I am pretty new to Dungoens and Dragons. I have been listening to Critical role for a while and was inspired to begin to play and try to DM (probably like many people haha).

I really enjoy the home brew style and creating my very own world is intriguing and fascinating to me, but I have heard warning of spending so much time in creating an entire universe from scratch. The twist that I am looking to bring is a world that has many different settings and opportunities for campaigns, and also an expansive yet broad history of the world to allow for different timelines to happen. That way i can create entirely different campaigns that can happen in the same location. My hope is to be able to use this world as a base to create new towns and areas, without having to think of the cultures land masses. Something that i can always be comfortable with and have a clear idea of. I am very new to roleplay and board game RPG and realize that this is a huge task to take on, but I believe that it will be just as rewarding once its flushed out.

Is there any advice that can be given for this? Any words of warning to what I am getting into? Should I even bother with it?

Thank you in advance!

Well for one, play in some games run by more experienced players. You'll notice and pick up some tricks. In general with world building, I like to have the world feel alive. things happen, with or without the players. If you don't want to have to worry so much about cultures, you can just pick a stock culture that the whole region shares instead. I personally do like having different cultures to make different regions feel more unique. In general though, I have found that the less i have set in stone, the better. Players tend to muck things up by being crazy, so I usually have a loose idea and just improvise based on the situation at hand. Like "this area is based off of 14th Century Spain" and go from there. In general I'd say don't have things set in stone because you might come up with a good idea later that you may not be able to use. 

Welcome aboard!

I think the biggest question in deciding how to proceed is "How much do you enjoy the act of world building for it's own sake?" Probably the easiest way to answer this is to just dig in and start creating stuff. Get a dedicated notebook (or digital equivalent) and just write down every idea you come up with. The parts that really strike you and/or you would like to explore with your first campaign, work on fleshing it out into detail. Often, the activity of building the world is enjoyable in itself, regardless of whether it will actually get used in game.

It's good to know because, a harsh truth you will need to accept from day 1 is that 99% of the time, your players will not be as interested in your world as you are.

It might range from the player who just has a character they like and wants to just play regardless of the world, to ones who might get really interested in just one very small slice of your world that their PC might be from. Either way, it is very, very rare that they will have nearly the same level of interest as you have and much of what you create might never even come up in the game.

That's perfectly ok, but do be aware from the start about that. If world building starts to feel like a lot of work that might not pop up in game, then just focus on what you will need for the game, and don't worry about the rest. A flip side of players knowing less about your world is that their needs for consistency are much lower. As long as you don't outright contradict yourself, you can work things to make sense and fit together after the fact.

However, it sounds like world building excites you, and for a lot of us, just creating the worlds regardless of whether it ever comes up in play is an enjoyable hobby itself. If you find that to be true for yourself, run with it! Just as long as you keep in mind that "World building for what's coming soon in the game" and "World building just cuz it's fun" are different goals that sometimes overlap and sometimes don't. Both are worthwhile, but be careful not to slide into trying to shoehorn the PCs into going somewhere that doesn't make sense for them just because you had this massive 50,000 year history for that area and you really want to share it. 

So, bottom line, just start throwing ideas down on paper (or keyboard). They can be a mishmash of things that don't seem to fit together, but that's actually more realistic if you look at the history of the real world. (And probably better if you want to avoid the 1 main human kingdom, and the 1 main dwarven mining city, etc. and instead have a world with many centers of power in complex relationships). All of the puzzle pieces don't have to fit together from the start, and the view the PCs will get will be very narrow at any given time anyway. So just start creating and rolling with what inspires you. The more you build, the more you will understand your world, and the richer it will become. Plus, in my experience, world building ideas will also arise from the actually playing as well. When the rogue wonders if there is a Thieves' Guild in the current city, it can vary depending on whether they are a dashing gentleman burglar looking for like-minded fellows, or someone who grew up on the streets who needs the protection of a larger gang, or if you want a vile organization they can oppose, etc. Who the PCs are and what they are looking for can drive a lot of the details of the world as well.

