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

[SkidAce]

I'm just trotting out my old campaign for another day in the sun. My modus operandi has been the same for about 30 years -- since '84. Every time that I start a new group I just time-leap my campaign 7 years into the future...

Moving a lot every year or two in the military, I did the same thing.

Its very helpful, as I have a framework of deities, NPCs countries, and "other incidents" i.e. adventurers actions that I can reference to make the world seem living, with depth.

Alas, although I was playing in 84, this world didn't start until 86 in Texas and Korea, so you are ahead of me by 2 years.

 

[The Grand User]

I'm working on a new setting for my first 5E campaign, sometime in the distant (but hopefully not too far) future.

The world has had a cataclysmic invasion by elves and lesser fey (gnomes, goblins, etc.) and the only safe places from them for humanity to live in are within the territory of dragons. It's been a few generations later, and the dragons are encouraging humanity to strike out and reclaim their old lands.

Humans aren't the only ones wanting to kick out the elves, as the dwarves have been holed up in their delves, and the orcs, goliaths and other Bulky Folk have maintained their own lands still, but are starting to waiver. Halflings have gotten by purely because they escape the fey's notice due to their crafty nature. And new people have also arisen though, the various fey touched and the dragonborn, and both bring sorcery.

There are a number of factions (and associated Icons, borrowing that design element from 13th Age) that (almost) all agree that the elves should be removed, but with enough disagreement about other issues to make things Interesting.

Game play I'm thinking will be sandboxy hexcrawling, with plenty of Old Kingdom ruins (and armories) to find and loot, as well as fey dwellings. Also the occasional young dragon to help establish a new lair & town.


The fey touched will be using the PC stats for elves, half elves, gnomes, and maybe tieflings and genasi. I'll probably use both the regular dragonborn stats and the aarakabirdthing's stats refluffed to be draconic. I haven't decided if they're just a change on humans due to living so close to dragons, or the more classical half-dragon route, though I am leaning towards the latter.

Dragons are not color coded, particularly in regards to alignments but also for abilities and general personalities, and they're about as variable as humans are.

I've got more details in a pastebin

 

[Grainger]

My 5e campaign is, which has as its point-of-departure an Anglo-Norman style setting. It has a broadly 11th-century technology and social structure. The kingdom is populated by Humans, Halflings and Dwarves ruled over by an Elven elite, who invaded 80 years ago and introduced the Feudal system to the land. I originally thought this would be a good way to teach a bit of history to my daughter (pointing out where things diverged of course, but showing peasant life under the Feudal System).

However, as I developed the setting, it soon became clear that things would have to pan out very differently from "real" history. You've got rulers and aristocrats who will live hundreds of years - you're not going to have much change in this setting, unless it's forced on the setting, and the same individuals (barring accidents or murder) will still be in charge. You also have Halflings and (especially) Dwarves who fought for the previous (Human) King who remember the times before the invasion, and the scourging of the rebellious Dwarven cities afterwards. As such, there's a built-in longer-term resistance to the "Normans" that you didn't get in real life. Throw in fantasy elements (the Elves used magic to defeat the Human/Dwarven army, which the survivors see as "cheating") and you have an interesting twist on things, in my opinion.

I've also thrown a coming undead apocalypse (I hadn't seen Game of Thrones when I came up with the setting, I swear), and add in the usual crazy idiot NPCs I tend to come up with, and I think it's a setting with great potential for drama, high adventure, intrigue and humour.

As I said upthread, I don't think it has anything in it that was driven by running it in 5e, or indeed D&D. However, I do think that 5e made it very easy to come up with this world; it has the right combination of ease of play but richness of options.

 

[Dausuul]

I'm working on a new setting for my first 5E campaign, sometime in the distant (but hopefully not too far) future.

The world has had a cataclysmic invasion by elves and lesser fey (gnomes, goblins, etc.) and the only safe places from them for humanity to live in are within the territory of dragons. It's been a few generations later, and the dragons are encouraging humanity to strike out and reclaim their old lands.

My 5e campaign is, which has as its point-of-departure an Anglo-Norman style setting. It has a broadly 11th-century technology and social structure. The kingdom is populated by Humans, Halflings and Dwarves ruled over by an Elven elite, who invaded 80 years ago and introduced the Feudal system to the land. I originally thought this would be a good way to teach a bit of history to my daughter (pointing out where things diverged of course, but showing peasant life under the Feudal System).

