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slaydemons
2011-04-02, 06:18 PM
I was wondering how most people make their worlds do they start with the gods and then do citys you know stuff like that. Now I understand if people don't make worlds but I would like to hear about how others did it. More background then map making desired, XD. I personally Would start with making the gods then the history of one race then the others one at a time.

Yukitsu
2011-04-02, 06:24 PM
Start with geography and cosmology, add races that fit physiologically and psychologically to that geography, add scarcity, move borders based on wars over scarcity, add racial amnity as bred from propoganda relating to those wars, develop Gods as personifications of the resultant ideologies, ditto the political setting of the various regions, progress technology based around magic (strangely, my higher magic settings have more magic fuelled tech, while only my early era low magic settings have low. I'm a huge Victorian age fan, so that pseudo medieval setting is not my cup of tea.) add cities in strategic locations to negate territorial conquest based on the technology of the era, fill the remaining space with farms, remove amounts of forest to accomodate for the appropriate population for the era to fill in the rest of the farmland, draw in trade paths, put down roads along those trade routes, and then name everything.

slaydemons
2011-04-02, 06:26 PM
Start with geography and cosmology, add races that fit physiologically and psychologically to that geography, add scarcity, move borders based on wars over scarcity, add racial amnity as bred from propoganda relating to those wars, develop Gods as personifications of the resultant ideologies, ditto the political setting of the various regions, progress technology based around magic (strangely, my higher magic settings have more magic fuelled tech, while only my early era low magic settings have low. I'm a huge Victorian age fan, so that pseudo medieval setting is not my cup of tea.) add cities in strategic locations to negate territorial conquest based on the technology of the era, fill the remaining space with farms, remove amounts of forest to accomodate for the appropriate population for the era to fill in the rest of the farmland, draw in trade paths, put down roads along those trade routes, and then name everything.

sounds like you make a bunch of worlds XD

Talakeal
2011-04-02, 06:30 PM
Well, what are you doing it for and what do you have done so far?

Usually I just start with a concept for a single campaign. If the campaign is good I set further campaigns in the same setting, and the longer these games last the more I need to expand and detail the local setting. Using this process over the years I will eventually get a whole world.

No need to do it all at once, just do it a piece at a time as inspiration strikes you or as the campaign progresses, and don't worry about tying it all together until near the end.

slaydemons
2011-04-02, 06:49 PM
Well, what are you doing it for and what do you have done so far?

Usually I just start with a concept for a single campaign. If the campaign is good I set further campaigns in the same setting, and the longer these games last the more I need to expand and detail the local setting. Using this process over the years I will eventually get a whole world.

No need to do it all at once, just do it a piece at a time as inspiration strikes you or as the campaign progresses, and don't worry about tying it all together until near the end.

well I was thinking of making a world for my friends where it contains certain races because as of now my players are just dungeon crawling. but It inspired me enough to ask how others made their words they use

slaydemons
2011-04-02, 06:55 PM
Sorry double post computer lag

Xanmyral
2011-04-02, 06:58 PM
The only advice I can give for building worlds is to take it at your own pace, write down everything you think may be important, and try not to be to worried about world cliches but rather do what you wish to be done. It's a very long process, depending on the scale of the project, how detailed you wish to go into, as well as if you wish to recreate the area in a different time. A lot of things go into it, names, geological features, history, who discovered what, are there legend, and so forth.

A good process would be to first ask how large of an area are you starting off in, and how many countries, nations, city states, or what have you reside there. What are the governmental styles of said [insert group name], and how do they get along with the others? Who lives there and do they specialize in some fashion like food, or military arms? What is the basic history of the place, like previous rulers, or maybe revolutions, or heroes that might of came before. Don't trick your self into thinking that you can decide on all of this in a small frame of time, unless you have a ton of free time, already know what you are doing, and never sleep.

The biggest bit of advice I can give as a closer, is to have fun with it. If it feels like work, wait until inspiration hits you, or it's fun again. A lot goes into this stuff, and if you hate doing it, it will show in your work.

Swooper
2011-04-02, 08:35 PM
I used to do the outside-in (i.e. first creating cosmology, gods, continents and working my way down to the details) way most people here have described, but to accommodate my short attention span when it comes to this kind of thing my next setting will be done inside-out. I'm starting with a single frontier duchy with only a vague idea of what might lie beyond its borders. That way, I can add things I want at each time without messing anything up.

Dr.Epic
2011-04-02, 08:46 PM
After finally getting into Avatar the Last Airbender, I got a neat idea: every nation is based off a different...thing...in the same subject matter. For Avatar it was each nation was based off an element. My world has each country based off an animal.

Trinoya
2011-04-02, 09:04 PM
I start every world I make with a single theme in mind. Once I have that idea done in my head, transcribing it to a map is effortless on my end. My record is two campaign worlds, relatively well mapped, with a full political spectrum, in just a little bit over a day.

