I've DM'd for roughly 10 years now, but I wouldn't exactly call myself an expert or a veteran. In that regard I'm not looking for validation or criticism necessarily, either. To put it into an analogy, my father works as a maintenance man in a machining plant, if he is the only one there machines get fixed slower because he doesn't have anyone to bounce ides off of in order to solve the problem. In a sense this is what I hope to find. I have built several worlds in the past, but I'm hoping that this one will last for a while so I want to make it as consistent and cohesive as I can.
I have a solid idea going but I have run into a few roadblocks which I hope to get through with the aid of veteran worldbuilders. Going over the whole of the idea in this exact post would be wordy and come off as a massive block of text but I am willing to answer any questions pertaining the project if and/or when asked.
Overall I look to have someone review my overall ideas for settings, religions, race options, class options, cultures, and civilizations/populations. I'm also hoping not to receive the tired old "you can do what you want, you're the dm" response, because for the way I build worlds this does not help me.
Please and thank you for your help if any is provided.
Happy to help although after 25 years of world building I stopped long ago putting to much down before session 1, my world building generally inviolves a really rough drawing of a world map, 10-15 bullet points and then I start working with players on characters forming the world as they make character choices (where do elves come from, how are tieflings viewed etc). In terms of a pantheon unless a player asks (eg a cleric) then I Don't need that for session 1, I might have some ideas but thats it.
I will populate the starting town/villiage with just enough for a first session, usually a list of names and buildings, and then figure out how the first 2 encounters. from then on I world build as I need to session to session.
Cliff notes for the "Water Cooler Pitch": The Continent of Varzia on the World of Marithor is mostly unexplored wilderness. Until roughly 400 year ago, when it was discovered by a fleet of immortal undead pirates called "the Cursed", no one even knew it existed. That is except for the native tribes of catfolk (Tabaxi, Leonin, Eluran, etc.). Actual settlement of the continent did not "begin" until 250 years ago (from present day) when a series of wars against the cursed waged by immigrants from lands across the Iron Sea to the east dispatched a number of the more maleficent Pirate Lords, repurposing the captured shanty towns as make-shift fishing villages, and with a little time, defensible walled forts.
This is about where I run into some issues. I ran a lot of numbers and by my calculations (based on the size of the ships the immigrants came over on, the likelihood of surviving raids or wars, additional hazards, procreation rate, etc.) after 250 years the number of individuals living on the continent of Varzia who are descended from the waves of immigrants would be roughly 100,000. I find this number remarkably low.
On that note, I don't believe any cohesive governmental system would successfully arise to rule scattered shanty towns inhabited by various races from different regions and cultures. Here I assume that even given the amount of time passed that there are no "cities" on Varzia per se, but rather a few walled port towns here and there and scattered coastal or riverside fishing villages loosely connected by mutual beneficial relationships similar to the Hanseatic League.
Obviously I could be very wrong about alot of this, especially the population thing. So that is partially why I'm hoping to bounce ideas off of people.
Look at the history of the US as an example, I have no idea what that will show but your history there tracks quite closely to the first discovery of America with your tabaxi etc taking the place of the Native Americans.
But I would also say if there is magic in your world then also consider that teleportation circles may have been set up to help bring more people over, you could create powerful magic items (permanent teleport circles) that don't require wizards to be used and so have a constant flow of people back and forth.
If you consider most fantasy realms are not massively populated (need lots of wilderness for adventurers to go out killing stuff in), you could consider a town to be 15-20,000 people which still gives you scope for your 100,000.
When world building like this I always work backwards, I estimate a population and then work out roughly how I got there but I will say, while it might be important for you, I doubt very much your players will care enough to question anything like how there is such a large population. My experiance of players is that they don't want. or need masses of history or details. They only need and want to know what they need to know right now for the story. I once, in my head, change the population of a city 4 times during a campaign because it didn't fit my needs, my players didn't even twig that the city was changing size mid campaign let alone that the population had shifted (but then I do lots of TOTM so there wasn't a physical map).
Some questions I will ask, what is the relationship between the Natives and the "immigrants" Is the fact that they got rid of the pirates meant they are accepted or are they still seen as invaders?
Are there any large native population centres or do they live as marauding races? In my world the Tabaxi live in a large rainforest in a city that is entirely in the roof canopy and below in the trees, nothing on ground level.
What is the main source of income, is there trade with the other nations?
In terms of government again if you look at the founding of the US states you could imagine a local government in each population centre, either some form of democracy with representatives of either each trade group, or each race depending on how you want to sort it. I could imagine a mix, so each race having representation, but then the main trade guilds also wanting a say. Possibly electing a mayor or other key members of government. Or maybe the leaders of the war took positions of authority and their families have continued as leaders.
You could then consider that with Magic there might be a form of communication between main population centres and an agreement of mutual protection, agreement of trading rights and costs ensuring no one town undercuts the others. Maybe they send a combined envoy to far away locations ensuring they can negotiate from a position of united strength instead of one town being played against another.
It would also make sense for them to combine in funding some form of navy to ensure the pirates can be dealt with if they return and to keep the sea lanes, which would be the main form of transport between towns, clear. I can imagine a constant flow of small ships travelling from town to town transporting goods and people between them.
0: On the note of wizards and teleportation circles. The history of the World of Marithor is longer than that of the continent of Varzia (for understandable reasons I left information in that regard out on purpose), immigration to the continent began only 300 years ago, but a series of catastrophes on the eastern continent in the last 200 years has stymied travel to Varzia nearly entirely. In addition, chartering a ship across the ocean is expensive and quite dangerous, limiting the options for standard travel to and from the continent as well as limiting the average populaces knowledge of it's existence in general. However, I can understand the idea, and am willing to rill with it (I had honestly not thought of that before and it gives some interesting ideas going forward.
1: The Leonin of the central grasslands are receptive to the immigrants and treat them with wary respect. The Tabaxi are shy but forge small alliances with a few nature related immigrant races, and the Eluran are too shy and suspicious to interact with immigrants fully. The Pirates were of little long term threat to the natives because the natives had nothing they wanted, and the natives could always just pack up and move or use the land to their advantage, but the less hostile attitudes of the immigrants have given the natives cautious reason to trust and trade with them.
2: The native do not have large civilizations, living predominantly in nomadic tribal clans, the Leonin hunt and roam nomadically ocassionally building grass hut villages, the Tabaxi and Eluran occasionally build small permanent villages in the forests they call home, the Tabaxi typically do so in the canopies of their temperate rain forest, while the Eluran are more grounded.
