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  1. - Top - End - #1
    Barbarian in the Playground
     
    GnomeWizardGuy

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    Default Post your homebrew worlds

    Exactly what it says on the tin. Post your homebrew worlds, or homebrew worlds you love. The more detailed the better.

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    ElfRangerGuy

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    Default Re: Post your homebrew worlds

    Isn't that a topic best suited for the World-building forum? Although admittedly, you will get much less traffic.

    It's not an easy request to fulfill, given that there often isn't a good starting point.

    The primary "schtick" of mine is that monsters are given the spotlight and humans (and most other PHB races) are relegated to the background.

    In D&D terms, if you don't have a level adjustment, what are you even doing here?

    The other part is, I tried to make it high-magic, without turning it into a tippyverse.

    Also, no monocultre races - before it was cool, before all that diversity crap brought on by IRL events that shall remain unnamed.

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    Default Re: Post your homebrew worlds

    Here is a key design element from one of my homebrew worlds: https://forums.giantitp.com/showthre...x-God-Pantheon

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    GnomeWizardGuy

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    Default Re: Post your homebrew worlds

    Quote Originally Posted by martixy View Post
    Isn't that a topic best suited for the World-building forum? Although admittedly, you will get much less traffic.
    Nope. I don't want to build them, I want to read them. ❤️

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    Default Re: Post your homebrew worlds

    Quote Originally Posted by Shinizak View Post
    Nope. I don't want to build them, I want to read them. ❤️
    Have you already read everything in the World-Building subforum?

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    GnomeWizardGuy

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    Default Re: Post your homebrew worlds

    Quote Originally Posted by Nifft View Post
    Have you already read everything in the World-Building subforum?
    I'm combing through it. Though What prompted this was reading a fan made avatar the last Airbender setting.

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    Default Re: Post your homebrew worlds

    When 5e first came out I ran a game in a custom setting. The world was about double the size of Earth, so huge surface area, but not higher gravity due to how much empty space within was occupied by the Underdark. This world had been ruled by all-powerful mage kings until another planet, a cold, dead world from the depths of space, mostly hollow and filled with unnatural beings, collided with it. When this happened it crashed through the upper planes and elemental planes, shards of raw elemental energy fell onto the material plane around it. It landed in the northern hemisphere on top of one of the most powerful magocracies, completely destroying it. During this time of turmoil magic wasn't working right, the boundaries between the upper planes were broken allowing enemies to reach each other, and the gods were occupied battling the powerful elder creatures that had been traveling the void in that hollow world. After an unspecified amount of time the gods built the Shimmering Veil, an inward-facing prismatic sphere that completely surrounded the alien world. The gods have been silent since then, it was believed that their power had been spent. It took a few hundred years for everything to normalize, for magic to become stable again, and for the upper planes to settle down.

    When the campaign started, the PCs were refugees on a ship fleeing from the Legion of Souls, an army of slaves commanded by death giants (3.5 MM3) who served a sorceress who fancied herself a goddess. Any who fell in battle with the legion, friend or foe, would have their soul claimed by a nearby giant lieutenant, all of whom paid tribute to the queen. Any who displeased their queen would be executed, their accumulated wealth of souls added to her own. I'd intended for this to be a super-high-level endgame challenge.

    The party's ship headed to the far north, to a loose republic of city-states that had been at the fringes of the magocracy that was now under the alien world. It had a cool climate and the light of the Shimmering Veil constantly shone across the land. This region had many areas still infused with raw elemental power, some of which created absurd ecosystems like the jungles around the smoldering crater. The main campaign became them traveling to each of those elemental locations and retrieving an orb of coalesced elemental power, they needed one of each primary element, one of each para-element, and one of each quasi-element. I don't even remember what the purpose of collecting all of them was, probably something to help them fight the death giants, but due to circumstances the game didn't go on long enough for them to find even half the orbs. Granted they probably went on two or three side quests for every orb they found, but that's how it goes sometimes.

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    Default Re: Post your homebrew worlds

    I have a fairly extensive one in my signature, the first hundred pages being almost entirely worldbuilding.
    Looking for feedback on Heart of Darkness, a character driven RPG of Gothic fantasy.

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    Default Re: Post your homebrew worlds

    I actually have three homebrew worlds, each designed specifically for certain campaign ideas I had and all in various states of being unfinished. They are all also heavily based on video games and shows that I watched at the time of their creation, as I do steal shamelessly from the things I like.

    One was a sort of steampunk setting in a world with very maliable reality, allowing for all sorts of psychic powers and wuxia-esque shenanigans. The thousand year old ruler of a world spanning empire had just disappeared after fighting off a powerful demon (which are actually reality-devouring parasites travelling from world to world in this cosmology), leading to her empire fracturing. It splittered into four seperate nations, each preparing for war, and the intended campaign was supposed to be about an elite airship crew in the days before and during that war.

    One of the nations legalized the use of alchemy to create zombies from indebted workers, enslaving them until they worled off their debts. Another idolized people and animals who became partially unreal after close encounters with demons, gaining essentially superpowers in the process. (But often just dying horribly as they fail to exist properly.) Those two were probably the most interesting.


    The second is a sci-fi setting in the far future, where after earth becomes uninhabitable due to warfare, the remainder of humanity relocates to a far-away planet and its four moons. However, once there, the people who settle on the moons are heavily exploited as their new homeworlds are strip-mined for resources. A lunar coalition is formed that is then overtaken by a radical and power-hungry leader, pushing humanity to the brink of another apocalyptic war that may wipe them out for good. The idea was for the players to be part of a neutral peacekeeping force trying to sabotage both sides and work towards a peaceful solution.

    To complicate the matter, there also were alien artifacts that had been found on the moon, and which had caused the rise of psychic powers within humans. Gaining access to them and discovering the truth behind them was intended to be a big part of the accompanying campaign.

