So I'm worldbuilding a setting for my upcoming campaign, and I'm worried it's too generic. I like classic D&D style medieval fantasy with dragons, dungeons and orcs, but I want to spice it up with something unique which the players will be surprised by and enjoy. I still want to use just the basic races in the PHB though. Any ideas?
I've found the history of the world is a good place to start, and build up from. For example, you might decide that civilisation as it is known in your world has been built up by Beholders who surrounded themselves with enough servants as to form a city. They only care that they are looked after and their every whim is met, so as long as there's enough people to serve them then they are happy to let the city grow. As such, every city in the world has a beholder at its center.
You might decide that there was a great war between the Orcs and the Dragons, resulting in low poplations of both.
You might decide that the weave of magic was in fact created by MYSTRA, the Moltz-Yargold Systematic Terragalvanic Radiation Accelerator, a particle accelerator which tore the world of technology from the map and left in its wake a world where magic is possible. Or, you might decide that the world went apocalyptic and the few people who survived had nanites in their blood, which passed down to their descendants, allowing them to manipulate reality in what we call magic. The technology was self-replicating but forgotton. Sometimes it's corupt, causing wild-magic, or reanimating corpses, and so on. So the players can learn that this is actually a post-apocalyptic futuristic world, not an historical one.
Otherwise, what is it that you feel is wrong about the world that you can make different in yours? In mine, I've changed Dinosaurs, Birds, Elves, Humans, Dwarves, Giants... lots of little tweaks that make the world unique.
Also, ask your players! Say "What is it you're most looking forward to discovering about the world?". Be open that you're building the world, so want to build awesome stuff for them to find, allowing them to lay their own stamp on the world (this is how the best worldbuilding occurs). A good starting point is "where are you from?". I have two mages colleges and a secretive monastic civilisation in a geological basin where the territories of 5 metallic dragons intersected because of the players. I also have pantheons fleshed out because the players needed gods to follow, and so on.
Not only does this approach mean that you get new ideas you might never have thought of yourself, but it also means that you are focusing your efforts on the things that the players will find rewarding, rather than 82 pages on every god there is, when they have already picked one or none and have no interest in the rest!
Now, if you have no players yet, I can throw some random ideas your way to work with for world building!
1: I am a tiefling born to a village in a secluded forest where they consider tiefling births a blessing. Trained to become the "chosen one", on my 18th birthday another tiefling was born, and I was cast aside. I left the village to find it was an island in an industrially deforested world, too steep a cliff to scale to chop the trees down. I now wonder the world seeking adventure, and trying to live up to my name; Salvation.
2: I am a druid who lives in a region of great lakes and rivers. I was trained in the druidic circle of the Isle of Rings, which is an island in a lake on an island in a lake on an island in a lake. Each ring of land has standing stones, and is supposedly a forgotten power in the world, long since relegated to spiritual purposes over practical. I have left my home to seek out a reason for the unexpectedly large quantities of oversized lobsters which have started to infest the revered clam-beds of second-ring lake.
3: I am a barbarian who has toured the underground fighting scene in many of the towns and cities. My homeland is a dry and dusty place, which we as a people were forced to leave because the yearly rains stopped coming. I seek to keep the few of my people who survived safe, and will take work or fights for coin. In a recent job with an underworld organisation, things went south, and now I'm on the run from an influential power who believes that I have stolen something of great value from them.
Hopefully there should be a lot of stuff in there that you can develop into world stuff, and maybe link together? I don't know if this is the direction you wanted, but I hope it helps!
You can have the most uninspired setting that's ever been created, and it can still be rich and engaging for your players if you give them a reason to care about it. Likewise, you can have an intricately detailed world and bore your players to tears with it. It's not about the setting, it's what you do with it.
For elements of surprise, you can subvert or change any number of expectations to up the fantasy factor:
- Environmental (grass is blue in one town, flowers give off emotions instead of scents, it rains drops of darkness instead of water, etc.) - Cultural (orcs are pacifists, goblins are popular intellectuals, dragons are giant scaredy cats) - Political (the most common governmental system is a democracy/socialist commune/oligarchy, wars are fought with board games instead of soldiers) - Magical (the secrets of transmutation have only been recently unlocked and those spells are a little wild, everyone born on a Tuesday can speak with ghosts) - Religious (people have turned away from the gods and divine magic is struggling to survive, a temple to the god of isolation has a million followers)
On top of these, having NPCs your players can latch onto and love really helps make a world come alive.
