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  1. - Top - End - #1
    Orc in the Playground
     
    Kobold

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    Jun 2013
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    Default Not sure where to start

    So I'm looking into making my own custom setting most likely going to be used for DnD or similar system.

    I'm not sure where to start to actually make the world. I have big vague ideas.

    -Points of Light
    -Post post apocalyptic (over a thousand years after the fact)
    -two continents with a third that was shattered into a bunch of islands.
    -mages are rarer but magic kinda exists everywhere.

    Any suggestions or help?
    78% of DM's started their first campaign in a tavern. If you're one of the 22% that didn't, copy and paste this into your signature.

    Where did you start yours?
    Planeswalking from Kamigawa to an unnamed Plane. Where I was immediately attacked by a giant beast.

  2. - Top - End - #2
    Troll in the Playground
     
    RogueGuy

    Join Date
    Aug 2014

    Default Re: Not sure where to start

    A frontier city. Build a city and an adventure site and spiral out

  3. - Top - End - #3
    Dwarf in the Playground
     
    DwarfBarbarianGuy

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    Apr 2016
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    Guild District, Wynleigh
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    Default Re: Not sure where to start

    I advise starting small. You've got some big picture already. Create a starting point, and flesh it out.

    For example, if you're starting the players in a guild, you'd want to have some Guild NPCs (and at least partially statted out), at least a basic understanding of their base of operations, and any other details you want for that guild.

    Then you'd expand to the neighborhood/town/city. You will want some key names for major people in town. Unless you're going to have the players interacting directly with them a lot, you don't need a lot of detail here. Have an idea of what the area is like and how it functions. Again, having a few pre-created NPCs on hand can be useful.

    From there, you can keep expanding outward. The further you get from your starting point, the less detail you need upfront. If your players are small-town heros, they don't need to know the inner workings of the king's court 100 miles away.

    Each time you move to another plot point, you can use this technique. The shattered islands you mention might start of being a far off location your players have only heard of in legend. And that's about what you would need to start off with. The closer your players get, the more detail you can add.

    From experience I can tell you it sucks when you work painstakingly on details your players won't ever see. You'll make yourself prone to shoe-horning in things that don't really fit.


    TL;DR: Create what your players will start with, and the further in the world you get from the players, the less detail you need.

  4. - Top - End - #4
    Titan in the Playground
     
    Knaight's Avatar

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    Aug 2008

    Default Re: Not sure where to start

    Start small, and get practice through doing that. Individual cities or small archipelagos are often excellent for this, and you can paint in broad strokes before actual play starts, fleshing it out more as you go. Steal from history and fiction*, put more development in what players find particularly interesting, and just let your setting grow.

    *One of the the most successful campaigns I ever ran was set mostly in one city, inspired heavily by the Taifa Emirates in general, Cordoba in particular, and just the general aesthetic of a port city.
    I would really like to see a game made by Obryn, Kurald Galain, and Knaight from these forums.

    I'm not joking one bit. I would buy the hell out of that.
    -- ChubbyRain

    Current Design Project: Legacy, a game of masters and apprentices for two players and a GM.

  5. - Top - End - #5
    Titan in the Playground
     
    Nifft's Avatar

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    Feb 2006
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    NYC
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    Default Re: Not sure where to start

    Yeah, start small.

    Figure out the starting area. Decide what people do there -- is there a specific industry that keeps the town interesting? Is it on a trade route between two larger areas? Does this area support a nearby castle or fort? How do they eat? What are the local building supplies?

    Now decide what's connected to it. The connections can be vague:
    - Next big town is three days down this road.
    - The pass fort is half a day this way, or six days if there's been snow.
    - The fort on the old smuggler's cove is a day that way, and if you go another day along that road you'll be at the border. Lots of traffic that-a-ways these days.

    Once you have the basics, my recommendation is to ask your players to help you flesh out the area.