I do this all the time though... Like... all the time. I've gotten very good at it over the years.

It helps that my job lets me waste time doing it. ^_-

BlueWizard
2011-04-02, 09:10 PM
It all starts with a big bang.....

holywhippet
2011-04-02, 09:19 PM
One suggestion I've been told - grab a sheet of paper and begin drawing a map. Put in bodies of water, plains, hills, forests, mountains etc. Your brain will begin filling in details about what might be at certain places and things that happened in the past.

Tyndmyr
2011-04-02, 09:22 PM
Ways appear to vary wildly. Everyone has their own style.

I tend to try to start at some point in the distant past and see how things might have changed...but even that is just a guideline.

However, I suggest not actually filling in every area. Leave blank spaces on the map, or very sparsely detailed areas. DMs are terribly fond of adding in bits and things of their own, so this allows them an easy way to blend their ideas with yours.

Knaight
2011-04-02, 10:54 PM
I personally use an inside-outside-back inside method. An initial conflict is created, and I let it play out a bit, with details added until I have a nice chunk of established geography and the political entities involved. Once I have that I polish and fine tune it, until the macro level stuff is highly functional, consistent, interesting, and most importantly believable. Once I have that outside development continues, but there is a focus on internal stuff. Specific important cities in a country, subcultures, historical events that aren't massively critical to macro level setting (a war between two nations that defines their current relations wouldn't fit in this, a government screwing an ethnic group by destroying something precious to the culture would), and let these influence the macro level setting.

I'm not particularly able to work methodically and in an organized manner from the beginning, and the last step is by far the largest. So I work on things very haphazardly, in a format that allows later compilation. For personal notes I include everything that I decided to keep in the setting, if I were to try and publish something I would have to add a massive editing phase of deciding what to include or not.

Cealocanth
2011-04-02, 11:56 PM
To create my campaign world I began with a question, a concept if you will. How could I create a scientifically reasonable explanation for the existence of the D&D world? Warning: Long thought Process detailed out

Well I thought about it, and came up with the concept of the Ancients, a powerful race that were very technologically savvy and, in fact, were so advanced that they could re-shape the planet to their liking. They had space travel, massive cities spanning across oceans, quantum computing systems, and off world colonies. Then I decided that Nature, as a concept on it's own, did not agree with this, and destroyed the ancients, more or less causing a global apocalypse. An event known as the Great Disaster occurred, splitting continents, sinking cities, and spreading a highly radioactive mineral known as Astralite all over the planet. Now, no sufficiently advanced race would just take an apocalypse lying down, they formed a plan. Most of the Ancients simply got up and left their dying planet, but some decided to stay behind and that race of Ancients lived underground for hundreds of years. Mutation occurred and it created many of the known races as well as monsters. It was then the races such as the Drow decided that life on the surface would never be possible, and they burrowed deeper, eventually forming the Underdark. With a global interconnection of the races, a war began, and only the surviving races lived to see the blue beauty that was Azura, the new world.Welcome to the age of colonization, where the new and old races thrive to repopulate this planet, with a strange new source of magical energy, Astralite, to fuel this revolution. Then I began to go through the fine detail work, detailing the history of many races and the existence of the many planes, I used Astralite and detailed it's chemical properties. It's a highly radioactive material that has a tendency to absorb certain qualities of the substances around it and thus, can react to it's own presence, creating large magical lightning bolts known as Ley Lines. I also established the existence of an Astralite ring around the planet left over by the Disaster. Astralite's radiation is known as Astral Energy, and can be channeled, absorbed, and used to project spells. It has to be used in moderation, however, because the existence of Astral Energy in living tissue causes active DNA fluctuations, and leads to more and more severe mutation the longer it is present. With the establishment of mutation and the reason behind it, I created a race known as Raiders, the group of raving mutants that left the Underdark long before anyone else and now patrol the planet and feed off of the newly arrived races. I decided that the few remaining Ancients could not be played, but the Raiders could, seeing if you modified a character with at least 12 mutation points. I am still coming up with ideas and things to explain parts of the world just like this.

The second step was to map it out. I created a continent and basic climatological areas of the continent, then I created a very small region on the edge of a desert known as the Fertile Strip, which supports the town of Midnight Shore, where the players begin. Then I used Campaign Cartographer 3 to map it all out.

The last step is currently in play, developing the world as it is playtested. The more and more the players explore, the more I develop the world and it's people. My campaign world is actively growing today even.
So, start with an idea and think out the concepts behind this world that make it unique. Then map out specific areas taking tectonic plate movement and possible natural disasters in mind, research helps with this. Then create a small play area and extend it as your players explore the world. Also check out Rich's articles on making a campaign world, I found them quite useful.

