I am currently looking for help with making worlds maps and a story for a campaign I am going to dm potentially within the year. Any help would be appreciated. The Rules will be based of the light novel The Beginning After the End magic system. If you are familiar with the System or books the might be helpful but any help would be amazing.
Thank you in advance
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Hello my name is Gh0st
I am currently starting and working on a D&D hub on discord. This server will be 18+. My hope is to create a community full of conversations, multiple campaigns going at once, teaching and developing skills and content for all to enjoy. If this sounds like something you are interested in or you have questions add me on discord PriorityGh0st#8335
Building a world, ruleset, and story is a LOT of work. Those of us that have delved into that much Homebrewing know that it can be overwhelming sometimes.
Breathe, dragons; sing of the First World, forged out of chaos and painted with beauty. Sing of Bahamut, the Platinum, molding the shape of the mountains and rivers; Sing too of Chromatic Tiamat, painting all over the infinite canvas. Partnered, they woke in the darkness; partnered, they labored in acts of creation.
I am currently starting and working on a D&D hub on discord. This server will be 18+. My hope is to create a community full of conversations, multiple campaigns going at once, teaching and developing skills and content for all to enjoy. If this sounds like something you are interested in or you have questions add me on discord PriorityGh0st#8335
When building a map, there are a few things I try to think about that I often see other DMs forget:
1. Think about how large you want your map to be, with a specific thought to travel times. Per official rules, parties tend to move at around 24 miles per day if not using mounts or other transportation (I tend to round this to 30, so we can just use a player/mount/vehicle's move speed and do not have to do any calculations). A map that takes 10 days to cross is going to play very differently than one that takes 60. The party will be able to more rapidly respond to threats and problems, which has both benefits and drawbacks.
2. Think about geography, both in terms of ensuring the map feels somewhat realistic and how that is going to influence things like national borders and the spread of cultures. Mountains, for example, can birth rivers from snowmelt, can create deserts from the rain shadow effect, and often form natural barriers where nations find their borders. Little things like that will make the world feel a bit more realistic.
3. Put some effort into naming, but remember that players have to actually use these names. Names can be fun flavor, and doing something like using one of Tolkien's elvish languages as the basis of elvish cities, or using French as the basis of one human kingdom and German for another, all can be fun ways to make it feel like the world is multicultural. However, many a DM has fallen into the trap of making these long or difficult to pronounce fantasy-sounding names for their towns. That might be flavorful, but it also makes things much, much harder for players, who are just going to forget names, make up nicknames, and otherwise be more annoyed than impressed by the complexity. Your first thought with a fantasy city name should be "is this something I can reasonably expect my players to internalize?"
One other word of caution - changing the rules too much to adapt another magic system to D&D very well could be a lot of work... that your players do not actually want. When playing D&D, a lot of players want to actually play D&D with the rules that they are used to and enjoy. When you start trying to make the rules based on something else, you are introducing dissidence between what the player expects and how your world operates, as well making it so things like D&D Beyond's digital tools no longer work correctly. Before doing a deep dive into changing the rules and magic systems, you should ask yourself - "do I really need to change the rules, or can I accomplish something similar by adapting the themes from the source material, without changing the rules themselves." The answer to that question is almost always (frankly, in my experience, exclusively) going to be "yes, I can accomplish the vibe without changing the rules."
2. Think about geography, both in terms of ensuring the map feels somewhat realistic and how that is going to influence things like national borders and the spread of cultures. Mountains, for example, can birth rivers from snowmelt, can create deserts from the rain shadow effect, and often form natural barriers where nations find their borders. Little things like that will make the world feel a bit more realistic.
I have to both agree and disagree with this one. I agree because, well, it’s also what I do and I find it works well for me.
But it also implies a lot of earth-like conditions that may not exist. Mountains and volcanoes as we understand them are from plate tectonics. Where in a fantasy world, maybe there are no continental plates and it’s just that the gods decided to put some mountains someplace on a whim, and the volcano is a portal to the elemental plane of fire so it can pop up anywhere. A rain shadow making a desert is because of the direction of prevailing winds, where in a fantasy world, those same atmospheric conditions might not exist. Heck, maybe there’s a desert where there shouldn’t be (according to earth-based science) because of some ancient magical event.
A river might flow uphill because there’s a water elemental living in it.
So, I agree it can help with realism, and is a good starting point as it can let you make a map the players can relate to. But I try to also be willing to break those constraints if I think it will make the map more interesting.
