Hey folks. I prefer writing homebrew content over using modules for a few reasons. One reason is I feel I can react to players deviating from the story easier if I wrote the whole world. So I have been spending time over the past six months learning about the new 5e rules and sketching out some ideas. The Internet is a wonderful thing and I have been able to find a few things about others preparing and running their own homebrew as well. I stumbled upon a vid of some respected players talking about Creating a World and they began to talk about one approach of developing a coherent world with realistic terrain and reasons for towns being established where the towns appear and even the idea of developing an overlay that describes the economy of the area. This is the sort of thing I like, which is to create a coherent world where things make sense, even though we're going to leave town and fight an army of mythical beings. What I was surprised to hear is that these players thought it was ludicrous to spend time creating a world that made sense.
So in an attempt to understand what appeals to the community, or at least a wide segment of the D&D community, I am interested in hearing if you also think it is necessary to have a coherent world with a little depth, or is all that just a big waste of time? What kind of details do you want to put in your homebrews and/or what are your players looking for?
I hear often about players rebelling against the DM and wanting to do something other than what the DM has prepared. How would you react to this if you hadn't developed the environs beyond the locale where the planned campaign was to take place?
My son speaks of opening the DMG and just rolling stuff off the tables. It just seems you could paint yourself into a corner that makes no sense doing things that way.
I think of my world in terms of "overlays." There is a terrain overlay. There is another one with roads and towns. There is another one with an economy, although the lion's share of that is all agrarian. There is a political overlay with nations and with government intrigue within a nation. With the Political overlay you get the distribution of races over the continent(s) and a description of which nations are at odds with one another. This is where the BBEG falls onto the scene. Where is he and what is he doing on the big political scale of things? Then I take this theme and I work it down in lower level conflicts. Some of the evil is a coordinated part of his master plan but in most places the evil is just the efforts of smaller level evil characters trying to seize more locally for themselves. Sometimes these are within a nation and sometimes these are between nations or races.
Armed with all this, I feel I am prepared to roll with what the party decides to do although I always have a couple prepared (detailed) stories for them to pursue.
It's always a good idea to incorporate as much depth and dimension as possible into your game world to make it feel as immersive and "real" as possible. But you should temper that with the limitations of time and resources that you have available to you. Creating a detailed world map and an interconnected economic system is nice - but showing up late to work 3 days a week because you were up all night factoring exchange rates between your ten different currency systems is not good.
Start small. Sure, have a rough draft of the map and the cultures of the larger world, but focus at first on only doing the real in depth work on building one city and its immediate surroundings. That's enough area to provide a new group of adventures several levels of fun and danger. Let the players hear rumors at the tavern of dangerous stories from other areas, so they can learn the geography, and so they can feel a bit of foreshadowing, but keep it vague enough that you can change it later if you have to.
Plan arcs. Maybe you want the first BBEG to be a necromancer. You draw a map of his lair. You stock that lair with traps and monster stat blocks. You pick his spells. And you decide to locate his lair in the Eastern Hills. But your players spend the next two weeks turning over every leaf and rock in the Northern Forest looking for him. Maybe they're ignoring your clues, or maybe they just keep rolling 1's on their rolls for Survival, Perception, and Taking-A-Hint. So guess what - in the midst of the Northern Forest maybe they stumble upon an ancient circle of stones, and there's runes on it, they read the runes, BOOM they get teleported to his lair! Or maybe you decide to forget the Eastern Hills and just put the dang BBEG lair in the dang stupid Northern Forest. Either way - the important thing is that you play it off as if that was the plan all along. The real magic of being a DM is making the players think that no matter where they go, you've got everything laid out waiting for them. When really you're clenching your teeth and pulling rabbits out of your interglutteal cleft all night.
Incorporate Backstories. During character creation, make each player give you a page of character backstory. At the very least a point of origin and a handful of bullet points. They can even use the "This is your life" chapter in Xanathar's Guide as a framework. This helps in TWO ways! First, it makes their characters more three dimensional, which will make role playing more fulfilling. But it also provides YOU with story ideas to play with. Basically you're just crowdsourcing your plot points. The players will be doing part of your job for you, and they won't even know it! Not sure what the next story arc should be? Go to the backstories! Who's got a sick parent? Who's got a younger sibling that could go missing? Who used to belong to an organization that doesn't let people leave?
The Big Picture. Eventually your players will ask about, or will simply travel to, other parts of your world. You need a world map. You want a world that makes some sense, geographically, and you'll want a map that most of your players are at least familiar with. Here's the problem: The players may be brand new to this world, but their characters have been living in this world for their entire lives. You need to bridge that gap. So you've got two options: Use a pre-made map, or create a completely new map of your own. A new map allows you to customize every detail. It gives you total creative freedom. But it makes your players work harder just to learn the basic layout when their characters should already know this stuff. So you could use a pre-made D&D map, like the Sword Coast, that your players are already familiar with, and just overlay your stories onto that map.
