Hi. Im currently making a entire universe/multiverse from scratch, and just wondering how long that usually takes? Looking to use it as a campaign setting.
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I have traversed all the outer planes- I have traversed all the inner planes- now I travel to the land of earth to ride an airplane.
-They/Them Pronouns-
If you need lore, spells, heaps of information, come my way!!
I've been building mine, off and on, for about eight years now. And every week I find something new I have to build and add in just to stay ahead of my players. Don't focus on how long it takes. Focus instead on what you've come up with today, and what you might come up with tomorrow. Don't try to build in sequence. Write down every idea as it comes to you, no matter how random or unimportant it may seem. Establish regular intervals to sort through the piles of raw data you've written to sort it, edit it, and compile it into your designs. Give yourself little challenges. Sit down and say, "I'm going to create 10 NPCs in the next 15 minutes." Each one needs a name, species, sex or gender, two skills, two idiosyncrasies, and two background facts. Then have a treat. Explore our real world to discover not only inspirations for your fantasy cultures and peoples, but to learn how those cultures and peoples interact. Cities are built near water, every mountain range has a wet side and a dry side, trade routes have to balance speed with security, junctions along trade routes become cities of commerce, racism and xenophobia become more prevalent the farther you are from the center of the trade conjunctions. Civilization is what geography allows. History is not what happened, it's the debate we have about what we think happened. But most importantly remember - much of what you create you will never use. And that's okay. Be okay with that. Don't build the world to fit into a campaign. Build the world first, then build the campaign that fits naturally in that world.
It will take exactly as long as you give it. Which is both an incredibly unhelpful answer as well as being the only true and correct one.
My advice is, start with a map and a set of NPCs.
This can be as expansive or as light as you wish. I might suggest a world/continent map, a map of the town where you're starting the characters, and then any important locations in the town. Maybe make some quirky battle maps that themselves start a story. ("Wait. Why is there a skeleton here in the back yard?")
It's good to have a few generic maps on hand - a forest with paths, a simple road, a couple of taverns/inns. These can be whatever places they need to be.
As above, if you're not experienced with geography, there are fun things to learn. Cities and towns are where they are for a reason: rivers, ports, mountain passes, water sources. Water flows downhill, and usually towards an ocean, though it can also flow into a lake. If your planet is Earth-like, the main climactic winds travel west to east and the direction nearer the pole is the side of the mountain that keeps snow the longest.
If you want your story to be geopolitical, you'll probably want at least to sketch out nations and the basics of their factions, resources, and trade routes. But you don't need that unless your story does.
Have fun. Remember Critical Role's world just started out as one small town, so you can in fact build a very expansive world session by session. Of course, you can also spend months or years before the campaign starts building out maps that are fun, of places your characters may never go, and that can be very fun too.
The question is the quality of that world. So let's use some examples:
Adventure 1 - Eternarii Initially this world was going to take inspiration from some early Final Fantasy games. The world has been split into three distinct forms. By uniting the artefacts of the gods the worlds can be brought back together as they ought to have been all along. This concept took around 8 hours during one week to detail out. In that time I had the origins of different playable races drawn out, I had four unique settlements designed, and the skeleton of an adventure path sketched out. It took an additional six weeks with roughly an hour a day to flesh out all the NPCs, religions, lore and suchlike.
I tested this world by putting it in front of a group of fellow GMs and the feedback was that I'd created something far too elaborate. It was clear that there was a world there, but it felt overwhelming. Seven weeks of work wasted. The quality simply didn't exist in my own eyes.
I then opened a campaign with a barebones idea using the maps and whatnot I'd created for Eternarii. I pretty much built the world around the players and developed the lore on the fly. Think Wallace and Gromit laying tracks in front of the train. The campaign was put in front of three separate groups that lasted levels 1-20 and each between 2 and 5 years. Each group too had their own versions of the world, slightly different according to the things they'd done within that world. By the end of it, I had a developed world in which setting stories and developing new adventures was simple.
Campaign 2 - Forsceta This time around I spend a good three months. I built the world starting from one core settlement and then expanded out around the world. I had a basic history for the last two-hundred years (when the city was founded) and an idea of the guilds, societies, legal structures, and a whole load more. The two groups adventuring in this setting have been going for a several months now and the continent of this setting is firmly fleshed out. So much so in fact that I have two additional adventure paths laid out for the same setting.