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I am currently looking for help with making worlds maps and a story for a campaign I am going to dm potentially within the year. Any help would be appreciated. The Rules will be based of the light novel The Beginning After the End magic system. If you are familiar with the System or books the might be helpful but any help would be amazing.
Thank you in advance
Hello my name is Gh0st
I am currently starting and working on a D&D hub on discord. This server will be 18+. My hope is to create a community full of conversations, multiple campaigns going at once, teaching and developing skills and content for all to enjoy. If this sounds like something you are interested in or you have questions add me on discord PriorityGh0st#8335
Thank you,
Gh0st
For mapmaking, I like inkarnate. The free version can work pretty well, even though you don’t get all the graphics you might want.
And there’s some great, also free, maps of lots of different stuff at dysonlogos.
Greetings PriorityCh0st,
Building a world, ruleset, and story is a LOT of work.
Those of us that have delved into that much Homebrewing know that it can be overwhelming sometimes.
I'd suggest posting in the Homebrew & House Rules Forum so you can get more help.
Cheers!
Breathe, dragons; sing of the First World, forged out of chaos and painted with beauty.
Sing of Bahamut, the Platinum, molding the shape of the mountains and rivers;
Sing too of Chromatic Tiamat, painting all over the infinite canvas.
Partnered, they woke in the darkness; partnered, they labored in acts of creation.
Thank you for the advice
Hello my name is Gh0st
I am currently starting and working on a D&D hub on discord. This server will be 18+. My hope is to create a community full of conversations, multiple campaigns going at once, teaching and developing skills and content for all to enjoy. If this sounds like something you are interested in or you have questions add me on discord PriorityGh0st#8335
Thank you,
Gh0st
When building a map, there are a few things I try to think about that I often see other DMs forget:
1. Think about how large you want your map to be, with a specific thought to travel times. Per official rules, parties tend to move at around 24 miles per day if not using mounts or other transportation (I tend to round this to 30, so we can just use a player/mount/vehicle's move speed and do not have to do any calculations). A map that takes 10 days to cross is going to play very differently than one that takes 60. The party will be able to more rapidly respond to threats and problems, which has both benefits and drawbacks.
2. Think about geography, both in terms of ensuring the map feels somewhat realistic and how that is going to influence things like national borders and the spread of cultures. Mountains, for example, can birth rivers from snowmelt, can create deserts from the rain shadow effect, and often form natural barriers where nations find their borders. Little things like that will make the world feel a bit more realistic.
3. Put some effort into naming, but remember that players have to actually use these names. Names can be fun flavor, and doing something like using one of Tolkien's elvish languages as the basis of elvish cities, or using French as the basis of one human kingdom and German for another, all can be fun ways to make it feel like the world is multicultural. However, many a DM has fallen into the trap of making these long or difficult to pronounce fantasy-sounding names for their towns. That might be flavorful, but it also makes things much, much harder for players, who are just going to forget names, make up nicknames, and otherwise be more annoyed than impressed by the complexity. Your first thought with a fantasy city name should be "is this something I can reasonably expect my players to internalize?"
One other word of caution - changing the rules too much to adapt another magic system to D&D very well could be a lot of work... that your players do not actually want. When playing D&D, a lot of players want to actually play D&D with the rules that they are used to and enjoy. When you start trying to make the rules based on something else, you are introducing dissidence between what the player expects and how your world operates, as well making it so things like D&D Beyond's digital tools no longer work correctly. Before doing a deep dive into changing the rules and magic systems, you should ask yourself - "do I really need to change the rules, or can I accomplish something similar by adapting the themes from the source material, without changing the rules themselves." The answer to that question is almost always (frankly, in my experience, exclusively) going to be "yes, I can accomplish the vibe without changing the rules."
I have to both agree and disagree with this one. I agree because, well, it’s also what I do and I find it works well for me.
But it also implies a lot of earth-like conditions that may not exist. Mountains and volcanoes as we understand them are from plate tectonics. Where in a fantasy world, maybe there are no continental plates and it’s just that the gods decided to put some mountains someplace on a whim, and the volcano is a portal to the elemental plane of fire so it can pop up anywhere.
A rain shadow making a desert is because of the direction of prevailing winds, where in a fantasy world, those same atmospheric conditions might not exist. Heck, maybe there’s a desert where there shouldn’t be (according to earth-based science) because of some ancient magical event.
A river might flow uphill because there’s a water elemental living in it.
So, I agree it can help with realism, and is a good starting point as it can let you make a map the players can relate to. But I try to also be willing to break those constraints if I think it will make the map more interesting.