Ranos
2011-04-03, 02:36 AM
I find world-building is way too much work, and it's not really my thing. In non-standard campaign settings, I actually get my players to do most of the setting work. I chime in here and there and compile the whole thing, but mostly it's on them. If for some reason that doesn't work out, then it's standard setting time.

akma
2011-04-03, 02:42 AM
I usually start worlds from an idea, and then work from it. If the idea can be integrated in one of my "existing" settings, then I integrate it instead of making a new setting (at extreme cases, it could lead to another plane of existence). If not, then I might make a new setting.

In your case, I suggest thinking about what adventures you want the players to go through, and then build areas from that. If you want them to fight a yeti, then they are near a tundra. If you want them to fight evil birdmen, then cliffs would be appropriate, etc.

Eldan
2011-04-03, 06:56 AM
Usually, I start with an idea. Mostly, it's "wouldn't it be cool, if".
Wouldn't it be cool if everyone lived underground? In an asteroid belt? On ships in an endless ocean? And so on. If Cosmology is important, it comes in here. As well as geography.
Number two, for me, is usually thinking about economy. What would people need to survive, how to they produce it. Which races seem obviously better adapted to that kind of world, and what would they still lack.
From that, then, grow NGOs. I usually do these before I do governments. Guilds, religions (though they can be theocracies) and so on.
Then, nations.

Ormur
2011-04-03, 08:31 AM
I mostly go outside-inside, starting with a rough map and then filling in a few important locations. It's useful to have some sort of an idea about most areas of the map without filling in all the details so you can shape the world depending on how the campaign goes and the player's wishes.

The first thing I though about what what kind of issues I wanted the setting to be about, what would the PC's be fighting for or against or dealing with. The historical theme was modernization and the recreation of an ancient empire based on some mythical ideal and how that clashes with reality. Not sure the players are very aware of it and I hope I'm not pushing it down their throats but it keeps me interested.

After that I figured out the geography. I went with a pretty conventional plausible world (or really just a continent) but you could go for a flat plane surrounded by infinite mountains where the sun is towed by the gods over the sky or something like that. I wanted to think about ocean currents, climate, a little about tectonics and how that would then shape the history, economy and culture of the races that inhabited the world.

I didn't spare much time for the greater cosmology of the planes so I used the default pantheon and had the material plane relatively isolated. The creation story didn't even come until later but I managed to connect it to the plot.

Yora
2011-04-03, 08:32 AM
This question poped up a number of times in the World-building forum in the last weeks.

http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=188544
http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=190155
http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=191614
http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=192087
http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=193582
http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=193610

I'm actually suprised by the sudden increase of interest into this subject.

Frozen_Feet
2011-04-03, 09:15 AM
Most of my world-building starts when I have several disparate ideas floating in my head, but no scene for them to play out - so to create that, I start tying them together. A setting that forms is sum of interaction between those elements.

For example, I might have few in-depth descriptions of small villages, or just singular people, together with few "empty" maps of places. So I start extrapolating qualites of the world and the people from what I know of them. I mix and match "outside-in" and "inside-out", with the goal of meeting halfway somewhere down the line.

One thing to keep in mind, though, is that world-building is an endless task; there's always somewhere to expand or something to detail better. To ever get sort of a "final" product, you must set a firm goal for yourself, a finishing line you can cross.

You must be able to say to yourself "this setting is about the X Age of World Y", and gloss over prior or future ones. Otherwise, you'll get sidetracked.

Ezeze
2011-04-03, 09:51 AM
Usually I have the players write backgrounds for their characters, then make a world around what those backgrounds need to make sense.

David wants to play a highly respected Cleric? Than obviously religion is important and the clergy politicized.

Sarah wants to play a nobleman's daughter? Then the government is a monarchy ruled primarily by a single King who then doles out pieces of land to noblemen in return for taxes and military service.

Mark wants to play a roaming bandit? Then there must be vast stretches of road the nobles are unable to completely police and extensive trade between cities.

Melissa wants to play a strange, foreign visitor to a new world? Then there must be other countries separated by enough distance to make them hard to interact with on a regular basis.

Then once you have everything the PCs need, you build around that in a way that makes sense.

1nfinite zer0
2011-04-03, 12:33 PM
+1 to Yora and Caelocanth's posts.

There's as many ways to create a world as you can imagine. The key thing is to me is finding a spark that is going to carry you through the process.

I am like Caelocanth in that I start on the outside, the over-acrhing principles of the world and then think of their effects on history until the present. (But I am a scientist and sci-fi nerd, so I like this kinda grand unifying theory approach).

But, start with where your passion is, because that is what your players will see. Don't just create a history because you feel you need it, but choose a topic or a theme that really makes you excited or sends you off into daydreams, and that energy will be reflected in your setting when other's play it.

