Hey, just wanting to look for a collaboration with an experienced dm to bring a home brew campaign to life. I'm not experienced enough to pull of doing a good job on my own but I am useing world anvil to help create the map and lore. Any help or offeres would be appreciated.

As a DM who has ran many home brew campaigns, I gotta point out you’re on the right track making the map first. 

I’d advise you to design your cultures and nations based off of historical ones rather than from whole cloth, to start. For example, the Zhentarim of Forgotten Realms are pretty much the British East India company from 1725-1780.

The World Anvil folks have tons of great world-building advice and tutorials. They have a bunch of videos you can watch and also, there is a super-active WA discord you can join. I'm on it, although I don't tend to read it much because it is too active for me -- I can't keep up. But you can definitely use it to ask questions and get help.

When you’re making your map, remember that cities need a fresh water source. It always bugs me when I see a fictional map and someone plops a town down in the middle of the plains Or mountains or Even on the coast with no river in sight.

Unless you have a world where some wizard or cleric created some magical self-filling pool large enough to sustain the population. Or you have people who can build aqueducts or something, just make sure there’s a water source. 
And if you have major trade routes cross, there will be some kind of settlement, anything from a simple inn to a big city (assuming there’s water).

Probably it will never come up in game even if there is no water, but it helps the world feel more real. 

Quote from Xalthu >>

When you’re making your map, remember that cities need a fresh water source. It always bugs me when I see a fictional map and someone plops a town down in the middle of the plains Or mountains or Even on the coast with no river in sight.

 

You can use underground water from the water table by digging wells, if there is no river or lake nearby.

Also, the Romans used aqueducts to bring water all over the place from the mountains. If they could do it, a fantasy empire can do it.

My suggestion is to not try and create everything at once.  Let time for your new ideas come into play.  Start with a coastline and a small kingdom.  Determine who/what/where this Kingdom is. As Dm_from_1975 said, use real history to help you out.  Is this Kingdom like the the Knights or King Arthur, or are they like the Spartans, Romans, or possibly the Japanese.  Who is their ruler, what does the kingdom do? (do they sell grain, are they miners, or are they predominantly seafarers?)   Who are their gods?  Do they worship one main god or many?  What is the population, is it mainly Human, Elven, a mix... all stuff like this is good to determine.

Then work on who are their neighbors (and then you have to go about creating all of the above information for each other country.)  

For example, the Kingdom of _____________ is predominantly human and it is ruled by a King who is known as the Dragonking.  The kingdom is based on the Romans so military order and might is a strong part of daily life.  (The population does not know that the King is actually a Gold Dragon)  Much of the kingdom is on the sea so the kingdom does a lot of trading with their neighbors.  To the north mountains create the natural border for the kingdom and it is in these mountains silver is mined.   Artisans create fine silver items and it is these items that are the kingdoms main item of trade.  The Kingdom worships the Elemental Gods (Sun, Moon, Forest...)...

As you can see, coming up with all of this can take some time.  But...I would say don't worry about getting it all down in stone.  Things can change over time.

I definitely agree with "don't create everything at once."

My campaign is based on the Roman Empire... which was huge. I have lots of maps for reference, and I created the overview of the empire itself. But I didn't try to detail every single city in the empire from the start.

I began with ONE... Nemasus (= Nemausus -- I took the extra u off because I liked the sound of "Nemasus" better), which was a town. I made a map of it. I detailed all the important/relevant NPCs, shops, etc. Then I let them adventure. I did not detail any other cities. To this day, I have not finished doing Rome, because they haven't wanted to go there yet (they are adventuring outside the empire's borders right now).

One of the PCs is from a (fictional) port named Port Voltur. It's the nearest large city, and is a port (so if they plan to take ship somewhere, logically this is where they'd look to hire one). I detailed that one next... about 10 or 11 sessions in, I sent him a map of it. Then I started working on Ostia, the port of Rome (figuring when they arrive in Rome, if they go by sea, which I have no idea whether they will do, they'd land in Ostia). It was a small city, not on the scale of Rome, so fairly easy to do.

Now, finally... 6 months into it... I am slowly working on a to-scale map of ancient Rome. I have all the main roads and aqueducts in, and I know where the major landmarks go... but it will be many hours of work doing all the side streets, putting in all  the buildings, and so on. For any other city, I would rough it in but I feel like with Rome... the map has to be detailed and hopefully awesome. I want Rome to be big and impressive. It was after all the greatest city in the world for on the order of 1,000 years in the real world, and has been for much longer than that in my alternate earth.

My point is... I didn't decide to do all of Rome and Ostia and Port Voltur and Nemasus, plus Carthage and Alexandria and Constantinople and so forth, BEFORE starting the campaign. If I had... I would probably never have finished, and the campaign would never have begun.

I work on these maps a little at a time. Wonderdraft, which I use to make my maps, is great software but it can drive you a bit batty after an hour or two of playing with it. I need to take breaks... one section of town today.. one next Thursday, another Saturday. Bit by big I make progress. No need to do it all at once.

There was an idea I got from YouTube (can’t remember who) about a geography term called S.P.E.R.M (yeah I know) but it stands for 

Social, Political, Economical, Religious, Military

And due to its acronyms word is easy to remember

but it’s a good way to approach world building, think about how these things developed.

In my game I wanted to build a vertical city into the mouth of a canyon, no reason more than I thought it was cool. But to do it I thought about why it would be built there, by who, is there a class system dependent on how high you live, what resources do they have, how do they protect themselves etc