    Ask your players stuff like:
    - "Why is your character here? What's your connection to $AREA?"
    - "Recently you noticed something ominous, a clue that you want to tell the rest of your party about. What was it?"
    - "Who in town can you trust?"
    - "Who in town is keeping a secret of some kind?"
    - "What's the landmark you remember most vividly? What's your connection to it?"

    Etc.


    HARD MODE (optional): Pick a rough population (maybe 200 people), and group them into families. Make up family trees (just numbers of people for now). Put a few names down, the people who are well-known or powerful in town, and why those people are powerful. Now write the names of their closest relatives. That's your "tribal" power structure. Create some grudges & events that would put families at odds. Figure out the power structure between them. Make links between a few families and the external connections -- "Little Sylvia is a half wood elf, and her father may be back in town this summer, if they keep to their their ten-year schedule. The rest of her family has been preparing to beat him silly if he don't take responsibility."

    When things go suddenly-yet-inevitably wrong, having these familial tensions mapped out will allow you to portray the breakdown in civil society in a very realistic way.

    It's also good for stuff like insidious invasions -- if people suddenly behave differently, it's a warning sign.

    WARNING: This is a lot of work.

  6. - Top - End - #6
    Barbarian in the Playground
     
    bryn0528's Avatar

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    Nashville, TN
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    Default Re: Not sure where to start

    In making a setting, I would suggest first figuring out what you want to get out of it. A setting meant for your close friends and casual games would probably look rather different than a setting you're wanting to get published. Likewise, the system the setting is meant for will probably also influence to setting (if you're using D&D, you might be interested in coming up with in setting factions/organizations that explain classes). What kind of tone do you want your setting to have? Swashbuckling heroics might not play so well in a dark, grey world where it always rains and everyone is a skeleton. You probably already have the answer to many of these questions, but sometimes it can be helpful to think about them again.

    Next, you should think about how you want to present your setting and what information is generally available. Make an outline if you're using a document (or series of documents), or a handy concept map if you're going wiki-style. It can be very nice to block out your major ideas and then come back later and detail them in. You may find that you need to keep penciling more things in just so everything makes sense! Keep in mind how you present your information is going to be pretty important.

    Which brings me to #3. I find it helpful to look at other setting primers while I write my own. Seeing how other people organize information is extremely helpful in that you can see what you like and what you don't like. It can also be a good source of inspiration if you're feeling stuck.

  7. - Top - End - #7
    Ogre in the Playground
     
    Flumph

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    Feb 2005
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    Santa Barbara, CA
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    Default Re: Not sure where to start

    I'm going to take a bit of a different tack. Start at the very large.

    And by very large I m talking mostly about your relationship with the world and metaworld considerations.

    Why is the world you are using and not a published one.
    What do you want the feel/mood of the game to be?
    What kinda of stories do you want to tell?
    What kind of dungeon/overland/social type adventures do you want to run?
    What kind of scale do you want the game to operate at? Both in terms of power settings and also physical setting.

    I definitely second the use of outline format with lots of iteration cycles slowing adding detail helps. But don't do it evenly-that way lies madness if you try it at scale.

    Next brainstorm a list of things you want to include. Later you have to edit it but It gets you thinking about effects. Some things work far better if you include them at the ground floor-be they everyday necromancy or a huge threatening empire far away with trade outposts. It is far easier to drop this stuff later then stuff it in later and rework once you are dealing with the smaller scale stuff. But do not go into more than a sketch at this point. This doesn't have to be stuff that will show up in the later smal scale work, in fact that is a time to test out ideas and junk em. But it also will help drive smooth development later to places you want to go and get you invested with enough interesting ideas to work on that the horizon of what you do develop seems more inviting than a challenge.

    Then start picking out what would be a good starting sample of you work above. The themes the mood the brainstormed ideas. A port city of an expanding trade alliance? A free city on a small island? The resettlement of a lost empire? This helps you pick a starting area that feeds on your work, that could exist better in your world than other settings, and has good adventure hooks al over the place. You're picking your small scale focus area where the players will start so you need to make sure it gets them into the world and has plenty of stuff for them to sink their teeth into on day 1.