Just_Ice
2011-04-03, 12:45 PM
If you need to ask this question, start simple.

Don't create a world, create a continent or country or even just a state/province. Then create simple versions of what surrounds this place and flesh them out when needed (having the party have to obtain local maps of the area helps).

If you're showing your players a map, have the geography planned out. It doesn't need to be too realistic, but cities will likely be near water. Work mountains, forests, swamps, deserts what have you into the dungeons you want to run.

If you're not showing your players a map, easy street; have a basic idea of the positions of the cities and dungeons/points of interest and just make up everything else as you go. The players will usually naturally append things and you can take advantage of this. If someone's mapping what's being said, they're doing the work for you and you're winning; that said make sure you don't double-back or super-impose things on top of one another.

Also, the main government of each are is good to know.

This is the "for dummies" guide, if you want to make a legitimate world you kind of have to model history; the problem is that most players care little and/or can't tell the difference. Happy building!

John Campbell
2011-04-03, 04:27 PM
I mostly don't, until I need to. Things immediately relevant to the PCs and the plot get fleshed out and detailed, but the further from them I get, the more vague I leave things. This leaves me room to maneuver as things develop. If I realize along the way that I need something, or the PCs go off on some weird unforeseen tangent, well, I can put it in, just over the horizon, or on that side street that they never had reason to go down before... whatever or wherever makes sense for the world as it's already been established.

This reflects my GMing style, which is very free-form and improvisational, and lies much more towards the sandbox end of the scale than the railroad end.

Keeping things consistent and sensible is tricky, but I'm good at holding a lot of state in my head, and at developing details on the fly (except for names; asking the random guy in the market that I invented on the spot because a PC needed someone to buy an apple from about his family won't trip me up, but asking his name almost always will... I really need to start keeping name lists for such situations), and I frequently find rational explanations for things that I wouldn't have ever pre-planned just kind of falling out of the organic growth process.

Ezeze
2011-04-03, 07:48 PM
I really need to start keeping name lists for such situations

I do that. Remember not to just take names you like - you need a good range - and cross off names once you've used them (or make a little note next to it).

GenericGuy
2011-04-03, 09:44 PM
One thing I find the most important about world building is how powerful and rare is magic? If everyone and their grandmother can toss a fireball around that’s one thing, but if magic is rare I find very unlikely that governments, religious organizations, and merchant guilds would allow walking talking WMDs do as they please without any form of “muggle” control.

begooler
2011-04-04, 01:01 AM
There's lots of things you can use as starting points.
I'm DMing a campaign that started with an idea my fiance had, which was all based off a feat in FC1, where you use a demon to fuel XP costs for the creation of magic items. Based on how the feat was written, he figured, you could chain lots of demons together and make magic items out of them for no XP cost to you.
The rest of the world was built around this. Who would want to build a magic item forge out of demons? How did they come to build this forge? How would they govern a kingdom? What would the result of pouring lots and lots and lots of (often cursed) magic items into an economy?

Sometimes a good starting point is the character concepts of your players. Okay, one player is an aquatic elf paladin, another is a dwarf necromancer, another, a etc etc. Those characters all have to come from somewhere...

You mentioned starting with deities.One thing is to decide whether you want the campaign to revolve around the divine and the world's cosmology, or if you want it to revolve around more mundane politics (like Eberron.) For the former, you'll want to think a lot about how the world was formed, and what entities might threaten it, for the latter, you'll want to think about how various kingdoms and countries came to be, what do they need to do to maintain their sovereignty, and what churches, organizations, noble families, etc sustain or threaten that structure.

Knaight
2011-04-05, 04:39 PM
One thing I find the most important about world building is how powerful and rare is magic? If everyone and their grandmother can toss a fireball around that’s one thing, but if magic is rare I find very unlikely that governments, religious organizations, and merchant guilds would allow walking talking WMDs do as they please without any form of “muggle” control.
If magic exists in a setting, then how it exists in a setting is relevant, with sheer power and rarity both being of concern. However, they represent only a small part of what the magic is, and that is only of concern if there is magic.

RandomNPC
2011-04-05, 06:46 PM
Creating a world, well you see when a mommy world and a daddy world really love one another......

On a more serious note, I toss some dots on a grid paper, throw in some geography, and start deciding what kind of city each dot is, dwarves, elves, gnomes, all placed by what I figure fits in the story. National boundaries and the like only come in if the story demands it. Usually there's some kind of drama going on for years, and it's finally gotten so bad someones got to do something about it. Ya know, mage overlords, dragons destroying towns, some epic wizard deciding to take his mountain for a fly around the continent, things like that.