3: Income is a relative term on Varzia (unless it can be assumed a significant amount of wealth in the manner of rare metals could have been mined from the earth in 250 years enough to manage a continental coin system). Much of the "income" of the region at present is barter and trade. In all honesty, because I do not understand how humans find mineral mines (without advanced technology), I cannot adequately answer the question. There is no major trade between continents (as of yet the teleportation thing gives me ideas) and most settlements on Varzia (at current) subsist mostly on grown crops and salted meats and fish, there are no local livestock (yet).
4: Where it comes to government I had assumed much the same, that various towns and villages would likely elect a form of local government of their own, but each settlement is many leagues lesser than say a city state so a mayor or a council is likely the most power any one would have. A handful of settlements have a "noble" families, in such that they are descended from heroes of note from the war era, some said families are magically inclined and likewise have important roles within their settlements.
5: On one final note about the setting in regards to future pirate attacks: Such concerns are still felt in the western bay, but most of the settlements have moved upriver inland. There is an internal freshwater sea, and the main river is large enough for small ships to travel on. From the internal sea an 8 mile canal has been dug to connect to a northwards winding river, allowing for ship travel from the western bay to the northern bay of the continent.
1st) It sounds like you have no ancestor civilization on the continent, that means no ruins to explore.
2nd) The indigenous sounds like primitive nomad/hut builders not stone builders, that means no ruins to explore.
3rd) If you have ghost pirates that come and loot, that means you have to have fortress towns built with heavy defense. What defense method did they develop to fight off the undead, silvered weapons common, where are silver mines then, would that mean the main settlement is near a silvermine?
4th) Do you really want to put in 100 Gods, just put in maybe two pantheons max 10 Gods, one for locals and one for immigrants. Giving a huge amount of Gods won't help with world building it will detract heavily as you have to come up with something for a priest of Vegerax Forger of Worlds, All Father to the Vole People of the Prairie - no thanks spending an hour fleshing him out, his priesthood, location, symbol etc. Just go with a few Gods and KISS.
5th) If you go the easy route of teleportation, there is no reason for shipping, meaning the fishing villages are just for fishing. There will be no island hopping or exploring open via ship. Logically it would also cut down on Road Building, which would make overland travel difficult.
6th) For towns to grow large enough to support smithing, magic item creation, research, advanced crafts, they will need strong walls, taxation and lords. You will want at least one of those for players to get power ups unless you want to have every fishing village have a magic crafter ie Magic Wal-Mart, which takes away travel, random encounters and world distance.
7th) Humans have been mining gold since at least 4,700 BC and have been using coin since 600 BC. If you don't want them to use precious metals, then give them precious shells or obsidian shards, something that isn't common, hard to attain and can't easily be counterfeited. My two cents, go with the default GP, unless you want to completely recreate loot tables and then have fun with modules. Unless you just want to have Obsidian Pieces = Gold Pieces, which I would say why not just use GP? You could also make it where iron is rare and precious metals are common, greatly jacking up the price of armor costing a lot Steel Pieces. See Dragonlance or Dark Sun as an example if you want that route.
I have a few things I’d like to add to the discussion, if I may.
1. Make Teleportation expensive. This way bad guys are the main ones who use it and it can be used in a pinch instead of “hand wavium” more bad guys show up type thing.
2. Base these Shanty towns on the Pirate History of the Gulf of Mexico, you’d be surprised how similar you already are to the history there. The Undead don’t have to murder everyone they see, it’s actually more evil to just make a settlement suffer over and over for their amusement.
3. It sounds like you’re setting up faction vs faction conflicts? The cardinal rule of making faction fighting interesting is to have 5 factions, max, any more and you risk overload and having to info dump at every session, that’s no bueno.
4. I’d leave room for the space to “breathe” your players will tell you the kind of game they want to play, if you listen you can use that help and build something better together with the skeleton of what you make here.
1 + 2) You'd be correct, there are no ruins to explore as far as I've defined.
3) The pirates were not specifically ghosts (some were), most of them were zombies, skeletons, wights, ghouls, think of them as Pirates of the Carribean immortal undead. History in a nut shell, 99 ship carrying said pirates came to Varzia, they got into a bunch of fights because they disliked each other, broke into smaller groups under certain captains and promptly stopped fighting each other when they ran out of steel shot and gunpowder, then immigrants (with many capable warriors and spellcasters) came over and killed a bunch of the major captains scattering the remaining crews still bent on looting and plundering. Since then the immigrants have also run out of gunpowder. Raids from pirates are fewer now than they were but pirate attacks do still occur (solution = Bloodhunters Order of the Ghost Slayer).
4) I do not recall indicating a massive pantheon of gods, certainly not 100. Several of the immigrants have brought over cultural gods from the eastern continent (20 or so) and a handful of newer deities are currently worshipped by the immigrants relative to their current location. I was never going to have more than 40. (Noting that roughly 21 sentient races inhabit Varzia this adequately defines the religious structures of the previous "old world gods" the native deities and the new gods created by the settlers)
5) Teleportation is by no means easy, I don't intend to make it common, there may be 1 city with a circle and it connects to a city on the eastern continent known for it's mages. Varzia itself will not be so overly magical. Travel will tend to be on foot or on ship.
6) Thanks to be discovering Kingdom Building rules in Pathfinder I have a clearer idea of population density in settlements. Four small sized walled and defensible cities exist (population 5000-10,000) with a handful of walled, defensible towns. Overall 50% of settlers and immigrants inhabit a town or larger settlement with the remainder inhabiting smaller villages and hamlets. The largest "city" on Varzia currently sits with just under 10,000 inhabitants and supports the regions only teleportation circle to the eastern continent.
7) I don't intend to redesign loot tables, I'm just not a geologist so I don't understand how humans find mineral veins. That was an issue I was looking at when weighing the advancement of civilization over 250 years, i.e. how long does it take medieval settlers to discover and develop worthwhile mines to make coins and use metal tools?
It's an OCD thing. To me, I need my world to have that sense of realism, even if it is fantasy. Yes these minor facts won't be important to players, but it sets a level of realism to the world that grounds everything in a sense that this can happen without an excessive amount of handwavium. This is specifically why I can't be told "your the dm, do what you want". I spent months fleshing out my previous long format campaign just to get accurate numbers for quantity of immigrants that came across on ships. These numbers were never told to the party, they were along for the ride, participating in the war against those pirates, in the background I was doing painstaking calculations to determine how many individuals of what race survived, how likely they were to reproduce etc. That is to say, I wrote an entire 8 part long format campaign full of intrigue and high seas fantasy combat, just to crunch numbers behind the action.