The setting is to my estimation a far superior setting in terms of level of detail, lore, NPCs and so much more. It is a more tightly built and well developed world. The differentiating factors here are time based. One world came after my own experience with a world I'd built previously. I had more experience by the time I came to develop forsceta. The other thing though is that I spent more time developing forsceta. Time and experience though are both within your control.
A world's quality will be determined by how much you've experienced other worlds created by other people, how many worlds you've created yourself, and how much time you give the creation process.
My advice to worldbuilders Read. Read. Read. Go off and read as many published adventures as you can. Develop your experience of other people's creations as much as you can. The more examples of other people's worlds that you have to drawn on the better built your own world will be. Take a look at Lost Mines of Phandelver for example. It's a great model for a GM. It starts you off with a handful of locations, a main settlement and a set of NPCs. You'll notice as you read more adventures that this tends to be a common theme. A central hub around which the adventure unfolds. You're given some NPCs and the base location. Of course as you read more advanced adventures you begin to see more travelling. I think Icewind Dale tends to be a good example of this. One big area but loads of places to explore within in. Vecna: Eve of Ruin is even more advanced again in that it has adventurers travelling planes of existence.
This is what I mean by go off and read adventures. The more you can find and read, the better it'll set you up for building your own worlds.
Awesome! I love the advice! Thank you. In my opinion though, the more complicated a world is, the better it is!
I don't as a rule disagree, I would however say that the more complex your world the more the weaknesses get highlighted though.
The most wonderful fantasy world that I can think of is also beautifully simple - deceptively so. Discworld. Sir Terry once described that every guild, profession, or suchlike existed in a permanent golden age. So you have have a fantasy magic school alongside a ruthlessly fun thieves' guild, alongside a victorian(ish) department store. The afterlife in Discworld is simply one where what happens after death depends on an individual's beliefs. There's no further explanation given. The real complexity in Discworld comes from those funny little creatures known as humans.
Even a work as impactful as Hobbit is relatively straightforward in their design. It's a world where some fantasy creatures exist, but beyond that the complexity mostly came afterwards.
I'm not saying don't put the work in, but genuinely the more worlds I experience the more beautiful simplicity I see within the designs...and deceptively so often
The important thing to remember is that world-building and DMing are two completely different hobbies. As a world-builder, it's fun to create a complicated world. But if you present a complicated world to your players, you and your campaign will fall flat on your face. If you present too much information and too much complexity too quickly, your players will be completely overwhelmed and will either devolve into "analysis paralysis", or the party will unravel in aimless confusion with no real idea what the underlying plot is.
By all means create a deep, nuanced, complex world full of interconnected subplots and esoteric philosophies. But that's a present that you give yourself. That's your game just for you. When you sit down at a table with a group of players, you need to present to them an abridged version of your world. You need to convey to them only the slivers of lore that their characters would have access to; and only burden them with the most essential material that they need to get from your first clear plot hook to the next clear step in the mutually-revealing story.
A thing to remember about complexity is that most of the people in a world are not aware of all its complexity, especially if it is a world without fast communications or fast and inexpensive travel. In your typical medieval type fantasy village, a person's whole life would be the town they live in and maybe a larger town nearby. They wouldn't know about neighboring nations unless they'd been a soldier or maybe a trader. Only scholars and maybe very high level national advisers would have a reason to seek out and collect that level of knowledge.
One of the reasons most folks say start small is that it’s a whole lot simpler and easier to get something that is game ready in a timeframe for putting a game together. If you’re building a novel that is different - at least potentially. A second reason is that once a campaign starts it becomes a shared world not “your” world and the others in the game will have inputs to it that take portions of it into directions you weren’t expecting. Note - that is a good thing turn your team loose on fitting things together.
If we’re still on the complexity topic, the other factor against is, your players will rarely retain the information. They have their own real world complexity to deal with, often when it’s time to play D&D they just want you to point them at the bad guys. Certainly figuring out who the bad guys are can be fun in itself, but calculating the geopolitical fallout from their choices is a bit much. That doesn’t mean don’t make the world complex, just don’t expect the players to retain that information. I often find myself telling them at decision point, In world it’s common knowledge that X and Y really don’t like each other, and doing this will help x, so choose carefully who you want to piss off vs. who you want to make happy.
I find that also helps as a way of slowly releasing the information, as no one likes to sit through a big info dump.
