Welcome to the World-Building Forum (Please Read)

Welcome to the fluffier side of homebrewing: The new World-Building forum at Giant in the Playground.

This forum is provided to help promote the art and science of building campaign settings and the pieces therof. Unlike the regular Homebrew board, the goal here isn't to evaluate the balance or mechanical strengths and weaknesses of your creations, but their thematic and narrative aesthetics. In particular, this forum is for making and showing off specific people, places, and things for and from your setting. Here are some examples of the kind of threads that would be appropriate here:

• Campaign Setting showcases: Have a great setting that you've been working on? Make a thread, type it up, and show it off. In a this kind of thread, the thread creator is displaying a setting he or she has been working on. The creator may ask for critiques, feedback, or just whether or not you like it. With this kind of single-creator world, we ask that you keep all information to no more than two "active" threads: A Topic thread, containing a single subject under particular discussion and debate, and a main setting thread, containing an overview and an index of all previous Topic threads.
  
• Community World-Building projects: In these threads, members of the community work together to create a setting right here on the board. Decisions are usually made through voting, though the details of how subjects come up for a vote may may vary. When there's a greater number of participants, these projects can span several "active" threads at once. This is permitted as long as no one project "takes over" the front forum page.
  
• World-Building advice: Sometimes, rather than have a fully-realized campaign setting, you'll just want help with one specific aspect. Maybe you're having trouble thinking of interesting ideas for that one city that you put on the map but never thought your players would visit. Or you need some ideas on what sort of government a nation of yakfolk would have. Or you can't figure out how to draw realistic maps. Whatever your question, if it's about your setting, you can ask it here.
  
• Pieces of Fluff: You don't have to show off a complete setting, either. If you have a piece of a setting—a town, an organization, an NPC, a religion—you can show it off, too. Maybe someone will adopt it into their world! All we ask is that threads in this forum stay on the side of discussing the way the people, places, and things fit into the world rather than their stats. If there's, say, a prestige class associated with your organization, that's fine and you can include that, but this forum wouldn't be the place to get feedback on how balanced it is.

Here are a few things for which this forum is NOT the place:

• Conversions of existing fictional worlds: Since the setting is set in stone by the original creator, the discussion will really be about the mechanics of conversion. In that case, it belongs in Homebrew Design.
  
• "Settings" that consist solely of a change of generic assumptions: In other words, if you're changing the magic level of a hypothetical world to be "low magic" but haven't actually bothered to talk about any of the places that exist in that world, it's not really a setting. You're describing a variant ruleset, and it belongs in Homebrew.
  
• Entirely new roleplaying game systems: They may have a unique world attached, but if so, separate the two and post the discussion of the rules over in Homebrew.
  
• Advice on adventures, encounters, plotlines, or DMing issues: These belong in Roleplaying General.
  
• Mechanical pieces that you happen to be using with a new setting: If you're inventing five new base classes to be in your new world, but they are fairly generic and could be used as classes for other settings, that belongs in Homebrew. Especially if you want anyone to critique their mechanical aspects.

As this forum is new, expect some threads to move to or from Homebrew as the community gets accustomed to which threads belong where. After today's split, any other movement will leave redirects, as normal.

We hope you enjoy this new home for world-building discussion.