I have a problem. That is why I'm seeking other dms for advice. *shrugs*
If you enjoy worldbuilding (it sounds like you do) then just go ahead and world build, but knowing that 99% of it will never really come up or be of interest to the players.
You are creating a game for players, first and foremost. They will be interested in what their characters can see, smell, hear and so on. They will have little interest in the history of settlements that they do not see, or are not in. Keep in mind what you need to know for the players, and only for the players.
There is no real benefit on coming up with hundreds of gods (nobody will ever hear of most of them), or the cultures of lands that may never be explored. Have a few key places laid out in the world - for instance you might want to be able to reference "The Jade Peninsula" when the PCs aren't there to give a greater sense of a wider world. But you don't need to know what's there until it becomes relevant to the story.
It may feel good to you to know how many immigrants arrived at a particular place, and that's all perfectly fine if you're having fun designing it. But it will never be relevant or useful knowledge to the players. If you want to make all that stuff up then do it! And if you don't want to then don't. It won't have any impact whatever you choose, because the game is focused around the adventures of the characters, not the things that they can't see.
Remember that even before "Mining" civilisations like the Egyptians, Aztecs etc had a large gold currency largely from panhandling it, or finding it loose on the ground. Tricky mining techniques are only needed once a civilisation has exhausted the materials they find easy to get hold of and Mining as we see it is a relatively new process, even the gold miners of the great american gold rushes would be shocked at what mining has become.
Both the Copper and Iron age "Mining" meant digging a hole in the ground near rocks that traditionally had the right ores around, in many ways the world of DnD is technologically already unrealistically ahead of the era it represents (which is an argument all to itself) In many ways the ability of dwarves to create entire underground cities and mine down to the level of molten lava is beyond even modern technology. The deepest hole in the world is no where near lava. As much as you may need to try and ground your world in reality the reality is that the DnD world is not based in that. The population density of the forgotten realms does not match what it should given the age that humans live (remember in middle ages the average age was 50, in DnD humans live to 80+) and the fact that disease can be cured by magic. In many ways the DnD world should be far more heavily populated than it is, but that wouldn't provide vast areas of wilderness to explore.
This is a lesson I had to learn about 20 years ago when I started world building, I thought I needed to do what you where doing, for many of the same reasons, but I then started teaching myself not to worry too much about the mechanics. But if you want a site that can be of real help I advise.
Okay, so mining for metals and minor population nuances aside, my next biggest hurdle I'd like to troubleshoot is how to approach the use of class options. I've never been one to tell a player they can't be X class, and I've tried to shoehorn in every class option in previous world building attempt, often relegating some of the more obscure ones to regions or cultures where their quirks would be more appreciated (i.e. saving samurai for a more oriental region, bladesinging for the elven forests, etc.).
But here I run into the problem that by the definition of the age of these minor civilizations certain classes would logically be under represented or absent. Case and point, Shaolin Kungfu has a history of 1500 years, and many other martial art teaching are also quite old. It would be hard to imagine new school of martial prowess imply popped into existence (not that I'm specifically calling out monks it is used as an example.) Wizarding academies, bardic colleges, Paladin orders, classes that require order, organization and significant time to develop would be at a disadvantage here (this was not intentional). A wizard would likely have learned from a mentor (Gandalf style as opposed to the school of magic story). Similarly bannerets typically (in my understanding) are noble orders of fighters beholden to a kingdom, I would find it hard to imagine such a class present in such a meager world thus far.
I am sorry to cause issues, I can understand how frustratingly bull headed I must seem.
But I reiterate, I do not and did not plan on developing 100 gods. 40 was the most I was gonna do.
Gandalf was an Istari, a missionary Maiar, first known by the name of Olorin when he lived in Lorien. He was never taught magic, he was a magical type of being that was associated with light and fire. He was created by Iluvatar before the Music of the Ainur. He was considered wisest of the Maiar.
He also never taught anyone magic.
my pedantic paragraph is now over.
Bro, it don’t seem like you actually want any help building your world since you veto anything anyone else mentions, so what is it you actually want from this dialogue?
Okay, so mining for metals and minor population nuances aside, my next biggest hurdle I'd like to troubleshoot is how to approach the use of class options. I've never been one to tell a player they can't be X class, and I've tried to shoehorn in every class option in previous world building attempt, often relegating some of the more obscure ones to regions or cultures where their quirks would be more appreciated (i.e. saving samurai for a more oriental region, bladesinging for the elven forests, etc.).
But here I run into the problem that by the definition of the age of these minor civilizations certain classes would logically be under represented or absent. Case and point, Shaolin Kungfu has a history of 1500 years, and many other martial art teaching are also quite old. It would be hard to imagine new school of martial prowess imply popped into existence (not that I'm specifically calling out monks it is used as an example.) Wizarding academies, bardic colleges, Paladin orders, classes that require order, organization and significant time to develop would be at a disadvantage here (this was not intentional). A wizard would likely have learned from a mentor (Gandalf style as opposed to the school of magic story). Similarly bannerets typically (in my understanding) are noble orders of fighters beholden to a kingdom, I would find it hard to imagine such a class present in such a meager world thus far.
I am sorry to cause issues, I can understand how frustratingly bull headed I must seem.
But I reiterate, I do not and did not plan on developing 100 gods. 40 was the most I was gonna do.
I generally always limit choice for all my campaigns, it forces players to think more cleverly rather then just going for a standard as a general rule I give my players 3 options per class which I pick from the range of choices. I also limit race and subrace choice, and sometimes have even told my players no, there are no wizards/clerics/rangers etc in this game.
But as for the classes you call out. There must have been a first wizard, the idea that all wizards learn from some school or academy is a very centralist view of Wizadry, it is just as possible to imagine someone teaching themselves, or maybe a wizard watching and learning from a sorceror finding ways to mimic the motions and movements and create the spells a different way. Or maybe a dragon taught the first wizards, or a creature from another plane.
Bards again, you don't need to have a college, a bard could simply take on an apprentice and then teach them a certain style, your problem here is you are trying to fit the classes as they exist in the handbook into your homebrew world. A monk doesn't have to have a temple or a home, it could be a farmer who wanted to protect his family so discovered the art of chi, or maybe a god taught a group of individuals, a paladin can dedicate themselves to a god without needing to be part of an order, or even have a concept of what an order is. Or the native tribes would have a spirit warrior who taps into the nature around them to become a powerful weapon of defence.
Ultimately this part isn't for you to define, work with your players and figure out what there background is. What came before, is the world only 300 years old? there must have been a before and the gods will have played a part in that development.