Or... there's a third option. The one I prefer. Use this world's map. Seriously. Look at a map of the Mediterranian region, for example. Many different regions, climates, topographical features, major cities already plotted, cultural areas already defined, and your players already have a general idea of what their characters know! You can even use the same names for the major cities, and just finnagle everything in between. Not everyone know the climate of Mirabar. Not everyone knows which direction it is from Baldur's Gate to Loudwater. But everybody knows that Spain is a high plateau, and that France makes great wine, and you can't go from Rome to Germania without crossing the Alps. It's just an option. Everyone already knows the layout. Just rename a few places, put the beer drinking dwarves in Germany and Switzerland, put the elves in France, put the humans in Rome, and shake it until stuff starts to collide.
Am I rambling? Sorry. It's late and I have a sleep disorder. I hope this helps.
Oh! Wait! One more thing! Dael Kingsmill has a great video on youtube about world building! She explains it using the "SPERM" method. It's an acronym. It stands for "Social - Political - Economic - Religious - Military". Those are the five structural components of any society. Whether you're building a small town or an entire world map, make sure you factor in at least something for each of those five components and you'll be fine.
Tayn of Darkwood. Lvl 10 human Life Cleric of Lathander. Retired.
Ikram Sahir ibn Malik al-Sayyid Ra'ad, Second Son of the House of Ra'ad, Defender of the Burning Sands. Lvl 9 Brass Dragonborn Sorcerer + Greater Fire Elemental Devil.
Viktor Gavriil. Lvl 20 White Dragonborn Grave Cleric, of Kurgan the God of Death.
Thanks. That reminded me that I was thinking of using the map of England & Ireland as a D&D world, except I was going to turn it upside down. I bet it would be a heck of a long time before anybody figured it out.
Westeros is basically just a creeped-up map of the UK.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Tayn of Darkwood. Lvl 10 human Life Cleric of Lathander. Retired.
Ikram Sahir ibn Malik al-Sayyid Ra'ad, Second Son of the House of Ra'ad, Defender of the Burning Sands. Lvl 9 Brass Dragonborn Sorcerer + Greater Fire Elemental Devil.
Viktor Gavriil. Lvl 20 White Dragonborn Grave Cleric, of Kurgan the God of Death.
Well, for me step one is to draw the terrain map of the nation. To draw a coherent map, draw an outline of the coast and then decide where the mountain ranges are going to sit. From the mountains, draw rivers that flow to the sea. From there, imagine where the communities first developed, and remember these were on the rivers or the coast. There will need to be fishing villages on the coast, villages that grew into towns as forest was cleared and the land became farms. Most meat was obtained by herding sheep, goats and raising chickens. Pork and cows came along too but not in the quantities we see today. You would likely have more meat from hunting than from domestic cows and pork, but deciding to have plenty of either (both) would not be an egregious sin to most players. With food figures out, you would then add on other economic needs; first raw materials. You would need a vast supply of wood and stone, and if you were lucky coal to offset some of the need to cut down trees and to improve the heat in smelting fires. You would also need to find a crop for making cloth such as cotton in the American south.
With the major land features and the raw materials located on your map, you can decide where the political centers should be on your map. These will need to be distributed so that each has an adequate supply of food and at least one significant trading commodity to be viable. With the political centers found, you may decide what sort of government will be in existence. Don't think of modern governments but something like a feudal system, a tribal system of strong men, or possibly a magical autocrat that uses magic to control enough men to perform the necessary administrative functions.
Now you should drop in some other races to flavor your setting. A kingdom of elves in the deep wood, and a nation of dwarves ruling those mountains; and possibly a tiefling nation on that island just off the coast. After you drop in the races you 'can' get along with, drop in some you probably can't get along with such as orcs, goblins, hobgoblins, trolls, or Drow. Decide how these nations exist and where their food comes from too. Decide if they have trading partners or if they just make what they need and take what they want.
If you're this deep in, you are well on your way to making your own homebrew setting.
Good advice from Tayn: Start Small. Then get an idea about how much more detail everyone wants.
I normally have a random encounter prepared. Something that is easy for me to run, but interesting enough to keep the players busy. When the players want to do something I'm not prepared for I let them make plans, get going, then drop the encounter. By the time the fighting and looting and dealing with new items and who has what is done it's been hours of time for me to make new plans and I'm done. If for some reason I'm not done I can always call the game a bit early and at least we've had a good fight.