    Spoiler: Spoilers for the players I intend to eventually run this for.
    Show
    Oh, and those alien artifacts are actually the avatars of ascended forms of humanity in parallel dimensions. The humanity of this world had actually achieved that already, but the goddess they created as a result went haywire since she was used to destroy rival species. And those other avatars wish to reawaken her so they can control her, and are manipulating everyone to achieve this.

    I watched too much anime before writing that setting.


    The third was a post-apocalyptic real word setting for Godbound, where a cosmic tried to take over the world in secret for use in a never-ending war against another entity, but the champion she created rebelled after learning their true purpose and ended up turning earth into a momster-riddled hellscape.

    The PCs were going to be her new champions, trained by her to fight the rebel in the torn-apart ruins of modern day America. The goal was something of a sandbox, with the players ultimately free to make their own decisions. This one is the most unfinished, as it really only has the cosmology and background, with an end goal of being something like Fist of the North Star meets Sin & Punishment.


    I really should polish up one of these and put it out on the worldbuilding forums sometime. The only issue is that they were created with specific campaigns in mind, so most of the material I have is focused on what I wanted in those specific campaigns, not exactly on building very coherent worlds.
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    You don't convince by proving someone wrong. You convince by showing them a better way to be right. The difference may seem subtle or semantic, but I assure you it matters a lot.

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    OrcBarbarianGuy

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    Default Re: Post your homebrew worlds

    Shortest version possible:
    My Homebrew is a multiverse that connects a few different campaigns together and allows cross over between different play groups.

    Each universe has its own set of deities based on the campaign and lore. The only true deities are unknown to most of the multiverse, they are called "Hero" and "Villainy" they represent the two parts of my mind as the DM that want to tell heroic stories and challenge the players.

    A group of Mystic Nomads police the multiverse keeping things in check between realities.

    One time I handed the reigns of DM to someone else and I made a character, that DM didn't work out and I took over again, turning my NPC into the BBEG. This is how "Villainy" incarnate entered the world as a Mystic Telepath Orc known as "Vile".

    Over a multitude of campaigns Voldemort style, Vile arose to become a major threat to the multiverse.

    I recently moved to a different state and as a farewell we had one final session comprised of all the players' favorite characters brought together throughout space and time to finally kill Vile.

    But in doing so they killed 1/2 of the true godhead and the multiverse collapsed...

    My new world was born out of this. Vile had a son, that child exists suspended in the Aether void being tended to by his Uncle Hero. My current campaign takes place in the dream of Vile's son. When we awakens that world will be destroyed and together Hero and Vile's son will build the new world, inspired by the dreams he had.

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    Default Re: Post your homebrew worlds

    An artificial moon that circles the elemental planes as a means of balancing its weather patterns. It was created to harness the powers of the planes, a "Lens", for magical experiments, but the wizard lost control of his toy when his artificial life form, the Shardmind of this universe, grew too intelligent and learned to harness the power of the lens from inside the planet.

    The planet is fairly hollow, with a crystaline core where the Shardmind come from that gathers the power of the nearby planes. Shardmind themselves cannot touch the light of the planes directly, or they'll risk dissolving into that element.

    Various humans and other creatures have started to inhabit the outer shell, unaware of what the planet's history is or what lurks underneath. Seasons are harsh, elementals are common, everything down to the dirt is downright magical.

    I'm having the overarching plot start with Drow trying to steal supplies, wizards, and other important things in the middle of the night, as they prepare to defend against their greatest foe yet in this world's vast Underdark.
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    5th Edition Homebrewery
    Prestige Options, changing primary attributes to open a world of new multiclassing.
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    Troll in the Playground
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    Default Re: Post your homebrew worlds

    And you can of course find more in World-Building (just if anyone wants an easy link).

    I have two that I designed from the ground up for role-playing games, I even built systems for these. Or they were built for my homebrew systems depending on how you look at it but the settings have so far done a lot better than the systems.

    One was a fantasy setting that was designed as a kind of kitchen sink setting in that it was treated like a series of independent settings that happened to be on the same planet. I forget exactly why I did it like that and a few of them never got very far. Still it was fun to see how hints of one area would come into another. In fact that ended up being my goal for it making sure you can see bits of influence (even if its just imported good) from one in another while keeping them all distinct. Individually they were pretty standard, except for the floating islands one because which feels like it has more to do with all the work I did explaining the floating islands than the floating islands themselves.

    The other is a post-apocalyptic future that is just transitioning to its post-post-apocalyptic state. The technology is a bit wonky because although the knowledge from before the end of the world has been mostly preserved the infrastructure to actually use it is gone in areas. There are new countries but also areas that are not part of any country (even if a map says it is) just because no one has built out control to do anything there and you have some sort-of colonialism going on. Also it is just kind of over the top so you can martial arts your way out of a gun fight.

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    Default Re: Post your homebrew worlds

    OK, I have a few I've messed around with.

    The fantasy setting I've used for my Dungeon World games is fairly standard from an on-the-ground perspective, but I thought the structure I created for it was kind of neat.
    The world is roughly flat and circular, with a fiery source of heat to the center, a cold (ultimately frozen) ocean around the edge, solid earth below, and an expanse of air above (thus including all the classical elements). The titans (beings of embodied chaos defeated long ago by the gods) are imprisoned below the earth.
    There are a lot of gods, but they are categorized and themed fairly simply. There are 7 main "good" deities who created the world and act to preserve the balances of nature and human society; they're themed after the Seven Heavenly Virtues (and there's a sub-cycle of four representing the four seasons). There are 7 "evil" deities who represent disruptions to or things outside of the natural order, themed after the Seven Deadly Sins (and again, a sub-cycle of four, based on the Horsemen of the Apocalypse). There are four "neutral" elemental gods who maintain the integrity of the material world. And there are a number of minor deities who are ascended mortals of various stripes, usually tied to one or other of the greater deities.
    I gave some thought as to why people would worship the various deities, including the "evil" ones, and how they might be interpreted differently or have different aspects attached to them in different cultures.