The classes are a template but you can name them whatever you want, I once wanted a warrior who had tapped into his magic but didnt like a fighter, so I used the paladin class but I wasn't a paladin, I didn't worship a god or have an order I used it to have a fighter with better magic then an eldritch knight. Another question, how old are elves, gnomes and othe rlong lived races in your world, if it is all as new as you say how did they come to be, and are they only a generation old?
I don’t get why you think the towns would all be disconnected. I get if you want it that way, it’s certainly plausible. But it seems like in 300 years, some strong (wo)man would have arisen and tried to conquer the town next door, and if they won, they’d just keep going. Eventually, they’ve made themselves a nice little country. Some other towns allied to fight off the aggressor, and now you’ve got a second country. Then some other towns saw these two and formed a third.
Disconnected towns works, too, I’m just saying its quite plausible that you have a couple nations in there. As for classes and organized groups, 200-300 years is a very long time. It really doesn’t take long for 5-6 people to get together and start a monastery, or college, or order of warriors, or wizard school, or whatever and start training others in their ways. You mention shaolin monks having a 1500 year history, well, that means 1200 years ago, they were 300 years old. Still a pretty impressive legacy. Princeton and Yale are less than 300 years old and they’re two of the top colleges in the world. 300 years is more than enough time for there to be lots of organizations with impressive histories.
I’m also curious about your estimate of only 100,000 people. If you want there to be more, as you kind of said you did, just tweak the family size. It’s a fair assumption that people colonizing a new world, in whats likely to be a pretty agrarian society, would have lots of kids — they’ll need help on the farms.
I get you wanting to make it realistic, but it seem like the way your doing it is also coming with a heaping helping of handwavium. In fact, that’s really the only way you can world build — you decided that the land was arable, that needed metals were easy enough to mine, the climate was favorable, the land wasn’t brimming over with dragons, etc. All of those were choices. It’s not too much to allow for higher levels of development, too.
Again, if you want disconnected towns without larger organizations, that’s perfectly reasonable, but it’s just as reasonable to have more development. I’d actually argue that over that time frame, higher development levels would even be more likely than small, scattered towns.
To answer your question, no, the world is not 300 years old, but the defined settlement of the continent only goes back 300 years. The world is much older, suffice to say that current year is ~1600 (but the natives know the world to be much older than that, long story). Magic users (of varying traditions) were common on the eastern continent, with major schools and orders and temples having been established for a while. I was wondering how long similar teachings would take to develop on a new continent without support from the old, but your idea of classes as templates.
Thanks to the idea of Teleportation Circle given earlier I worked out a way to transport knowledge from the eastern continent to the new one, at least preserving a larger array of class options and academia as a whole. Given 250 years it would not be hard to imagine smaller schools would likely develop in other small cities.
In response to Xalthu, the reason I assumed there wouldn't be larger countries is because raising an army to attack or conquer another town, and then also having that army to enforce control over that town is harder to do with fewer people and no stable food and resource base. It's not just about attacking and capturing it's about retention over time. When it comes to the "handwavium" I've been using in building the world, I generated a map on azgaar first. The continent is as arable and has a climate similar to central Europe with generated biomes. That specifically wasn't handwavium, that was actual map making, generated based on climate, latitude, water sources, geography, topography, and temperate, but I do get your point. The metals point was actually a point of significant contention in a few previous posts. Research was done on that in between as well.
I agree though, over time greater development leads to centralization, but I'm also using historical evidence when making decisions as well, and while Greece is a country now, originally it was just scattered city states bound my mutual trade agreements, which is about where this continent is now. I would post a map of the continent, and I did try, but I can't seem to get one large enough to save.
On the note of long lived races, there are still some elves (Wood Elves, Sea Elves, Eladrin, etc.) who are old enough to remember the first voyage to this new continent, and some Leshy may still exist who remember the Third Pirate War (roughly 250 years ago).
Gandalf was an Istari, a missionary Maiar, first known by the name of Olorin when he lived in Lorien. He was never taught magic, he was a magical type of being that was associated with light and fire. He was created by Iluvatar before the Music of the Ainur. He was considered wisest of the Maiar.
He also never taught anyone magic.
my pedantic paragraph is now over.
It's fine, what I meant was Gandalf was a wandering wizard, not specifically taught by a school and didn't have a tower like Saruman. Though the lore of LotR is much different regarding the nature of wizards my intention of the statement was to mean someone could potentially find a wandering wizard "like gandalf".
The answer to most of the questions you're asking is:
You have invented problems for yourself, setting up parameters that you alone know about, and you alone find important.
These parameters are now causing you small headaches because they prevent the game running in the way that you want it to (e.g. wizard academies)
The answer is simple: change anything about those parameters that improves the gameplay
It's a bit like saying the following:
I have to move a small pile of sand from A to B.
I have chosen to use some tweezers to move it all, but I only have 30 minutes
This is a problem because I can't move it fast enough
The solution is: stop using the tweezers and use your hands and you'll be done in 3 minutes.
Essentially you're creating your own problems. Want there to be samurai? On the original continent, there were samurai, and some of them came with the immigrants. If a player wants to be a samurai, add in a samurai area. Want there to be wizard colleges? There are wizard colleges on the original continent, and if a player wants to come from one, then maybe they came from a group of eight wizards on a field expedition. You can dismantle your own roadblocks very easily by simply changing what you've already designed.
Most of what you've designed isn't going to impact the gameplay of the characters for many, many levels of gameplay. Focus your energy on designing adventures for them, not on logistical, political and economic systems that are unlikely to be relevant through the course of a campaign.
Why does your world have to have wizard colleges or Bard colleges at all, you could have a wizard who is self taught and instead of buying spell scrolls spends time, materials and effort learning new spells to add into the book, you could have a a bard who learnt from there mentor and so that is how they gained their skills.
You seem to be fixating on being able to apply the DnD world to your homebrew. I have had homebrew worlds where the rules and mechanics of the classes exist, but the fluff around them is very very different. So a wizard doesn't have a book but tattoos spells to there body (a shaman), a warrior who fights using the magic given to him by his parents (paladin who worshipped no god and repurposed the oaths to be something completely different).
I had a world where there was no college of magic, instead there where planes of magic and a wizards "specialisation" indicated they drew magic from that plane. They didn't "learn spells" they communed with the god of their plane and after giving the right level of dedication they received spells they could write in their prayer book (magic spell book). To learn additional spells they might need to complete a task, or offer up an offering to receive the spell into the book.