Work with your players to get there races, backgrounds and classes connected to your world, and from there, into the story. This is something to do in session zero.
If you haven't done your overworld map yet, I'd start with the natural features (mountains, lakes, rivers, forests, etc), and then look at it and see where it would make for villages or cities to be (a port city at the mouth of a river, a mountain valley village around a gold mine, A farming village in open planes near a river, etc). Are there ancient ruins in your world? If so, who left them, and what happened to them?
Once you have the basic outline for the map, consider the characters' backgrounds and races for where they lived before becoming adventurers. In medieval times, people didn't travel much, which is why villages and cities were largely ethnically homogeneous. Travel between settlements would largely be limited to traveling merchants, political envoys, and in a fantasy setting... adventurers. As such, you can base the cultures of any villages or cities in your setting on the generalities of the cultures of the various races (An elven city may be based on Lothlorien or Rivendell, a human city might be based on Laketown, a dwarven city may be based on the Lonely Mountain, etc). How the various settlements feel about each other is up to you and what tone you want your game to have.
And for their classes, consider adding lore to them (ex: Maybe to be a druid, there's a years-long sequence of training and a ritual that one must undergo to gain the ability to cast the primal magic of nature, and characters who start as druids have already been through this, but it makes it much harder to multiclass into Druid. By tying classes to roleplay, it makes class choice more nuanced than what's merely the most mechanically expedient.
Consider why the characters are adventurers. One method is to have everyone choose a reason their character needs a lot of money, something they can get from adventuring, but not from regular jobs. In your setting, are adventurers common (resulting in a lot of competition) or rare (which is why people are so eager to give your characters tasks to do).
You can also connect your characters by giving each of them 5 cards to write 5 things about their character that others might gossip about (two true and positive, two true and negative, and one that's false), then distribute the cards for each character among the other players, so they have an idea about who each-other are, but they don't know how accurate what they "know" is.
one day i hope to adapt the Terry Pratchett novel "Feet of Clay" (about class struggles and golems) to Waterdeep. i say pick an old novel you like and borrow, borrow, borrow. even if no one or everyone has read it. the players likely aren't feeling the same hangups about playing a "generic" fantasy that you do, so really this is about the dm having a good time. so, have a good time!
...oh, and i don't mention Waterdeep lightly. there are festivals for nearly every week, unique statues scattered about each with their own history, and factions with lots of fairly official wiki entries. borrow, borrow, borrow!
Invite your players to do it. Ask each of them to write up a description of something, a place, an organization, whatever. Then incorporate it into the setting. The players will be excited when it shows up, and it helps invest them in it overall.
And, ideally, don’t think of this as a one-off world. You can run your campaign here —starting small is usually best — and then when you put the next campaign in the same world, and the one after that, you grow it into something more and more interesting. A place with a history the players know, because they helped make that history. That’s the dream anyway.
OK I asked each of my players what they want in the setting and this is what I have so far:
One person wants a snowy region.
Another wants a forge in a volcano.
Another wants to see the Underdark.
Edit: Someone wanted guns, but that would mess with everything so I had to say no. Another guy wanted a forest like the Forbidden Forest in Harry Potter. I can do that.
I'll update when I have more replies. There are two others who haven't responded yet. I have an idea to blend ideas 1 and 2: a frigid, Iceland-like tundra region with volcanoes. Hidden in one of the volcanoes is a forge which used to belong to a powerful giant. It is guarded by golems and other constructs which the giant created. But it has been taken hold of by dark forces.
So I'm worldbuilding a setting for my upcoming campaign, and I'm worried it's too generic. I like classic D&D style medieval fantasy with dragons, dungeons and orcs, but I want to spice it up with something unique which the players will be surprised by and enjoy. I still want to use just the basic races in the PHB though. Any ideas?