Anxe
2011-04-05, 08:01 PM
Spoiled cause I wrote a whole essay.
I design my worlds by starting with a specific area. It should be the area the players are in. They'll probably be helping out some people in a small village in that area by defeating monsters that attack the poor undefended village. The village is part of some kingdom. You should design the nearby Lord's castle next. Possibly the kingdom's capital is also nearby, so you can design that as well. Perhaps there is a magical fountain/lake/cave nearby as well. As the players get more powerful you can design more of the world for them to romp around in.

At the beginning all they need to worry about is the village. They get stronger and they can deal with the lord's problems, then the king's, and then problems that are afflicting the kingdom as well as the kingdom's neighbors and then finally problems that affect the whole world. Or this can just be one problem that continually escalates. Like a Zombie-pocalypse.

That's how I design worlds. I've never designed a pantheon. I just adapted the Greek pantheon to my own campaign. Makes more sense to me than the Greyhawk pantheon or whatever D&D pantheons are currently published by TSR and Wizards. There's an awful lot of information on the Greek gods freely available on Wiki. Also, most of your players should have a basic understanding of the pantheon (It's part of the public school curriculum in the US). I like studying the Greek myths so I made a list of every possible important character or deity for them to worship in a 37-page single-spaced word document (Still growing. I've started adding minor characters.)

After I got the map and the descriptions for the cities nearby to the players I described all the other places they would want to go to (In my world, high magic exists in one geographic area and low magic is everywhere else. The players want to stay in the high-magic zone because then they have a lot more fun). I described about 30 or so major cities for them to explore and romp around in. These descriptions inhabit a 42-page single-spaced word document.

Next I built a basic cosmology. The cosmology is the description of where the planes are in relation to each other. The basic D&D cosmology has sort of a radial thing going on with the astral, ethereal, and shadow planes overlapping the material plane. The elemental planes are close to the material plane. The outer planes where demons, devils, angels, other outsider types, and gods hang out are beyond the the inner planes of elementals. The outer and inner planes are arranged radially around the material plane. I feel that these planes are placed the way they are due to where the deities of that cosmology would want to live in relation to each other. Evil deities live close to evil and good close to good.

My campaign is the Greek gods, so my cosmology was fairly simple. I looked it up. The Greek system uses layers. The bottom layer is Atlas. Above him is the other side of the world (Cause Greek mythology had a flat world, even if Greek science didn't). Above the other side of the world is the underworld (which itself has a few layers, but that's not important). Above the underworld is the Underdark (Where Drow live). Above the Underdark is the material plane. Above that is Mount Olympus. The the Elemental planes, astral, shadow, and ethereal planes exist surrounding and overlapping all of the other planes. Elysium also represents another plane far to the west on the Material level of our planar cake.

Note that in my cosmology all of the planes had physical connections. A player could conceivably walk all the way from Olympus down to the Other side of the World. Yours does not have to work this way. Planes can just be different dimensions with no physical overlaps. The overlaps in the D&D cosmology I think are mostly due to the River Styx, which flows through all the outer planes. Not sure on that though.

Since my world is now very well established (I've described every major city and a few minor ones for an area the size of Europe), I now focus on describing the important NPCs. Important NPCs would be the people above 9th level or so. Pretty much anybody who is the leader of a city or has a significant impact on the decisions that the leader of the city makes. For these guys I put a very small description of their goals and where they're from. Then I stat them out fully. The important NPCs fill a word document of about 30 pages.

Next I stat out the average soldier types for each of the nations in the world. A lot of the nations will have similar military structures which allows me to use the same soldier for them. I haven't started doing this yet for my current campaign, but for my last one I got about 20 written pages of stat blocks. This was necessary because my players were involved in a war and I wanted some soldiers for them to fight against and fight with.

Depending on what's happening or going to happen in your campaign you can skip some of these steps obviously. Or you can do your own thang. This is just what I did.
tl;dr I wrote a bunch about the order I do stuff to build my campaigns. I also bragged about how many pages of word documents I've written for those campaigns.

TheThan
2011-04-05, 08:14 PM
I usually come up with a map first. I make heavy use of photo shop for this. I use cloud effects to generate random continents. Then I fill in mountains, water masses and large forests all using the same method. Everything else is filled in later.

After that I work on placing nations. I use the same method as above. I color code the nations but otherwise leave them unnamed for the time being. I make sure the nations fit together and don’t spill over into the sea, which is actually the longest part of the process. This is all done using overlays and layering to generate a fairly sophisticated map.

Then I start looking around the map for interesting spots. See that lake in the center of the mountain range that’s bisected by a boarder? That’s a nice place to start. I zoom in and start working on the detail work; cities, towns, rivers, streams, etc. Once I’m satisfied with what I have, I move over some and do more detail work.

