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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tyler Do'Urden" data-source="post: 7909180" data-attributes="member: 4601">Nah bro, these aren't good ideas. They're great ideas! I want to steal them!And that's just the thing... as Pablo Picasso put it, "Good artists copy, great artists steal."You want to be a great DM? You're gonna steal, you're gonna do it ruthlessly and shamelessly, and if you do it well none of your players will ever know or care because they're too enthralled with the game.Because here's the deal - you don't have time to build a world from scratch, and think of everything your players will want to ask. You've got bills to pay. There are guys who do this stuff for a living - they're called GAME DESIGNERS.Game designers aren't gods, though, and a good DM is probably capable of doing the same work they do given the time that they can spend on it. But you've got a fraction of that time. And since they aren't gods, feel free to taint their creation however you desire. The only canon welcome here is the kind that shoots metal balls or turbolaser blasts. And maybe the kind that wears robes and casts healing spells, if that's more your thing.The issue here is that you've got great macro ideas. That's some nice skin, or maybe at this level, clothing. But you need muscles, bones, organs, blood vessels... you get the idea. That's where you need to pick some materials to rob blind.(Be careful! Don't rip off something all your players know. I've made that mistake before. But there's so much material out there... you shouldn't need to do this.)I'll demonstrate how I homebrewed a setting through this method in the last several minutes, between preparing client correspondence and running to the copier:First we need a theme. I'm not thinking something quite as big and grandiose as yours... I'm going to go with something easy - dark Germanic fairytale. Quaint villiages, mysterious castles, cursed knights, faerie-haunted woods, and lots of people named Fritz and Hans. Cool.Okay, we need a home base. Something well fleshed out that we can scratch the serial numbers off of. This is a quaint, dark fairytale world, so we don't really want a bustling metropolis. No Waterdeep, Lankhmar or Greyhawk here. Let's see, what are some good villages... well, if your players are really new to the game, or old grognards just starting 5e after a hiatus, Phandelver would work fine. If they're newer-school gamers for whom AD&D has less meaning than ADHD, maybe try using good ol' Hommlet, or Restenford from The Curse of Bone Hill - both very well rendered villages. But I'm not going with either of those.Nope, we're gonna steal Bree. Grab yourself a PDF of the <a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/262110/Adventures-in-Middleearth--Breeland-Region-Guide?src=hottest_filtered" target="_blank">Cubicle 7 Bree-land supplement </a>and you're good to go.BREE? But all my players have watched the Peter Jackson trilogy like ten times!Doesn't matter. They don't remember anything about it that matters here, and will never notice. As long as you've ripped Barleyman Butterburr's skin off and replaced him with Gersteman von Leerweiss, a fat jolly old knight who took over the great big Landsknecht Gasthaus (which is going to become one of their favorite places to drop coin after an adventure),  they're never even gonna notice. They're not in Bree, they're in Bockenburg, and they're never gonna realize they're in Bree. Especially because you just replaced all the hobbits with gnomes.None of this is going to take any more work than scratching out a handful of descriptions (far from all, just a few flavorful ones) and keeping a random German name generator and a random Gnome name generator handy to rename all the hobbits and humans. Everything else remains the same...… and they'll be too busy playing to notice. Hmm... let's make the Dunedain into cursed wood elf rangers from an ancient fallen kingdom that used to be on these lands... kewl. We'll give them Celtic names. The Dwarves who wander through... are still just the Dwarves who wander through. They dress well and have a lot of coin. Maybe we'll use old norse names... or better yet, Polish. There we go. There, I just saved you dozens of hours of work.Now we need adventure material.There are a few low level adventures and hooks in the Bree book... those will get us started. Then we need some more nearby environs.First we need a big cursed wood. If you have new players, go ahead and reskin some of the old Myth Drannor supplements, and you're off to the races. Or whip out <a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/browse/pub/5606/Necrotic-Gnome/subcategory/27522/Dolmenwood" target="_blank">Dolmenwood</a>.Now we need some more towns, slightly bigger, for higher level adventures. Preferably with lots of werewolves, and some undead. Oh yeah. Are we pulling out <a href="https://www.dmsguild.com/product/17486/RA1-Feast-of-Goblyns-2e?term=feast+of+go" target="_blank">Feast of Goblyns</a>? Yes we are.After the elf-kingdom fell, there was a human kingdom, now also fallen. We need some grim old castles. Let's throw in <a href="https://www.dmsguild.com/product/17159/B3-Palace-of-the-Silver-Princess-Basic?term=palace+of+the+silver+pr" target="_blank">Palace of the Silver Princess,</a> <a href="https://www.dmsguild.com/product/17476/Castles-Forlorn-2e?term=castles+for" target="_blank">Castles Forlorn</a>, and "The Forgotten Man" from <a href="https://annarchive.com/files/Dungeon%20Magazine%20%23075.pdf" target="_blank">Dungeon #75</a>. There's plenty of spookiness and classic fantasy castle adventure. We also need a ruined tomb/big freaking dungeon. How about the<a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/755/Tomb-of-Abysthor?src=hottest_filtered" target="_blank"> Tomb of Abysthor</a>? It's not quite as daunting as Rappan Athuk, and more coherent.My god man, I think we have a setting here! I want to go run this right now!That's how I build a campaign, and it just snowballs from there. Lots of details I wouldn't think of are pre-filled - and I can fill in the rest. Analysis paralysis is broken, as rather than creating the setting, I'm co-discovering it.Now, you try. Let's reach out to the EnWorld Hive Mind and see what materials might work well for your campaign idea...</blockquote>

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