I made my own setting because I was too lazy to learn someone else's. The benefits of having creative players is that when they ask me questions about things it helps me better shape the world.
I would still call that having a strong opinion. Its just that the opinion is " why should I put all my work into learning what someone else made when I can do my own thing".
I always thought that it was somewhere between "too lazy or cheap to buy all the splatbooks for a setting" and "too much competition between the setting fangirls bitching about who knows better" that led to most (if not ALL) GM's building and adding into a "Homebrew World" just for their own table/share... Don't get me wrong, working from RAW in any of the pre-existing settings can be done well, and still leaves room for creativity and interaction... BUT when you understand just how much money and time gets invested in all the different aspects of a world-setting, it can create just too much competition to "world lawyer" as much as "rules lawyer" the game instead of letting a GM drive the story's conflicts and having fun. I was always BOTH too lazy to learn it by heart and WAY too cheap to buy so much stuff... I'd generally "just wing it" and end up with new stuff all the time. Players like having their portion of agency in crafting the world, some of the politics, and even a new take on how to manipulate magic... AND there's no end to inspirations for further stories, more conflicts, great monsters that you CAN NOT find in a Monster Manual... so nobody gets "an edge" on the rest of the table. ;o)
"Make your world as weird and idiosyncratic as it needs to be for you to fall in love with it." I have to admit I'm a little freaked out by how inspiring that statement is. Thank you Matt, I gotta go write some stuff now :D
My craziest campaign was a backyard campaign where everyone played tiny creatures like fairies nice even had a squirrel paladin in walnut armor. Think of "The Rats of Nim" the fun part for me was all the equipment being made of everyday house hold items sewing needle rapier or button shield of a war axe made from a bobby pin and a piece of broken glass. This was the most creative game ever.
Hah! Actually short video! Probably won't get another 30+ minute epic until after we launch the Stream. I have a whole big list of topics and normally I pick the one I think is the MOST IMPORTANT but that means I'm often writing a script and taking several days to produce it. This is a good opportunity to do some shorter subjects that we'd never otherwise get to.
I agree so much with this! For me, my fantasy setting is a comedic arcanepunk with a dose of pessimistic social commentary. LoL, and my players love every minute of it! It is very important to be flexible and be cooperative with your players.
Looking forward to the D&D game. One request, when you make a sketch or something on paper, use a sharpie please. Pen or pencil doesn't show well at all on camera
I have an image of like, a coven of hags using each other to empower their magic, and I was like “there’s no mechanic for casting as a group”, so I’m working on introducing that. Basically, the more similar two casters are, the more effective it is. Two wizards will mesh very well, wizard and sorcerer will mesh okay, wizard and cleric will be significantly different and therefore can’t group cast (unless you’re an arcana cleric, maybe). The benefit of group casting is that it gives you access to higher level spells than you’d otherwise be able to cast alone. Unlike solo casting, you can spend multiple spell slots on a group cast spell, but the total spell slots contributed by the group must equal twice the spells traditional spell slot value. For example, two level four clerics could cast revivify, a 3rd level spell, if they contributed a total of 6 levels of spell slots. Maybe each cleric spent three 1st level slots, or a 1st and a 2nd, or one cleric spent all four of their 1st level slots and one spent one 2nd level slot. This could be done with a cleric and a druid, but I’d say there’d by a percentile roll to see if it succeeds or something like that. Maybe they’d have to roll on the wild magic surge table. I’m still working it out but that’s one feature of my setting. I’m also working on a system for using slain magical creatures as a way to cast powerful spells, similar to the dark magic from The Dragon Prince. It’s going to be a centerpiece of my bbeg’s story and plan
In my setting gods are actually manifestations of mortals. They are powered by belief, but not by knowledge. This means gods are always competing with each other for cultural relevance over different domains of life to keep to gain power, and if a god loses a lot of followers they might get demoted to demigod status, which reduces their power greatly but lets them move into the material plane. Also, the material plane is one of many material planes that have come into existence and died in some sort of apocalyptic scenario. So the world's been remade many times and is always at the brink. Many powerful monsters are survivors of previous material planes.
