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Yora
2013-07-22, 02:27 PM
In the worldbuilding forum we tend to see a lot of world that people are working on for months or years to use in campaigns in the future, but I quite suspect that this is more the exception than the norm for most games that are run using homebrew settings.

And I am quite curious. Other than a one-shot and a mini-campaign I ran in my homebrew setting, pretty much every game I've played in my 15 years of playing were in published settings (mostly FR and some Shadowrun). What kinds of worlds have you been actually playing in? When I ran my homebrew world mini-campaign, we never went to any other settlement than the starting village and there were only four named NPCs in total, so the rest of the world didn't really get explored in any way. And accordingly, there wasn't really much going on that would differentiate from any other generic kitchen-sink world.

But to people who played longer running campaigns in homebrew settings, could you give a short summary on what those worlds were like and what unique traits and quirks they had? I think this might be quite interesting to hear.

Fighter1000
2013-07-22, 03:29 PM
My friend's campaign setting was pretty good. In the earliest stages of that world, there were six deities: one was called Fire, the other Water, another was Earth, and Darkness, and Light, and Air, and you pretty much get the picture. They all originally inhabited this island called Xinos, which is where our first campaign for this world/setting took place. After that first campaign ended, the six gods and goddesses (Fire, Air, Water, Earth, Light, Darkness) left the island of Xinos to go tend to other places. They left behind several mortals to be the new gods and goddesses (our player characters) of that island.
In our newer campaign, there's this evil death cult who is trying to gather all the divine artifacts of the newer deities so that they can use them to make their leader a god. As the PCs, it is our job to stop them, by getting all of the divine artifacts before they do, and giving them to this order of paladins (one of the current PCs is a member of this paladin order).
So yeah, that's pretty much my friend's world. There's more I could say, but I think I've rambled on enough for now.

QuintonBeck
2013-07-22, 06:07 PM
I've run two campaigns in custom settings and I'm working on a third. Each has gotten increasingly more complex and thus more time consuming however so by my fifth or so I likely will be within the exceptions of taking years to plan.

My first one was a shoddy, you make a character I'll make a story. I had a rough idea that the heroes were ancient heroes of lore who had been drained to 1st level and stored somewhere and that's where we started. I layered in a vampire conspiracy to rule the world (they had stored the heroes cause their essence was so tasty I decided) I layered on a little complexity as we went but the kingdom had no name, I had no idea if there were other kingdoms, and all names were made up on the spot. (Players still remember the name King Reginald though, which was good cause I forgot it the session after I had come up with it haha)

My second homebrew campaign setting I worked on for a couple months before deploying it, laying out some basic geography and nations, cribbing some history (colonization ftw!) and set the players lose on the coast of the colonies intending for not too much political intrigue or such. My players and I seem to be attracted to intrigue though and so a few sessions in I had to start expanding on the existing nations and how they operated to give my players politics to play in.

The campaign I'm currently designing I'm working quite diligently on. I need a map to help lay out the nations I have in mind, but I've been working on coming up with a role for every class and thus expanding the inner workings of each nation. I have a custom pantheon of gods along with plans to detail the as yet undetermined but more than 200 year history of the modern age.

So yeah, homebrewing a setting becomes an addiction. From my experience at least. Why waste time learning a premade? Goes to, well I wish I had some fluff to explain things... To, I will create the world and the familial history of every blacksmith in the realm! *lightning strike*

zorenathres
2013-07-22, 07:21 PM
But to people who played longer running campaigns in homebrew settings, could you give a short summary on what those worlds were like and what unique traits and quirks they had? I think this might be quite interesting to hear.

Well, my experience is quite the opposite, as a Player I have tried a few one-shots & other written modules (& once played a terrible game in Ravenloft), though as a DM I always avoided the established settings. Over the years I have run a few different homebrew worlds, though the more recent ones I have made are much more highly developed...

While I once used to use the Forgotten Realms setting as a base (sorta combined with Dark Sun), I turned it on its head & added massive floating continents (the earth released them in the cataclysm), & you guessed it, another apocalypse, making a majority of the surface a barren desert. Most players never recognized the setting, because most of civilization had crumbled & the knowledge of the previous age was lost.

I currently run a D&D 3.5 campaign based on the Primordia (http://www.gogwiki.com/wiki/Primordia) setting, where the last surviving humans hide deep underground in bunkers & habitats, while apathetic machines rule the uninhabitable surface. With Magi-Tech as a base for the technology of the setting.

I also occasionally run a d20 future campaign based on the Berserker Series (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berserker_%28Saberhagen%29), where humans try to stop the inevitable annihilation of their species by ancient machines.

Most of my One-Shots I run revolve around my homebrew d20 zombie apocalypse setting, with players deciding when they want to begin (during the initial outbreak, the mid-way survival treks, or the future where they are trying to rebuild society).