    Another one I haven't had much chance to play in is an anime-inspired cyberpunk anthro setting called Eigen City, drawing elements from Bubblegum Crisis, Shadowrun, JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, and Zootopia, among others. (...and I was definitely working on it long before that one OotS comic about the various other worlds the gods made :P ) Even though it's basically a mashup of tropes and setting elements I like drawing and writing about, I have quite a few details written out (and quite a few intentional blanks to be filled in later).
    It's the last city left on the planet Rhea after an environmental collapse, protected from the polluted atmosphere by a vast energy shield wall. The city was built by alien beings known as the Galactics to preserve what was left of the planet's population around three or four generations past. The city is a place where reality seems somewhat "thin", where corporations war in the shadows and people can bond with spirits that grant them superpowers. It's a place where just about anything can happen.
    I actually have a setting document written up with Fate setting aspects as I got to play in a game based around it for a short time. I'm actually thinking of trying to start a different Fate Accelerated game using the setting.
    (As of the writing of this, my forum avatar is the character I was playing, Vixie "Silver" Reinhardt and her agathion, JAM Project.)

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    Default Re: Post your homebrew worlds

    Sure,

    [SPOILER=For this scenario]
    Quote Originally Posted by 2D8HP View Post
    :
    Quote Originally Posted by PhoenixPhyre View Post
    The more I DM and world-build, the more I find myself using certain patterns, shortcuts, themes and default assumptions. Ruts, if you will. These may be things that I avoid or things that show up, whether I intended them to be there or not.

    A few of mine are
    * Gender-egalitarian societies....

    ....I'd like this thread to be the positive counterpart to the "Tropes I hate" thread. Please focus on things you do because you like, rather than things you avoid because you don't like them.
    :
    Um "positive"?

    Well I positively don't like too much complexity, and basically I just have just two setups, one is "You meet at a tavern to loot a Dungeon" with an intro like this:

    Quote Originally Posted by 2D8HP View Post
    Spoiler: Set up from 40 years ago
    Show
    100 years ago the sorcerer Zenopus built a tower on the low hills overlooking Portown. The tower was close to the sea cliffs west of the town and, appropriately, next door to the graveyard.
    Rumor has it that the magician made extensive cellars and tunnels underneath the tower. The town is located on the ruins of a much older city of doubtful history and Zenopus was said to excavate in his cellars in search of ancient treasures.

    Fifty years ago, on a cold wintry night, the wizard's tower was suddenly engulfed in green flame. Several of his human servants escaped the holocaust, saying their rnaster had been destroyed by some powerful force he had unleashed in the depths of the tower.
    Needless to say the tower stood vacant fora while afterthis, but then the neighbors and the night watchmen comploined that ghostly blue lights appeared in the windows at night, that ghastly screams could be heard emanating from the tower ot all hours, and goblin figures could be seen dancina on the tower roof in the moonlight. Finally the authorities had a catapult rolled through the streets of the town and the tower was battered to rubble. This stopped the hauntings but the townsfolk continue to shun the ruins. The entrance to the old dungeons can be easily located as a flight of broad stone steps leading down into darkness, but the few adventurous souls who hove descended into crypts below the ruin have either reported only empty stone corridors or have failed to return at all.
    Other magic-users have moved into the town but the site of the old tower remains abandoned.
    Whispered tales are told of fabulous treasure and unspeakable monsters in the underground passages below the hilltop, and the story tellers are always careful to point out that the reputed dungeons lie in close proximity to the foundations of the older, pre-human city, to the graveyard, and to the sea.
    Portown is a small but busy city 'linking the caravan routes from the south to the merchscant ships that dare the pirate-infested waters of the Northern Sea. Humans and non-humans from all over the globe meet here.
    At he Green Dragon Inn, the players of the game gather their characters for an assault on the fabulous passages beneath the ruined Wizard's tower.

    Another is "You find a treasure map" like this:

    Quote Originally Posted by 2D8HP View Post
    Spoiler: set up from 76 years ago!
    Show
    “In the Year of the Behemoth, the Month of the Hedgehog, The Day of the Toad."

    "Satisfied that they your near the goal of your quest, you think of how you had slit the interesting-looking vellum page from the ancient book on architecture that reposed in the library of the rapacious and overbearing Lord Rannarsh."

    “It was a page of thick vellum, ancient and curiously greenish. Three edges were frayed and worn; the fourth showed a clean and recent cut. It was inscribed with the intricate hieroglyphs of Lankhmarian writing, done in the black ink of the squid. Reading":
    "Let kings stack their treasure houses ceiling-high, and merchants burst their vaults with hoarded coin, and fools envy them. I have a treasure that outvalues theirs. A diamond as big as a man's skull. Twelve rubies each as big as the skull of a cat. Seventeen emeralds each as big as the skull of a mole. And certain rods of crystal and bars of orichalcum. Let Overlords swagger jewel-bedecked and queens load themselves with gems, and fools adore them. I have a treasure that will outlast theirs. A treasure house have I builded for it in the far southern forest, where the two hills hump double, like sleeping camels, a day's ride beyond the village of Soreev.

    "A great treasure house with a high tower, fit for a king's dwelling—yet no king may dwell there. Immediately below the keystone of the chief dome my treasure lies hid, eternal as the glittering stars. It will outlast me and my name,"

    But I'm considering a "campaign arc"

    [SPOILER=Adventure Idea]
    Quote Originally Posted by 2D8HP View Post

    Viking kids vs Morlocks
    ...

    The PC's are adolescents and very young adults in an isolated village where two summers ago all the fighting age men, and many of the women left on a "trading" mission, and have not returned, so the elders of the village at a moot in the godshall have some of the youth accompany "old Ragnar", a one armed former Viking (who will die of natural causes soon after they set sail) as their guide.

