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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Man in the Funny Hat" data-source="post: 2567712" data-attributes="member: 32740">Should you bother?  Only you can answer that.  World building is as much an exercise just for your own fun as it is trying to create something for everyone else to see.  Do it if you enjoy it.  If it's no fun or too much like WORK then look for an alternate solution.Does it sound "done too often"?  Again that's a question for you - or more importantly to your potential players.  It sounds fine to me but then I tend to gravitate to the tried and true rather than trying to do something so wild and radical that nobody (including me) can get a real handle on what the world is.It sounds interesting enough to me.Start SMALL.  It generally takes a fair amount of experience at world-building to design from the top-down and have it come out the way you want it to at the level of player-interaction.  Don't try to start with a map of the entire globe when players are only going to be concerned with an area that's a few hundred miles in radius.Start with a small town or even a mere village and someplace nearby for initial adventures.  Expand from there to larger towns, more distant hills and forests, what's on the OTHER side of that big river, etc.  Design it in the sequence that the player characters are most likely to explore it.  Don't worry too much about the terrain making real-world sense.  If you want frozen lands of snow try to put them in to the far north (or far south as the case may be).  Otherwise when you want a river - put in a river.  When you want a land of plains on the other side of the mountains - then put a land of plains on the other side of the mountains.  If you want ocean nearby to be able to put in some seagoing adventures then put it in wherever you want it, add a few port cities and towns at the mouth of rivers, establish that there are trade ships and caravans that move in that direction and all's well.As you expand your world out from the initial area that PC's are likely to start in you can place kingdoms and peoples appropriately.  Don't try to squeeze EVERYTHING into the initial spaces - just because you want two kingdoms to be at war doesn't mean they have to be RIGHT next to each other.  It might even work better if they have to go tromping through a third country in-between.Create something interesting or unknown about each piece of the world for PC's to discover, but it doesn't have to be anything Earth-shattering or even something that will concern the PC's directly.Stick VERY closely to the core rules to start.  Use optional prestige classes, races, and rules very sparingly.  A little goes a long way.  MORE is actually seldom better.  Too many "kitchen sink" campaigns start to look like the sinks garbage disposal backed up.  Keep it lean and mean.Communicate with your players early and often - not just to find out what they like or dislike about your campaign world but to let them know what YOU are trying to emphasis or keep out of it.  Also players need to know what your opinions are on topics like alignment, how strict you want to be with rules enforcement, how much hack/slash vs. roleplaying you're intending to have and YOU need to know THEIR opinions in turn so that you can better gear the creation of your world to the players that are going to be intimately a part OF it with the actions of their PC's.</blockquote>

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