World Creation - The Beginning

[GravyFingerz]

Like all DMs that I have known or have heard from, they have attempted at one time or more to create their own world for their games. I myself have had hundreds of ideas and such, and have made many beginnings, including but not limited to:

1) Starting with deities first
2) Starting with world creation myth first
3) Building a small area first
4) Building a large area first
5) Starting with a specific country/culture
6) Etc.

I read Dungeoncraft and it had great advice, but I don't know if it was the right advice for myself.

At any rate, it would be interested to hear how other DMs began working on their campaign settings, failed or not.

And if you have any advice for me, I'd appreciate it

 

[BiggusGeekus]

Start small, work out.

And if you're having a hard time with design, I notice that a certain author recently got a good review on Monte Cook's site

 

[alsih2o]

i have to agree with bg, i started by drawing the city walls around a major city and added a bridge. the backstory on the bridge got me through lots.

some detail you spark on will bring you a large part of the way forward usually.

 

[Sixchan]

I start with a map of the planet, then add countries and cities (also work out world history here), pick a main campign area, and flesh that out. Things such as culture and racial makeup come sooner or later, depending on the particular world.

 

[Hand of Evil]

I start with a small corner of the world, this is mostly the campiagn area. I then build my world myth, the gods, good/evil, the major issues that the characters will be playing around. I expand the world as my players need to know.

 

[SpiderMonkey]

My own advice would be, before you start designing anything, to choose a theme that distinguishes your world from other worlds. If you're playing a fairly "generic" world, I would recommend either using a published setting (i.e. Greyhawk or FR) or use one of the homebrews you can find on various homepages.

Once you've figured out the theme, the first step will usually present itself. For example, if you are thinking about a world in which all of the gods have fallen and the world is a demon-ridden nightmare, theology and cosmology are your best bets for a starting place. Interested in playing a game in which the PC's culture has reached its zenith and enjoys a 'golden age'? Come up with national and cultural info first, and tailor the rest around that.

If you're planning on running a campaign in a generic world, BG has the right of it: start small. You can always tailor deities and the nation to suit your needs.

Sorry if this was pedantic and overbearing. Good luck with your game!

 

[Zappo]

The classic methods are the top-down and the bottom-up. Most other methods can be reduced to one of these.

In the first, you design the whole world with little detail, deciding the setting's tone and theme, large-scale geography, major power groups, main religions, world history, and threats. Then, you proceed by selecting a specific aspect (such as a particular region, organization, historical period, whatever) and make detailed information for it.

In the second, you design a small area, generally the one where the PCs will start out, and immediately prepare all the detail on it; local history and geography, local power groups, relevant local religions, and all. As the PCs progress through the world, you design more and more of it.

Each has its merits and flaws. Personally, I favor the top-down method because it makes the work much easier in the long run, and generally gives better results. Being consistant and maintaining a definite theme or feeling is easier. The drawback, naturally, is that it'll take you some time before an area of the world is detailed enough to start playing. And that if the world concept sucks, you won't find out until you've spent quite some time on it.

 

[maggot]

Top Down

My most successful campaign was designed top down. I designed how the world came into being, how the deities came to be, how the races came to be, and how the major countries and organizations came into being. This only took an afternoon of brainstorming. It was all very high-level.

With this, I could write any adventure in the world because I knew exactly what everyone wanted and why. The players never saw this overview and marvelled that I could constantly pull things out of a hat. The things might not make sense to them, but they seemed to fit.

My only problem was I spent too much time at a high-level and never really did the really low-level stuff like naming the baron of the starting town. Heck it was a week before the game before I had settled on the names of the gods for the setting.

Still, it worked out great. You can always change the local stuff with a war or something. It is much more difficult to change the motivations of the god of death.

 

[Will]

I did a top-down design in a world back in college... I recently went back to it to consider turning it into D20.

Among other things, one 'lament' I had was that despite all my work, the players never traveled more than, oh, 100 miles from their starting point. (Though one PC had an offscreen voyage halfway around the world)

Despite this, I think the world design really helped me get a cohesive feel for what was going on. Every horizon I had some knowledge of.

And I did spend some time, then, focusing on the local events, and how larger-scale wars had shaped local matters.

For example. In the southern continent of Farsvia there had been a war over a thousand+ years between dragons and humans. Humans fled north, into the continent of Potchot...

The arabic 'Farsvians' shoved out the germanic and anglic (more or less) peoples in the northern continent. For 700 years the Rianneth (northern nation) considered this nation to the south 'invaders.'

Of course, the southerners weren't one monolithic culture but a mosaic of very different peoples.

The PCs were all members of a family of a no-man's-land between Rianneth and the Farsvians, territory that was technically dominated by the Farsvians after a loss 10-20 years before.

The parents end up dying in Farsvian reprisals for banditry... and go!

It was one of my most rewarding gaming experiences.

 

[Kid Charlemagne]

As I am currently redesigning my campaign world after running games in it for 14 years (almost non-stop), I'll go into how I'm doing it.

Top down vs. Bottom Up
Umm, both. Going all bottom up runs a risk of having your campaign grow like Kudzu, with little or no cohesive thought lending it purpose. So I'm locking down the big elements, deciding on how I want certain things to work, and what elements I want ot incorporate.

For example, I want to incorporate these major elements: A Plane of Dreams, increased emphasis on Fey and Faerie, a non-standard cosmology, Orcs in relatively advanced Kingdoms rather than backwards tribes, a major human Empire like the Holy Roman Empire forming the main adventuring area, wizards who attend colleges of wizardry to learn and get 'licensed,' a relatively monotheistic church being dominant in the main campaign area, swashbuckling piratical activity in one area, more scandinavian/viking activity in another, emphasis on Yuan Ti as major villains, and so on.

I've been taking notes on various things that come to mind for the past few months, but it's no more than a few pages of outline notes, some stuff I've DL'd off the net, and suggestions from people I've asked for advice.

Now I'm starting the bottom up - designing the first town that the PC's will start in, the NPCs there, and plotting out the first half-dozen adventures (in very sketchy form) and figuring out what I need to make them work, in terms of foreshadowing, NPC's to introduce who will become more important down the road, etc.

Since I've got a definite framework to work off of, I can hang bits on it, and if 90% of the nations of the world exist only in the form of a sentence fragment or two, I at least have a plan in place if I need to suddenly develop stuff.

Extra note: It'll help if the first campaign in a new campaign world starts from 1st level, so PC's can't decide some place you've hardly developed sounds interesting, and teleport there.