So I am for the first time creating a new world. Ive got Nine fairly diverse continents and some cool NPCs and such that ive thought of for the world I ask for any advice or ideas in making this world as ive found myself with writers block recently
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Bardic Inspiration is just someone believing in you, and I believe in you
Well, You have the continents, you have some NPCs. If I were creating a world, the next step is to go from big picture to small.
The Big Picture can be things like: How was the world created? What sorts of Gods would be interested in populating this world? What types of faith exist across the continents? What is the average technology level of the continents?
Cultures can follow, what do people on continent A do different than B? Are the continents diverse equatorially? This leads to certain cultures adopting differing strategies, ie. Nomads versus farm types.
From there, you decide what interactions the continents have, are some self sufficient and cut off? Have some developed tradeways or air paths? What continents house civilizations likely to form cities?
From there you can populate some of the major cities, throw your NPCs in those, and then look at a generalization chart. Chart out dice rolls for the size of hamlets, townships, towns, small cities and what sorts of shops would be in them.
After that you can focus on the type of story you want to 'hook' your players into.
These hooks can change the world, or perhaps you just want minor story elements, these depend on the vision you have for your campaign.
You've given very little info, so it's tough to make suggestions, but here goes. Geography like mountains, rivers etc, as they help define where populations would naturally build. Creation Myth. How'd the world get there. You can reverse engineer this based on the layout of the world above. Then cities. Start with major cities, then "bridging" towns. those towns that spring up because it's just too far to make it from Point A to Point B in a reasonable amount of time, so Point C becomes a place somewhere in the middle, or just before or after a barrier, like a mountain or major river crossing. Then some cool frontier towns where life is hard and no one asks questions. Next, factions. Religious orders, governments and guilds. These almost invariably form the meat of your conflicts. Which leads me to conflicts. These are the huge, overarching plots of your world and may be the focus of a campaign, or just the background. Now that you have groups and plots, make some major NPC's to lead them.
Find a red thread that goes through it. What kind of setting is this? Wutai-style eastern adventure? Eberron-style magitech? Medieval Fantasy or early 1900s European? Find a theme and try to connect to that throughout
Otherwise, the best advice I can give is plagiarize. If you find something cool from LOTR or Warcraft or Warhammer or whatever, pick out the elements you like and use them.
I would say start small. Having nine different continents is fine, but what are the chances that people are going to experience all of that?
A trick in writing is that the reader brings a lot to the story. By this, if you have a couple of blurry, vaguely tree-like things in the distance, then they're going to say "Look at those trees. I wonder what is over there?" They might even come up with some ideas. However, you as the writer, or in this case DM, know that they're not even trees. They're just little blurs of paint that give the impression of a treeline. You don't need to know what they are yet or who lives there until someone says "let's go there."
If you get some great ideas for a society or a god or a creation myth or whatever elements exist in your world? Great. Write that down and come back to it later. For right now, I would focus on one specific place with specific people and then start asking yourself questions. Create your NPCs first and give them traits and then justify those traits with culture. In writing, logic will often fill out the gaps. Why doesn't the blacksmith work with copper? Why does the local priest only eat raw meat? Why does the local lord only travel with a party of exactly five people? Maybe the blacksmith comes from a region with a lot of ambient electricity and copper is seen by them as bad luck. Maybe the priest sees the idea of cooking food as disrespectful to the animals it comes from, akin to mutilating the corpse. Maybe there is an old story about an ancient hero who had five companions and now it is a tradition for people of authority to travel with no more or less than five companions. Start small and build it out from there.
Lastly, I once saw or read that someone said this: what comment do you have about fantasy settings? What would you do differently? What do fantasy settings get wrong? The advice given by said individual, whomever that was originally, was if you can't come up with a good answer to those questions, why are you creating a setting? Settings aren't easy to build or introduce to other players, so unless you are going to do something cool and unique and show people something entirely new, why are you going through all that work?
I say, forget about the continents and build a city, make that city as magnificent as you can, then make another city, and then another, because when you are creating a whole new world and you have nine continents, what are the odds that all of them get fully explored and explained. We as humans knew only of our continents or countries that was all there was for tens of thousands of years, we found all other continents in the last 500 years. When building a world create the worlds image, but focus on the countries and cities in it, and most importantly the peoples and religions, languages and cultures that exist. And what of the planet's history, the wars fought and lives lost. Find someone or some race and city to be the focus of your telling of the story of the world and tell it from their eyes, for all stories told are from a certain person's perspective, find that one and start writing about his life and explore outwards. When you create a character, it is as you yourself are in the world and not just the onlooker or god of creation, for a world to be fully emersive it must be told from the person that lives in it, and not the person that created it.