    What they find is that nearby they are de-populated and sometimes burned towns with no bodies and little evidence of what happened.

    Upon returning home (assuming they do), they find their village simillarly emptied, with cooking fires still smoldering, and in the distance a low thumping sound, like a muffled hammering.

    If they seek out the source of the sounds, they find what look to be new wells outside the village, but they see no water at the bottom, and ha hand and foot holds along the sides, and descending and exploring leads them to discover albino "Goblins" leading the enchanted people of their village deeper into the earth, and then....
    ....well basically the Goblins are the Morlocks in the 1895 Time Machine novella, and the 1960 film, led by albino Drow/Elves not unlike the character played by Jeremy Irons in the 2002 film.

    Further exploration by the PC's leads them to find tunnels made by digging machines (like in At The Earth's Core), and locales like in Journey to the Center of the Earth (ruins and dinosaurs!), and a civilization a bit like the Selenites in First Men in the Moon.

    Spoiler: Some images that inspired me
    Show








































    ...
    [/SPOILER
    Spoiler: Assumptions and setting when I'm the DM
    Show
    Quote Originally Posted by 2D8HP View Post
    ...if I'm the DM, I only allow humans and half-humans as PC's, and the assumptions would be:


    Most anything that is not a human dirt farmer is monstrous (and they are as well, when the Druids tell them the harvest demands a sacrifice):





    Dwarves are underground dwellers who make cursed items (The Ring des Nibelungen),

    Elves are child stealing near demons ( the "Fair Folk").
    "Elves are terrific, they bring terror"

    When in doubt, just assume that they're going to torture and kill you.

    (Basicly all Elves are pasty Drow/Fey)

    Goblins?

    Steal your cattle, and poison your wells in the night.

    Kings?

    Take your crops, and maybe your children for their wars.

    Gods/Goddesses?

    Out of spite they turn you into spider or a tree, and make you suffer eternally.

    Best to stay in the fields you know, keep your head low and escape "the high ones" notice.

    Failing that?

    Grab some iron, and cut the bastards!

    I'd tell my players that:

    "Your PC's don't know what's in any D&D book, they know the Fairy tales of the Grimm Brothers, Greek and Norse myths, and to cross themselves and touch iron when the speak of 'the kindly ones'"

    "Your race is human, or close to one, with a background of "has sword wants loot"


    "Now past some tree roots blocking it you see an opening that's leading underground...."

    [/SPOILER
    Let's explore!


    So a basic "swords against sorcery" theme.
    How to turn that "positive" in @PhoenixPhyre's terms?

    Well in "sword using times" as now, I believe some societies had more and some less gender inequality.

    The Scandinavians, for example, were known to be more equal (as attested to by Arab traveller Ibrahim ibn al-Tartushi for example).

    In fact some Viking graves, that contained weapona as grave goods and consequently were originally thought to have held men (Assigned male at excavation?), were actually women ("shieldmaidens"/skjaldmćr), and that's been the cause of some speculation, true or not I'ma gonna run with it.

    Even if someone says a dóttir wasn't as likely as a son to pick up the family sword, my game, my rules Berserker women are more fun, I picked Viking-ish for a reason.

    Some parts of old Scandinavia weren't fun, slavery for example (yes I know probably not as brutal as the old sugar plantations of Barbados, but still too brutal to be fun, I don't want to go full Game of Thrones), so I hand wave then away.

    Why not go more fantasy and less expy?

    Because I"m lazy as a GM, and as a player I dislike "homework" (reading a big fat lot of setting information) before we can get to the part where the GM says, "What do you do?".

    Why not a swashbucklimg Caribbean settimg, pirates are cool?

    Yes that would be cool, but I want to make use of Norse myths and monsters.

    How about Ninjas, they're cool?

    Yes Ninjas are cool, but homework is involved in fitting them in the initial setting.

    How are you going to have Druids then?

    I'll get to that.

    I don't want to play some pasty-behind Scandinavian named Astrid or Ragnar, verily you sucketh 2D8HP!

    That's a good point.

    One reason I chose Viking-ish is because they had battle-axes, and they....
    ....okay that's pretty much the reason.

    Sorry!

    Oh wait! It's because Vikings are familiar enough that players, may just get into character without doing much homework, and besides who doesn't want to shout out "By Odin's sagging bits, you will taste steel!"?

    Dude, I don't know Norse mythology! How about Greek or Egyptian? Hekate and Osiris are cool!


    Hmmm, they really are.

    Okay, how about this: A melting pot Empire, or collection of City States (decide when it comes up in game) sends out merchants and missionaries all over, and they settle amongst, well everywhere, so you have families in the village who aren't pasty, and have Italian and Spanish names, so you have Rodrigo the blacksmith next to Signe the leatherworker, and the imported wine merchant is a cleric of Dionysus.

    Oh that's a little better..

    ...what a minute!

    Italian?

    Spanish?

    Not Egyptian and Greek?

    Well those names are harder for me to pronounce, 'sides someone has to be able to be called Inigo Montoya.

    What if someone just wants to be called Jane Thatcher or William Weaver?

    Fine, the village is Anglo-Norse then.

    Hey! You still haven't 'splained the Druids. Hark you still sucketh 2D8HP!

    Oh right. In the woods, and some nearby village there's Celts with Druids.

    So your using the Celtic pantheon as well?

    Um., no I can't pronounce those names

    Can I play a Tabaxi Bladesinger with a bonus Feat?

    No.

    Bogus! Totally lame and un-positive 2D8HP!




    I sketched out a further "world" partially historical, and partially fantastic, as happens we only had a couple of sessions and nothing much more than a couple of abandoned human towns, and the Morlocks tunnels got explored so not much "world" came into play, but what I had in mind was a basically 14th century Britain, France, Ireland, Spain, and parts of western Germany and northern Africa with everywhere else Faerie/"There by Dragons", and a NotRussia "Markovy" with airship flying Tartars. Most of Germany and further east would be "The Great Dark Woods" with lots of fairytale-ish Kingdoms until the Boyers of Markovy.