Super interesting in my current games im running with that the gods are basicly higher mortals and that there is about 4 to 5 one being a king of a growing kingdom and he basicly represents civilization and protection. Another is said to be this old barbarian who lives in the north who is trying to unite all of the different tribes under his name so he represents war and conquest. And in my curret session coming up one of the clerics in the party (i actually have two for once) after reaching level 10 asked how divine intervention works...which i said i had to think about and get back to him
My game has most of the Gods being people that ascended to godhood through their own deeds. Sort of like sigmar in Warhammer. The elves worship actual dudes who were just super powerful mages. That's it.
When I made my DnD setting, I set out to make exactly that. A DnD setting. Not a fantasy setting, like the one that I write about in my spare time, but one that has everything that is in DnD lore, that has only minor changes, and one where the spells the players use impact the geopolitical landscape. There are no villages in my setting, only farms, cities, and the occasional town, as people can teleport, and the world is filled with extremely dangerous things. There are only magical plagues, as ordinary ones can be cured by any priest. Death is considered very differently, due to how impermanent it can be, and how well documented the afterlife is. The rules of DnD don't align with my ideas of a fantasy setting, but I find it very fun working within those constraints in order to create an interesting setting that seems to make sense
My campaign all the gods are as they are described in the books from the worshipers perspective but in reality all of the gods are chaotic Eldridge monsters that don't understand mortals.
You should make them like clueless business executives trying to be hip with the kids. Pelor: Maybe I should send down some shaggoths, mortals like shoggoths right? Raven Queen: I sent down shoggoths the other day, and they didn't like it very much. Pelor: WHAT MORE COULD THEY WANT?!
The real heart break comes every time your players forget the "super important" differences and fall back on the standard assumptions… "every necromantic magic causes everybody in a large radius to be corrupted by planar magic" - "Let's buy 3 times the material components for revivify and raise dead, before we head out though"
Ideas I came up for my homebrew setting: 1) Dragons were among the first creatures to crawl from the primordial chaos at the beginning of time (at least on the material plane), and their bodies remain inundated with the power of creation. Magic is in their breath, their bones, and their blood. Especially the blood. People drink their blood to gain Draconic Sorcery, and most draconic creatures (Kobolds, drakes, dragonborn, pseudo-dragons, etc.) were spontaneously generated when a dragon's blood was spilled onto fertile soil. That's why dragons often have kobold servants. 2) People are assumed to be ignorant, unless proven otherwise. Because Ignorance is the default state of people in Real Life, and I see no reason to change that in a game that aims to ape medieval society. Common folk probably can't read (unless/until printing presses are invented), and will "know" a great deal of information that is merely heresay or myth. 3) The lion's share of Tieflings in the setting come from a nation that practiced widespread infernalism and was brought down by a holy crusade. The populace who survived the bloodbaths to follow escaped - along with the fiendish taint in their blood - scattering to the four winds. Regardless of a Tiefling character's actual morality, most folk will assume the worst of them, when they aren't being mistaken for literal demons. If you play a Tiefling, you are agreeing to play Hard Mode. 4) The oceans were traditionally home to aquatic races - Merfolk, Tritons, Sea Elves - who have seen the rise and fall of numerous undersea empires over the millennia. The last great kingdom in this part of the world was destroyed by the No Life King, when he marched his undead army across the bottom of a strait in order to reach the island nation of Anglia. The attack dispersed the aquatic races, many of whom were driven to open ocean or even into the river systems of the land, where many still dwell. The most notable city for aquatic people is Porpherie, a Venice-style trade city state that makes use of extensive canals. With high concentrations of the aquatic races there, Porpherie has as much going on below the water line as it does above. 