The big advantage of a custom setting is that you don't have to worry about trampling on previously established information, nor do you have to worry about previously established Big Names. Take full advantage of it; it's a lot easy to run grand scale adventures if you don't have to worry about making sure that overpowered NPCs somehow aren't paying attention.
OK I asked each of my players what they want in the setting and this is what I have so far:
One person wants a snowy region.
Another wants a forge in a volcano.
Another wants to see the Underdark.
I'll update when I have more replies. There are two others who haven't responded yet. I have an idea to blend ideas 1 and 2: a frigid, Iceland-like tundra region with volcanoes. Hidden in one of the volcanoes is a forge which used to belong to a powerful giant. It is guarded by golems and other constructs which the giant created. But it has been taken hold of by dark forces.
OK I asked each of my players what they want in the setting and this is what I have so far:
One person wants a snowy region.
Another wants a forge in a volcano.
Another wants to see the Underdark.
I'll update when I have more replies. There are two others who haven't responded yet. I have an idea to blend ideas 1 and 2: a frigid, Iceland-like tundra region with volcanoes. Hidden in one of the volcanoes is a forge which used to belong to a powerful giant. It is guarded by golems and other constructs which the giant created. But it has been taken hold of by dark forces.
Maybe there’s also an entry to the Underdark via this “Icelandic” volcano - perhaps the source of the Dark Forces? - see “Journey to the Centre of the Earth” by Jules Verne for further ideas, including dinosaurs….
Perhaps the volcanoes have been set off by the evil denizens of the underdark, to cool the world and make the surface dwellers extinct - so your players eventually have to solve global cooling - NO PRESSURE!!!
I haven't read the book, but I have watched the film. The old one. I loved the idea of lots of interconnected caves with different styles going deep into the earth, and an impossibly ancient subterranean civilisation.
I haven't read the book, but I have watched the film. The old one. I loved the idea of lots of interconnected caves with different styles going deep into the earth, and an impossibly ancient subterranean civilisation.
I’m afraid my main literary memory of the book is the Ladybird adaptation!
A vast mysterious empire looming in the East, ruled by Maglubiyet.
Orcs are creatures born from vats, made with foul alchemy to fight in the forces of evil.
Many of the good aligned gods, which I'll call angels for now, were killed or weakened when a party of adventurers failed to stop a cult from performing a dark ritual. Now dark gods are spreading their shadows across the land, and evil entities wander the countryside. The death of the angels has sent many knightly orders into madness, many killing themselves or turning to flagellance, believing the angels forsook them and that they will return if humanity is punished enough. The worst of all are the ones who turned to darkness and started to serve the dark gods.
Dragons are intelligent, cunning beings, preferring negotiating and deceiving before outright attacking. They outsmarted the giants and banished them to the far reaches of the world. Anyone have ideas for how they outsmarted them?
Also does anyone have any ideas for nations/ factions? Maybe this thread could be a short term collaborative worldbuilding thing for a while, and we can build on each others ideas.
Read broadly. Tolkien's best trick was stealing from both Norse and Classical sources. Your world will be as original as the sources you can draw on to invent it. I would prescribe (in no particular order) N. K. Jemisin, Edmund Spenser, Robert Chambers, Ovid, Dante Alighieri, Lord Dunsany, Ursual LeGuin, Richard and Wendy Pini... There's more, but that's enough for now.
Well I've already read LOTR and the first Earthsea book, and I've read a lot that's not on that list. I haven't actually read that many fantasy classics though. I tried the Wheel of Time and ended up hating it.
Well I've already read LOTR and the first Earthsea book, and I've read a lot that's not on that list. I haven't actually read that many fantasy classics though. I tried the Wheel of Time and ended up hating it.
Not everything on that list is fantasy, which is also part of the point... I'd add One Hundred Years of Solitude, as well, although you'll need plenty of patience.
What was it about the Wheel of Time that left you feeling underwhelmed? I've read most of it more times than was healthy. That was a while ago, now. I remember the world having a feeling of fullness, which I would account a good thing. It helped that I hadn't read Dune at that time, and I didn't see the Aiel as an element of influence. There's plenty in Jordan's themes and characters that's problematic--I'm not trying to defend the story. However, I always felt he was a model for building a world by literary thievery.