    Then work on the small scale as above. Not everything on your brainstorm list will effect all parts of the world but it will help you build in a less generic fashion as well as having placed foundation stones to build out from as the game gets going.

  8. - Top - End - #8
    Bugbear in the Playground
     
    jqavins's Avatar

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    Default Re: Not sure where to start

    There are quite a few threads on this general topic (or similar ones) that contain lots of good advice. A good deal of it, I'm afraid, contradicts other good deals of it, so you have to consider what seems like it will work for you. And what will work for your group.

    One such recent thread is here, and I'll quote one bit of advice from it:
    Quote Originally Posted by CaptainSarathai View Post
    When I design a campaign world, my first question is always,
    "Why?"
    Why am I not using an existing campaign setting? Why am I running this campaign; who is it for, what do they want? Why is my setting different?
    The advice I've frequently given in such threads is to think back on your experience as a player. What have other GMs done in the past that worked? What have they done that you did not like? And in both cases, why did you like it or not?

    As for getting your players to help, which is something many people have suggested on various occasions, I advise caution, which is not to say that I'm advising against it. Sometimes it works out very well. Sometimes players will give you bad ideas, or OK ideas that don't really fit. At other times the players can be left feeling that you're copping out and getting them to do your job. It really depends your players, and only you know them. One thing you can do that is partway down that path is to ask the players to make up backstories for their characters. Give them a few basics about their starting position, then have them make up a first draft of how they got to that point, telling them up front that you need to discuss the stories with each of them in turn before they are set. If your players are into it you can have them make up details about their home towns, extended families, regional events wherever they came from, etc., but none of us can gauge whether or not that's a good idea with your group.
    -- Joe
    “Shared pain is diminished. Shared joy is increased.”
    -- Spider Roninson
    And shared laughter is magical

    Always remember that anything posted on the internet is, in a practical if not a legal sense, in the public domain.
    You are completely welcome to use anything I post here, or I wouldn't post it.

  9. - Top - End - #9
    Dwarf in the Playground
     
    BlackDragon

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    Mar 2013
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    Sweden
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    Default Re: Not sure where to start

    You should always start with "what do my players do here?" (basically, what types of games do you want to run?). Seriously, it's the question that guides your setting and make it the setting it really is. You can change geography, population, religions, history and almost everything and still have the players notice nothing, but when they need to start doing something else they'll notice it right away.

    So, don't think "it's going to be a world of floating islands!", think "it's going to be a world of air piracy!" and then naturally progress to a world of floating islands working out for those types of games.
    It will also let you cut things much easier, something I see time and time again that people have problems with; they stick too much stuff in there and they don't know what distracts the players from doing what originally drew them to the world and what keeps the world focused but organic. Too often I've seen settings bloated with a ton of information but without any indication that my character should care at all.
    Last edited by nrg89; 2017-06-19 at 05:31 AM.

  10. - Top - End - #10
    Barbarian in the Playground
    Join Date
    Mar 2016

    Default Re: Not sure where to start

    I expected to come in here as the first voice asking you what kind of stories you want to tell in this setting, but it seems I have to refresh the page a whole lot more often to be that guy.

    So, a post-post-apocalyptic world built off of points of light, without so many wizards but plenty of magic, sounds like... a typical euro-centric campaign setting. I get the impression that nations are generally small but leaning into expansionist tendencies where lots of kingdoms that basically control 3 cities worth of land slowly grind their way across the landscape making free cities pledge fealty by force or by arranged marriages, and the space between cities is much more wilderness than farmland.

    Is this pretty much correct, and the sort of thing you want? Have you fully described how much you want to shake up the world, or do you want it to be a lot more different than this? Does the nature of that apocalypse matter, and is there still some remnant of whatever it was in the world? Did it scour the civilizations of old off of the face of the world such that only your standard dungeons deep below the Earth remain, and contain wonders from that civilization that modern civs cannot replicate? Were the standard fantasy races changed during this cataclysm?

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