When I have a whole political region mapped out I begin creating a nation. I figure out what sort of political system it has, economics, military, culture, demographics, religion all that sort of stuff. Eventually the place gets a name. I try to sum up in two or less pages. Once this is done, I go back to the map and repeat the process in another nearby area.

slaydemons
2011-04-05, 08:37 PM
I usually come up with a map first. I make heavy use of photo shop for this. I use cloud effects to generate random continents. Then I fill in mountains, water masses and large forests all using the same method. Everything else is filled in later.

After that I work on placing nations. I use the same method as above. I color code the nations but otherwise leave them unnamed for the time being. I make sure the nations fit together and don’t spill over into the sea, which is actually the longest part of the process. This is all done using overlays and layering to generate a fairly sophisticated map.

Then I start looking around the map for interesting spots. See that lake in the center of the mountain range that’s bisected by a boarder? That’s a nice place to start. I zoom in and start working on the detail work; cities, towns, rivers, streams, etc. Once I’m satisfied with what I have, I move over some and do more detail work.

When I have a whole political region mapped out I begin creating a nation. I figure out what sort of political system it has, economics, military, culture, demographics, religion all that sort of stuff. Eventually the place gets a name. I try to sum up in two or less pages. Once this is done, I go back to the map and repeat the process in another nearby area.

now I wish I had photoshop I got gimp XD

Cyrion
2011-04-06, 09:17 AM
I typically start with an idea that I think would be interesting to base a series of adventures or campaigns in. If you're going to build a whole world, make it worth the effort! My longest running campaign was set in Renaissance Italy of a world where Columbus didn't come back, and magic really worked. I thought about the political and cultural consequences and ran with it from there. For this one, gods, maps, etc. were fairly straight-forward, and it was an easy world build.

I'm currently working on one where I wanted the geography to be mobile. Here, designing the system for things to move was the key, so designing a working map was the hardest part. Now that I've got my basic map, I'm thinking about a broad sketch of the history, a couple of big campaign arcs, and the first adventure to bring all of the characters together. From that, I'll add a little more detail to my maps and finish thinking about races/countries. I don't need to have everthing detailed, but I want to find something that makes each group distinct- both from each other in the game world and from other campaigns we've run.

Once I've got the big ideas down, I focus on putting in the things I think my players will enjoy and want. Things like deities, cosmology, particular cities/cultures, appropriate playgrounds for different kinds of adventures, etc. A lot of this may not be fixed in a specific place, but I've got a batch of ideas in reserve that I can put where and when I need them.

Several people have given a particularly good piece of advice- leave yourself blank space in your world of the "Beyond Here, There Be Dragons" sort. You'll have new ideas, your characters will generate adventures, etc. that will need someplace new and custom-designed to fit.

Oracle_Hunter
2011-04-06, 12:48 PM
First, read The Giant's Articles (http://www.giantitp.com/Gaming.html) on world-building. They're excellent.

Anyhow, here's a good checklist based off of my technique.

(1) What is the Theme for your world?
Every world needs some sort of hook to it. Things like "it's flat!" aren't compelling enough to justify the way the world is; you need a thematic hook that can color everything else you do. This can be anything from "piracy on the high seas" to "the balance of power" but it needs to be something that can serve as a good foundation for your setting.

(2) What is the scale of your campaign?
Aside for published worlds, you are only going to be making a campaign setting that fits for a campaign. Particularly when you're starting out, you should limit your sights to just what you need. If your PCs are low-level heroes adventuring within a single kingdom, then you need to focus on detailing that kingdom. If your PCs are going to be planar travelers then it will be very important for you to figure out how the planes fit together.

(3) Start with the most important part of your campaign. Work out from there.
Once you've figured out what your campaign is going to focus on, start with that focus. If it's a kingdom, figure out how the kingdom works first and how your BBEG fits into it. While you're working on that you're bound to raise more questions about issues like what gods there are, who are the neighbors of the kingdom, and how races fit into it. When you answer them, you will be doing so with the most important parts of your campaign world (i.e. the campaign & the world's theme) in mind.

As an example, here's the application of the checklist according to my most recent campaign world: Gold & Glory (for D&D4)
(1) What is the Theme for your world?
"Gold & Glory" - the idea that the adventurers are going to be able to find fame & riches through adventure. As a side issue, I also decided to incorporate all PC races from published D&D4 books into the setting, but the theme was predominant.

(2) What is the scale of your campaign?
Gold & Glory was intended to support a Heroic Tier campaign first and foremost - start at LV 1 and ending with LV 11.

(3) Start with the most important part of your campaign. Work out from there.
So what is most important here? Well, opportunities for "gold & glory" of course! This means we need a world with few existing "heroes of legend" and some place where lots of treasure is available and the power structure is sufficiently fluid that Heroic Tier PCs might be able to find a spot in it. So I designed the continent of Arcadia.