Well I've already read LOTR and the first Earthsea book, and I've read a lot that's not on that list. I haven't actually read that many fantasy classics though. I tried the Wheel of Time and ended up hating it.
Not everything on that list is fantasy, which is also part of the point... I'd add One Hundred Years of Solitude, as well, although you'll need plenty of patience.
What was it about the Wheel of Time that left you feeling underwhelmed? I've read most of it more times than was healthy. That was a while ago, now. I remember the world having a feeling of fullness, which I would account a good thing. It helped that I hadn't read Dune at that time, and I didn't see the Aiel as an element of influence. There's plenty in Jordan's themes and characters that's problematic--I'm not trying to defend the story. However, I always felt he was a model for building a world by literary thievery.
Yeah Jordans worldbuilding was good. I enjoyed some elements of the story, like the first books were great. But I felt he was dragging it our too much, like he had too many ideas. I don't mind slow pacing, but I don't like it when it feels like it's going nowhere. And there's the fact that all the women are catty and annoying, and all the men are clueless oafs. This is more when characters are interacting though. The main characters are thought out and have interesting personalities. That's just a few of my issues. So yeah it wasn't all bad but the negatives outweigh the positives, at least for me.
A vast mysterious empire looming in the East, ruled by Maglubiyet.
Orcs are creatures born from vats, made with foul alchemy to fight in the forces of evil.
Many of the good aligned gods, which I'll call angels for now, were killed or weakened when a party of adventurers failed to stop a cult from performing a dark ritual. Now dark gods are spreading their shadows across the land, and evil entities wander the countryside. The death of the angels has sent many knightly orders into madness, many killing themselves or turning to flagellance, believing the angels forsook them and that they will return if humanity is punished enough. The worst of all are the ones who turned to darkness and started to serve the dark gods.
Dragons are intelligent, cunning beings, preferring negotiating and deceiving before outright attacking. They outsmarted the giants and banished them to the far reaches of the world. Anyone have ideas for how they outsmarted them?
Also does anyone have any ideas for nations/ factions? Maybe this thread could be a short term collaborative worldbuilding thing for a while, and we can build on each others ideas.
A few random thoughts and questions:
How far you wanting to bring in “standard” D&D cosmology? So far, you have the “Angels” and the “Dark Gods” set in opposition, then Maglubiyet. You haven’t, in what you’ve presented, linked Maglubiyet with the Dark Gods. One idea would be for him instead be a renegade Angel: their most vehement champion against the Dark Gods, now broken from his fellow Angels for not sharing his uncompromising belligerence. His Empire of Goblinoids and vassal states is a harsh bastion of Order opposed against the chaos of the Dark Gods.
How do you envisage the Dark Gods? Evil deities, Fiends, evil Elder Elementals, Great Old Ones? Or just leave them as unknowable dark threats?
Perhaps the Dragons and the Giants were once allies or servants of the Angels, later divided by the insidious machinations of the Dark Gods? Must the characters help to heal the bitter rupture?
The volcanic forge an ancient site where Fire Giants crafted divine weapons for the warriors of the Angels?
Are the Dragons a single faction or a fractured force? Do they provide pockets of resistance and order amidst the Angel-lorn chaos?
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So I'm worldbuilding a setting for my upcoming campaign, and I'm worried it's too generic. I like classic D&D style medieval fantasy with dragons, dungeons and orcs, but I want to spice it up with something unique which the players will be surprised by and enjoy. I still want to use just the basic races in the PHB though. Any ideas?
Soon to be DM.
Currently in a homebrew post-apocalyptic game.
I've found the history of the world is a good place to start, and build up from. For example, you might decide that civilisation as it is known in your world has been built up by Beholders who surrounded themselves with enough servants as to form a city. They only care that they are looked after and their every whim is met, so as long as there's enough people to serve them then they are happy to let the city grow. As such, every city in the world has a beholder at its center.
You might decide that there was a great war between the Orcs and the Dragons, resulting in low poplations of both.