My suggestion?   Rather than creating an entire WORLD for the game, focus on creating a unique city, or region, with lots of plot hooks.   Neverwinter, Icewind Dale, Balder's Keep, all these are signature areas that time and again have people coming and leaving them, and are filled with a wide variety of different things you can do.  That's what people are going to want to explore.

This way, the area will be filled with details that are directly relevant to your plot and potentially to the PCs, so they're more likely to be interested.  And more likely to come up in play- its neat that you detail something out, but if its not something that comes up, then its not really going to be anything more than a footnote in your binder.

If you look at it from a zoomed view with each room being part of a map you could count a room thats however much space as one movement point of the character in that room and have a strategy style world but when not doing combat people could focus more on the settings and campaigns in each room which could also affect how many rooms people could move through just as difficult terrain would. what would be interesting is how to explain tokens sitting in squares adjacent to each other that were not 5 feet in distance but 500 feet and how they could still perform standard actions.

I can offer little advice in the how-to of worldbuilding as I can by no means judge myself a good or competent DM (hopefully my players are less hard on me), but I still might be able to offer some advice on the usefulness of worldbuilding at all.  I am the type of DM who is not great at improvising, so I have an excess of information prepared for most aspects of my world, creatures, and adventures that never comes into play and the players will never know nor want to know.  So, for me, fleshing out a lot of the details of my world at the beginning of a campaign is a must.  This does require a lot of extra time and energy that could be better spent creating encounters or more directly involved elements of play and is not the norm.

If this does not describe you and you are not worldbuilding out of a great love of worldbuilding (think Tolkien), then it is a waste of time.  While it might still be nice to have the comfort of a well fleshed-out map and a solid geographical and geopolitical knowledge of the world the characters are inhabited, there is also something nice about figuring it out along the way.  Of course you should still prepare the things that are directly pertinent to the players' environs, but everything else can be omitted for the moment.  You want to know the layout and society of the town they are starting in, some important NPCs, and current conflicts in the area, but is the makeup of the town council essential? will it come up? will the NPC's marital situation?  They might be relevant, in which case include it, but if you don't plan to involve the NPC in that capacity, then it's not worth thinking about.  A lot of the remaining details will sort themselves out or just never come up.  While Matt puts a lot of work into his campaigns (like, an unbelievable amount of work; how is he so amazing?), he also leaves a lot of gaps when he is building his world.  A lot of these organically fill in over time; the players will be a big help here.  If the players ask about that NPCs wife, then you can come up with an interesting story of lost love, mysterious illness, or just casually mention that he's not married and leave it there.  Matt is definitely guilty of this.  He starts small-ish and makes more details as relevant.  If one of the players mentioned finding an armorer to fashion their bear some bullette armour, you might want to flesh that out for the next session.  He did not start by creating Emon (I don't actually know how to spell it and am to lazy to check the campaign setting or Google) or the Dindwalian (same problem but I'm more confident on this one) Empire in as much detail as they ended up, if at all.  He has mentioned in Q&A's how much work he has put into the campaign setting guide, which indicates that it was by no means thought out, at least not in that much detail.  By not fully creating your world, you allow it to be more reactive to the player's actions and desires.

This was a somewhat long post in which I rambled quite a bit, but my main point is that lots of worldbuilding can be a lot of fun, but it is also not necessary for a successive campaign.  Even if you are planning on inhabiting this world for a long time, the whole world will not be immediately visible to the players, and if anything this just gives you longer to develop it.

I had a few remarks on worldbuilding itself, but, since it is a separate point than my previous one, I decided to give it its own post.  Nothing I say here will be novel or particular, but, since you mentioned you were relatively new to this and creating a whole world is a fairly daunting task, I have here collected a few thoughts.

First, the Internet is an amazing, amazing place, with lots of resources for worldbuilding.  Some of these resources are specific to D&D, but most of them are for aspiring fantasy authors;  the information is basically the same.  (I unfortunately haven't kept track of sources and couldn't tell you where exactly to look, but generic Google searches can hardly steer you wrong.)