Arcadia's predominant features are the existence of a fallen empire (for treasure) and the total collapse of government (for a power vacuum). So first I needed to figure out what this Empire was all about and why there were not currently any major powers picking up the pieces. I created the Alabaster Empire and decided that its fall was connected to the intelligentsia being seduced by the Dark Side (necromancy) while the aristocracy was seduced by Devils. The Devils managed to create an elaborate ritual which opened a 108 year Gateway to Hell in the capitol city and tainted the blood of the aristocracy to power it (thus creating Tieflings). The devils and their minions overran the nice parts of the Empire and the survivors either took up living in hard-to-reach (and poor) parts of Arcadia or fleeing to the former "vacation islands" of the aristocracy which soon became the only effective "government" for the continent - a government which rarely reached past the islands themselves.

From there I worked on the different regions of Arcadia and sketched out a path for my initial adventure (a "track the fugitive" quest). As I went on I got to thinking about the cosmology (what were Devils like here; why did they target the Alabaster Empire), other powers interested in Arcadia (who else is interested in Arcadia; how do they approach it) and so on.
Hope that helps :smallsmile:

Knaight
2011-04-06, 11:05 PM
First, read The Giant's Articles (http://www.giantitp.com/Gaming.html) on world-building. They're excellent.

Anyhow, here's a good checklist based off of my technique.

(1) What is the Theme for your world?

(2) What is the scale of your campaign?

(3) Start with the most important part of your campaign. Work out from there.


This is all brilliant. Its what has worked best for the in the past, though I only now see that I've been doing it (I tend towards intuition in gaming, and rarely analyze highly functional methods that don't need improvement).

That said, for question 3 it works better if one allows for a great many campaigns. Starting with what works for one and building out until you have variety is ideal, in the best published settings, my best settings, and the best settings I've seen of others a bunch of stories can be told, and with that a bunch of campaigns played.

Oracle_Hunter
2011-04-07, 12:33 AM
That said, for question 3 it works better if one allows for a great many campaigns. Starting with what works for one and building out until you have variety is ideal, in the best published settings, my best settings, and the best settings I've seen of others a bunch of stories can be told, and with that a bunch of campaigns played.
Published settings require exponentially much more work than most homebrews ever see. As I said, I choose to focus on "what I need for my campaign" because that ensures that the essentials are covered. Usually, you'll find that after answering some questions essential to the campaign, new ones on the periphery show up.

Admittedly, it can take some practice (and ideally, education in history, economics, and political theory) to pick up the appropriate questions to ask & answer. However, the more you unfold the world, the broader the sorts of campaigns it can support. One-note worlds rarely get very far in Question 3 territory - after awhile you simply have to ask questions about the non-pirate nations in your Pirate World :smallbiggrin:

Knaight
2011-04-07, 01:07 AM
Published settings require exponentially much more work than most homebrews ever see. As I said, I choose to focus on "what I need for my campaign" because that ensures that the essentials are covered. Usually, you'll find that after answering some questions essential to the campaign, new ones on the periphery show up.

I agree entirely, but that doesn't mean that they are significantly superior. Better documented, with everything done upfront yes, probably more detailed until the homebrew has been consistently used for a very long time, but not better. Among these core things that allows a world to feel real is that it allows a great many stories. This isn't particularly difficult, and can happen by accident.

Boring for most example below:

As an example, I'll use my current favorite personal setting, something by the name of Alchemquest. Originally it was an improvised setting tailored to a specific group of players who wanted adventure during a war, so two nations were made that were at war, with implications of others. These were hinted at, dragged in, and once I had a full geographical area (its a small archipelago, so that didn't take much), that campaign ended, giving me a starting point for some major revisions and polish. This inadvertently has allowed me to GM games such as the following, all very different, within a grand total of 1 of the countries in the setting.

An investigative game focused upon an alchemist who's research has clearly been stolen and is being exploited for someone else's profit.

A more quest based game in which a group of traders and caravan guards tries to find someone who holds a secret that the local government has otherwise covered up, complicated by the fact that said person hid in a zone of perpetual civil wars.

A political intrigue based game, where the PCs were all operatives under a noble who had been poisoned, trying to maneuver within the court in light of that fact.

An attempt at damage control in the light of an uprising and power vacuum that spun way out of control.


The point is, none of these were intended, I simply made sure that the setting was worked out to the point where all of them could happen. The setting should feel alive, and that means seeing that all sorts of disparate parts are worked on, and rendered as a cohesive whole.

Oracle_Hunter
2011-04-07, 02:33 AM
The point is, none of these were intended, I simply made sure that the setting was worked out to the point where all of them could happen. The setting should feel alive, and that means seeing that all sorts of disparate parts are worked on, and rendered as a cohesive whole.
Of course.

