D&D 5E Tell me about your Homebrew 5E campaign setting

[Ratskinner]

I was getting kinda tired of making up whole new worlds. So my last campaign was set on an alternate history/reality Earth.

I remembered the story of the Buddha, and how he was prophesied to be either a great conqueror or a great teacher. I thought, "What if it went the other way?" ...which lead me to think of Alexander and pose the reverse situation.

So, my map was Earth, centered on the Mediterranean. Alexander had brought the Enlightenment to that end of the world just as the vast Kapalivashtun Empire of Siddhartha was falling apart to the East. Because magic was real in this version of Earth, Archimedes had held Syracuse (and lived for a few hundred years) and that had lead to history playing out quite differently. Rome never got to take off entirely, Carthage didn't fall. Syracuse was pushing the advance of technology/magic. Spartans really liked the ascetic aspects of the Enlightenment, so (monk-classed) Spartans built Gymnasia to spread the Enlightenment around the Med and Europe. Athens held an important place a cultural/religious center for the Greek pagan/polytheism (which, much like Hinduism and Buddhism IRL, coexisted alongside the Enlightenment.) The game was set in what would have been about 300 CE in our world.

The big plot was that another godswar was coming, and that was bad. I hadn't gotten to reveal it all to the players when the campaign ended, but Archimedes and the Academy at the Syracuse had figured out (by looking at fossils, geology, etc.) that godswars were happening with increasing frequency. Soon reality wouldn't be stable as the disruptions became too frequent. So, the PCs were eventually going to have to figure out a way so disconnect the prime/Earth from the realms of the gods.

Other tidbits:
There was a cult of Moro. Moro was a wizard who couldn't help but try to merge/hybridize/chimerize different creatures together. (He was the wizard who had "did it" wrt owlbears and a few other critters.)

That cult had recently been recruited by some evil dragons who (at the behest of Tiamat) were hoping to create dragons that could breed. (During the godswar before the last one, Tiamat and Bahamut had been allies. Each dragon was a unique creation of theirs and they did not reproduce.) This was going to be a fine source of huge monsters with special abilities.
The gods themselves were splitting into three factions: a) conservative, b) revolutionary (pushing the godswar), and c) Retreaters (Apollo and a few others who realized that soon the world would be chaos.).

There was a militaristic order in the Enlightened World called the Peacekeepers. While belonging to no country in particular, they have nevertheless managed to find themselves controlling several countries to help ensure "stability", "order", etc. On the other hand, piracy is almost non-existent in the Med. because of their navy. In many Enlightened places, joining the Peacekeepers is an alternative to the Death Sentence.

There was no Common (although a low form of Greek was closest). I've always found the idea of a common tongue to be odd.

 

[KingOfVor]

I'm super late to the party, but, here's mine. It's called Domhan, though my players know it as Locus. The world is a mix of a ton of genres, and draws inspiration from a ton of books and games. In it, there are 7 gods that started in this primordial black. 6 wanted to create a world, but the 7th and most powerful didn't. They did any way, creating an impenetrable shield with their lives. The world has since been through 8 ages. Magocracies, cold wars, peaceful eras, and more. Currently the world is in the Age of Unity, where countries are scrabbling to pick up the remains of the Dewiseren Collective. Only two contenders are left. The incorruptible but expansionist Gestartet Empire, and the isolationist but corrupt Mehr Saubat. But, dun dun dun! There is another continent! And it likes raiding! And look, the 7th God is invading! Though those will happen at different times unless my players do something horribly wrong.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

The world of Aldorona is a world made up of islands in a vast ocean. The largest landmass is about the size of Australia, and is home to dragons.

The rest of the world consists of archipelagos, and occasional lone islands. The main setting area is a place to which humans are fairly new settlers, and still very much a minority population. Gnomes, Goliaths and firbolgs, halflings, Dragonborn, dwarves, kobolds, tortles, tabaxi, and to a lesser extent elves, are the most populous races of the region, which is a cluster of archipelagos roughly the same geographical scale as North America, with several roughly Indonesia sized islands dispersed throughout, and days of sailing between many of the island groups.

I am still doing basic concepts on the map, but I’m considering using constellations as inspiration more than realistic archipelagos.

There was a fairly recent war between the kingdom of Alandil and The Cloudlaw, but they have mostly repaired relationship, thanks in part of the influence of the Empire of The Sun, which is an ancient empire that these days seeks mostly to maintain peace and promote trade, and is inspired in aesthetics and religion by the First Persian Empire. It used to be expansionist but is now under the leadership of a deeply faithful dynasty that see expansion for what it is, and isn’t interested in that kind of destruction.

It is, in other words, a fairly peaceful world. There are monsters that lurk between the islands, storms to weather, pirates, etc, but the last great threat that really requires big damn heroes was the Dragon War, when Dragons came to conscript whole island chains in service of defending the world from fiends, nearly a thousand years ago.

But there is always old magic best left alone, and there are always power hungry fools that will do anything for it, and the peace will not last forever.