I guess I have a taste for the PA settings :smallbiggrin:

DigoDragon
2013-07-23, 07:29 AM
But to people who played longer running campaigns in homebrew settings, could you give a short summary on what those worlds were like and what unique traits and quirks they had?

My homebrew world of Dracadia was inspired by the cartoon series Thundarr the Barbarian (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thundarr_the_Barbarian). Its a post-apocalypse savage world filled with the remanant abberations of a long-ago failed alien invasion. Scattered around the continent of Dracadia (formally North America, but the land is so vastly changed it took 10 sessions for my players to notice it) are walled cities of civilization that try to survive day to day.

Because of the scarcity of resources, adventurering parties have formed to scour the uncharted landscape for the lost wealth of the past. Dungeons were forgotten bunkers (some small and fairly tame, others as bizzare as Fallout's Vault-Tec). There were two instances of the party finding crashed alien ships. Neither instance ended well, but the ships were destroyed.

The gods of this world are actually super computers in orbit around the planet. They were originally built by the prior civilization to ensure the world's survival and upkeep, but after centuries of doing such they have developed their own ideas of how "survival" is interpreted. Now they fight each other for the final say on how the world should survive, though I have reinterpreted some of the gods.

Tiamat (a former weather satellite) believes that civilization should be "green", but her methods of sending her followers to attack polluted cities makes most people think that she is a goddess of conquoring. Pelor's doctrine involves clensing the undead with fire (a favored element of his followers). This is because he was formerly an orbital solar plant that beamed down microwave energy to collectors (that no longer exist). So now when a cleric calls upon a Flame Strike, it's actually an orbital bombardment of a literal sense.

I've only touched upon it, but most of the planes are other worlds. The Outlands is actually a terraformed section of Mars around mount Olympus (which is in game the impossibly high mountain where Sigil floats above. Sigil itself is a derilict donut-shaped space station with teleporters that can take you anywhere, hence it's "City of Doors" rumor)

prufock
2013-07-23, 07:43 AM
We rarely play in prepublished settings. In fact, lately I've been on sort of a setting-creation kick. Our group's other DM also tends to create his own. Currently, my list of completed or in-progress settings includes:

Rose Lake: Rose Lake is my default, catch-all setting. No specific ideas were behind its creation, other than "we need a place to have adventures," and I crafted a town, then a kingdom, then several kingdoms. It's a standard d20 world, where any and all D&D material can exist, though not necessarily all in one area.

Of course I've made my own tweaks and additions. One is the inclusion of the Mission, a fake atheist humanist organization that claims to be helping people, but it's really a sort of anti-theist cult that is attempting to infiltrate and eliminate all other churches.

Another tweak is that the reason elves live so long and don't need to sleep is because they actually DO sleep - but intermittently and for long periods, going into a suspended animation-like state similar to using somec in Orson Scott Card's The Worthing Saga.

Weird West: (http://weird-west.wikispaces.com/The+Weird+West) You can basically guess how this works, link provided if you want details. It's a bit of a technological bump from standard fantasy fare - there are guns, steam engines, etc. It's set on a desert frontier, with native races and settler races that sometimes clash.

Empires: This is gearing up to become my more standard sword & sorcery setting, stripped down to a few essentials. Only 6 gods, and they all inhabit the mortal realm, albeit in difficult-to-access locales that serve the purpose of "planes." There are likewise 6 "empires" - I use quotation marks because 2 of those empires are loosely organized tribal/gypsy groups.

Skull & Bones: D&D at sea, this is a ship-based exploration setting with pirates. I've only just started working on this one, so it isn't fleshed out yet.

Yet-Unnamed Oriental Adventures-type setting: Again, still fleshing this out. It's going to use an honour/reputation variant rule.

City of Monsters: A more modern setting, this is about what it sounds like. I appreciate the basic idea behind Vampire: the Masquerade (monsters are real and exist in our society), but absolutely hate the actual setting and system that goes with it. So this is my idea for doing it better.

The Godslayers: A setting built to tell a single story. Ages ago the gods and humans coexisted and humanity flourished. As they flourished, they became arrogant and demanding of the gods, which in turn caused the gods to become spiteful. With the gods becoming neglectful and/or oppressive, civilization crumbled to a state of near-starvation among humankind. Then one day come the Godslayers. Different from birth, they displayed special powers. People spoke of a long-kept prophecy that new benevolent gods would rise up to defeat and usurp the old.

Faerie Fire: A low-tech setting that introduces the fey as the main antagonists through something called faerie fire - taint rules adapted to the setting. Actually inspired greatly by your Ancient Lands setting, with my own tweaks and turns. Not fleshed out fully yet, and may never be... too much to do.

Not sure how many of these I'll ever actually have time to finish; some might languish as thought bubbles forever. Most of these settings are actually designed to be E6 games. Also noteworthy is that most of these settings will exist in the same world, just different parts of it at different technological levels and possibly time periods.