You might decide that the weave of magic was in fact created by MYSTRA, the Moltz-Yargold Systematic Terragalvanic Radiation Accelerator, a particle accelerator which tore the world of technology from the map and left in its wake a world where magic is possible. Or, you might decide that the world went apocalyptic and the few people who survived had nanites in their blood, which passed down to their descendants, allowing them to manipulate reality in what we call magic. The technology was self-replicating but forgotton. Sometimes it's corupt, causing wild-magic, or reanimating corpses, and so on. So the players can learn that this is actually a post-apocalyptic futuristic world, not an historical one.
Otherwise, what is it that you feel is wrong about the world that you can make different in yours? In mine, I've changed Dinosaurs, Birds, Elves, Humans, Dwarves, Giants... lots of little tweaks that make the world unique.
Also, ask your players! Say "What is it you're most looking forward to discovering about the world?". Be open that you're building the world, so want to build awesome stuff for them to find, allowing them to lay their own stamp on the world (this is how the best worldbuilding occurs). A good starting point is "where are you from?". I have two mages colleges and a secretive monastic civilisation in a geological basin where the territories of 5 metallic dragons intersected because of the players. I also have pantheons fleshed out because the players needed gods to follow, and so on.
Not only does this approach mean that you get new ideas you might never have thought of yourself, but it also means that you are focusing your efforts on the things that the players will find rewarding, rather than 82 pages on every god there is, when they have already picked one or none and have no interest in the rest!
Now, if you have no players yet, I can throw some random ideas your way to work with for world building!
1: I am a tiefling born to a village in a secluded forest where they consider tiefling births a blessing. Trained to become the "chosen one", on my 18th birthday another tiefling was born, and I was cast aside. I left the village to find it was an island in an industrially deforested world, too steep a cliff to scale to chop the trees down. I now wonder the world seeking adventure, and trying to live up to my name; Salvation.
2: I am a druid who lives in a region of great lakes and rivers. I was trained in the druidic circle of the Isle of Rings, which is an island in a lake on an island in a lake on an island in a lake. Each ring of land has standing stones, and is supposedly a forgotten power in the world, long since relegated to spiritual purposes over practical. I have left my home to seek out a reason for the unexpectedly large quantities of oversized lobsters which have started to infest the revered clam-beds of second-ring lake.
3: I am a barbarian who has toured the underground fighting scene in many of the towns and cities. My homeland is a dry and dusty place, which we as a people were forced to leave because the yearly rains stopped coming. I seek to keep the few of my people who survived safe, and will take work or fights for coin. In a recent job with an underworld organisation, things went south, and now I'm on the run from an influential power who believes that I have stolen something of great value from them.
Hopefully there should be a lot of stuff in there that you can develop into world stuff, and maybe link together? I don't know if this is the direction you wanted, but I hope it helps!
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You can have the most uninspired setting that's ever been created, and it can still be rich and engaging for your players if you give them a reason to care about it. Likewise, you can have an intricately detailed world and bore your players to tears with it. It's not about the setting, it's what you do with it.
For elements of surprise, you can subvert or change any number of expectations to up the fantasy factor:
- Environmental (grass is blue in one town, flowers give off emotions instead of scents, it rains drops of darkness instead of water, etc.)
- Cultural (orcs are pacifists, goblins are popular intellectuals, dragons are giant scaredy cats)
- Political (the most common governmental system is a democracy/socialist commune/oligarchy, wars are fought with board games instead of soldiers)
- Magical (the secrets of transmutation have only been recently unlocked and those spells are a little wild, everyone born on a Tuesday can speak with ghosts)
- Religious (people have turned away from the gods and divine magic is struggling to survive, a temple to the god of isolation has a million followers)
On top of these, having NPCs your players can latch onto and love really helps make a world come alive.
Work with your players to get there races, backgrounds and classes connected to your world, and from there, into the story. This is something to do in session zero.
If you haven't done your overworld map yet, I'd start with the natural features (mountains, lakes, rivers, forests, etc), and then look at it and see where it would make for villages or cities to be (a port city at the mouth of a river, a mountain valley village around a gold mine, A farming village in open planes near a river, etc). Are there ancient ruins in your world? If so, who left them, and what happened to them?