    Had the village Godi/Druid/Priest and Priestess annoted the PC's with blood and hand out "charms" that kept them from the Morlocks mind control spells, they battled a few, saved some of their village and found a digging machine (which they couldn't get to work) and they gave chase to rescue the rest of the village, and that was pretty much it, I though my description of the abandoned and looted towns before they turned back to their own village went well. Typically I wished I was a player and someone else was GM'ing the adventure. That I limited how powerful the PC's magic abilities were to less then D&D wasn't popular though, but "high magic" isn't my jam and I have limited imagination for those scenarios, plus modifying published adventures to be less one track isn't as fun and is too much work for me than winging it is. As it is with our four-year old in the house there isn't time for gaming now, but our older son enjoyed it, but his time is too limited now as well.
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    Default Re: Post your homebrew worlds

    I am loving these, keep them coming!

    ♥️

  16. - Top - End - #16
    Firbolg in the Playground
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    Default Re: Post your homebrew worlds

    Spoiler: Tales from the Maw
    Show

    E6 multiverse based on the Leibniz quote about the 'best of all possible worlds'. The individual universes basically have no gods or divine powers, but the multiverse as a whole has four entities, one of whom wants to alleviate suffering by abducting souls from all the 'bad' universes in the multiverse and fusing them with their selves in the version of the universe it thinks is the best of the bunch, thereby ensuring that everyone lives in the best of all possible worlds. The game takes place in one of the universes that isn't the one picked to be the best.

    Within that universe there are a variety of spacefaring civilizations, one of whom has been picked up by a servitor of this overdeity to - on cosmic timescales - remove all souls from the universe and direct them to the good one. The mechanism for this is that basically they've been given the setting's only resurrection ritual, but powering the ritual requires sacrificing a number of captured souls, basically preventing them from reincarnating and transmitting them into the good universe. The servitor basically hangs out in the void pretending to be a star and waits - it's mainly lazy rather than actively malicious, but it does Holy Word any ships who get too close (which, in an E6 universe without any conception of alignment, deities, or even divine magic is sort of hard for people to figure out how to counter, though not impossible).

    Said civilization basically enacts a bunch of proxy wars on primitive planets, equipping the natives with amped up Thinaun weapons and directing the captured souls to make their entire population effectively immortal. The game takes place on one of these planets.

    As a quirk, other universes in the multiverse have noticed this going on and have mounted their own resistance movements against it. Inter-universe travel basically only occurs via co-opting the channels being used to transmit souls to the 'good' universe, so universes that have won their fights send the souls of their heroes to reincarnate in other universes to carry the fight forward. The souls from these other universes don't retain their memories (barring autohypnosis or other tricks to recover them), but they do pull with them a small fragment of the physics of the universe they're from. As a result, there are all sorts of characters popping up with weird un-explainable abilities (called 'Impossibilities' in-setting) which break the normal rules of D&D magic and some aspects of the setting limitations. These start small, like B-list superpowers, but grow with the character (essentially there are Feat trees unique to each character that can expand the scope of their impossibility). At the same time, characters with impossibilities that get sufficiently strong trip some minor alerts set by the overdeity and its servitors, which tends to bring down overwhelming force against their city, country, or world - souped up outsiders with particular forms of 'authority' over fundamental physical laws. Fortunately the servitor assigned to this particular universe is quite lazy and for the most part isn't paying attention.

    The world itself has various kitchen sink fantasy elements - an kingdom of lycanthropes, an empire that's expanding, a mercantile republic, a nation with mists that remove things from time to return them only infrequently, a secret society up in the mountains that is collecting the people with Impossibilities and teaching them to use their powers, etc.


    Spoiler: A Few Dead Men
    Show

    This is a setting constructed around ancestor worship. When someone dies in this setting, their soul goes to join a sprawling civilization that has built up in the afterlife, memories intact. Older souls become increasingly more powerful, with certain transitions occurring in which they gain abilities similar to divine domains and start to be able to control aspects of the mortal world. Normally the afterlife inhabitants mess with and guide the mortal world to pass the time, or otherwise lose themselves in the extremes of emotion and experience that the geography of the afterlife enables (there are regions which amplify pretty much any aspect of existence - you can have a house in Joy and take a weekend trip to visit Sorrow, go to work at Ambition, etc). However, just as the world holds an exponentially growing population, so too is the population of souls in the afterlife exponentially growing, and this has recently started to cause problems. New souls are being squeezed out into the void between concepts, where unless they can find their way to the lands of the afterlife they are eventually ground down into barely sentient existences. Furthermore, there have been energies of corruption preading through the population, twisting souls' personalities, purpose, and abilities.

    The ancient souls of this setting that act as de-facto divine powers are based off of a variety of vodou loa and Yoruba orisha, and souls being summoned to possess the living is a standard way for the afterlife to interact with the mortal world.

    At the same time, in the mortal world existence itself is running out of the causal substrate which connects together proximal events, and descending into the chaos of Typhon. This is primarily due to someone having developed a spirit ability that necessitated the introduction of branching timelines style time travel (jerks playing at having a time-war, sending power back to their past selves). As people growing exponentially causes the afterlife to crowd, timelines growing exponentially causes the world to start to run out of causality. As a counter-measure, an object has been introduced into the world which has the authority to be in the same state in all timelines. When this creates a impossible situation within one of the branched timelines (for example if someone breaks the object in two and moves one half of it so that it would overlap with the other half), then the timelines in which the 'same state' criterion cannot be satisfied terminate. Unfortunately (or fortunately from the point of view of the group of entities trying to conserve causality) some shavings from the object were taken and implanted in people to create a kind of quantum suicide situation for them - now, any timeline in which those people would die automatically ends and it turns out they were in another one all along. There's a looming threat of 'timeline zero' - what if the last timeline becomes inconsistent with the authority of the object?