I wouldn't call it a fixation, I suppose. The Eastern continent had a place for almost every subclass, and to that end there were several academies and colleges because Wizards and Bards to some extant aren't just spellcasters they are somewhat representative of higher learning in general. I'm not against wizards and bards learning on their own or having a mentor (again returning to the finding a wandering wizard like Gandalf thing), but I feel that even if their specialization isn't tethered to a specific college then a generic college or school of arcana is somewhat needed just to otherwise serve the purpose of a university of higher learning, like oxford or bologna.
Part of it is the relative simplicity of the rules as written. I'm not trying to be fixated on it, but for the ease of explaining how a class functions in the world I'd rather not change to much and risk confusing players who, in my experience, do not read setting material if given to them. (Which as of late simply was a setting map, a list of races that were allowed, the 15 gods [taken from odysseys of theros] and their teachings, and a small summary of each subclass and where it could be found [both in world and sourcebook] or what it meant to certain races or cultures, and a short treatise on the spell point system the campaign used form magic [found in the dmg])
On that note your ideas for homebrew usages of magic and class functions are actually quite interesting.
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I've DM'd for roughly 10 years now, but I wouldn't exactly call myself an expert or a veteran. In that regard I'm not looking for validation or criticism necessarily, either. To put it into an analogy, my father works as a maintenance man in a machining plant, if he is the only one there machines get fixed slower because he doesn't have anyone to bounce ides off of in order to solve the problem. In a sense this is what I hope to find. I have built several worlds in the past, but I'm hoping that this one will last for a while so I want to make it as consistent and cohesive as I can.
I have a solid idea going but I have run into a few roadblocks which I hope to get through with the aid of veteran worldbuilders. Going over the whole of the idea in this exact post would be wordy and come off as a massive block of text but I am willing to answer any questions pertaining the project if and/or when asked.
Overall I look to have someone review my overall ideas for settings, religions, race options, class options, cultures, and civilizations/populations. I'm also hoping not to receive the tired old "you can do what you want, you're the dm" response, because for the way I build worlds this does not help me.
Please and thank you for your help if any is provided.
Happy to help although after 25 years of world building I stopped long ago putting to much down before session 1, my world building generally inviolves a really rough drawing of a world map, 10-15 bullet points and then I start working with players on characters forming the world as they make character choices (where do elves come from, how are tieflings viewed etc). In terms of a pantheon unless a player asks (eg a cleric) then I Don't need that for session 1, I might have some ideas but thats it.
I will populate the starting town/villiage with just enough for a first session, usually a list of names and buildings, and then figure out how the first 2 encounters. from then on I world build as I need to session to session.
Cliff notes for the "Water Cooler Pitch": The Continent of Varzia on the World of Marithor is mostly unexplored wilderness. Until roughly 400 year ago, when it was discovered by a fleet of immortal undead pirates called "the Cursed", no one even knew it existed. That is except for the native tribes of catfolk (Tabaxi, Leonin, Eluran, etc.). Actual settlement of the continent did not "begin" until 250 years ago (from present day) when a series of wars against the cursed waged by immigrants from lands across the Iron Sea to the east dispatched a number of the more maleficent Pirate Lords, repurposing the captured shanty towns as make-shift fishing villages, and with a little time, defensible walled forts.
This is about where I run into some issues. I ran a lot of numbers and by my calculations (based on the size of the ships the immigrants came over on, the likelihood of surviving raids or wars, additional hazards, procreation rate, etc.) after 250 years the number of individuals living on the continent of Varzia who are descended from the waves of immigrants would be roughly 100,000. I find this number remarkably low.
On that note, I don't believe any cohesive governmental system would successfully arise to rule scattered shanty towns inhabited by various races from different regions and cultures. Here I assume that even given the amount of time passed that there are no "cities" on Varzia per se, but rather a few walled port towns here and there and scattered coastal or riverside fishing villages loosely connected by mutual beneficial relationships similar to the Hanseatic League.
Obviously I could be very wrong about alot of this, especially the population thing. So that is partially why I'm hoping to bounce ideas off of people.
Look at the history of the US as an example, I have no idea what that will show but your history there tracks quite closely to the first discovery of America with your tabaxi etc taking the place of the Native Americans.
But I would also say if there is magic in your world then also consider that teleportation circles may have been set up to help bring more people over, you could create powerful magic items (permanent teleport circles) that don't require wizards to be used and so have a constant flow of people back and forth.
If you consider most fantasy realms are not massively populated (need lots of wilderness for adventurers to go out killing stuff in), you could consider a town to be 15-20,000 people which still gives you scope for your 100,000.
When world building like this I always work backwards, I estimate a population and then work out roughly how I got there but I will say, while it might be important for you, I doubt very much your players will care enough to question anything like how there is such a large population. My experiance of players is that they don't want. or need masses of history or details. They only need and want to know what they need to know right now for the story. I once, in my head, change the population of a city 4 times during a campaign because it didn't fit my needs, my players didn't even twig that the city was changing size mid campaign let alone that the population had shifted (but then I do lots of TOTM so there wasn't a physical map).
Some questions I will ask, what is the relationship between the Natives and the "immigrants" Is the fact that they got rid of the pirates meant they are accepted or are they still seen as invaders?
Are there any large native population centres or do they live as marauding races? In my world the Tabaxi live in a large rainforest in a city that is entirely in the roof canopy and below in the trees, nothing on ground level.
What is the main source of income, is there trade with the other nations?
In terms of government again if you look at the founding of the US states you could imagine a local government in each population centre, either some form of democracy with representatives of either each trade group, or each race depending on how you want to sort it. I could imagine a mix, so each race having representation, but then the main trade guilds also wanting a say. Possibly electing a mayor or other key members of government. Or maybe the leaders of the war took positions of authority and their families have continued as leaders.
You could then consider that with Magic there might be a form of communication between main population centres and an agreement of mutual protection, agreement of trading rights and costs ensuring no one town undercuts the others. Maybe they send a combined envoy to far away locations ensuring they can negotiate from a position of united strength instead of one town being played against another.
It would also make sense for them to combine in funding some form of navy to ensure the pirates can be dealt with if they return and to keep the sea lanes, which would be the main form of transport between towns, clear. I can imagine a constant flow of small ships travelling from town to town transporting goods and people between them.
On the note of the questions asked:
0: On the note of wizards and teleportation circles. The history of the World of Marithor is longer than that of the continent of Varzia (for understandable reasons I left information in that regard out on purpose), immigration to the continent began only 300 years ago, but a series of catastrophes on the eastern continent in the last 200 years has stymied travel to Varzia nearly entirely. In addition, chartering a ship across the ocean is expensive and quite dangerous, limiting the options for standard travel to and from the continent as well as limiting the average populaces knowledge of it's existence in general. However, I can understand the idea, and am willing to rill with it (I had honestly not thought of that before and it gives some interesting ideas going forward.