I have saved your comment for it is very helpful and good. Thank you very much! The only thing I'd like to know in more detail is what will better reveal all the facets of the story. Low fantasy or high fantasy? Dark or normal? Heroic or high? https://omegle****/
Its very heroic a dark fantasy, the first module is about some cultists stealing villagers, killing them, and bringing them back to life a zombies to make an apocalypse army.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
I have traversed all the outer planes- I have traversed all the inner planes- now I travel to the land of earth to ride an airplane.
-They/Them Pronouns-
If you need lore, spells, heaps of information, come my way!!
Have your players help! This will take some of the creative pressure off of you (only allow them to help with aspects of the world you are not feeling incredibly precious about or wanting to exert more control over). This also helps them feel more ownership and investment in the world since it's something they've helped create. You can use a session zero world creation game where you have some questions the players can roll for and then answer. Their answers become canon, but you and the other players reserve the right to "yes, and" the suggestions. I did this for one of my campaigns and will never not do it going forward for any homebrew setting. The session 0 was a lot of fun and as a DM it felt great having my players so invested in creating the world that had existed only in my head before presenting to them the bones and structure I'd already come up with.
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Hi. Im currently making a entire universe/multiverse from scratch, and just wondering how long that usually takes? Looking to use it as a campaign setting.
I have traversed all the outer planes- I have traversed all the inner planes- now I travel to the land of earth to ride an airplane.
-They/Them Pronouns-
If you need lore, spells, heaps of information, come my way!!
I've been building mine, off and on, for about eight years now. And every week I find something new I have to build and add in just to stay ahead of my players. Don't focus on how long it takes. Focus instead on what you've come up with today, and what you might come up with tomorrow. Don't try to build in sequence. Write down every idea as it comes to you, no matter how random or unimportant it may seem. Establish regular intervals to sort through the piles of raw data you've written to sort it, edit it, and compile it into your designs. Give yourself little challenges. Sit down and say, "I'm going to create 10 NPCs in the next 15 minutes." Each one needs a name, species, sex or gender, two skills, two idiosyncrasies, and two background facts. Then have a treat. Explore our real world to discover not only inspirations for your fantasy cultures and peoples, but to learn how those cultures and peoples interact. Cities are built near water, every mountain range has a wet side and a dry side, trade routes have to balance speed with security, junctions along trade routes become cities of commerce, racism and xenophobia become more prevalent the farther you are from the center of the trade conjunctions. Civilization is what geography allows. History is not what happened, it's the debate we have about what we think happened. But most importantly remember - much of what you create you will never use. And that's okay. Be okay with that. Don't build the world to fit into a campaign. Build the world first, then build the campaign that fits naturally in that world.
Anzio Faro. Protector Aasimar light cleric. Lvl 18.
Viktor Gavriil. White dragonborn grave cleric. Lvl 20.
Ikram Sahir ibn-Malik al-Sayyid Ra'ad. Brass dragonborn draconic sorcerer Lvl 9. Fire elemental devil.
Wrangler of cats.
It will take exactly as long as you give it. Which is both an incredibly unhelpful answer as well as being the only true and correct one.
My advice is, start with a map and a set of NPCs.
This can be as expansive or as light as you wish. I might suggest a world/continent map, a map of the town where you're starting the characters, and then any important locations in the town. Maybe make some quirky battle maps that themselves start a story. ("Wait. Why is there a skeleton here in the back yard?")
It's good to have a few generic maps on hand - a forest with paths, a simple road, a couple of taverns/inns. These can be whatever places they need to be.
As above, if you're not experienced with geography, there are fun things to learn. Cities and towns are where they are for a reason: rivers, ports, mountain passes, water sources. Water flows downhill, and usually towards an ocean, though it can also flow into a lake. If your planet is Earth-like, the main climactic winds travel west to east and the direction nearer the pole is the side of the mountain that keeps snow the longest.
If you want your story to be geopolitical, you'll probably want at least to sketch out nations and the basics of their factions, resources, and trade routes. But you don't need that unless your story does.
Have fun. Remember Critical Role's world just started out as one small town, so you can in fact build a very expansive world session by session. Of course, you can also spend months or years before the campaign starts building out maps that are fun, of places your characters may never go, and that can be very fun too.
The question is the quality of that world. So let's use some examples:
Adventure 1 - Eternarii
Initially this world was going to take inspiration from some early Final Fantasy games. The world has been split into three distinct forms. By uniting the artefacts of the gods the worlds can be brought back together as they ought to have been all along. This concept took around 8 hours during one week to detail out. In that time I had the origins of different playable races drawn out, I had four unique settlements designed, and the skeleton of an adventure path sketched out. It took an additional six weeks with roughly an hour a day to flesh out all the NPCs, religions, lore and suchlike.