5) Before the mortal races gain control, large swaths of the continent were the dominion of Fey lords, which were since time past divided into Seelie and Unseelie courts. Elves and gnomes were the mortal servants of the Seelie Fey, while Goblinoids served the Unseelie. But this was long ago - in a time before written record - and the Fey retreated from the surface to live in their fairie realms, beneath the ground. Though mortals rule the surface, the Fey have long memories, and wax nostalgic for those halcyon days. So much so, that many Fey desire to reconquer their lost dominions, and restore ancient Arcadia to its former glory. 6) Illithids do not need to eat intelligent brains to survive. Rather, they do need it for protein, yes, but they can just eat animals or grow grey matter in their labs. Rather, they subsist on mental energy, and can draw it out from a living person without harming them (at least, not physically). An Illithid could theoretically live its entire life "humanely", sipping mental energy from people a little at a time. This makes their actual behavior all the more repugnant. They can feed on individual aspects of a person's mind - thoughts, feelings, hopes, dreams, memories, even madness - and each kind of mental construct has its own "flavor". As such, Mind Flayers in this world are gourmands and gluttons, capturing mortals and psychologically torturing them. All in the interest of not only getting a controllable supply of sustenance, but to be able to generate a variety of flavors to feed their palettes. It would honestly be more merciful for their victims if they WERE simply killed. 7) While necromancy and dark powers of undeath certainly exist, the undead can also arise "naturally", and often do. Corpses not properly disposed of can become inhabited by unclean spirits, or animated by the grudges held by their living selves. These grudges can turn the spirits into incorporeal undead as well. All common folk know to give the dead - especially those who died unnatural or painful deaths - proper burials, cremations, or "sky burials". Lest the dead return to make war on the living, as the No Life King did long ago. 8) Monsters sometimes have bizarre weaknesses or hang-ups, because they draw more on the mood of fairy tales. Trolls, ogres, and the like cannot stand the sound of music. Certain monsters aren't merely disadvantaged by light, but are repelled by it. Fairies are stymied by the presence of iron nails, and hags are blocked by lines of salt. Sometimes, superstitions have roots in reality. Other times, they are profoundly useless. Have fun figuring out which rumors or folk tales are true and which aren't!
I really like these and may use one or two things for my homebrew urban campaign which also draws inspiration from the occult, myths, and fairy tales. In this low magic campaign, most humans are plain and ignorant of magic and Old Knowledge (basically D&D/Supernatural lore and magic + myths). Races and monsters are more hidden as old souls, residing in humans that can feel/see/draw magic from another planes. Players can use Perception to see pointier Elven ears, paler skinned Celestials or use Insight to feel they know more than they should (but I won't tell them that). So it's a puzzle to see which NPC's can be trusted with information about things like demons and spells or which ones will send them to asylums for their insane ideas.
@@lisalisa3635 i believe the sky burial is leaving the body on the cliffs for the predatory birds to pick them clean. or to be left on the plains for wild animals devour etc The key point being that the body is left under open sky so their souls can drfit upwards to whatever kind of afterlife exists. i think there used to be a lot of it in tibet/ mongolia
This video made me feel so much better about the TTRPG I'm working on. As many times as I've read the phrase "Fantasy Heartbreaker" over the past month I was beginning to get a little discouraged 😅 Thank you for validating my passion 😁
I made my setting have elves be one of the rarest races on the material plane because they saw themselves as better than all the other races. They rebelled, lost, and were banished to the Feywild. If one of my PCs decides to play either an elf or a half elf, I make sure that they will be treated super harshly because of this.