1: The Leonin of the central grasslands are receptive to the immigrants and treat them with wary respect. The Tabaxi are shy but forge small alliances with a few nature related immigrant races, and the Eluran are too shy and suspicious to interact with immigrants fully. The Pirates were of little long term threat to the natives because the natives had nothing they wanted, and the natives could always just pack up and move or use the land to their advantage, but the less hostile attitudes of the immigrants have given the natives cautious reason to trust and trade with them.
2: The native do not have large civilizations, living predominantly in nomadic tribal clans, the Leonin hunt and roam nomadically ocassionally building grass hut villages, the Tabaxi and Eluran occasionally build small permanent villages in the forests they call home, the Tabaxi typically do so in the canopies of their temperate rain forest, while the Eluran are more grounded.
3: Income is a relative term on Varzia (unless it can be assumed a significant amount of wealth in the manner of rare metals could have been mined from the earth in 250 years enough to manage a continental coin system). Much of the "income" of the region at present is barter and trade. In all honesty, because I do not understand how humans find mineral mines (without advanced technology), I cannot adequately answer the question. There is no major trade between continents (as of yet the teleportation thing gives me ideas) and most settlements on Varzia (at current) subsist mostly on grown crops and salted meats and fish, there are no local livestock (yet).
4: Where it comes to government I had assumed much the same, that various towns and villages would likely elect a form of local government of their own, but each settlement is many leagues lesser than say a city state so a mayor or a council is likely the most power any one would have. A handful of settlements have a "noble" families, in such that they are descended from heroes of note from the war era, some said families are magically inclined and likewise have important roles within their settlements.
5: On one final note about the setting in regards to future pirate attacks: Such concerns are still felt in the western bay, but most of the settlements have moved upriver inland. There is an internal freshwater sea, and the main river is large enough for small ships to travel on. From the internal sea an 8 mile canal has been dug to connect to a northwards winding river, allowing for ship travel from the western bay to the northern bay of the continent.
1st) It sounds like you have no ancestor civilization on the continent, that means no ruins to explore.
2nd) The indigenous sounds like primitive nomad/hut builders not stone builders, that means no ruins to explore.
3rd) If you have ghost pirates that come and loot, that means you have to have fortress towns built with heavy defense. What defense method did they develop to fight off the undead, silvered weapons common, where are silver mines then, would that mean the main settlement is near a silvermine?
4th) Do you really want to put in 100 Gods, just put in maybe two pantheons max 10 Gods, one for locals and one for immigrants. Giving a huge amount of Gods won't help with world building it will detract heavily as you have to come up with something for a priest of Vegerax Forger of Worlds, All Father to the Vole People of the Prairie - no thanks spending an hour fleshing him out, his priesthood, location, symbol etc. Just go with a few Gods and KISS.
5th) If you go the easy route of teleportation, there is no reason for shipping, meaning the fishing villages are just for fishing. There will be no island hopping or exploring open via ship. Logically it would also cut down on Road Building, which would make overland travel difficult.
6th) For towns to grow large enough to support smithing, magic item creation, research, advanced crafts, they will need strong walls, taxation and lords. You will want at least one of those for players to get power ups unless you want to have every fishing village have a magic crafter ie Magic Wal-Mart, which takes away travel, random encounters and world distance.
7th) Humans have been mining gold since at least 4,700 BC and have been using coin since 600 BC. If you don't want them to use precious metals, then give them precious shells or obsidian shards, something that isn't common, hard to attain and can't easily be counterfeited. My two cents, go with the default GP, unless you want to completely recreate loot tables and then have fun with modules. Unless you just want to have Obsidian Pieces = Gold Pieces, which I would say why not just use GP? You could also make it where iron is rare and precious metals are common, greatly jacking up the price of armor costing a lot Steel Pieces. See Dragonlance or Dark Sun as an example if you want that route.
I have a few things I’d like to add to the discussion, if I may.
1. Make Teleportation expensive. This way bad guys are the main ones who use it and it can be used in a pinch instead of “hand wavium” more bad guys show up type thing.
2. Base these Shanty towns on the Pirate History of the Gulf of Mexico, you’d be surprised how similar you already are to the history there. The Undead don’t have to murder everyone they see, it’s actually more evil to just make a settlement suffer over and over for their amusement.
3. It sounds like you’re setting up faction vs faction conflicts? The cardinal rule of making faction fighting interesting is to have 5 factions, max, any more and you risk overload and having to info dump at every session, that’s no bueno.
4. I’d leave room for the space to “breathe” your players will tell you the kind of game they want to play, if you listen you can use that help and build something better together with the skeleton of what you make here.
1 + 2) You'd be correct, there are no ruins to explore as far as I've defined.
3) The pirates were not specifically ghosts (some were), most of them were zombies, skeletons, wights, ghouls, think of them as Pirates of the Carribean immortal undead. History in a nut shell, 99 ship carrying said pirates came to Varzia, they got into a bunch of fights because they disliked each other, broke into smaller groups under certain captains and promptly stopped fighting each other when they ran out of steel shot and gunpowder, then immigrants (with many capable warriors and spellcasters) came over and killed a bunch of the major captains scattering the remaining crews still bent on looting and plundering. Since then the immigrants have also run out of gunpowder. Raids from pirates are fewer now than they were but pirate attacks do still occur (solution = Bloodhunters Order of the Ghost Slayer).
4) I do not recall indicating a massive pantheon of gods, certainly not 100. Several of the immigrants have brought over cultural gods from the eastern continent (20 or so) and a handful of newer deities are currently worshipped by the immigrants relative to their current location. I was never going to have more than 40. (Noting that roughly 21 sentient races inhabit Varzia this adequately defines the religious structures of the previous "old world gods" the native deities and the new gods created by the settlers)
5) Teleportation is by no means easy, I don't intend to make it common, there may be 1 city with a circle and it connects to a city on the eastern continent known for it's mages. Varzia itself will not be so overly magical. Travel will tend to be on foot or on ship.
6) Thanks to be discovering Kingdom Building rules in Pathfinder I have a clearer idea of population density in settlements. Four small sized walled and defensible cities exist (population 5000-10,000) with a handful of walled, defensible towns. Overall 50% of settlers and immigrants inhabit a town or larger settlement with the remainder inhabiting smaller villages and hamlets. The largest "city" on Varzia currently sits with just under 10,000 inhabitants and supports the regions only teleportation circle to the eastern continent.
