I'm Making My Own Solo D&D 3.5 Campaign

[Lvl 2 Expert]

My tip would be: don't be too structured.

It's tempting when world building to create nice patterns. The continent consists of 7 kingdoms, roughly equal in size and power. This religion has 3 gods, each symbolized by one of the primary colors and each the patron of one of the three main groups of adventurers. Every 6 years for as long as we can remember the dragon of awe has awoken and eaten a village.

Taken all together it ends up feeling fake. A real world has lots of elements that don't make sense, continental maps with no clear balanced power blocks, with small regions nobody can agree on who they belong to and ethnicity maps that are even worse. Religions that you think you have figured out, but then there's a bunch of supernatural beings that don't really have a category or even a story people agree upon. City maps where one of the five districts is as big as the rest combined yet the city center still lies between the five rather than shifted towards the large one, or the other way around when that option doesn't make sense. The world wasn't build from a plan, countries were not designed as a whole, but build one house at a time. Unless your world was build from a plan, someone put those cities there for a reason, try to add some chaos. It will feel more real.