I tested this world by putting it in front of a group of fellow GMs and the feedback was that I'd created something far too elaborate. It was clear that there was a world there, but it felt overwhelming. Seven weeks of work wasted. The quality simply didn't exist in my own eyes.
I then opened a campaign with a barebones idea using the maps and whatnot I'd created for Eternarii. I pretty much built the world around the players and developed the lore on the fly. Think Wallace and Gromit laying tracks in front of the train. The campaign was put in front of three separate groups that lasted levels 1-20 and each between 2 and 5 years. Each group too had their own versions of the world, slightly different according to the things they'd done within that world. By the end of it, I had a developed world in which setting stories and developing new adventures was simple.
Campaign 2 - Forsceta
This time around I spend a good three months. I built the world starting from one core settlement and then expanded out around the world. I had a basic history for the last two-hundred years (when the city was founded) and an idea of the guilds, societies, legal structures, and a whole load more. The two groups adventuring in this setting have been going for a several months now and the continent of this setting is firmly fleshed out. So much so in fact that I have two additional adventure paths laid out for the same setting.
The setting is to my estimation a far superior setting in terms of level of detail, lore, NPCs and so much more. It is a more tightly built and well developed world. The differentiating factors here are time based. One world came after my own experience with a world I'd built previously. I had more experience by the time I came to develop forsceta. The other thing though is that I spent more time developing forsceta. Time and experience though are both within your control.
A world's quality will be determined by how much you've experienced other worlds created by other people, how many worlds you've created yourself, and how much time you give the creation process.
My advice to worldbuilders
Read. Read. Read. Go off and read as many published adventures as you can. Develop your experience of other people's creations as much as you can. The more examples of other people's worlds that you have to drawn on the better built your own world will be. Take a look at Lost Mines of Phandelver for example. It's a great model for a GM. It starts you off with a handful of locations, a main settlement and a set of NPCs. You'll notice as you read more adventures that this tends to be a common theme. A central hub around which the adventure unfolds. You're given some NPCs and the base location. Of course as you read more advanced adventures you begin to see more travelling. I think Icewind Dale tends to be a good example of this. One big area but loads of places to explore within in. Vecna: Eve of Ruin is even more advanced again in that it has adventurers travelling planes of existence.
This is what I mean by go off and read adventures. The more you can find and read, the better it'll set you up for building your own worlds.
DM session planning template - My version of maps for 'Lost Mine of Phandelver' - Send your party to The Circus - Other DM Resources - Maps, Tokens, Quests - 'Better' Player Character Injury Tables?
Actor, Writer, Director & Teacher by day - GM/DM in my off hours.
Awesome! I love the advice! Thank you. In my opinion though, the more complicated a world is, the better it is!
I have traversed all the outer planes- I have traversed all the inner planes- now I travel to the land of earth to ride an airplane.
-They/Them Pronouns-
If you need lore, spells, heaps of information, come my way!!
I don't as a rule disagree, I would however say that the more complex your world the more the weaknesses get highlighted though.
The most wonderful fantasy world that I can think of is also beautifully simple - deceptively so. Discworld. Sir Terry once described that every guild, profession, or suchlike existed in a permanent golden age. So you have have a fantasy magic school alongside a ruthlessly fun thieves' guild, alongside a victorian(ish) department store. The afterlife in Discworld is simply one where what happens after death depends on an individual's beliefs. There's no further explanation given. The real complexity in Discworld comes from those funny little creatures known as humans.
Even a work as impactful as Hobbit is relatively straightforward in their design. It's a world where some fantasy creatures exist, but beyond that the complexity mostly came afterwards.
I'm not saying don't put the work in, but genuinely the more worlds I experience the more beautiful simplicity I see within the designs...and deceptively so often
DM session planning template - My version of maps for 'Lost Mine of Phandelver' - Send your party to The Circus - Other DM Resources - Maps, Tokens, Quests - 'Better' Player Character Injury Tables?
Actor, Writer, Director & Teacher by day - GM/DM in my off hours.
The important thing to remember is that world-building and DMing are two completely different hobbies. As a world-builder, it's fun to create a complicated world. But if you present a complicated world to your players, you and your campaign will fall flat on your face. If you present too much information and too much complexity too quickly, your players will be completely overwhelmed and will either devolve into "analysis paralysis", or the party will unravel in aimless confusion with no real idea what the underlying plot is.