Hey folks. I prefer writing homebrew content over using modules for a few reasons. One reason is I feel I can react to players deviating from the story easier if I wrote the whole world. So I have been spending time over the past six months learning about the new 5e rules and sketching out some ideas. The Internet is a wonderful thing and I have been able to find a few things about others preparing and running their own homebrew as well. I stumbled upon a vid of some respected players talking about Creating a World and they began to talk about one approach of developing a coherent world with realistic terrain and reasons for towns being established where the towns appear and even the idea of developing an overlay that describes the economy of the area. This is the sort of thing I like, which is to create a coherent world where things make sense, even though we're going to leave town and fight an army of mythical beings. What I was surprised to hear is that these players thought it was ludicrous to spend time creating a world that made sense.
So in an attempt to understand what appeals to the community, or at least a wide segment of the D&D community, I am interested in hearing if you also think it is necessary to have a coherent world with a little depth, or is all that just a big waste of time? What kind of details do you want to put in your homebrews and/or what are your players looking for?
I hear often about players rebelling against the DM and wanting to do something other than what the DM has prepared. How would you react to this if you hadn't developed the environs beyond the locale where the planned campaign was to take place?
My son speaks of opening the DMG and just rolling stuff off the tables. It just seems you could paint yourself into a corner that makes no sense doing things that way.
I think of my world in terms of "overlays." There is a terrain overlay. There is another one with roads and towns. There is another one with an economy, although the lion's share of that is all agrarian. There is a political overlay with nations and with government intrigue within a nation. With the Political overlay you get the distribution of races over the continent(s) and a description of which nations are at odds with one another. This is where the BBEG falls onto the scene. Where is he and what is he doing on the big political scale of things? Then I take this theme and I work it down in lower level conflicts. Some of the evil is a coordinated part of his master plan but in most places the evil is just the efforts of smaller level evil characters trying to seize more locally for themselves. Sometimes these are within a nation and sometimes these are between nations or races.
Armed with all this, I feel I am prepared to roll with what the party decides to do although I always have a couple prepared (detailed) stories for them to pursue.
Thanks for your thoughts.
It's always a good idea to incorporate as much depth and dimension as possible into your game world to make it feel as immersive and "real" as possible. But you should temper that with the limitations of time and resources that you have available to you. Creating a detailed world map and an interconnected economic system is nice - but showing up late to work 3 days a week because you were up all night factoring exchange rates between your ten different currency systems is not good.
Start small. Sure, have a rough draft of the map and the cultures of the larger world, but focus at first on only doing the real in depth work on building one city and its immediate surroundings. That's enough area to provide a new group of adventures several levels of fun and danger. Let the players hear rumors at the tavern of dangerous stories from other areas, so they can learn the geography, and so they can feel a bit of foreshadowing, but keep it vague enough that you can change it later if you have to.
Plan arcs. Maybe you want the first BBEG to be a necromancer. You draw a map of his lair. You stock that lair with traps and monster stat blocks. You pick his spells. And you decide to locate his lair in the Eastern Hills. But your players spend the next two weeks turning over every leaf and rock in the Northern Forest looking for him. Maybe they're ignoring your clues, or maybe they just keep rolling 1's on their rolls for Survival, Perception, and Taking-A-Hint. So guess what - in the midst of the Northern Forest maybe they stumble upon an ancient circle of stones, and there's runes on it, they read the runes, BOOM they get teleported to his lair! Or maybe you decide to forget the Eastern Hills and just put the dang BBEG lair in the dang stupid Northern Forest. Either way - the important thing is that you play it off as if that was the plan all along. The real magic of being a DM is making the players think that no matter where they go, you've got everything laid out waiting for them. When really you're clenching your teeth and pulling rabbits out of your interglutteal cleft all night.
Incorporate Backstories. During character creation, make each player give you a page of character backstory. At the very least a point of origin and a handful of bullet points. They can even use the "This is your life" chapter in Xanathar's Guide as a framework. This helps in TWO ways! First, it makes their characters more three dimensional, which will make role playing more fulfilling. But it also provides YOU with story ideas to play with. Basically you're just crowdsourcing your plot points. The players will be doing part of your job for you, and they won't even know it! Not sure what the next story arc should be? Go to the backstories! Who's got a sick parent? Who's got a younger sibling that could go missing? Who used to belong to an organization that doesn't let people leave?
The Big Picture. Eventually your players will ask about, or will simply travel to, other parts of your world. You need a world map. You want a world that makes some sense, geographically, and you'll want a map that most of your players are at least familiar with. Here's the problem: The players may be brand new to this world, but their characters have been living in this world for their entire lives. You need to bridge that gap. So you've got two options: Use a pre-made map, or create a completely new map of your own. A new map allows you to customize every detail. It gives you total creative freedom. But it makes your players work harder just to learn the basic layout when their characters should already know this stuff. So you could use a pre-made D&D map, like the Sword Coast, that your players are already familiar with, and just overlay your stories onto that map.