BWR
2013-07-23, 07:54 AM
Currently playing a setting we're calling DwarfQuest.
We started out as dwarves basicaly at stoneage level. We had some knowledge of how to use copper, but in our tiny little cave we were resource-starved. We gradually discovered other caves (most importantly behind a weird, very hard and green flat piece of 'rock'), have gradually discovered ancient dwarven cities now in ruins for thousands of years with other races living there. The underground world is immense, with one cavern hundreds of miles long and several miles high at its highest.

So far we have just had tantalizing hints about the fall of the dwarven empire, but we have discovered other dwarven remnants, mostly with better tech than us (some even had iron!). So far it is just an exploratory game that has been going on for just over a year now, but the PCs have dreams of cleaning out the infestation of goblins (excpet for the nice ones), hobgoblins, giants, dragons and gnomes and rebuilding the ancient dwarven glory.

Eldan
2013-07-23, 08:00 AM
I actually never got to play in Etherworld, despite having close to a hundred pages of notes on it. At least, not in a game that lasteed. I've started two or three online games and they all imploded early. I might try a Skype game at some point.

Apart from that... when I still played at tables, six, seven years ago now, I think, we never really bothered with developing a setting much. New pieces were introduced as necessary and aprt from that, the world was just a generic kitchensink of parts from the player's handbook, monster manual and whatever earlier DMs had thrown in.

There was a continent. It had a map. There was a big city, I forgot the name. There was a forest kingdom full of elves, I think it was called Blackwood. The dwarves lived in a mountain we never bothered to name. There was a frozen north, a lot of forest...

Yeah. Barely anything, really.

falloutimperial
2013-07-23, 10:00 AM
A great start for a homebrew setting is the "Dawn of Worlds," in which the players and DM create the world together. The players get a say, that one guy gets his race of Assassin's Creed look-alikes, and you get to make everything nice and interesting. The world has history as petty and pointless as actual history. We're currently a handful of sessions in and going strong.

Silus
2013-07-23, 10:18 AM
I've got a homebrew world I'm using at the moment. No "real" name for it yet, but the campaign is called Planebreak, so I suppose that'll do.

There are some problems with it however.

1) I'm not much of a world builder, so I only really planned plot-related locations and whatnot. Which is terrible because, well, players.

2) 5/6 of the players all have double digits more gaming experience than I do and are, honestly, making me pay for my inexperience by pointing out holes in the world (Well how does this government work? Why is this like that?) to the point that I believe I told them to just shut up about it. :smallannoyed:

3) The initial starting conditions lead to some...upsets. Basically the world has been under the equivalent of the Elder Evil "Seal of Binding" sign, locking the world off from the planes and the divine (and essentially the rest of the universe barring the moon and sun). So lack of direct divine power and planar shenanigans lead to some...problems as pointed out, often, by the players.

4) The world itself is a sort of low fantasy in that there's only the core races, Orc, Centaur and Drow (Goblins are there as well at the...insistence of the players). No dragons, no magical or mythical creatures unless it's relevant to the plot or falls into the "cryptid" category or are remnants of before the aforementioned Seal of Binding was thrown up.

The world, I feel, has promise, but needs quite a bit of work to be "up to snuff".

Hunter Noventa
2013-07-23, 10:25 AM
our previous campaign was a massive Gestalt campaign, where every character had been pulled into this strange sort-of Dyson Sphere of a world to be a 'Knight', and these Knights were all competing to have the chance to have the world reborn into a whole new plane entirely of their own design, they could make themselves into gods or whatever if they wanted to.

In the end, the mad scientist who built the sentai squad won, but man was that final battle a doozy, what with Airships and Citymechs fighting tarrasques, my Soulknife/Swordsage wielding a Mind Blade several times her size against a power-hungry emperor who tried to go all Berserk Evangelion only to be cut down, and literally banishing my character to the depths of hell with his dying breath...

Someday we'll play the sequel campaign, where the mad Scientist, after making terrible misuse of temporal physics to break things in an even more insane way than the DM could have imagined, created a new world that would be even crazier.

QuintonBeck
2013-07-23, 10:26 AM
My homebrew world of Dracadia was inspired by the cartoon series Thundarr the Barbarian (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thundarr_the_Barbarian). Its a post-apocalypse savage world filled with the remanant abberations of a long-ago failed alien invasion. Scattered around the continent of Dracadia (formally North America, but the land is so vastly changed it took 10 sessions for my players to notice it) are walled cities of civilization that try to survive day to day.

Because of the scarcity of resources, adventurering parties have formed to scour the uncharted landscape for the lost wealth of the past. Dungeons were forgotten bunkers (some small and fairly tame, others as bizzare as Fallout's Vault-Tec). There were two instances of the party finding crashed alien ships. Neither instance ended well, but the ships were destroyed.