7) I don't intend to redesign loot tables, I'm just not a geologist so I don't understand how humans find mineral veins. That was an issue I was looking at when weighing the advancement of civilization over 250 years, i.e. how long does it take medieval settlers to discover and develop worthwhile mines to make coins and use metal tools?
It's an OCD thing. To me, I need my world to have that sense of realism, even if it is fantasy. Yes these minor facts won't be important to players, but it sets a level of realism to the world that grounds everything in a sense that this can happen without an excessive amount of handwavium. This is specifically why I can't be told "your the dm, do what you want". I spent months fleshing out my previous long format campaign just to get accurate numbers for quantity of immigrants that came across on ships. These numbers were never told to the party, they were along for the ride, participating in the war against those pirates, in the background I was doing painstaking calculations to determine how many individuals of what race survived, how likely they were to reproduce etc. That is to say, I wrote an entire 8 part long format campaign full of intrigue and high seas fantasy combat, just to crunch numbers behind the action.
I have a problem. That is why I'm seeking other dms for advice. *shrugs*
If you enjoy worldbuilding (it sounds like you do) then just go ahead and world build, but knowing that 99% of it will never really come up or be of interest to the players.
You are creating a game for players, first and foremost. They will be interested in what their characters can see, smell, hear and so on. They will have little interest in the history of settlements that they do not see, or are not in. Keep in mind what you need to know for the players, and only for the players.
There is no real benefit on coming up with hundreds of gods (nobody will ever hear of most of them), or the cultures of lands that may never be explored. Have a few key places laid out in the world - for instance you might want to be able to reference "The Jade Peninsula" when the PCs aren't there to give a greater sense of a wider world. But you don't need to know what's there until it becomes relevant to the story.
It may feel good to you to know how many immigrants arrived at a particular place, and that's all perfectly fine if you're having fun designing it. But it will never be relevant or useful knowledge to the players. If you want to make all that stuff up then do it! And if you don't want to then don't. It won't have any impact whatever you choose, because the game is focused around the adventures of the characters, not the things that they can't see.
Remember that even before "Mining" civilisations like the Egyptians, Aztecs etc had a large gold currency largely from panhandling it, or finding it loose on the ground. Tricky mining techniques are only needed once a civilisation has exhausted the materials they find easy to get hold of and Mining as we see it is a relatively new process, even the gold miners of the great american gold rushes would be shocked at what mining has become.
Both the Copper and Iron age "Mining" meant digging a hole in the ground near rocks that traditionally had the right ores around, in many ways the world of DnD is technologically already unrealistically ahead of the era it represents (which is an argument all to itself) In many ways the ability of dwarves to create entire underground cities and mine down to the level of molten lava is beyond even modern technology. The deepest hole in the world is no where near lava. As much as you may need to try and ground your world in reality the reality is that the DnD world is not based in that. The population density of the forgotten realms does not match what it should given the age that humans live (remember in middle ages the average age was 50, in DnD humans live to 80+) and the fact that disease can be cured by magic. In many ways the DnD world should be far more heavily populated than it is, but that wouldn't provide vast areas of wilderness to explore.
This is a lesson I had to learn about 20 years ago when I started world building, I thought I needed to do what you where doing, for many of the same reasons, but I then started teaching myself not to worry too much about the mechanics. But if you want a site that can be of real help I advise.
https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/
Okay, so mining for metals and minor population nuances aside, my next biggest hurdle I'd like to troubleshoot is how to approach the use of class options. I've never been one to tell a player they can't be X class, and I've tried to shoehorn in every class option in previous world building attempt, often relegating some of the more obscure ones to regions or cultures where their quirks would be more appreciated (i.e. saving samurai for a more oriental region, bladesinging for the elven forests, etc.).
But here I run into the problem that by the definition of the age of these minor civilizations certain classes would logically be under represented or absent. Case and point, Shaolin Kungfu has a history of 1500 years, and many other martial art teaching are also quite old. It would be hard to imagine new school of martial prowess imply popped into existence (not that I'm specifically calling out monks it is used as an example.) Wizarding academies, bardic colleges, Paladin orders, classes that require order, organization and significant time to develop would be at a disadvantage here (this was not intentional). A wizard would likely have learned from a mentor (Gandalf style as opposed to the school of magic story). Similarly bannerets typically (in my understanding) are noble orders of fighters beholden to a kingdom, I would find it hard to imagine such a class present in such a meager world thus far.
I am sorry to cause issues, I can understand how frustratingly bull headed I must seem.
But I reiterate, I do not and did not plan on developing 100 gods. 40 was the most I was gonna do.
Gandalf was an Istari, a missionary Maiar, first known by the name of Olorin when he lived in Lorien. He was never taught magic, he was a magical type of being that was associated with light and fire. He was created by Iluvatar before the Music of the Ainur. He was considered wisest of the Maiar.
He also never taught anyone magic.
my pedantic paragraph is now over.
Bro, it don’t seem like you actually want any help building your world since you veto anything anyone else mentions, so what is it you actually want from this dialogue?
I generally always limit choice for all my campaigns, it forces players to think more cleverly rather then just going for a standard as a general rule I give my players 3 options per class which I pick from the range of choices. I also limit race and subrace choice, and sometimes have even told my players no, there are no wizards/clerics/rangers etc in this game.
But as for the classes you call out. There must have been a first wizard, the idea that all wizards learn from some school or academy is a very centralist view of Wizadry, it is just as possible to imagine someone teaching themselves, or maybe a wizard watching and learning from a sorceror finding ways to mimic the motions and movements and create the spells a different way. Or maybe a dragon taught the first wizards, or a creature from another plane.
Bards again, you don't need to have a college, a bard could simply take on an apprentice and then teach them a certain style, your problem here is you are trying to fit the classes as they exist in the handbook into your homebrew world. A monk doesn't have to have a temple or a home, it could be a farmer who wanted to protect his family so discovered the art of chi, or maybe a god taught a group of individuals, a paladin can dedicate themselves to a god without needing to be part of an order, or even have a concept of what an order is. Or the native tribes would have a spirit warrior who taps into the nature around them to become a powerful weapon of defence.
Ultimately this part isn't for you to define, work with your players and figure out what there background is. What came before, is the world only 300 years old? there must have been a before and the gods will have played a part in that development.
The classes are a template but you can name them whatever you want, I once wanted a warrior who had tapped into his magic but didnt like a fighter, so I used the paladin class but I wasn't a paladin, I didn't worship a god or have an order I used it to have a fighter with better magic then an eldritch knight. Another question, how old are elves, gnomes and othe rlong lived races in your world, if it is all as new as you say how did they come to be, and are they only a generation old?