    Spoiler: Memoir
    Show

    In Memoir, the pre-eminent power is the ability to declare a Geas that determines a fixed aspect of the future which must take place, causing the rest of time to restrict itself such that the Geas is fulfilled. There's a roughly 10000 year cycle in which the accumulated stresses of the Geases applied to reality stretch it to a breaking point, causing a reset of time, shuffling around all the pieces and expressing a new history. The gods of the setting are basically beings who figured out how to keep their personalities intact across these crashes, and when the cycle restarts they get to pick the initial conditions that determine what the world is going to be like.

    In the last cycle, someone figured out a little bit of what was going on and invented a sort of poison that would persist across the jump, something that basically directed the reality stresses into whomever handled the carrier of the poison. This ended up shattering the personae of the gods and the mechanism of the cycle, leaving the world stuttering, bereft of a past and with only a few chunks of Geas-inflicted futures remaining. The uncertain region where past and future aren't consistent settled to a place known as the 'Unknowing Realm', and individuals from two empires embroiled in a war were sent to dive into the Unknowing Realm in order to try to seize control of the determination of the past and therefore cause their side to win.

    At the same time, the fragments of the shattered gods landed in this realm and activated a number of free agents. Those agents have the ability to subsume the histories of other fragment bearers, to dominate the fragments, or the destroy them utterly in exchange for a special kind of energy. In some sense, each of them is a present self that has the power to consciously determine post-hoc aspects of their own backstory by eating the backstories of others - they're agents of the present determining the past, a form of living Geas.

    However, there's a catch. The Unknowing Realm expels those who are explicitly aware of the knowledge of the state of the future and the events which led up to this cycle. The more these agents figure out, the more they become entangled with those residual Gaesa (those frozen chunks of future and past which exert a strong pull), and the less able they are to remain within the Unknowing Realm. Basically, awareness of the future causes you to have to fight the pressure of that particular Geas over all of the others.

    The setting itself is sort of steampunk Victorian England, with a faded military, smokestacks going up to fuel the war efforts, etc. However, it's this shaken-out-of-time version of it where most of the inhabitants are just memories or shadows of those who actually lived there, there's a growing population of sentient undead from those who had died in a Geas'd future but were able to sustain their existence in the Unknowing Realm, the universe desperately borrows people's memories and recollections to figure out what events should look like, meaning that strong memories, nightmares, or even beliefs about onesself can create physical impacts on the 'Weft' of the world around them, etc. Basically chaos.


    Spoiler: Gilded Flasks
    Show

    This is a setting based roughly off of Mana Khemia and the Atelier games. There's a continent-spanning Guild which has solitary access to the recipe and procedure to customize a 'level up' potion, and which strictly controls level advancement among characters in the world. Everyone who isn't a Guild member is basically stuck at a baseline Level 3, and so the Guild maintains control over the state of the continent by allowing its members to take contracts to fight on behalf of nations and states. There's a city of magical research, a city of endless night that harvests materials from a nearby volcano, an underground city that fights against a scourge of warped creatures from the depths, a lawless pirate town that functions by raiding the Guild for doses of the treatment and has had some success in reverse engineering at least the lower-level courses, a halfling mafia family with its fingers in everything, a walking city on mechanized stilts, and all sorts of craziness of that form.

    Underneath it all, there are indications that people in the past didn't need this particular treatment to be as powerful as the highest levels the guild can produce, or even greater. Once or twice the continent has had to band together to defeat 'Revenants', self-resurrected individuals or long-lived undead from a particular period 800 years prior who were basically all Lv20 characters with a lot of tricks besides. There's evidence from the past that whenever civilization gained the ability to produce characters of that level, there was some kind of massive purge that wiped out 90% of all life on the continent, which is sort of an ongoing worry for people who are aware of it.

    Stuff begins when the PCs encounter an entity that calls itself Mother and which grants them a 'blessing' of sorts that causes them to steadily level up without receiving the Treatment from the Guild. Given the implications of having a higher level than your latest treatment, this immediately has the potential to create great conflict with the Guild since it suggests that at best the PCs have been stealing doses. Worse, however, is that those affected by Mother's Blessing find that their blood can act as a sort of quick and dirty Treatment, bringing other characters up to the level of the one who provides it.

    And things develop from there.


    Spoiler: Elseportrait
    Show

    This is a setting where all creative activities are automatically a form of magic. Sculptures come to life and self-animate, well-written stories draw people in to re-enact them as a form of subtle mind-control, paintings act as gateways to other worlds, etc. There are a number of entities which have been created out of whole cloth that share the world with its native population - so-called Figments. However, the mysterious thing is that these Figments appear to have memories and knowledge that is simultaneously self-consistent, but not available to their particular creators at the time of their genesis. This suggests a potential common origin, as if the creative acts which led to their existence drew from existing worlds rather than actually generating them from whole cloth.

    While most creative magic is limited in its expression, occasionally an individual is struck with a moment of inspiration and becomes something called a Mad Artist. Mad Artists break all the rules, create impossible workings, and generally spread both wonders and chaos apace. In order to protect the world from the more dangerous examples of the form, a secret society called the Counter Art Taskforce (or CAT) was formed. It sends its agents to collect and archive the artifacts made by Mad Artists, and to generally monitor worrying developments in the creative undercurrents of the world.

    Within the vaults of CAT, something worrying has been discovered - a device which displays a complex signal that originates from wherever the Figments are drawn. It appears that something is trying to remind the world that it exists, to plant the idea of itself into the creative zeitgeist, so that it may participate in its own creation.

    The setting has all sorts of secret organizations associated with interpreting some specific thing as 'a creative act' - there's a society of Dreamers, people who are working on making a form of magic based on Media, etc.