In our realm, geometry is based on triangles. The shortest distance between two points of the triangle follows a straight line of the triangle. In my D&D realm, the geometry is based on squares. The shortest distance between two points follows the curved side of a square. This curved trajectory is why 30 feet of diagonal movement would be almost 40 feet in our realm - in D&D, the seemingly straight lines are curved. Magic exists in the realm of D&D because of the manipulation of these curves. Widening or compressing geometry causing changes in the elements and gives the four elemental planes, one at each side of the square. In 3D, the fey and shadowfell occupy the tops and bottoms. If a magic user considers a 4D tessaract, then you have just enough sides for the outer planes. The idea is that the curvature required for an arrow to require 30 feet to travel what can only be about 20 feet leaves a lot of room to manipulate a lot of energy. Heck ...where do you think bags of holding go?! ;-)
So us as players may view an object on the battlemap such as a rectangular table, but do non-magical characters perceive it as rectangle as we do, or is it rounded off from their perspective?
Nathan Perkins You are correct that our circle is to their square. That is, to the non-magical D&D characters, a set of points equal distance away from a center is a square. They do not differentiate between what they call a square and what we call circle. Only magic users manipulate that extra space - because that’s magic.
I made my current campaign setting based on one notion: "homebrew is so liberating, I wish it was valued more." And I made a setting that functions akin to the painted worlds of the Dark Souls games, where people literally just show up in the worl at random. Various races, with their own gods, their own levels of knowledge and languages. The world is filled to the brim of ancient stories of other worlds that no one remembers how they got here. And many people have just always lived in this world, so the races have mostly blended in. Some cities still have leading or higher demographics, but almost every city can have almost any race in it. What was fun was I didn't have a solid answer for where magic comes from until a player told me about their idea for their character. They wanted to be a sort of emmicery for the Igdrasil (or however you spell it), and at that moment I decided that all magic, the weave, all energy of life, came from the world tree. Still haven't decided if that makes druids more powerful or not, but still.
I often steal city maps from older TSR stuff when creating my own worlds. Just rotate the map to suit your landscape, rename the sections and prominent businesses, and BAM!, the players will probably not realize it's actually Waterdeep...
I’m currently doing this! I’m adapting the setting of the video game Enderal to D&D. It has a lot of interesting and unique takes on existing fantasy tropes, a rich history that is JUST ill-defined enough that I can change one aspect without feeling like that change will snowball into a massive inconsistency, a really great vibe (I believe because it was originally a German game, so cultural differences between a German view and an American view make the setting feel fresh to American audiences) and the game itself is obscure enough that I can feel confident that my players aren’t going to expect something from the setting that I changed or removed. I get to skip all of the stuff I find tedious, frustrating, or overwhelming - map-making, geographical features, core themes, factions, basic history - while also ensuring that the things that I really like and enjoy writing about - interpersonal conflicts, more detailed worldbuilding, subverting the fantasy tropes that I dislike - are my main focus. There are only five races to choose from, but I custom built 3 of the 5, hopefully so that players will be less tempted to fall into the cliched stereotypes about what an elf or dwarf SHOULD act like (since they won’t be playing an elf or dwarf, they’ll be playing an aeterna or a starling). It’s been super interesting! I’m currently trying to find a way to bring more political intricacies into the setting as an option for the players should they choose - I love hearing Matt talk about power politics and fealty and such, so I think it’d be cool to think more about how I can bring that into the setting, because I think it’s fun and interesting. Anyway thanks for coming to my Ted talk.
Works for monsters too. Rename it’s abilities and you can turn an ice dragon into a giant angry sea turtle. Your description totally changes the monster!
A simple exercise to see if this is for you: take a setting you know well and throw the weirdest thing you can into the mix. Follow through on all the implications of that change and you'll very quickly find a world of your own.
"where does magic come from? Where do the gods come from? Why are there elves' T'was an awesome feeling when I answered each of those questions in relation to my setting as he posed them.
My campaign setting is highly inspired by the anime "made in abyss". We play in golarion (the pathfinder setting) but on the world map you can see a giant persistand storm in the middle of the ocan. In my world, thousands of years ago, one of the gods was cast down from the heavens, and his cristaline body crashed into the ocean, leaving behind a several kilometer deep crater, sorounded by an island. inside, the lower you get the crazyer the enviroment becomes. more and more powerfull monsters are emerging....but adventurers go down there just to ge shards of god glass. a purple, cristaline highly magical substance, that is used to create magic weapons, armor, aso. and so the abyss swallows more and more adventurers......its basicly a ginormus mega dungeon ^^
That's really cool. I love the concept of Made in Abyss too and have begun incorporating some elements inspired by it into a world I'm creating for my own tabletop game. Love that sense of wonder and danger.