By all means create a deep, nuanced, complex world full of interconnected subplots and esoteric philosophies. But that's a present that you give yourself. That's your game just for you. When you sit down at a table with a group of players, you need to present to them an abridged version of your world. You need to convey to them only the slivers of lore that their characters would have access to; and only burden them with the most essential material that they need to get from your first clear plot hook to the next clear step in the mutually-revealing story.
Anzio Faro. Protector Aasimar light cleric. Lvl 18.
Viktor Gavriil. White dragonborn grave cleric. Lvl 20.
Ikram Sahir ibn-Malik al-Sayyid Ra'ad. Brass dragonborn draconic sorcerer Lvl 9. Fire elemental devil.
Wrangler of cats.
A thing to remember about complexity is that most of the people in a world are not aware of all its complexity, especially if it is a world without fast communications or fast and inexpensive travel. In your typical medieval type fantasy village, a person's whole life would be the town they live in and maybe a larger town nearby. They wouldn't know about neighboring nations unless they'd been a soldier or maybe a trader. Only scholars and maybe very high level national advisers would have a reason to seek out and collect that level of knowledge.
Thank you FoolishMortal18588 for your insight! Will keep that in mind.
I have traversed all the outer planes- I have traversed all the inner planes- now I travel to the land of earth to ride an airplane.
-They/Them Pronouns-
If you need lore, spells, heaps of information, come my way!!
If you are interested in the world that im building, check out my future posts!!!
I have traversed all the outer planes- I have traversed all the inner planes- now I travel to the land of earth to ride an airplane.
-They/Them Pronouns-
If you need lore, spells, heaps of information, come my way!!
One of the reasons most folks say start small is that it’s a whole lot simpler and easier to get something that is game ready in a timeframe for putting a game together. If you’re building a novel that is different - at least potentially. A second reason is that once a campaign starts it becomes a shared world not “your” world and the others in the game will have inputs to it that take portions of it into directions you weren’t expecting. Note - that is a good thing turn your team loose on fitting things together.
Wisea$$ DM and Player since 1979.
Hi! My new campaign is coming out soon! Look for new releases!
I have traversed all the outer planes- I have traversed all the inner planes- now I travel to the land of earth to ride an airplane.
-They/Them Pronouns-
If you need lore, spells, heaps of information, come my way!!
.
I have traversed all the outer planes- I have traversed all the inner planes- now I travel to the land of earth to ride an airplane.
-They/Them Pronouns-
If you need lore, spells, heaps of information, come my way!!
If we’re still on the complexity topic, the other factor against is, your players will rarely retain the information. They have their own real world complexity to deal with, often when it’s time to play D&D they just want you to point them at the bad guys. Certainly figuring out who the bad guys are can be fun in itself, but calculating the geopolitical fallout from their choices is a bit much.
That doesn’t mean don’t make the world complex, just don’t expect the players to retain that information. I often find myself telling them at decision point, In world it’s common knowledge that X and Y really don’t like each other, and doing this will help x, so choose carefully who you want to piss off vs. who you want to make happy.
I find that also helps as a way of slowly releasing the information, as no one likes to sit through a big info dump.
.
I have traversed all the outer planes- I have traversed all the inner planes- now I travel to the land of earth to ride an airplane.
-They/Them Pronouns-
If you need lore, spells, heaps of information, come my way!!
I have saved your comment for it is very helpful and good. Thank you very much! The only thing I'd like to know in more detail is what will better reveal all the facets of the story. Low fantasy or high fantasy? Dark or normal? Heroic or high? https://omegle****/
Its very heroic a dark fantasy, the first module is about some cultists stealing villagers, killing them, and bringing them back to life a zombies to make an apocalypse army.
I have traversed all the outer planes- I have traversed all the inner planes- now I travel to the land of earth to ride an airplane.
-They/Them Pronouns-
If you need lore, spells, heaps of information, come my way!!
Have your players help! This will take some of the creative pressure off of you (only allow them to help with aspects of the world you are not feeling incredibly precious about or wanting to exert more control over). This also helps them feel more ownership and investment in the world since it's something they've helped create. You can use a session zero world creation game where you have some questions the players can roll for and then answer. Their answers become canon, but you and the other players reserve the right to "yes, and" the suggestions. I did this for one of my campaigns and will never not do it going forward for any homebrew setting. The session 0 was a lot of fun and as a DM it felt great having my players so invested in creating the world that had existed only in my head before presenting to them the bones and structure I'd already come up with.