The gods of this world are actually super computers in orbit around the planet. They were originally built by the prior civilization to ensure the world's survival and upkeep, but after centuries of doing such they have developed their own ideas of how "survival" is interpreted. Now they fight each other for the final say on how the world should survive, though I have reinterpreted some of the gods.

Tiamat (a former weather satellite) believes that civilization should be "green", but her methods of sending her followers to attack polluted cities makes most people think that she is a goddess of conquoring. Pelor's doctrine involves clensing the undead with fire (a favored element of his followers). This is because he was formerly an orbital solar plant that beamed down microwave energy to collectors (that no longer exist). So now when a cleric calls upon a Flame Strike, it's actually an orbital bombardment of a literal sense.

I've only touched upon it, but most of the planes are other worlds. The Outlands is actually a terraformed section of Mars around mount Olympus (which is in game the impossibly high mountain where Sigil floats above. Sigil itself is a derilict donut-shaped space station with teleporters that can take you anywhere, hence it's "City of Doors" rumor)

I want to play in this setting so bad!! I've always loved this kind of idea and this setting sounds so perfect! Gah Digo now I can't stop thinking about this awesomeness!

Jay R
2013-07-23, 10:46 AM
In the world I'm playing in right now, the Old World has five nations - England, Spain, France, Germany, and Austria-Italy. It has been static after the Mage Wars 1,000 years ago nearly destroyed the world. There have been no battles for centuries, and spellcasters are extremely rare - each kingdom has a Court Mage and an adept. Unlicensed wizards are feared.

Recently a New World was discovered across the ocean, and the PCs met by joining an expedition to start the Roanoke colony. Exploring the new world, we found evidence of other races, and eventually a Spelljammer ship (which we crashed.

We eventually found evidence that elven orphans are kidnapped and sold in slavery on other planets. In uncovering this plot, we also found the long-lost heir of the aging king, and brought him back to England, where we fought in (and won) the first major battle in centuries.

We have reason to believe that the heirs enemies have allies from another world.

JusticeZero
2013-07-25, 05:48 AM
Currently? See sig. No arcane or divine magic at all, just psionics. Landlocked by what amounts to a nuclear accident involving psionic items. Pretty standard fantasy fare nonetheless.

Calimehter
2013-07-25, 09:46 PM
Earlier this year I ran a mini-campaign set in "real life" late medieval Europe. It was basically Harry Dresden-style storytelling set 700 years in the past using a heavily modified D&D 3.5 system. It was a lot of fun to research and write up, and the first few sessions went well, but RL concerns put things on hiatus.

Kikon9
2013-07-25, 11:34 PM
I personally hate using pre-published campaign settings, aside from crossovers, so I tend to make plenty of settings. These are the ones I've used the most.

Many-Earths
A setting I made for a sci-fi game. The main premise is that an apocalyptic event in the not-too-distant future linked earth to alternate universes where major events in evolutionary and geological history ended up differently. So now there are sapient velociraptors from a world where dinosaurs never died out, neanderthals, and a weird trilobite species with advanced nanotechnology.

"Super-Earth"
An unnamed superhero setting that focuses on an event that caused tidal waves to hit basically every country with a pacific coastline, and the more technically minded supers created a giant arcology to house all of the displaced survivors and supers. Has tons of magic, mutants, and probably more aliens than it should.

Dragonsands
Desert world where dragons rule feudal kingdoms and keep the humanoid races in line with a false religion worshiping a God-Dragon named Sar'thal. When in actuality, Sar'thal is the name of a man who became a monster in order to decimate the outer planes and seal the gods away inside the sun, which allowed dragons to rise to dominance.

Rot and Steel
Basically, a standard fantasy setting, but with an infectious zombie plague and a warforged robot apocalypse. The main idea is that divine magic is considered evil because even some of the gods became infected by the plague.

Glimbur
2013-07-27, 08:46 PM
I was one of the DMs who ran a multi-party world for two semesters.

The core of the idea was a place called Administratum. The question we wanted to answer was: what does a lawful evil city look like? We ended up with a place ruled by nine Judges, where laws were determined by who could pay the most, and which was in danger of falling to Hell (which is an idea I shamelessly stole from Planescape: Torment).

There was also the Azure Isle. Crystals, floating in the sky, and Good. However... the reason it floats is because people with psychic potential were being kidnapped by the mind flayers that live in the bottom of the island. The Good party dealt with this.

There was also a neutral city, but the party didn't spend a lot of time there.

And there was a forest outside Administratum, and a desert somewhere, and a lake under Azure City. But the Evil party mostly stayed in Administratum, and the Good party went from neutral-ia to the Azure Isle to Administratum for the end of campaign PvP extravaganza. The Good party won the fight by bribing most of the Evil party to throw the fight, which I was surprised by.