs. I always like a story with two unrelated villains; maybe some lizardfolk or yuan-ti with intelligent dinosaurs would spice it up a bit...

 

[kitsune9]

Okay, now you got your campaign synopsis, you now know what to detail and what to leave out. Since you're running E6, you can cap your campaign at 6th level and then begin the process for the next one by going in different directions, also move up the timeline too by a few years (or a century), so that the actions of the PC's in the first campaign influenced the course of history.