However, summarizing what is in dozens of those as yet unlooked-at websites, here goes:  I started with the large landmasses.  You can generate these in various ways. 1) Just put a pen to paper and begin drawing 2) Roll some dice on a large sheet of paper and make the areas where they clump land 3) Create an amalgam of other real/fantasy maps 4) Using an online generator 5) Countless other methods.  When using a non-random method, I do find the Earth's actual geography to be an excellent source of inspiration.  Ultimately, you want something that can believably have been formed.  For most worlds this will be through tectonic plate theory and evolution of the landscape over time, but alternatively, who cares? This is a fantasy setting in a fantasy game.  If your world was created in its current form by intelligent beings, then maybe it has a very patterned design to its landforms or is even humanoid.  If it strays from Earth geography, you just have to have an in-world explanation, and you're golden.  The one thing about Earth's geography, I would caution against in a fantasy setting is oceans.  That isn't to say don't have them, but having something like the Pacific (or even the Atlantic) which is large and difficult to traverse separating continents is problematic.  It makes the landmasses too far apart to be reasonably reached without some form of high-level teleportation magic or a lengthy sailing voyage, which can be just as fun in half the time.  The other big point against them is it makes it really hard to draw everything on a rectangular map, which realistically is what you're dealing with.  (Obviously if you want a continent to be distant and unreachable, then a stormy or kraken-infested ocean is one of the best ways of going about it, so, as with all advice you will ever receive as a DM, be willing to go against it if the story requires).

Once you have your landscapes you can really get into the nitty-gritty.  Again, using Earth as inspiration, I would look at the landforms I've just created and decide where mountains would naturally go.  They typically form chains, though you could have a lone mountain as well.  After that, I would look to major rivers, which flow out of these mountains to the sea.  Now put any unusual features in such as deserts or swamps.

With the geography nailed down, we can think about the beings which inhabit it.  I like to come at this from an evolutionary perspective (obviously D&D creatures and evolution have never heard of each other, but this mindset helps me think of where civilizations sprang up and why).  I think to where different races would be indigenous and how they might have developed.  I typically play under the assumption that the world is fairly old and so the races have interacted, warred, loved, and traded with each other and have moved around quite a bit from this arrangement.  But having thought about it does allow me to say that perhaps there is a kingdom here where most people are either dwarf or hafling whereas the kingdom over here is majority elf with a minority human population which is ill treated due to years of tension with the neighboring human kingdom.  On the other hand, some species might be exactly where they started.  The goliaths might live in this mountain range here, but not that one over there, and the tabaxi are endemic to this one jungle ringed by mountains and the sea.

This is the point where I bring in all the ideas I have for the campaign.  The setting may inspire some, but usually I let the ideas that have been ruminating in my head this whole time finally take over here.  While the geographical and natural evolution approach could definitely be continued to determine the society of a kingdom, I typically abandon it in favour of other ideas I've come up with.  If I get stuck, it's a comfortable place to go back to, but ultimately, I like to add a bit of the fantastical in the setting which I feel is sometimes missing when it is so realistically and naturally formed.

My last piece of advice is also my first and also my most important.  Steal everything: from the Internet, from the books you love, from the movies you watched growing up, from your own life experiences.  Put your own spin on it of course, but there is absolutely no shame in being inspired by the work of others.  Use things your players won't have heard of, and they'll think you're the most brilliant Dungeon Master there is.  Or, make a nod towards a shared passion and watch your players become even more engaged in the encounter.

Again, I know this was long, but I hope it helped.  Good luck on your worldbuilding and your campaign.

Hey bro, 

Welcome to the game.

When I world build, I begin with a map. Basic features such as coastlines, mountains, rivers and forests will give you guidance to place cities and towns, as most will grow around waterways and coastlines. Mountains and rivers are often natural political boundaries.

Once I have a few map locations and place names, I create a few major NPCs and basic city locations. From there, we play. 

I'm pretty good at building on the fly, so I react to player choices and make up a lot of the history and detailed features as we go. This requires a lot of note taking during and after. If you're good at improv, this might work for you.

God luck.