Never homebrewed!

[sunbeam60]

For me, the motivation to keep on is definitely in the map, strange as it may seem. I absolutely love drawing all those places no one but my own fantasy will ever visit. Also, the cool thing about a homebrew is that I don't need to worry about:

• Players knowing the world and knowing where everything is. There is a sense of discovery there.
• Following someone's storyline. Although this is of course of your own doing, I always feel constricted to never add or remove too much.

Also, as a poor student, playing homebrew keeps me out of the "just one more forgotten realms fix" loop. Actually, I have never played in a pre-built world.

(super-pimp: Check the results out at the Fourth Age website

regards
Toft

 

[DDK]

If you do homebrew, what gets you motivated?

That it's mine, Mine, all MINE!

Seriously. The fact that I can do whatever I want with it is a great motivator, especially when I get miffed at limitations or silly things done in published settings. I get into a, "I could do this so much better..." mood and so I sit down and rework my world for the nth time.

Also, much like Drawmack, I write both fiction and flavour text for the world which is something I enjoy doing. My world's history is replete with wars and empires and ages and lots of cool stuff (or at least I think it's cool... which is half the point).

Most especially, I love making up characters and evolving them into the world. A lot of my character concepts start out simple and evolve, you see, into highly detailed and very complex personalities. Character is, IMO, what truly drives a world. Make your characters bigger than life itself but not so big that they dwarf anything a PC could do (something I feel Forgotten Realms suffers from) and you've instantly got an interesting backdrop.

And cities, I love making up cities. Giving each one a little quirk all it's own. Some have big quirks, others have little ones, but much like in the real world, each city has a character all its own. Paris is different from London; Melbourne is different from New York; Seattle is different from Moscow, and all of them convey the immense variety that just ONE species is capable of.

About the only thing I dislike is races. On my world, the races are a bit like on David Eddings world, where they have differences that make them distinct enough to tell apart, but not so blatent as the difference between, say, a dwarf and an orc. And there are no hobbits on my world. God I hate hobbits.

 

[BryonD]

Why do you do it if you have to make yourself do it?

There are plenty of great materials that you can use. (He says, stupidly shining the light of the obvious all around. )

Seriously though, why don't you just do the parts that you want to do?

My homebrew world is around 15 years old. But I have never forced myself to work on it. I do it because it is a part of the game that I greatly enjoy. It is my artistic expression thing and simply a lot of fun to me.

I really like to play, but sometimes it is more fun to build. And sometimes when I am DMing in my world it feels more like I am tricking my players into helping my flesh out my world than anything else.

So I guess I am saying I don't understand your question. So I would like a bit more info. Or, barring that, just encourage you to not do the parts you don't get pleasure from. That is more time you can spend doing what you do like.

Have I made a bit of sense? Or am I rambling incoherently?

 

[Breakdaddy]

Ive never really WORKED on a homebrew, but I came up with one on the fly as we were playing for about a years worth of sessions. It went surprisingly well, and a couple of years later when I asked the players if they suspected I had been doing the whole campaign on the fly, none of them believed me. I was lucky or inspired, I suppose. Im just glad I didnt get called on it at the time!

 

[sunbeam60]

... I came up with one on the fly as we were playing for about a years worth of sessions. It went surprisingly well, and a couple of years later when I asked the players if they suspected I had been doing the whole campaign on the fly, none of them believed me.

Yeah, did the same for my 5 year campaign. Started out with a bare minimum skeleton (basically a map outline) and everything grew from there. My players actually don't really believe me when I tell them how much was invented on the spot. Several places, I just had "cool moments" that I wanted to incorporate and the players' crazy paranoia created a whole storyline for me to pick from

regards
Toft

 

[ForceUser]

Yeah, did the same for my 5 year campaign. Started out with a bare minimum skeleton (basically a map outline) and everything grew from there. My players actually don't really believe me when I tell them how much was invented on the spot. Several places, I just had "cool moments" that I wanted to incorporate and the players' crazy paranoia created a whole storyline for me to pick from

regards
Toft

Those are the best campaigns!

 

[Skade]

Henry: I don't suppose that PDF doc of yours is available for anyone to check out?

10 years and counting. I actually began mine simply because I didn't really like any of the published settings. I have never gotten into Greyhawk for my own myopic reasons, and I was only a casual fan of Dragonlance. I liked the Forgotten Realms but it seemed to large for a beginning DM. I had already written some short stories that were basically fantasy. So, Agastasi was born in the small village of Caer Valen.

Now my players sometimes complain it is too much like the FRs- too much to absorb in one sitting.

I kept going for all of the reasons above. I loved creating, and being the sole authority of my world. That and my players and I just became accostomed to it, and its particular style of play.

I still intend on finsihing a novel set there someday.

 

[BButler]

Well the closest thing to world building I've ever done is to fill in the gaps in a very sketchy published world. Beyond that, I find that I don't have the time to really give a setting the treatment it needs.

As for home brewing--I've been known to turn out a pretty mean pale ale on occasion.

 

[WayneLigon]

If you do homebrew, what gets you motivated?

I almost always homebrew. What gets my juices flowing? I nice map. Give me a cool map and I'll build a world around it in nothing flat.

The inspiration for Ashara was the Map of Matrin in Holly Lisle's Diplomacy of Wolves . Just seeing that cool map in tiny smudged reproduction was enough to inspire me.

 

[Trevalon Moonleirion]

I've never sat down and started a homebrew... the task has always seemed really daunting to me... I've "helped" my friend Fayredeth on occaision, but really, anything good that came out of that is really just his work. He is a homebrew freak.... a bit too much of one since he gets tired of one and starts up another--I've had 4 characters with him DMing and I've never gotten past 5th level. (if you want me to play in a campaign run by you, let me keep my friggin' character, boy!!!) LOL