I have a confession. I've never written my own campaign setting. Oh I have put together the occasional city or village, but I've never created my own campaign setting from scratch. It always seemed so overwhelmingly complex. How do you create something that is that big?

Ever since I first heard about them, I thought it would be cool to do a campaign setting on an eyeball planet. On the desert side of the planet are fiends who are immune to fire. On the frozen side are fiends who are immune to cold. With that in mind, I decided to start with the creation myth. It's a mix of Gnosticism, Zoroastrianism, and this idea that I've been banging around where players can imagine their own gods and those gods become manifest. The more followers a god has, the more power it has, so players who choose to worship Banjo the Puppet God are not going to be as powerful as ones who are worshipping the equivalent of Zeus or Lathander. I don't know what that will look like mechanically yet, but it's something I'm introducing into the campaign.

My question is, where would you start next? Any tips? I feel like there are loads of tips for writing adventures and campaigns, but very few concrete tips for how to write campaign settings. Any resources you would recommend I take a look at? Let me know.

I would take a look at how the Wildemount book was put together with its gazetteer, that’s probably a good reference. I would start one city or region at a time and take it from there.

Quote from DoveArrow >>

I have a confession. I've never written my own campaign setting. Oh I have put together the occasional city or village, but I've never created my own campaign setting from scratch. It always seemed so overwhelmingly complex. How do you create something that is that big?

Ever since I first heard about them, I thought it would be cool to do a campaign setting on an eyeball planet. On the desert side of the planet are fiends who are immune to fire. On the frozen side are fiends who are immune to cold. With that in mind, I decided to start with the creation myth. It's a mix of Gnosticism, Zoroastrianism, and this idea that I've been banging around where players can imagine their own gods and those gods become manifest. The more followers a god has, the more power it has, so players who choose to worship Banjo the Puppet God are not going to be as powerful as ones who are worshipping the equivalent of Zeus or Lathander. I don't know what that will look like mechanically yet, but it's something I'm introducing into the campaign.

My question is, where would you start next? Any tips? I feel like there are loads of tips for writing adventures and campaigns, but very few concrete tips for how to write campaign settings. Any resources you would recommend I take a look at? Let me know.

So, you have begun to flesh out a Cosmology.

You have an idea of the Landscape.

You will need to have at least a little bit of knowledge about the Cultures.

but I am first going to echo Sposta's suggestion: start small. Start with a village or a Town (not a City). and then start expanding from there. This is called the "bottom up" style of world building. Know what is needed at a small, local scale, and the rest will just come pretty naturally.

I have been worldbuilding since the mid 70's, lol, and the thing that drew me into D&D was the ability to "make that world come alive".

You can go to Amazon and search "worldbuilding". You can run over to Drive Through and pick up a book called Campaign Law from ICE. You can google "worldbuilding for D&D" and you will get a gazillion results.

However, something to be aware of when you do, is that worldbuilding is best done over time. You can start big or small, start with a story or a question, start with anything  as the first kernel, but if you try to build everything at once, you will indeed feel overwhelmed.

The most famous worldbuilders of our day, whose worlds are celebrated, did not create them in a month or two -- Tolkien is perhaps the best known, and he took 40 years and never really finished, lol.

My last campaign involved a world I took 6 months or so to create.  It was fast. It had 1 Town, 5 Villages, a desert, a swamp, a forest, a lake, and a few rivers. It was less than 30 square miles in size. The whole world. Because it was a completely sealed off valley. That was our world for three actual years.

I am finishing up a five year project -- started before that campaign world I mention -- that involves the creation of a new "full scale" world. You can look at how I set it up, but really, any of the existing guide books is useful in getting an idea.

Give yourself room to imagine stuff later. The best game worlds grow and evolve and change according to the players.

That leads into this next piece for advice: if you are creating a world that you want to play D&D with others in, then ask the others what they want. Get them involved in the creation process. Find ways to incorporate what hey want into your stuff.

That is perhaps the most important piece, because while you are the DM, really, if players have an input then they are more likely to dive into the world.

THis is the big thing to be aware of when you read links and books and such -- worldbuilding is a hobby in and of itself -- and people build worlds to write stories in, to build fictional worlds for their own sake, and to create worlds for games. Each of those has a different kind of building needs.

Worlds can be as big as a solar system (after that you get into a whole host of weird stuff) or as small as a single village.

ok, so I did my usual.

Here's my outline:

• Cosmology -- Planes, Dimensions, Magic
• Gods -- Who, what, where
• Planet -- physical features, weird shit
• History -- the stuff that got us there told as a story
• Realms -- the place where people live, how they feel about each other, customs, law, government, military, trade, culture (arts and recreation)

I have worlds where all of that was a single sheet of paper and worlds where it is 400 pages (like the one in my sig).

Have fun with it.

To me, worlds grow dynamically - for one world, the basic premise is: Wild nature is strong enough to keep civilisation in check. That led to the conclusion that large cities are rare (there are three - as far as the players know) while smaller communities that don't impact nature in the same way, are much more common. Travel is difficult, distances are great, cultures are distinct for that reason, they quite simply don't interact too much. 

So, three cities to work with (plus the other two the players don't know about).

One is high in the mountains, and unsurprisingly produces iron (which is rare in this world), so they're rich and have strong military, being the only ones with unlimited supply of high quality steel weapons and armor. This is a very human-centric culture - no one else is willing to live in the cold.

One is at the shore of a great bay, similar in many ways to some of the cultures around the mediterranean. It's a melting pot of hundreds of races and cultures, foods and goods, and so on. Ruled by a shadowy 'council' of .. well, officially 'merchants', but then why are they all so secret. They wear masks and so on. 

