tips for new world to be written

[Azazel_Unbound]

So, I have finally decided to fully commit to homebrewing something for my fellow players and making something original for myself. So, I'm turning to the community and asking, are there any tips more experienced DMs would be able to pass onto me? Things to avoid,stuff to not get stuck on, good habits to follow.

[Kane0]

Can you be more specific? What are you picking as your starting point?

[pwykersotz]

There's lots of tips, but threads like this often devolve around certain topics unless there's a clear goal. Maybe if there's a little more clarity on the question, there's a little more chance of useful info.

What are you designing? Worlds? Classes? Spells? Items?
What level of time investment do you picture yourself making in this?
Do you have a single dedicated table, or multiples?
What style of games do you run? More free-form and sandboxy? Pre-written modules? Some form of hybrid?
What sorts of game systems have you played before, other than 5e?

As far as general advice goes, start small and work your way up. A spell. An item. A monster. A city. Keep it dialed in and slowly expand. It's easy to get trapped in world-building mode when a simple castle, town, hamlet, and outpost will do the job. Focus on what your players will interact with most, and always ask yourself if you would have fun being a player with what you write.

[Azazel_Unbound]

I'm currently working on the more important bits of lore in the world. How it came to be more precisely. I'm trying to keep it vague so I don't get too caught up in it. Once I am satisfied with what I have I intended to a tleast lay out a few countries on the main continent. Once I had that done, I was gonna do a major zoom in to one town or so. I remember a mention of starting small in the dmg as a tip, but I wanted to at least have some lore to the world. Its something I always appreciate, and I know at least one or two of my lot of players will enjoy to hear.

Time investment wise, I'm hoping for something long term. I'm planning events to happen in the background of the player's current missions and tasks that will grow and become something the players will be more aware of later in the game.

Table wise, no more than two groups, and I'm unsure whether I will play them in seperate timelines or allow echos of their adventures effect one another.

Playstyle wise, I'm hoping to keep it open for my players. As I mentioned earlier, I also want to have a plot arch planned and forming in the background.

5e has been my first and only one I'm afraid.

Does this help narrow down my issue?

[Kane0]

Firstly get a kernel of a concept you are going to work on and expand from. Decide if you are going to start big and zoom in or start small and zoom out. Different DM and creative styles lend themselves to each and can be commonly described as how adept you are at pulling stuff out of your butt as you DM.

Then get yourself one A4 piece of paper.

On one side, doodle a map or other reference point. Big scale means a world or country map, small usually means a town or particular building. A dungeon even.
On the other side scribble your notes, the shorter the better. Big scale starts with world origins, multiverse layout and whatever deities you're going to be going with, small starts with specific NPCs and situations that will be dealt with by the PCs.

From there prep what you need for a session 0. Fill your players in on the basic premise you have, bounce ideas off of your players. An easy way to get worldbuilding is to outsource :smallwink:

After sharing your concept and getting it off the ground start fleshing out any deviations from the 'norm' (either the D&D norm, the Tolkienesque norm, etc). You pretty much have the option of going 'stock', 'stock with a twist' or 'bizarro' for any particular item such as races. Be careful not to get too audacious at this point, you're going to work your way up to it over time so you don't drown both yourself and your players in notes and unique tidbits.

The important thing is to focus on what will see play, and leaving the background where it belongs in the background. If you trouble yourself with all the extras working off-screen you will overwhelm yourself with work for no benefit if and when you get around to playing. It's good to have an idea of how things will go but your first priority will be making something you can sit down with your group and use to play and develop, not engineering an entire working system/society/what-have-you that may or may not be useful when the time arises.

Ideally you should be thinking of designing smaller adventures you can string together instead of a grand campaign spanning months/years. if you're lucky you can blend oneshots, adventures and full on campaigns into the same gameworld as you progress, but keep your expectations manageable and realistic or the biggest problem you will encounter is writers block.

Edit: As far as specific tips go I'm a huge fan of the 'Rule of 3'. It's just great. Other than that, try not to reinvent the wheel if you don't have to.

[Specter]

The first thing to worry about is the tone of the world/campaign: is it gritty, fantastic, horrific, whimsical...?. With that covered, you can start giving a direction.

After that, there are places, people, monsters and so much it'll make your head spin. I find it's easier to start thinking about important places first - like where the elven hero sacrificed himself fighting a devil, or the waterfall that covers the entrance to the Underdark, etc. With that in mind, things kinda unfold by themselves.

[Chugger]

Have a sense of where it will grow but start small and controllable.

If you can give some choice, that's great (i.e. cool things to do). But you don't have to, if you can't handle that - the more choice you give the more you either have to plan (or the more you have to be really great at spontaneous adventure generation - and we don't all have that skill).

Don't overwhelm them. Give them a sense of the world and their small part in it - but how maybe they could one day be great in it - and then let them discover stuff as they go - don't give it all in one big dump.