Naturally, since the hole has been around for millennia, all the most easily obtained deposits of God Glass have been stripped bare. Meaning adventurers must delve progressively deeper. Setting them at odds with the monsters (and other threats) far below. Including the living - but doubtless mad - remnants of previous adventurering parties, who are either undead or transformed or got lost and became savage and/or cannibalistic in order to survive. Sounds cool.
Thank you so much Matt for all you do, this video has been the perfect response and remedy for a player of mine and me. In my game, I have spent hours late at night trying to understand the ecology and minute details of my homebrew world and one player in particular is always asking me why I cut certain things out of my world. And I keep telling him that I find certain concepts in DND to be not emersive, not possible, and not fleshed out enough to be in my world. A good example would be the Tortle and firbolg races. Because of this conflict, there's been a bit of tension in the game recently and all I've been wanting for days would be the perfect response to him, and you have helped me find it. You really are an inspiration to me, my younger brothers (who are all aspiring dms) and to my players. Thanks! Also, I just finished Priest, and I love it!
This video really speaks to me, not specifically with regards to D&D, but simply what I do in my head all day. I spend all my time trying to make stories, but instead of making stories I just add more detail to the world the story takes place in. In a story that takes place in an alternate history of our world, I spend all my time figuring out where the history differs from ours, what technology they have that we don't and vice versa, etc. In an urban fantasy, I spend all my time figuring out the mechanics of magic. Not super successfully, mind you, but I _do_ have _lots_ of ideas for what kind of magic system makes sense to me, which mythical creatures exist and what they should be like, which deities should exist and what they should be like, and so on. While I don't normally apply my worldbuilding to D&D, brainstorming how robots might approach D&D gave me an idea for a D&D class that only artificial intelligences could use, which then led me to an idea for a "Robot" monster type (which would include "living constructs" like Warforged), for which I'm hoping to create some robot "races" that would make sense in a D&D-like setting. While it frustrates me to no end that I never actually manage to write the stories that are supposed to take place in these worlds, this video has made me feel good again about my addiction to tweaking pre-existing settings or coming up with new ones. It never really occurred to me that doing this as much as I do means I have strong opinions about how these things should work, or that this is a quality worth appreciating. I'm going to try to appreciate it more.
I started worldbuilding when I realized that most Fantasyland style settings have an ancient past of elven and dwarven kingdoms, when dragons and giants ruled the wilderness. And that ancient past is always much more interesting sounding than the current time. My first attempt was the High Forest of the Forgotten Realm in the first days of Netheril. 8 years later I am now doing a world that is basically the cultures of Dark Sun and Morrowind set in the forests of Endor. With elf barabarians riding on dinosaurs.
I had a setting a while ago, where the world was just a bunch of different floating islands in the sky. Each plane had it's own island, and especially large planes had multiple islands. Because the islands were crashing into each other a lot, extraplanar invasions were common. All of the planes, except for the material plane, were held aloft by some unknown force, but the material plane was chained down. The chain connected to a cage, where the gods were trapped, their life-force fueling the magic that kept the islands aloft, instead of on the ground, where they should have been.
this might be a little off topic, but I didn't make my own setting because I wanted to make a new thing at first. I made it because I wanted a defined setting because I both didn't have money to buy books and partially didn't want my players to know more about the setting than me. I hated the idea of knowing there is an answer to a question my player asks about the setting, but not knowing what it is. it creates a weird situation where the dm and what they say are now fallible and the story can be derailed not by player choice, but by the dm's lack of knowledge. I have since made a number of assumptions about my world and rewritten my setting to include those ideas in its bones.