I'll be honest - creating a "fully realized world" is something I do so organically I'd have a hard time creating an outline for it. I would never consider a world where only one sort of adventure can happen, simply because that's not a world - it's a scenario.

However, making a world "feel alive" is something which can only be accomplished by experience. IMHO, the Giant's articles on world-building are about the best substitute to experience you can get in this area. He points out the large-scale issues you need to pay attention to, but only the designer can actually resolve those issues.

Fortunately, most world-builders don't need "living" worlds - they just need some place to set their campaign. Start small, and over time you can learn to build richer and larger settings.

Knaight
2011-04-07, 01:40 PM
However, making a world "feel alive" is something which can only be accomplished by experience. IMHO, the Giant's articles on world-building are about the best substitute to experience you can get in this area. He points out the large-scale issues you need to pay attention to, but only the designer can actually resolve those issues.

With this I agree wholeheartedly. Looking back at my earliest settings, from when I was still new the living world notion is largely absent, either with a lack of conflicts within the setting barring those the PCs are involved in or a sort of stasis until the PCs change it. In short, awful, low grade settings that nobody should have fun in, and that my players did is nothing short of miraculous (though they were also very new). Experience is key, but nonetheless odds are one will get there faster if they have access to the sort of resources this thread provides, and know targets they should be getting to.

Shyftir
2011-04-07, 05:36 PM
Dawn of Worlds (http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:QEDlAOIgeI8J:www.clanwebsite.org/games/rpg/Dawn_of_Worlds_game_1_0Final.pdf+dawn+of+worlds&hl=en&gl=us&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEESg0TjVZ7nlU1S53sLHKc3VXnYnrGpCRTaUAXEgd nt19UdDWYGOYR6AliHWxXnUKuQSq5shOufOgXdDYDuq5-o_KTkyxvNpdQ2b2paIX7Ptk4kf4b2zOkEeo66qsk1puGIsEqgc v&sig=AHIEtbTY-3vieMMj1RPOlNTlZk1lHc8mWA)

That is all.


P.S. It wasn't coming up on the original website so that is the link to the GoogleDocs copy. To find the original site just search "Dawn of Worlds."

TheThan
2011-04-08, 02:31 PM
now I wish I had photoshop I got gimp XD

Here's an example I'm working on. Its an unfinished geographic map, but it should do.


http://i53.photobucket.com/albums/g42/TheThan/DnDmapgeo.jpg


I realize now that I should be using vector maps for this, it'd probably be easier and faster. (guess i'll have to study up on vector maps now). anyway I don't have any overlays done (for wooded foot hills etc), and none of the oceanic stuff either.

The key goes something like this:
greens: forest
dark green: dense
light green: light

Browns: mountains
dark brown: tall peaks
light brown: foot hills and smaller mountains

yellow: boring plains
orange: deserts
light blue: ice fields

Gwyn chan 'r Gwyll
2011-04-08, 10:27 PM
First, I drew some tectonic plates. Then I drew the direction these plates were moving. Then I drew a bunch of lines. These were the high points, the mountain ranges and island chains. Then I drew the continents and islands around them. Then I drew the ocean currents. Then I drew terrain. Then I had my map.

After that, I do whatever the hell I want.

Edit: For my current world-building project, I already knew what basic cultures I wanted. I knew I wanted the Greek-based Hill humans, the Semi-nomadic Vandal/Goth/Dark Ages horse plains humans, the marsh-dwelling innately magical gnomes, the elves living either in mountain valleys, jungles, or in the scattered forests on the plains, and the dwarves living in underground cities, and lastly the strange mysterious newcomer race from over the sea, the Roma/Gypsy based Halflings, and the rising force of the Goblin civilization from the desert, which I just realized I could make arabic in culture, and then make them non-evil to avoid... y'know. Complications. Cause exceedingly polite arabic Hobgoblins is win.

Since then, I added the Tiefling Byzantine Empire to bring it up to 4th edition, decided that the incoming mysterious race had 4 arms, 4 eyes, huge gaping mouth with lots of pointy teeth, really thing and gangly, and above all dark age IRISH in culture, and basically put in different cultures to fill in the blank spaces in the land. For example, I made some Norse dudes to fill up some mountainous, cold, volcanic islands. Some other islands have a generic german/english culture, probably where any adventure with new players starts, as it'll be the most familiar fantasy land feeling wise. I generally have lots of small tiny cultures based off of various cultures from the Caucasus: Georgians, Armenians, Circassians, Alans, etc.

The gods and such I decided afterwards as well. Well, I decided from the start that each culture has it's own religion, mostly excluding the other ones. The Dwarves have their gods, the Elves have their... really complicated religion, the Tieflings have their monotheistic god...

soyeah.