D&D 5E Published Campaign Setting or Home Brew?

[Snoring Rock]

My first thought, as I start this campaign, is that I want to place this ruined tower on a rocky coast line, with a sizable settlement nearby. The town/city can be the home base of the PC’s for their first several adventures. I can detail that area and then as they move out, I can detail more.
My problem is, I tend to understand all too well, how the world at large has effects on the details of the insignificant corners of the world. I feel compelled to detail the larger area; what deities are worshipped (you need this for clerics anyway), what kingdom are you part of, and where are the power centers of this kingdom?
Back when I was young and lacked experience, none of that really mattered. Now if kind of does. It is funny because I have stuck to the Judge Guild Wilderlands, which is a maze of mixed up city states that make no sense at all, and have no true boundaries. As I think about it, I rarely refer to the campaign setting itself. I love the maps.
This campaign has to be something special. That is why I want to make it home brew. But yes, I must form it, give it history and breathe life into it. Is work or play?

 

[evilbob]

I've used both, but even my homebrews are based on something, typically (usually a video game). It just helps when someone else has thought of a bunch of stuff for you already. Then again, I never think about games as being part of a specific "setting" (other than "today"), but then again maybe that's just semantics.

 

[Charles Rampant]

I currently run my own homebrew. I've kept it pretty restrained; I just built one island, about the same size as Britain. This allowed me to put in enough landmass to have several different climes and states, without being such a huge space as to seem impossible to travel around. The downside is that the High King of the island appears pretty weak, since large parts of a relatively small area don't listen to him, but then that isn't unusual for medieval politics anyway. The rest of the world has absolutely no detail done on it, not even a sketched out map; I figure that if my plot doesn't take them there, then they don't need to (and probably won't) care about having reams of information on what lies beyond the boundaries of their island. I think that playing King Arthur Pendragon for a couple phases of the Grand Campaign is what gave me this thinking; it would take 23 days to walk from the top of the island to the bottom, and that sounds like plenty enough space to have adventures in!



A player made this rather fancy version of my map for me. As I say, a relatively restrained effort - I've got details on all the nations and cities on the above map, even if only a line or two, and over around 14 months of adventuring, first one group and then a second separate group, I've had them visit only small parts of the map. Lasqua, parts of Torvsala, some bits of the mountains. The most interesting and important city (to me) is in the bottom right, and none of the players have displayed any interest in going anywhere near there. But then, that is the 'high level' town, with planar portals and whatnot, so that works.

In the past I've run with premade settings - Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 2e, Dark Heresy, that sort of thing. It is a lot easier in many ways. Just read, and you've got all the maps ready and whatnot. But sometimes it can be annoying; when I ran a Vodacce campaign for 7th Sea, I found that the detail was so skimpy as to leave me to do all the work anyway. The main city that I used had a map with no locations marked on it, which isn't as useful as it sounds. On the other hand, the sheer depth of detail available for some settings - Forgotten Realms especially, can be wildly off putting to read. I can't be bothered reading more than one hardback for my setting, and even that might be too much judging from how I glazed over while reading Eberron.

So you kind of want to find a balance between 'I have not enough detail here to place my plot' and 'there is too much detail here, I feel like I'm choking'. That balance can be found in either homebrew or premade - Forgotten Realms tends towards the latter, but you can easily restrict yourself to, say, just the 3e hardback and some stuff from the computer games, and have a good time of it.