That sounds like a very exhausting predisposition to labour under as players and DMs. Whenever one runs premade stuff, I would never dream of consider the module as a higher authority than the DM. Modules are guidelines and suggestions, not scripture set in stone.
When this situation shows up, where I don't actually have an answer for my players, I've gotten into the habit of saying, "I know I have that written down at home, I didn't bring it with me. I'll message you those details later." If it's something about history, or like one of my players ruled a Natural 20 on a history check regarding a family logo on a nobles' jacket that was weighed down with stones and drowned in an aquiduct so I had to right a three paragraph history on his entire family. That was fun. Or if its about a reward like 10gp/goblin ears and I've forgotten how many ears they ought to have I'll say something like "I know I have the exact number written down at home, but until I find the note we'll just say that you have a bag of a yet undetermined amount of gold." Otherwise if its story related like their trying to convince the main baddy to give up and they put forth a decently held together arguement and they succeed on whatever task or roll I set forth for them, then I'll leave the session there as a cliffhanger before I tell them the result. I'll then use that time to determine what happens next and come back the next session with their answer. They think I'm a fantastic story teller for leaving them on an EPIC cliffhanger, and I get a week to figure stuff out. Win-win. :)
@@ethandavis3762 yeah, I feel you… I played with some really horrible players when I was younger. They'd "correct" me as a GM and fellow players on their characters' cultures at least twice per session. Thus I vowed to never play the Dark Eye (popular German RPG) ever again, because it really seems to attract these players
In some part I did the same because of this. I don't want to play in the forgotten realms because I have players that know too fucking much about the forgotten realms and I know next to nothing and have no interesting in learning since I find reading through inconsistent lore a bore. It's the same reason I also make most of my own monsters. When 3/5 of your players know the monsters manual by heart then its not very interesting when a monster pops up and they know exactly how dangerous it is, what it can do and how hard it should be to kill. It kills all the mystery. One of my players in particular is so avid with the system I sometimes have to remind them that this x thing you just mentioned in passing as your character is not something your character would think trivial. Specifically resurrection, plane travel and so forth. There is no reason that your character should know about the existence of spells in the spell compendium that are such high level that as far as your character is concerned no mortal in the world has access to.
The world is essentially a fire fuelled by belief. The characters in the world are not aware of it but it's their understanding of magic that makes magic work the way it does.
In my world, the "gods" are just really powerful mortals that has gone beyond mortality. Like the god of death is just a stupidly powerfull litch that has made a device that summons the souls of people after they die
We had a campaign when most of us were young and we tried to pick it back up some years later after most of the former heroes had passed (mostly human lifespans). But we had limited magic as earlier one of my characters turned evil and leveled Evereska, the heart of magic. Additionally, it had been noticed that all of the top 6 bbegs were some flavour of arcane caster, that of course did terrible things, so there was some bias and reluctance. On top of that, at the end of the final battle, my rogue had managed to arrange a way of banishing these ancient beings (older than gods) from this universe of existence. Point being when we picked up, we couldn't play wizard or sorcerer, but maybe had an increase of people in Eldritch knight or with arcane initiate as they had potential, but no guidance. Another fun thing was we had a pocket dimension earlier than eventually collapsed but in it, time progressed faster and a Dragonborn had changed the evolution process of the local dinosaurs and simians so we made rules for these new races that suddenly appeared in our world, that had a skewed belief system based on the gods the party that ventured in there followed. Could have made for interesting stuff, but it was decided that for many reasons to just start a new world, not the least of which was new players both to 5e and the world we made. Puts everyone on equal footing.
But what does the world use as a heat sink? If there is a sun like light source it would heat up the inside of the planet to a similar temperature to the light source.