Last is a desert culture - but the only real 'nation'. The others are city states. But the desert people are nomads, and range across an enormous expanse, going where the one river or the other is currently flooding, or lakes fill, or migrating animals flock, or whatever. Technically sparsely populated, but since it's so large an area, this is easily the most populous of the three. And they would easily conquer the others, except it's very hard for a nation with limited food supplies to gather many thousands of soldiers, then travel thousands of miles. 

One thing follows kinda naturally from the other, and basically all of it comes from that basic premise: Nature is strong enough to fight back. 

Quote from Acromos >>

To me, worlds grow dynamically - for one world, the basic premise is: Wild nature is strong enough to keep civilisation in check. That led to the conclusion that large cities are rare (there are three - as far as the players know) while smaller communities that don't impact nature in the same way, are much more common. Travel is difficult, distances are great, cultures are distinct for that reason, they quite simply don't interact too much. 

So, three cities to work with (plus the other two the players don't know about).

One is high in the mountains, and unsurprisingly produces iron (which is rare in this world), so they're rich and have strong military, being the only ones with unlimited supply of high quality steel weapons and armor. This is a very human-centric culture - no one else is willing to live in the cold.

One is at the shore of a great bay, similar in many ways to some of the cultures around the mediterranean. It's a melting pot of hundreds of races and cultures, foods and goods, and so on. Ruled by a shadowy 'council' of .. well, officially 'merchants', but then why are they all so secret. They wear masks and so on. 

Last is a desert culture - but the only real 'nation'. The others are city states. But the desert people are nomads, and range across an enormous expanse, going where the one river or the other is currently flooding, or lakes fill, or migrating animals flock, or whatever. Technically sparsely populated, but since it's so large an area, this is easily the most populous of the three. And they would easily conquer the others, except it's very hard for a nation with limited food supplies to gather many thousands of soldiers, then travel thousands of miles. 

One thing follows kinda naturally from the other, and basically all of it comes from that basic premise: Nature is strong enough to fight back. 

 Side Note: I thought about creating a world stuck in the bronze age because iron was in short supply. However, I found out that iron is one of the most abundant elements, while copper and tin are relatively scarce.

That's the main reason they moved away from using bronze weapons. Bronze is a little softer, to be sure, but it's about on par with iron weapons and armor in terms of effectiveness in combat and far easier to smith. Old D&D rules that gave a -1 penalty on AC and attack rolls for bronze weapons were, shall we say, misinformed.

I never did anything with the idea, but I decided that if I were to ever develop the campaign setting out, copper and tin would be abundant, so there would never be any pressure to transition to iron weapons and armor.

Quote from DoveArrow >>

Quote from Acromos >>

To me, worlds grow dynamically - for one world, the basic premise is: Wild nature is strong enough to keep civilisation in check. That led to the conclusion that large cities are rare (there are three - as far as the players know) while smaller communities that don't impact nature in the same way, are much more common. Travel is difficult, distances are great, cultures are distinct for that reason, they quite simply don't interact too much. 

So, three cities to work with (plus the other two the players don't know about).

One is high in the mountains, and unsurprisingly produces iron (which is rare in this world), so they're rich and have strong military, being the only ones with unlimited supply of high quality steel weapons and armor. This is a very human-centric culture - no one else is willing to live in the cold.

One is at the shore of a great bay, similar in many ways to some of the cultures around the mediterranean. It's a melting pot of hundreds of races and cultures, foods and goods, and so on. Ruled by a shadowy 'council' of .. well, officially 'merchants', but then why are they all so secret. They wear masks and so on. 

Last is a desert culture - but the only real 'nation'. The others are city states. But the desert people are nomads, and range across an enormous expanse, going where the one river or the other is currently flooding, or lakes fill, or migrating animals flock, or whatever. Technically sparsely populated, but since it's so large an area, this is easily the most populous of the three. And they would easily conquer the others, except it's very hard for a nation with limited food supplies to gather many thousands of soldiers, then travel thousands of miles. 

One thing follows kinda naturally from the other, and basically all of it comes from that basic premise: Nature is strong enough to fight back. 

 Side Note: I thought about creating a world stuck in the bronze age because iron was in short supply. However, I found out that iron is one of the most abundant elements, while copper and tin are relatively scarce.

That's the main reason they moved away from using bronze weapons. Bronze is a little softer, to be sure, but it's about on par with iron weapons and armor in terms of effectiveness in combat and far easier to smith. Old D&D rules that gave a -1 penalty on AC and attack rolls for bronze weapons were, shall we say, misinformed.

I never did anything with the idea, but I decided that if I were to ever develop the campaign setting out, copper and tin would be abundant, so there would never be any pressure to transition to iron weapons and armor.

 
This is actually quite gigglesome for me.

You see, my new world is "iron poor". However, a metal that is even more abundant on Earth (but also more difficult to access) is more common there and is also found in a natural state that it isn't found in on Earth: Aluminum. Aluminum is free range, lol. Drives my engineers into fits when I do stuff like this.

Much of the metal in use (though I don't specify it) is called "alkuni", though no one quite recalls why. Al Cu Ni alloy. there are also Aluminum bronzes -- but very few of them contain iron.

I am always in favor of playing with "physis" and "chemistry" and such -- because it drives home the fact that this fantasy word is not Earth, and so things that people of earth think of don't always work the same.

THe downside, for me, is that I have to have a reason for things to be that way, of course. So I do.