4th & Dragon : Dungeons and Dragons...and stuff

OK, lets get this world design subject started.

Lets look at why I like the idea of design your own, or home brew.

Fluff books made by Wizards I find are a little dull and boring… They should take a leaf out of Pinnacles design motto – if it aint exciting why read it?

Remembering facts ... hmm one of the benefits is that if I designed I know it, therefore its harder for a player to gazump me. IE “there are no trolls in the desert, the chaos gods who made them are terrified of the desert..” lame I know, but I hate it, commercially designed games have free access that the players tend to read.

Your world, you are not waiting for the next source book to come out and reveal a terrible truth – yes I know you can wing it, but invariably you will purchase that book and so will the players. Once your world is changed you have to work with someone else’s design and work your theories into it, far more easier to start with a blank slate.

Now there are some important points I would like to call your attention too.

Dont make more than you need – dont over focus on details that may never be used.

Make a character primer – Dont assume your players will listen to your inane ramblings make a document they can read before designing your character. (Deadlands made I think the best.)

Map – one for you one for them, unless they live under a rock they would know at least their country.

Dont be afraid to break the mold… a little break it too much and its hard for the players to ground themselves in your setting.  Page 150 to 151 of the 4e DMG is a great guide.

History – this is one of the areas I mention above – don’t go into great detail initially its something that can be covered in latter reviews.

Review – like your campaign go over the world and add to or change – adapt it to your characters, your own style.

So this is the first installment into this – I apologize for my poor spelling and failure of punctuation. Im hoping we (including me) can learn from this thread so dont feel afraid to share ideas or critique others.

My approach is to work on whatever inspires me.  Maybe the players will find that area, maybe they won’t.  Maybe an idea for an obscure cult of a far-off region may cycle back into an idea that directly impacts the PCs, even to the point of having an adventure based on it.

Also, always remember to keep the PCs in mind.  Yeah, it’s great to note that the Archduke’s uncle’s second cousin is secretly in love with the drow princess nobody knows about, but how does this affect the PCs?  At some point, you need to involve the players.  For this reason, it is a good idea to have an idea of what the PCs are going to do.

What I do is to construct a world with no regards to PCs. When the world is developed enough, I can find some cool place to stick players in. But I homebrew for homebrew’s sake, it’s my own amusement in creation that I really care about, not players’ enjoyment (which is also important, but secondary).

I like making up stuff. If it gets used in a game so much the better.

While I don’t really have complete disregard for players when world-building, I tend not to worry too much about them either. It sort of follows my philosophy regarding artistic creation in general (which in my case, consists mostly of literature): for something to really work, it needs inspiration, and inspiration functions on its own rules, with little regard toward what others think. That’s a necessary starting point, to me - the new campaign world starts not because there’s a player demand for playing in a setting with such-and-such characteristics, for example, but because I had an idea about such-and-such setting. That’s the starting point, which determines at least the broadest generalities of the setting. Then, when I get to detailing it further, the second part of my artistic creation philosophy comes into play: Never forget the goal of an art piece, which is reaching out to a target public. In this case, players. They have to (1) be able to relate to it, and (2) have opportunities to play characters and do things they will enjoy. A campaign setting is useless if people aren’t having fun playing in it. So, while I don’t try to please everyone and include every possible character option in every book (that makes for jumbled-up worlds with little personality), but I try to make the character range wide, and put in it locations and built-in plot hooks that players might want to explore. All fitting with the basic idea of the setting, of course, since that’s where it starts.

I think I would advise keeping the PCs in mind.  I also love creating worlds for their own sake, and my hard drive is filled with ideas where I just don’t know what the PCs are going to do.

For example, after finding out Mongoose is releasing a supers RPG called Chimaera, I started coming up with ideas for alternate earths, like the new DC universe, except I’ll probably have 1296 worlds, each with myriad variants.  (No, I am not going to detail them all.) I don’t know what the PCs are going to do to appreciate this—maybe some sort of campaign where they shift from earth to earth fixing things, but keep returning to the same earths—so no I won’t be using all 1296 earths—so that they can come to appreciate the variety.)

I guess my point is that the artistic idea does come first (A thread I started once about running a variant Ringworld campaign comes to mind), but if I am going to develope it into a campaign setting there has to be a way to connect the PCs.  I have two ideas for the Ringworld, and might use both:  a) the PCs plane-shift into an area of the ringworld which is 12,000,000 square miles dominated by gnolls; b) the ringworld makers take an Earth town and transport it to their ringworld, and the PCs have to figure out what happened and what they are going to do about it.  Another interesting idea that was posted on the thread involved a “Lawrence of Arabia” style scenario where the kobolds were fighting a war against storm giants.

I was in a Cthulhu Dark Ages game once where the GM had interesting ideas based on historical research, but because it was an RPG he couldn’t directly share the ideas with us.  Unfortunately, these ideas didn’t translate very well into what we, the PCs who didn’t have any social status in this world, could relate to, so the game was like “we’re following this group of people across the mountains for some reason.” He’s normally a good GM, but that game just didn’t work out for us.

I also know from my own experience that I do a lot better at getting an actual game together, and the games are more successful, if I start from the PCs point of view.  For example, I’ve long wanted to run a game based on Dan Simmon’s Hyperion novels, but while adventuring in the Hegemony might be a great game, I never really came up with anything.  On the other hand, my ideas for a Battlestar Galactica campaign are looking very promising because the whole concept is based around the PCs scouting for the Galactica, which makes it easy for think of things for them to do.