    Current project in the works is something tentatively called Mythclad, where ancient legends and myths rehash themselves and evolve by allowing themselves to be called upon by avatars and representatives among the heroes of the world, but this is probably enough for now.

  17. - Top - End - #17
    Dwarf in the Playground
     
    PaladinGuy

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    Default Re: Post your homebrew worlds

    I have one, though the title is only a working one: The Soul War. It, essentially, brings the Blood War between Devils and Demons to the forefrontz having it spilt onto the material plane (some conspiricists belive as part of a massive gambit by Asmodeus) and mortals, of course, being caught in the middle.

    It's a Dieselpunk-esque campaign mixed with fantasy. When I pitched it to my players, I described essentially as DOOM meets the reboot Wolfenstein games. I'm very proud of it, myself. However, it completely rips out standard Vancian spellcasting and is built primarilly around Spheres of Power.

    To save me rambling on and on, I'll just link my setting folder on Google drive: https://drive.google.com/folderview?...-_XjpPMp-pwmuC

  18. - Top - End - #18
    Troll in the Playground
     
    Imp

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    Default Re: Post your homebrew worlds

    I've been working for a few months on a homebrew project, it started years ago and has morphed over time. Recently it has crystalized into a full blown website (github pages project)

    The intro goes

    "Infinite Darkness is a sci-fi roleplaying game set in a future where humanity has begun to take to the stars, aliens and humans co exist.

    With the discovery of faster than light travel- the ability to visit distant stars became a possibility. But space is still vast beyond imagining, the time it takes to travel is still long. Due to the limitations of telescopes most stars in the local neighborhood are still mostly uncharted, very little is known of each system beyond the classification of the star and occationally limited information of a planet.

    No body knows what lurks out there and if you can't take a little bloody nose then perhaps you ought to go home and crawl under you bed. It's not safe out there, it's wonderous with treasures to satiete desires both subtle and gross. But it's not for the timid"

    It takes inspiration from World Of Darkness and the Swedish rpg Drakar och Demoner.

    Humanity has colonized space, most planets around the sun have some permanent inhabitants. The Alpha Centauri system is colonized and has become independent, humanity has encountered 3 alien species, the Shambra, the Merlion and the Nekovians.
    The Shambra are an anthropod almost lobster like alien that just grow bigger as they get older, the Merlion are the first aliens to make contact and currently make up half the population of an independent Mars. Nekovians were discovered as hunter gatherers on the planet Neke, initially they were left alone but eventually some tried to integrate with human colonies on their water world.

    There are also higher dimensional beings who can grant spells or mutations to humans, but it requires higher dimensional activities on the humans part (like traveling faster than the speed of light, using the Alcubierre inspired FTL system).
    Black text is for sarcasm, also sincerity. You'll just have to read between the lines and infer from context like an animal

  19. - Top - End - #19
    Orc in the Playground
     
    D&D_Fan's Avatar

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    Default Re: Post your homebrew worlds

    The bag world.
    It can only be entered by a magic bag.
    The being that owns it collects dungeons.
    And puts them in the bag.
    The inside of the bag exists outside of any dimension.
    The dungeon is also not restricted by time, and plenty of modern and even space age tech can be found in it.
    It is an unendning megadungeon.
    There are ways out, like travelling on the subway realm, which has a station in bagword.
    Bagworld is 26+ dimesions.
    It is weird to an extreme, but I won't go into detail.

  20. - Top - End - #20
    Barbarian in the Playground
     
    GnomeWizardGuy

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    Default Re: Post your homebrew worlds

    Quote Originally Posted by D&D_Fan View Post
    The bag world.
    It can only be entered by a magic bag.
    The being that owns it collects dungeons.
    And puts them in the bag.
    The inside of the bag exists outside of any dimension.
    The dungeon is also not restricted by time, and plenty of modern and even space age tech can be found in it.
    It is an unendning megadungeon.
    There are ways out, like travelling on the subway realm, which has a station in bagword.
    Bagworld is 26+ dimesions.
    It is weird to an extreme, but I won't go into detail.
    No please, go into detail. ❤️

  21. - Top - End - #21
    Barbarian in the Playground
     
    DwarfBarbarianGuy

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    Default Re: Post your homebrew worlds

    A setting I have used a few times now, one where the necromancer overlord essentially won. Undead, and their corruption of the natural flows of mana in the world, are now the "natural order".

    The last remaining holdout is a kingdom, where an alliance of humans and dwarves created armies of warforged. Since warforged cannot become undead, they were able to hold off the necromancers and survive. Dwarven artificers are highly valued.

    Elves are much more powerful, ancient eldritch beings, in tune with the natural magicks of the world...and were among the first to fall as the wave of corruption spread. Half elves, for the most part, are the bastard offspring of a particular elf ambassador. Their natural inclination for magic manifesting as druids, and having the same stats as a drow noble.

    Good and evil are far less important than survival of the kingdom and the people. Corruption is a major theme as well. Most forms of arcane magic put the caster at risk, and many risk bystanders as well. Most magics are cast with a monkeys paw, interpreted in the most negative way possible. This has led to the ascendancy of divine magics, and the strict regulation of the arcane. The high stress, high magick environment however has led to a huge increase in the number of sorcerors manifesting...

    With the primacy of death magicks in the world, healing is weakened. Making other options a valuable quest goal.
    Repair and [force] descriptor spells work fine though.

    There is a lot more, but not something I can access on a tablet...
    "There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter."
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  22. - Top - End - #22
    Firbolg in the Playground
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    Default Re: Post your homebrew worlds

    Well, since I'm posting this in another thread anyway…

    Spoiler: random post apocalyptic D&D
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    Minecraft logic for topography. And variable-length days / seasons. And reproduction? That's for higher lifeforms only - plants and animals just spontaneously appear. (Arcane) Magic? It's not "chance" or "genetics", it's diet - and (whether they realize it or not) Dragons are the only ones who can sense which bits of matter have become infected with midichlorians (although having draconic ancestry certainly helps your odds of eating dirt as a kid and becoming a Sorcerer in the process).

