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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hussar" data-source="post: 3533380" data-attributes="member: 22779">Look, what I'm advocating isn't ground breaking or particularly new.  It's not.  What I'm trying to say is that, for the homebrewer, the DM might be better served in emulating Green Ronin's Freeport, Goodman Games DCC's or AEG's World's Largest Dungeon rather than Forgotten Realms, Scarred Lands or Eberron.If you go the FR route, whether you go top down or bottom up, you are, IMO, placing setting first.  You are creating world independently of adventure.  Granted, that process may lead to adventure creation, that's true, but, why not skip the middle man?  The adventures are the important thing.If you go the Goodman Games route, instead, then you craft adventures, based on whatever criteria.  At the end of the process (if it ever ends) you are left with functional adventures rather than simply adventure ideas that then need to be turned into adventures.After you have your collection of adventures, then you work out any setting that you might need that follows from those adventures.I realize that this is going against the grain of what's been inculcated into the collective brains of DM's over the past couple of decades.  After all, Tolkien created setting first, story second, so, why shouldn't we?  Ed Greenwood did exactly the same thing as well - stories of FR first appeared in Dragon without any module support and people ate it up.  Second Edition is littered with setting after setting.  Really, the only settings that started with adventures first would be Greyhawk and Dragonlance (possibly Mystara as well) and, from DL, we have the sense that adventure first=railroad.  My point is, if you go setting first, world building first, whatever you want to call it, you are going to do a lot of extraneous work.  True, you can fit that work into the adventures, but, then you run into the danger of forcing square pegs into round holes of contriving your scenarios so that the work you did becomes relevant.  So that square windows somehow figure into your adventures.  Like I say, this is hardly a new concept.  Heretical perhaps now, but hardly new.  Heck, The Keep on the Borderlands is as generic as you can possibly make an adventure - the NPC's don't even have names!  Yet, this is still held up as a very solid, very good module by a lot of people.I know bodybuilding is all the rage, but, honestly, try yoga.  It does wonders.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

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