Once you have the basic outline for the map, consider the characters' backgrounds and races for where they lived before becoming adventurers. In medieval times, people didn't travel much, which is why villages and cities were largely ethnically homogeneous. Travel between settlements would largely be limited to traveling merchants, political envoys, and in a fantasy setting... adventurers. As such, you can base the cultures of any villages or cities in your setting on the generalities of the cultures of the various races (An elven city may be based on Lothlorien or Rivendell, a human city might be based on Laketown, a dwarven city may be based on the Lonely Mountain, etc). How the various settlements feel about each other is up to you and what tone you want your game to have.
And for their classes, consider adding lore to them (ex: Maybe to be a druid, there's a years-long sequence of training and a ritual that one must undergo to gain the ability to cast the primal magic of nature, and characters who start as druids have already been through this, but it makes it much harder to multiclass into Druid. By tying classes to roleplay, it makes class choice more nuanced than what's merely the most mechanically expedient.
Consider why the characters are adventurers. One method is to have everyone choose a reason their character needs a lot of money, something they can get from adventuring, but not from regular jobs. In your setting, are adventurers common (resulting in a lot of competition) or rare (which is why people are so eager to give your characters tasks to do).
You can also connect your characters by giving each of them 5 cards to write 5 things about their character that others might gossip about (two true and positive, two true and negative, and one that's false), then distribute the cards for each character among the other players, so they have an idea about who each-other are, but they don't know how accurate what they "know" is.
Hope this helps, at least to get ideas flowing.
one day i hope to adapt the Terry Pratchett novel "Feet of Clay" (about class struggles and golems) to Waterdeep. i say pick an old novel you like and borrow, borrow, borrow. even if no one or everyone has read it. the players likely aren't feeling the same hangups about playing a "generic" fantasy that you do, so really this is about the dm having a good time. so, have a good time!
...oh, and i don't mention Waterdeep lightly. there are festivals for nearly every week, unique statues scattered about each with their own history, and factions with lots of fairly official wiki entries. borrow, borrow, borrow!
unhappy at the way in which we lost individual purchases for one-off subclasses, magic items, and monsters?
tell them you don't like features disappeared quietly in the night: provide feedback!
Invite your players to do it. Ask each of them to write up a description of something, a place, an organization, whatever. Then incorporate it into the setting. The players will be excited when it shows up, and it helps invest them in it overall.
And, ideally, don’t think of this as a one-off world. You can run your campaign here —starting small is usually best — and then when you put the next campaign in the same world, and the one after that, you grow it into something more and more interesting. A place with a history the players know, because they helped make that history. That’s the dream anyway.
OK I asked each of my players what they want in the setting and this is what I have so far:
One person wants a snowy region.
Another wants a forge in a volcano.
Another wants to see the Underdark.
Edit: Someone wanted guns, but that would mess with everything so I had to say no. Another guy wanted a forest like the Forbidden Forest in Harry Potter. I can do that.
I'll update when I have more replies. There are two others who haven't responded yet. I have an idea to blend ideas 1 and 2: a frigid, Iceland-like tundra region with volcanoes. Hidden in one of the volcanoes is a forge which used to belong to a powerful giant. It is guarded by golems and other constructs which the giant created. But it has been taken hold of by dark forces.
Soon to be DM.
Currently in a homebrew post-apocalyptic game.
The big advantage of a custom setting is that you don't have to worry about trampling on previously established information, nor do you have to worry about previously established Big Names. Take full advantage of it; it's a lot easy to run grand scale adventures if you don't have to worry about making sure that overpowered NPCs somehow aren't paying attention.
Maybe there’s also an entry to the Underdark via this “Icelandic” volcano - perhaps the source of the Dark Forces? - see “Journey to the Centre of the Earth” by Jules Verne for further ideas, including dinosaurs….
Perhaps the volcanoes have been set off by the evil denizens of the underdark, to cool the world and make the surface dwellers extinct - so your players eventually have to solve global cooling - NO PRESSURE!!!
I haven't read the book, but I have watched the film. The old one. I loved the idea of lots of interconnected caves with different styles going deep into the earth, and an impossibly ancient subterranean civilisation.
Soon to be DM.
Currently in a homebrew post-apocalyptic game.