Sounds like "elvish overlords" is the theme of the day. Here's my contribution:

For ten thousand years*, the world's human kingdoms paid heavy tribute to the high elves, who ruled a decadent empire of slaves and wizardry. Six hundred years ago, humans rebelled and threw off the elvish yoke. The elvish empire still exists, but it remains focused on its own internal power struggles; the humans, too, have fallen to fighting among themselves. Meanwhile, the dwarves are expanding their realm through the Underdark, and have begun to take an active hand in surface politics. The halflings have no nation of their own, but they have a powerful crime syndicate that spans kingdoms and races.

To the extent there is a cosmic struggle going on in this setting, it's between order and chaos. Good and evil are personal choices, and there are no "gods" as such. Clerics worship powerful legendary beings, from extraplanar spirits to ancient dragons, mummy lords, and the tarrasque. (Three guesses what the tarrasque's clerical domain is, and the first two don't count.)

[size=-2]*Because "thousands of years of technological stasis for no good reason" is a pet peeve of mine, I should expand a bit on this: The high elves rose to power during this world's Stone Age, and they were much more interested in arcane knowledge than mundane technology. Wizardry as it is known today comes from millennia of experiments by high elf wizards. Bronze-working began about halfway through the elves' reign. Steel was finally discovered eight hundred years before the Great Rebellions, and it played a major part in the humans' victory.[/size]

 

[Grimstaff]

This is great stuff, and why EnWorld is such an awesome community!

I'll be chronicling the development of my 5E setting, "Atheon", over on my blog beginning here:

http://beyondtheblackgate.blogspot.com/2015/03/designing-campaign-world-part-1.html

Let me know what you think!

 

[Blue]

Not currently running a homebrew in 5e, so I'll mention my last homebrew which had two campaign about 12 years total RL, and about 80 year in game.

Errantas is a small but growing human kingdom founded on empty shores after the Great Fleet fled the century long war again the elven invaders. Other races have been found, Dwarves in a mountain chain, the only ones left from a great cataclysm. Halflings joined Errantas, though later most became xenophobic and pulled back in and closed their borders. Elven wanderers were found, enough to start a few settlements that mingled with the humans and halflings, who came "from the West". Goblins to the other side of the Dwarves mixed with barbaric humans, Orken sailors and slavers in the archipelago to the south, and unrelated tribes of Orken Mongolian nomads in the Steppes to the north. Oh, and an usurped duke who was exiled but took many with him and started up a cosmopolitan empire of many races, strict laws, and slaves.

Behind the scenes it was a different story. First a new cosmology that was very important to the world. There are many prime materials, and each of them "floats" independently in all four of the elemental planes, protected by a membrane. Sometimes these Primes got close to each other in one of the elemental planes and it was possible to go between them. The Prime the game took place in had a thinner membrane then others - easier to get to. And many gods had used it as a place to deliver followers seeking sanctuary.

The humans sailed across the elemental plane of water to get here following divine guidance, but that knowledge has been lost in the intervening generations. The human barbarians are a ship that was lost from the great fleet and ended up getting here sooner but destroyed, leaving remnants to get to shore. (At a later point in the campaign the magical rudder from that ship was recovered from the sea floor and a water-plane-travelling corvette was built for exploring.)

The dwarves also ended up fleeing a cataclysm on their world by going down into the underworld and inadvertantly travelling through the elemental plane of earth to Errantas. Most of the other races had a similar story except the halflings, who were native. This also explained why there were several different groups of orcs, etc.

The elves were the only ones who understood that. They had many fae lands pocket primes (before 4e faewyld) that each was a "court" of elves that would visit the mortal primes they came near. The elves in Errantas were left there when their court got too far away to go back. Later in the campaign a new court of elves got close and started popping up, and these were the ones that had battled the (LE) civilization they had originally fled.

There were a lot of mythic overtones, including a "the king is the land and the land is the king". However, a previous (looong ago) human civilization had previously been here, and had "encapsulated" this with "proxy" kings that were magical obelisks. One, called the Wardstone by the new humans, made the land fertile and the weather good now that there were humans back in the area again. It also invigorated many of the long dead previous humans, causing them to become undead. So there was a faction of intelligent undead that just wanted to destroy the Wardstone and get back to eternal rest, but the kingdom saw them as trying to destroy the magical device that controlled the weather and made the land fertile. These undead also clashed with necromantically raised undead, which confused many since they didn't know their story.

Lots of other mythic stuff going on across the campaigns, but that's a nutshell of the setting.

 

[ForceUser]

My homebrew 5E setting is inspired by Arabian Nights, al-Qadim, Dark Sun, and Crusader history. I don't meddle with RAW for flavor's sake, but I do have a conversation with players about where their characters fit into the setting. For example, a player recently rolled a druid, but we agreed that in the setting he is a "Yatha'a mystic". Rather than druidic, he knows the secret language of jinn. He's still a druid---his religion is even called the Old Faith---but the concept is tailored to the setting.

 

[Viking Bastard]

My setting has come to be about the idea of a gonzo D&D world at the end of its lifespan, yet isn't post-apocalyptic, as much as it is post-post-apocalyptic. Over its million year life, this world has been everything D&D has thrown at us, be it Dragonlance, Greyhawk or Dark Sun (or Points of Light, or Ravenloft, or..., or...). It has gone through dozens of iterations of apocalypse and rebirth, with its history reading like a list of "Realm Events" and everybody's campaigns. Currently it looks a lot like 5e and kind of smells like dwarf.

The world is old, battered and close to breaking down. A sea of eldritch horrors threatens to rise to engulf it, that is if the earth doesn't fall down first, as it has been slowly losing altitude ever since one of its moons crashed down. Cracks are forming in every layer of this dimension—the world is leaking elemental energies and magical forces are out of whack, resulting in odd but not necessarily random effects. The crystal sphere that encases the world is nearing the end of its cosmic journey, now drifting out into the Void to become one of the Outlands, a faded remembrance in a pasty palette. If it makes the journey, as the sphere itself is cracking, exposing the world to the Bleed and extra-planar threats, who see this old tired world as easy pickings.

But the people march on—whatcha gonna do? ya fix it an' get on with yer life!

 

[Mhyr]

Never did a whole Homebrew World, but felt like when 5E released. My players convinced me to run the Realms for them, but after the first campaign that feeling is returning. So with some DM-time at my hands - just playing in a CoS game - i give it a try.

There are three moons in the night sky: a blue one, a green one and a red one. Each one is tied to a neutral deity: a LN one, a N one and a CN one. They are caught between the sun (a NG deity) and the darkness (a NE deity). The five form a tight pantheon, but for every star there is another deity. They are not that important to Avalon, but have a following among its population. (Some even claim there are really just five deities, A, E, I, O and U - Chaos, Evil, Neutrality, Good, Law, and every other deity is a combination/mixture of these five.)

The continent in the spotlight is called Avalon. Yes, after THE Avalon. It is a refuge of sorts, as well as IG as OoG, as well as on its own planet as in the D&D-multiverse. Its world is just another world of and for D&D.
Dragons "imported" humans, after the elves resisted their breeding magic, to create the dragonborn. The chromatic ones forged a mighty empire - Imperium Drakanum - with their help and ruled a big part of the world. It grew too big and broke apart. Guided by Bahamut, the metallic dragons dealt the death blow to the crumbling empire together with the humans and founded a realm of goodness by giving birth to five half-dragons. The five noble Dragon Kings withdrew to the easily defended Avalon.
The draconic bloodlines grew weaker and weaker until only one kingdom remains. On first glance the four other kingdoms fell to orcs, vampires, yuan-ti and a demon lord, but chromatic dragons might have aided the forces of darkness here and there. The Last Kingdom has the darkest enemy of them all and doesn't even know!

Most of it is supposed to be background only, peppered between classic modules out of TotYP or such. We will see.

Love this thread! Any more info on the worlds you built for/with 5E?

 

[Beria1021]

Jester David, I know this is a few years late, but I’ve been looking at different camaign settings and I’m quite interested in yours. I’ve started reading through the doc you provided, and I would like to know if you have any more maps or resources available. Thanks!