Or... there's a third option. The one I prefer. Use this world's map. Seriously. Look at a map of the Mediterranian region, for example. Many different regions, climates, topographical features, major cities already plotted, cultural areas already defined, and your players already have a general idea of what their characters know! You can even use the same names for the major cities, and just finnagle everything in between. Not everyone know the climate of Mirabar. Not everyone knows which direction it is from Baldur's Gate to Loudwater. But everybody knows that Spain is a high plateau, and that France makes great wine, and you can't go from Rome to Germania without crossing the Alps. It's just an option. Everyone already knows the layout. Just rename a few places, put the beer drinking dwarves in Germany and Switzerland, put the elves in France, put the humans in Rome, and shake it until stuff starts to collide.
Am I rambling? Sorry. It's late and I have a sleep disorder. I hope this helps.
Oh! Wait! One more thing! Dael Kingsmill has a great video on youtube about world building! She explains it using the "SPERM" method. It's an acronym. It stands for "Social - Political - Economic - Religious - Military". Those are the five structural components of any society. Whether you're building a small town or an entire world map, make sure you factor in at least something for each of those five components and you'll be fine.
Tayn of Darkwood. Lvl 10 human Life Cleric of Lathander. Retired.
Ikram Sahir ibn Malik al-Sayyid Ra'ad, Second Son of the House of Ra'ad, Defender of the Burning Sands. Lvl 9 Brass Dragonborn Sorcerer + Greater Fire Elemental Devil.
Viktor Gavriil. Lvl 20 White Dragonborn Grave Cleric, of Kurgan the God of Death.
Anzio Faro. Lvl 5 Prot. Aasimar Light Cleric.
Thanks. That reminded me that I was thinking of using the map of England & Ireland as a D&D world, except I was going to turn it upside down. I bet it would be a heck of a long time before anybody figured it out.
It worked for Game of Thrones.
Westeros is basically just a creeped-up map of the UK.
Tayn of Darkwood. Lvl 10 human Life Cleric of Lathander. Retired.
Ikram Sahir ibn Malik al-Sayyid Ra'ad, Second Son of the House of Ra'ad, Defender of the Burning Sands. Lvl 9 Brass Dragonborn Sorcerer + Greater Fire Elemental Devil.
Viktor Gavriil. Lvl 20 White Dragonborn Grave Cleric, of Kurgan the God of Death.
Anzio Faro. Lvl 5 Prot. Aasimar Light Cleric.
Just want to say this discussion is cool and I wish that more DMs I know would be willing to take as much care with worldbuilding as either of you.
Oops, me saying that probably means I should go out and get myself a copy of the DMG and XGTE and start homebrewing myself!
Well, for me step one is to draw the terrain map of the nation. To draw a coherent map, draw an outline of the coast and then decide where the mountain ranges are going to sit. From the mountains, draw rivers that flow to the sea. From there, imagine where the communities first developed, and remember these were on the rivers or the coast. There will need to be fishing villages on the coast, villages that grew into towns as forest was cleared and the land became farms. Most meat was obtained by herding sheep, goats and raising chickens. Pork and cows came along too but not in the quantities we see today. You would likely have more meat from hunting than from domestic cows and pork, but deciding to have plenty of either (both) would not be an egregious sin to most players. With food figures out, you would then add on other economic needs; first raw materials. You would need a vast supply of wood and stone, and if you were lucky coal to offset some of the need to cut down trees and to improve the heat in smelting fires. You would also need to find a crop for making cloth such as cotton in the American south.
With the major land features and the raw materials located on your map, you can decide where the political centers should be on your map. These will need to be distributed so that each has an adequate supply of food and at least one significant trading commodity to be viable. With the political centers found, you may decide what sort of government will be in existence. Don't think of modern governments but something like a feudal system, a tribal system of strong men, or possibly a magical autocrat that uses magic to control enough men to perform the necessary administrative functions.
Now you should drop in some other races to flavor your setting. A kingdom of elves in the deep wood, and a nation of dwarves ruling those mountains; and possibly a tiefling nation on that island just off the coast. After you drop in the races you 'can' get along with, drop in some you probably can't get along with such as orcs, goblins, hobgoblins, trolls, or Drow. Decide how these nations exist and where their food comes from too. Decide if they have trading partners or if they just make what they need and take what they want.
If you're this deep in, you are well on your way to making your own homebrew setting.
Good advice from Tayn: Start Small. Then get an idea about how much more detail everyone wants.
I normally have a random encounter prepared. Something that is easy for me to run, but interesting enough to keep the players busy. When the players want to do something I'm not prepared for I let them make plans, get going, then drop the encounter. By the time the fighting and looting and dealing with new items and who has what is done it's been hours of time for me to make new plans and I'm done. If for some reason I'm not done I can always call the game a bit early and at least we've had a good fight.
Your milage may very, but it works for me.