I’m afraid my main literary memory of the book is the Ladybird adaptation!
I see you are connoisseur of fine literature.
Soon to be DM.
Currently in a homebrew post-apocalyptic game.
Another few ideas I had which I'll add to:
A vast mysterious empire looming in the East, ruled by Maglubiyet.
Orcs are creatures born from vats, made with foul alchemy to fight in the forces of evil.
Many of the good aligned gods, which I'll call angels for now, were killed or weakened when a party of adventurers failed to stop a cult from performing a dark ritual. Now dark gods are spreading their shadows across the land, and evil entities wander the countryside. The death of the angels has sent many knightly orders into madness, many killing themselves or turning to flagellance, believing the angels forsook them and that they will return if humanity is punished enough. The worst of all are the ones who turned to darkness and started to serve the dark gods.
Dragons are intelligent, cunning beings, preferring negotiating and deceiving before outright attacking. They outsmarted the giants and banished them to the far reaches of the world. Anyone have ideas for how they outsmarted them?
Also does anyone have any ideas for nations/ factions? Maybe this thread could be a short term collaborative worldbuilding thing for a while, and we can build on each others ideas.
Soon to be DM.
Currently in a homebrew post-apocalyptic game.
Read broadly. Tolkien's best trick was stealing from both Norse and Classical sources. Your world will be as original as the sources you can draw on to invent it. I would prescribe (in no particular order) N. K. Jemisin, Edmund Spenser, Robert Chambers, Ovid, Dante Alighieri, Lord Dunsany, Ursual LeGuin, Richard and Wendy Pini... There's more, but that's enough for now.
Well I've already read LOTR and the first Earthsea book, and I've read a lot that's not on that list. I haven't actually read that many fantasy classics though. I tried the Wheel of Time and ended up hating it.
Soon to be DM.
Currently in a homebrew post-apocalyptic game.
Anyone have any more specific ideas they think would be cool? What have YOU always wanted to see in a fantasy world?
Soon to be DM.
Currently in a homebrew post-apocalyptic game.
Not everything on that list is fantasy, which is also part of the point... I'd add One Hundred Years of Solitude, as well, although you'll need plenty of patience.
What was it about the Wheel of Time that left you feeling underwhelmed? I've read most of it more times than was healthy. That was a while ago, now. I remember the world having a feeling of fullness, which I would account a good thing. It helped that I hadn't read Dune at that time, and I didn't see the Aiel as an element of influence. There's plenty in Jordan's themes and characters that's problematic--I'm not trying to defend the story. However, I always felt he was a model for building a world by literary thievery.
Yeah Jordans worldbuilding was good. I enjoyed some elements of the story, like the first books were great. But I felt he was dragging it our too much, like he had too many ideas. I don't mind slow pacing, but I don't like it when it feels like it's going nowhere. And there's the fact that all the women are catty and annoying, and all the men are clueless oafs. This is more when characters are interacting though. The main characters are thought out and have interesting personalities. That's just a few of my issues. So yeah it wasn't all bad but the negatives outweigh the positives, at least for me.
Soon to be DM.
Currently in a homebrew post-apocalyptic game.
A few random thoughts and questions:
How far you wanting to bring in “standard” D&D cosmology? So far, you have the “Angels” and the “Dark Gods” set in opposition, then Maglubiyet. You haven’t, in what you’ve presented, linked Maglubiyet with the Dark Gods. One idea would be for him instead be a renegade Angel: their most vehement champion against the Dark Gods, now broken from his fellow Angels for not sharing his uncompromising belligerence. His Empire of Goblinoids and vassal states is a harsh bastion of Order opposed against the chaos of the Dark Gods.
How do you envisage the Dark Gods? Evil deities, Fiends, evil Elder Elementals, Great Old Ones? Or just leave them as unknowable dark threats?
Perhaps the Dragons and the Giants were once allies or servants of the Angels, later divided by the insidious machinations of the Dark Gods? Must the characters help to heal the bitter rupture?
The volcanic forge an ancient site where Fire Giants crafted divine weapons for the warriors of the Angels?
Are the Dragons a single faction or a fractured force? Do they provide pockets of resistance and order amidst the Angel-lorn chaos?