I don’t get why you think the towns would all be disconnected. I get if you want it that way, it’s certainly plausible. But it seems like in 300 years, some strong (wo)man would have arisen and tried to conquer the town next door, and if they won, they’d just keep going. Eventually, they’ve made themselves a nice little country. Some other towns allied to fight off the aggressor, and now you’ve got a second country. Then some other towns saw these two and formed a third.
Disconnected towns works, too, I’m just saying its quite plausible that you have a couple nations in there.
As for classes and organized groups, 200-300 years is a very long time. It really doesn’t take long for 5-6 people to get together and start a monastery, or college, or order of warriors, or wizard school, or whatever and start training others in their ways. You mention shaolin monks having a 1500 year history, well, that means 1200 years ago, they were 300 years old. Still a pretty impressive legacy. Princeton and Yale are less than 300 years old and they’re two of the top colleges in the world. 300 years is more than enough time for there to be lots of organizations with impressive histories.
I’m also curious about your estimate of only 100,000 people. If you want there to be more, as you kind of said you did, just tweak the family size. It’s a fair assumption that people colonizing a new world, in whats likely to be a pretty agrarian society, would have lots of kids — they’ll need help on the farms.
I get you wanting to make it realistic, but it seem like the way your doing it is also coming with a heaping helping of handwavium. In fact, that’s really the only way you can world build — you decided that the land was arable, that needed metals were easy enough to mine, the climate was favorable, the land wasn’t brimming over with dragons, etc. All of those were choices. It’s not too much to allow for higher levels of development, too.
Again, if you want disconnected towns without larger organizations, that’s perfectly reasonable, but it’s just as reasonable to have more development. I’d actually argue that over that time frame, higher development levels would even be more likely than small, scattered towns.
To answer your question, no, the world is not 300 years old, but the defined settlement of the continent only goes back 300 years. The world is much older, suffice to say that current year is ~1600 (but the natives know the world to be much older than that, long story). Magic users (of varying traditions) were common on the eastern continent, with major schools and orders and temples having been established for a while. I was wondering how long similar teachings would take to develop on a new continent without support from the old, but your idea of classes as templates.
Thanks to the idea of Teleportation Circle given earlier I worked out a way to transport knowledge from the eastern continent to the new one, at least preserving a larger array of class options and academia as a whole. Given 250 years it would not be hard to imagine smaller schools would likely develop in other small cities.
In response to Xalthu, the reason I assumed there wouldn't be larger countries is because raising an army to attack or conquer another town, and then also having that army to enforce control over that town is harder to do with fewer people and no stable food and resource base. It's not just about attacking and capturing it's about retention over time. When it comes to the "handwavium" I've been using in building the world, I generated a map on azgaar first. The continent is as arable and has a climate similar to central Europe with generated biomes. That specifically wasn't handwavium, that was actual map making, generated based on climate, latitude, water sources, geography, topography, and temperate, but I do get your point. The metals point was actually a point of significant contention in a few previous posts. Research was done on that in between as well.
I agree though, over time greater development leads to centralization, but I'm also using historical evidence when making decisions as well, and while Greece is a country now, originally it was just scattered city states bound my mutual trade agreements, which is about where this continent is now. I would post a map of the continent, and I did try, but I can't seem to get one large enough to save.
On the note of long lived races, there are still some elves (Wood Elves, Sea Elves, Eladrin, etc.) who are old enough to remember the first voyage to this new continent, and some Leshy may still exist who remember the Third Pirate War (roughly 250 years ago).
It's fine, what I meant was Gandalf was a wandering wizard, not specifically taught by a school and didn't have a tower like Saruman. Though the lore of LotR is much different regarding the nature of wizards my intention of the statement was to mean someone could potentially find a wandering wizard "like gandalf".
The answer to most of the questions you're asking is:
It's a bit like saying the following:
The solution is: stop using the tweezers and use your hands and you'll be done in 3 minutes.
Essentially you're creating your own problems. Want there to be samurai? On the original continent, there were samurai, and some of them came with the immigrants. If a player wants to be a samurai, add in a samurai area. Want there to be wizard colleges? There are wizard colleges on the original continent, and if a player wants to come from one, then maybe they came from a group of eight wizards on a field expedition. You can dismantle your own roadblocks very easily by simply changing what you've already designed.
Most of what you've designed isn't going to impact the gameplay of the characters for many, many levels of gameplay. Focus your energy on designing adventures for them, not on logistical, political and economic systems that are unlikely to be relevant through the course of a campaign.
Why does your world have to have wizard colleges or Bard colleges at all, you could have a wizard who is self taught and instead of buying spell scrolls spends time, materials and effort learning new spells to add into the book, you could have a a bard who learnt from there mentor and so that is how they gained their skills.
You seem to be fixating on being able to apply the DnD world to your homebrew. I have had homebrew worlds where the rules and mechanics of the classes exist, but the fluff around them is very very different. So a wizard doesn't have a book but tattoos spells to there body (a shaman), a warrior who fights using the magic given to him by his parents (paladin who worshipped no god and repurposed the oaths to be something completely different).
I had a world where there was no college of magic, instead there where planes of magic and a wizards "specialisation" indicated they drew magic from that plane. They didn't "learn spells" they communed with the god of their plane and after giving the right level of dedication they received spells they could write in their prayer book (magic spell book). To learn additional spells they might need to complete a task, or offer up an offering to receive the spell into the book.
I wouldn't call it a fixation, I suppose. The Eastern continent had a place for almost every subclass, and to that end there were several academies and colleges because Wizards and Bards to some extant aren't just spellcasters they are somewhat representative of higher learning in general. I'm not against wizards and bards learning on their own or having a mentor (again returning to the finding a wandering wizard like Gandalf thing), but I feel that even if their specialization isn't tethered to a specific college then a generic college or school of arcana is somewhat needed just to otherwise serve the purpose of a university of higher learning, like oxford or bologna.
Part of it is the relative simplicity of the rules as written. I'm not trying to be fixated on it, but for the ease of explaining how a class functions in the world I'd rather not change to much and risk confusing players who, in my experience, do not read setting material if given to them. (Which as of late simply was a setting map, a list of races that were allowed, the 15 gods [taken from odysseys of theros] and their teachings, and a small summary of each subclass and where it could be found [both in world and sourcebook] or what it meant to certain races or cultures, and a short treatise on the spell point system the campaign used form magic [found in the dmg])
On that note your ideas for homebrew usages of magic and class functions are actually quite interesting.