[pwykersotz]

I'm currently working on the more important bits of lore in the world. How it came to be more precisely. I'm trying to keep it vague so I don't get too caught up in it. Once I am satisfied with what I have I intended to a tleast lay out a few countries on the main continent. Once I had that done, I was gonna do a major zoom in to one town or so. I remember a mention of starting small in the dmg as a tip, but I wanted to at least have some lore to the world. Its something I always appreciate, and I know at least one or two of my lot of players will enjoy to hear.

Time investment wise, I'm hoping for something long term. I'm planning events to happen in the background of the player's current missions and tasks that will grow and become something the players will be more aware of later in the game.

Table wise, no more than two groups, and I'm unsure whether I will play them in seperate timelines or allow echos of their adventures effect one another.

Playstyle wise, I'm hoping to keep it open for my players. As I mentioned earlier, I also want to have a plot arch planned and forming in the background.

5e has been my first and only one I'm afraid.

Does this help narrow down my issue?

Ah World-building. I do recommend checking out GITP's subforum (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?57-World-Building). It's low activity, but there's some good stuff there.

But beyond that, here's a few thoughts. Take them with a grain of salt.

Overarching Theme. Look at different fantasy worlds and compare the feel. Do you like the Avatar: The Last Airbender world? Discworld? Lord of the Rings? Narnia?
Simple vs Complex. Your scope is good, it's pretty reigned in, and that lets you put your major mental energy into what the players will experience.
Get player feedback. Talk to your players about the sort of world they want to play in and ask for feedback regularly. Try to temper your ideas with theirs and create a compromise.

Regarding lore: Check out (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?497963-Teaching-new-tricks-to-old-gods&highlight=shar) these threads (http://secretsofthearchmages.net/Threads/WOTC/2008/Deities%20and%20the%20Planes/964088.html). They have some pretty interesting ideas that should inspire you one way or another. Remember that what the players know doesn't have to be the truth when it comes to myth and legend, so if you start with an idea and you decide later it's no good, you can swap it out and tell them a new legend in its place. Usually for a good origin, you need a great destroyer and a great creator. Exceptions abound, but these are the most common way. It can be good vs evil, law vs chaos, light vs darkness, or anything else. But a core threat that isn't quite gone or is even very much still around is a pretty big deal if the world is overrun with monsters and other stuff that needs adventurers to sort it out.

Make good use of generators for Towns and then fill in the blanks.
Medieval Demographics Made Easy (http://www222.pair.com/sjohn/blueroom/demog.htm)
Town Generator (http://www.rdinn.com/town_generator.php)

Other than that, read a lot. If you have some serious time, I highly recommend Afroakuma's Planar Questions threads on the 3.5 forums. They're big, but they're very interesting. They focus on the Great Wheel cosmology and interactions of planes, gods, and planar creatures.
Thread 1 (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=265884)
Thread 2 (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=272393)
Thread 3 (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=299450)
Thread 4 (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?317316-afroakuma-s-Planar-Questions-Thread-IV)
Thread 5 (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?372289-afroakuma-s-Planar-And-Other-Oddities-Questions-Thread-5!)
Thread 6 (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?418709-afroakuma-s-Planar-And-Other-Oddities-Questions-Thread-VI)
Thread 7 (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?527699-afroakuma-s-Planar-And-Other-Oddities-Questions-Thread-VII)

Regarding custom campaigns in this custom world, start small once again. My most successful villain ever was a vampire named Chahir that was just a kill and forget mook from a throwaway passage of the module City of the Spider Queen. The party fought him but didn't destroy his coffin. I decided that he was angry about that and wanted revenge. And so he would show up at incredibly inopportune times to fight the party. They always had a choice: take care of Chahir once and for all, or else fulfill their objective. I gave him experience for taking on the party each time, and by the end of the campaign he was a BBEG all his own.

For my overarching plots though, I usually find out what kind of thing my players want to take on. I often get disjointed ideas like "Post apocalyptic" or "floating island" or "take down an evil empire". Then I find a place in my world where that idea would fit. From there I spend a couple weeks fine tuning it by reading up on other campaigns that have had similar feels to them (seriously, old D&D modules (http://www.enworld.org/forum/content.php?2206-The-15-Best-Official-D-D-Modules-Of-All-Time) and the Dragon Magazines (http://www.aeolia.net/dragondex/) are worth their weight in gold).

And always remember, steal everything that isn't nailed down. There is no such thing as plagiarism or theft in the personal campaign design world. If you see an idea or a bad guy you like, take it. Use it. If it inspires you, it's yours. Stand on the shoulders of the giants who came before you. I myself am terrible at game design, but rather good at narrative design. So if I need a mechanic, I often search the internet and take what I think will feel the best. Do the same thing with regards to narrative.

I hope this gives you some ideas. :smallsmile: