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Message: <blockquote data-quote="ThirdWizard" data-source="post: 2044411" data-attributes="member: 12037">I like a mix. I've actually tried both ways, and here are the problems that I have personally experienced (I've made a good many homebrews).If  you concentrate too heavily on top down, you run into the problem that there are less details during actual play. There's a big picture, but it is best to convey a big picture in an actual game through events, npcs, and other things that are real to the players. You might have a kingdom to the south preparing for war, but you might not know how the area the PCs are in will react, what the town militia is planning, etc. You can have a wonderful pantheon, but the running of the local temple eludes you. Things like that are important to make PCs feel like part of the world, and if they PCs arn't part of the world, then what's the point of having all the info about it?If  you concentrate too heavily on bottom up, you run into the problem that the world seems to end where the PCs havn't been, or arn't expected to go. A town might be very well defined, but its relation to its neighbors, or the kingdom as a whole, might be non-existant. When those things spring into play, tension that should have been there the whole time just then is created, and the PCs are left feeling a bit out of place.Generally, I like to start off designing a large area, kingdom sized perhaps, detail a bit about the surrounding areas, design some gods and genral religiouis beliefs, like a top down approach, but leave everything ambiguous enough that its there, and if the PCs want to know more about it, then it can be fleshed out fairly easily. Then I decide where the PCs will start and work on a town in detail. From there, I can decide where the PCs and where they live fit into the big picture and go back to modeling the top-down again, in a long and involved process until the two meet each other, theoretically somewhere.It's been a while since I used a homebrew, though, actually. I run a Planescape campaign, and one of the things I like about it is that the top is already there. I "recently" started an Outlands based campaign, and while a lot of the big picture is done for me, I got to create an entire area, the city where the PCs were starting, all the surrounding areas, and all that fun stuff. Most of my PS campains are actually heavily homebrewed, come to think of it. Before this we had a Ysgard/Carceri campaign, and I had to create a lot for that as well.</blockquote>

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