So I am for the first time creating a new world. Ive got Nine fairly diverse continents and some cool NPCs and such that ive thought of for the world
I ask for any advice or ideas in making this world as ive found myself with writers block recently
Bardic Inspiration is just someone believing in you, and I believe in you
Well, You have the continents, you have some NPCs. If I were creating a world, the next step is to go from big picture to small.
The Big Picture can be things like: How was the world created? What sorts of Gods would be interested in populating this world? What types of faith exist across the continents? What is the average technology level of the continents?
Cultures can follow, what do people on continent A do different than B? Are the continents diverse equatorially? This leads to certain cultures adopting differing strategies, ie. Nomads versus farm types.
From there, you decide what interactions the continents have, are some self sufficient and cut off? Have some developed tradeways or air paths? What continents house civilizations likely to form cities?
From there you can populate some of the major cities, throw your NPCs in those, and then look at a generalization chart. Chart out dice rolls for the size of hamlets, townships, towns, small cities and what sorts of shops would be in them.
After that you can focus on the type of story you want to 'hook' your players into.
These hooks can change the world, or perhaps you just want minor story elements, these depend on the vision you have for your campaign.
Hopefully some of these ideas help!
Cheers!
You've given very little info, so it's tough to make suggestions, but here goes.
Geography like mountains, rivers etc, as they help define where populations would naturally build.
Creation Myth. How'd the world get there. You can reverse engineer this based on the layout of the world above.
Then cities. Start with major cities, then "bridging" towns. those towns that spring up because it's just too far to make it from Point A to Point B in a reasonable amount of time, so Point C becomes a place somewhere in the middle, or just before or after a barrier, like a mountain or major river crossing.
Then some cool frontier towns where life is hard and no one asks questions.
Next, factions. Religious orders, governments and guilds. These almost invariably form the meat of your conflicts.
Which leads me to conflicts. These are the huge, overarching plots of your world and may be the focus of a campaign, or just the background.
Now that you have groups and plots, make some major NPC's to lead them.
Find a red thread that goes through it. What kind of setting is this? Wutai-style eastern adventure? Eberron-style magitech? Medieval Fantasy or early 1900s European? Find a theme and try to connect to that throughout
Otherwise, the best advice I can give is plagiarize. If you find something cool from LOTR or Warcraft or Warhammer or whatever, pick out the elements you like and use them.
I would say start small. Having nine different continents is fine, but what are the chances that people are going to experience all of that?
A trick in writing is that the reader brings a lot to the story. By this, if you have a couple of blurry, vaguely tree-like things in the distance, then they're going to say "Look at those trees. I wonder what is over there?" They might even come up with some ideas. However, you as the writer, or in this case DM, know that they're not even trees. They're just little blurs of paint that give the impression of a treeline. You don't need to know what they are yet or who lives there until someone says "let's go there."
If you get some great ideas for a society or a god or a creation myth or whatever elements exist in your world? Great. Write that down and come back to it later. For right now, I would focus on one specific place with specific people and then start asking yourself questions. Create your NPCs first and give them traits and then justify those traits with culture. In writing, logic will often fill out the gaps. Why doesn't the blacksmith work with copper? Why does the local priest only eat raw meat? Why does the local lord only travel with a party of exactly five people? Maybe the blacksmith comes from a region with a lot of ambient electricity and copper is seen by them as bad luck. Maybe the priest sees the idea of cooking food as disrespectful to the animals it comes from, akin to mutilating the corpse. Maybe there is an old story about an ancient hero who had five companions and now it is a tradition for people of authority to travel with no more or less than five companions. Start small and build it out from there.
Lastly, I once saw or read that someone said this: what comment do you have about fantasy settings? What would you do differently? What do fantasy settings get wrong? The advice given by said individual, whomever that was originally, was if you can't come up with a good answer to those questions, why are you creating a setting? Settings aren't easy to build or introduce to other players, so unless you are going to do something cool and unique and show people something entirely new, why are you going through all that work?
I say, forget about the continents and build a city, make that city as magnificent as you can, then make another city, and then another, because when you are creating a whole new world and you have nine continents, what are the odds that all of them get fully explored and explained. We as humans knew only of our continents or countries that was all there was for tens of thousands of years, we found all other continents in the last 500 years. When building a world create the worlds image, but focus on the countries and cities in it, and most importantly the peoples and religions, languages and cultures that exist. And what of the planet's history, the wars fought and lives lost. Find someone or some race and city to be the focus of your telling of the story of the world and tell it from their eyes, for all stories told are from a certain person's perspective, find that one and start writing about his life and explore outwards. When you create a character, it is as you yourself are in the world and not just the onlooker or god of creation, for a world to be fully emersive it must be told from the person that lives in it, and not the person that created it.
Patience.
if you have writers block out the pen down for a day or two.
world building never stops!
follow the rabbit holes as you find yourself fixated on them!