How do people go about writing their homebrew campaign stories and worlds?
I recently made a video guide talking about MY personal process (How to WRITE a D&D Campaign) but it was all done from my own viewpoint of what has worked for me personally over the last 10 years. It is only one perspective.
How do my fellow homebrew enthusiasts write their stories? Where do you begin and how do you keep your ideas fresh, and how much of cannon D&D lore do you tend to use when making a world from scratch? I'm looking to continue to improve in my Homebrew creation and would love to hear your process!
Making a world from scratch I tend to start with the factions / nations / civilizations I want and what I want their relationships to be to each other. That then determines what geography should be like and where they should be located.
For instance if want a long history of war between two civilizations (e.g. giants & dwarves) they need to be next to each other with some resources of common value near-ish the border and not too much natural barrier - maybe a narrow river between them. Whereas a peaceful civilization that is isolated & remote from the others might be in a valley surrounded by mountains or up on a natural plateau, or on an island surrounded by strong currents. A diverse mercantile civilization would be around a major river and/or natural port, and an agricultural one ruled by powerful kings with vast armies would be in endless planes striped with rivers. But I tend to make my worlds as a generic sandbox that I tend put specific stories into in different places at different times for specific campaigns.
For stories and campaigns I pick (or I let the players pick) which civilization / region they want to start in and ask the players to come up with a reason why their character is in that region. Based on those and the PCs backstories I develop a basic idea for a conflict within each of the home regions of the player characters - these are usually generic conflicts drawn from any number of texts - real-life mythology, history, TV shows, movies, books etc... these can be as simple as : the land has been cursed, an assassination triggers a civil war or a usurper to take the throne, an evil cult is spreading, a magically triggered natural disaster, a giant monster attacks a major city, a magical island causing ships to wreck themselves on its coast, someone kidnaps the princess triggering a war, a long defeated BBEG is waking up again, a tyrant is oppressing the people, the gods have gone missing etc....
Last I create a few relatively mundane quests for their starting location, which I then pepper with hints about the other conflicts for each of the home regions and see which of those the PCs latch onto, and develop those further.
D&D lore I use to fill in anything that I'm not interested in creating myself - e.g. I often use D&D gods because I can't be bothered to invent my own pantheon, sometimes I'll also use lore for the other planes other than the material plane, if the PCs are just doing a side quest there. Otherwise I don't give D&D lore any special place vs other inspirations.
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How do people go about writing their homebrew campaign stories and worlds?
I recently made a video guide talking about MY personal process (How to WRITE a D&D Campaign) but it was all done from my own viewpoint of what has worked for me personally over the last 10 years. It is only one perspective.
How do my fellow homebrew enthusiasts write their stories? Where do you begin and how do you keep your ideas fresh, and how much of cannon D&D lore do you tend to use when making a world from scratch? I'm looking to continue to improve in my Homebrew creation and would love to hear your process!
Making a world from scratch I tend to start with the factions / nations / civilizations I want and what I want their relationships to be to each other. That then determines what geography should be like and where they should be located.
For instance if want a long history of war between two civilizations (e.g. giants & dwarves) they need to be next to each other with some resources of common value near-ish the border and not too much natural barrier - maybe a narrow river between them. Whereas a peaceful civilization that is isolated & remote from the others might be in a valley surrounded by mountains or up on a natural plateau, or on an island surrounded by strong currents. A diverse mercantile civilization would be around a major river and/or natural port, and an agricultural one ruled by powerful kings with vast armies would be in endless planes striped with rivers. But I tend to make my worlds as a generic sandbox that I tend put specific stories into in different places at different times for specific campaigns.
For stories and campaigns I pick (or I let the players pick) which civilization / region they want to start in and ask the players to come up with a reason why their character is in that region. Based on those and the PCs backstories I develop a basic idea for a conflict within each of the home regions of the player characters - these are usually generic conflicts drawn from any number of texts - real-life mythology, history, TV shows, movies, books etc... these can be as simple as : the land has been cursed, an assassination triggers a civil war or a usurper to take the throne, an evil cult is spreading, a magically triggered natural disaster, a giant monster attacks a major city, a magical island causing ships to wreck themselves on its coast, someone kidnaps the princess triggering a war, a long defeated BBEG is waking up again, a tyrant is oppressing the people, the gods have gone missing etc....
Last I create a few relatively mundane quests for their starting location, which I then pepper with hints about the other conflicts for each of the home regions and see which of those the PCs latch onto, and develop those further.
D&D lore I use to fill in anything that I'm not interested in creating myself - e.g. I often use D&D gods because I can't be bothered to invent my own pantheon, sometimes I'll also use lore for the other planes other than the material plane, if the PCs are just doing a side quest there. Otherwise I don't give D&D lore any special place vs other inspirations.