    I might well try to use both the "god of <race>” and "god of Wizards" portfolios to remove "Wizard" is a class, and create a new race of "Querti", beings with inherent learned magical potential, and the ability and inclination to research new spells. Their "Sorcerers" lack the "spells known" limit; or, rather, can break that limit through spell research.

    Druids, as defenders of the new "Nature", might look at higher races (and themselves) with disgust, calling them "free births", and encouraging a quixotic, Glaconda-like return to the more natural spontaneous spawning.

    Elves should do what elves do, and evolve new variants, adapted to the intervening wastes. "Wastes elves", ethereal elves, maybe even sea elves seem plausible.

    Undead… not sure where to go here. Definitely want the return of Baelnorm. Not sure how to go about that. Maybe make a world where "undead" are the "good guys", bringing life to the world with their very presence. Yeah, that's it! Undead are powered by Life, they're the heroes who brought the world back from desolation. They explain how life just spontaneously generates. Kill off too many, and the world goes back to being a wasteland. Maybe it is in some places, because of the strength of the local Clergy of Pelor. Places rife with undead become rich with life - overgrown jungles, forests with powerful nature spirits, etc.

    It would be nice to change the 4 elements while we're at it… I'll give it some thought.

    Druids build great "Stonehenge"-style structures; the power of which, secretly, is to control the various "biomes" - life here is "desert"; life next door is "arctic"; next to that is "forest", etc. The code for these is in the unreadable, otherwise unlearnable Druidic language.

    These Stonehenge control structures dictate *which* plants and animals will spontaneously appear, what the temperature will be like, etc. Actually building or changing them is an Epic-level ability.

    Geometers (not sure what they are, mechanically - perhaps Warlocks or Artificers or Factotems, or perhaps something entirely new) have learned to hack the system with (what they don't realize is) pidgin-Druidic, creating magical sigils that will cause a single plant to spontaneously grow in a particular area.

    Thus, in some parts of the world, "commoners" are replaced with Geometers, and nature-oriented Geometers, known as "farmers", practice the heretical arts of controlling nature through "crop circles".

    -----

    Most races of "Monsters" are the result of flaws in the system.

    For example, if a cow attempts to spawn at the edge of a zone, and the adjacent zone does not recognize cattle as valid, a gorgon might be formed instead. If a cow tries to spawn in an area occupied by a human, you might get a Minotaur.

    Thus, the world can be filled with Wondrous one-offs, like milkweed trees that give actual milk.

    Such defects are far more common where the system is being hacked (such as near crop circles). Thus, because cities normally require agriculture, in a perversion of expectations, city zones are actually among the most dangerous in the world.

    who said anyone actually knows that undead work that way (other than *maybe* the gods, who probably aren't telling)? There's still lots of (ie, the exact same) prejudice against undead in this world (as projected) as exists in any other world. Everything is understood backwards ("undead like to congregate in high life areas", "witches who own black cats cause the plague", "a good rain tends to cool things down", "this area needs the protection of the city because of the terrible monsters here", etc).

  23. - Top - End - #23
    Barbarian in the Playground
     
    DwarfBarbarianGuy

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    Default Re: Post your homebrew worlds

    Reminds me of a setting I wrote up but never really got to use.

    Set immediately after the Godswar. The world was in chaos, the landscape constantly twisting and changing. People, creatures and monsters changing with the environment. You might be a wood elf today, but suddenly you are at the bottom of the ocean and you are a sea elf...
    There is a solution. Wizards and clerics working together have found a way to stabilise, and even lock down small chunks of countryside. From a simple ritual that protects your campsite, up to the mighty pylons that anchor entire counties (about a 32 mile hex).

    There is a lot of Birthright style realmbuilding, with the added advantage of being able to add exotic terrain features, or resource rich provinces to your realm...or even just sending out teams to harvest/pillage the surrounding landscape before it warps into something new.

    Of course any new change brings the threat of new and warped monsters...
    "There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter."
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  24. - Top - End - #24
    Orc in the Playground
     
    D&D_Fan's Avatar

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    Default Re: Post your homebrew worlds

    An example of a room in bagworld:

    There is a room with an elevator that is deactivated.
    There is a box on the wall with 5 levers.
    The levers are labeled in English, but not Common.
    They have to figure it out through trial and error.
    Players take off the box.
    The first lever (red) activates a robot.
    There is a smaller lever for the robot to push when activated.
    The robot is activated.
    It refuses to push the lever.
    The party pushes the smaller lever.
    It makes the robot go forward and deactivate the lever again.
    Second lever (blue) turns off gravity.
    They quickly reactivate that one.
    Third lever (yellow) turns off lifeform lock.
    The wizard is now a dolphin.
    They reactivate the lifeform lock.
    The wizard is now trapped as a dolphin.
    They deactivate the lifeform lock again.
    The wizard is now an American Chestnut Tree.
    They get him back to being human.
    4th lever (white) activates the elevator.
    They push the 5th (black) lever out of curiosity.
    It turns off all DM narration.
    That stopped the game until they reactivated it.

    Other:
    They had potions in jello and hypodermic needle format.
    They also converted all of their gold into USD.
    In the train subdimension, they wanted to buy food, but all money was souls.
    They tried to get a man with multiple personalities since he would have multiple souls or something.
    The surviving personality was evil and stole their food.
    There was a hotel on the train subdimension that took peanuts instead of souls, but it was replaced by a rollerblading rink.
    The wizard became a god of mayonaise.
    Really.

    Classic fun.
    Last edited by D&D_Fan; 2020-07-04 at 07:39 AM.

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