@@DTDdeathmas there is spherical portal to the realm of fire in the center and it emit gravity outward kind of like a reverse black hole and it's not really a planet it's the rock just goes down to the underdark and eventually the abyss (mantle of the world) and the sphere changes get's closer to the plane of ice (moon) at night. and when you look up you see the other side of the world (like a halo ring). but there hasn't been a Christopher Columbus yet so the light of cities are the stars
Since it's a fun exercise... First of all, I have a mid-Industrial Age setting with some tech even approaching 20th Century levels. It features (and counting) four unique homebrew races (some of which have subraces), 8 major nations, and a pantheon containing 23 gods in four separate groups. Most of the nations are separated by water, putting naval combat at the fore, and the combination of political instability and a nearly untamable wilderness has allowed piracy and privateering to continue thriving even as national navies enter into the dreadnought era. It's like I took a blender and filled it up with World of Warships, Warhammer 40k, Monster Hunter, a pinch of Subnautica, a regular D&D high seas adventure, and topped it off with some past creations of mine that I found in the back of the fridge. Yes, this is a nightmare to put together, especially since 6 of those major nations are on the same partially submerged continent (one trio shares a land border, the rest have nothing but sea between them), and I've applied the usual fantasy approach of things going back well beyond living memory and mixed it with a technological era most known for rapid advancement.
weirdest thing in my campaign setting: there's an entire section of the world that's relatively difficult to get in and out of due to mountains, deserts, oceans, and magical barriers across said oceans, that views arcane magic as inherently evil and will kill any sorcerers or warlocks that they come across (they don't have to worry about wizards, because those were all killed off about 1,000 years ago, and their arcane tomes burned). North of the anti-arcane zone, across a whole bunch of mountains that are home to a whole bunch of ice dragons, is a Roman-esque empire that's all about that conquest. East across the desert that's chock full of undead and definitely isn't home to Vecna's old wizard tower, is a society so dedicated to understanding magic that it's basically become a science, and has developed airships and magical technology that I definitely didn't rip from Final Fantasy XII
Your comments about having strong, developed opinions about the world you create is spot on and what I'm struggling with in writing currently. I'm still piecing my setting together, that's going to be more of a story then something playable like D&D but I'm worried about aspects of it being too weird and if I'm being too opinionated, it feels like I'm walking on eggshells trying to write sometimes hoping what I'm writing makes in world sense and that I'm not shoehorning ideas in to give the setting depth. Sticking to an idea and going down a certain direction only to find that what I've written down or described doesn't make sense to people as to why things in the world are as they are especially if the themes are prevalent, are responsible for characters' actions is something I'm worried about.
One virtue of creating your own setting in a vacuum is that you have more freedom to incorporate stuff from your players’ backstories. I know you just talked about this in a recent video, but one of my favorite moments in the first campaign I played was when I told my DM all about the dwarven mountain village my character was from, and as we ventured away from the first chapter of the campaign, we realized the second chapter of the campaign (levels 5-8) would place in my hometown!
This video was a godsend. I'm running my first campaign soon and I've homebrewed all of the magic mechanics and completely changed the setting (I know it's ambitious for a first-timer, but my group are interested in the concept and committed to helping me balance everything). I keep worrying that it'll just fall apart because it's not balanced or things don't work the way they're used to seeing in D&D, but this setting has been an idea of mine for years and I really want to express it to my friends.
One of my favorites that I"m trying to drum up a campaign for right now? It had two major things I was looking to highlight in particular. 1) Animosity between the races is minimal, animosity within a race is high. This was just sort of something I borrowed from the real world history and such. Like, Protestants and Catholics in Ireland. The differences between them are minor. To the point where I remember someone saying the only way they had to tell if someone was one or the other is if they pronounced "H" a certain way when reading the alphabet. And yet it was this bloody, brutal conflict where neither side would broker peace. So instead of having elves hate dwarves and everyone hates the Orcs or something. I had Elves who hated those elves that were 98% similar to them. To the point where you'd have that classic TOS Star Trek Moment of: "... but you're exactly the same." "What are you talking about?" "You're both half black and half white." "Yes but he's black on the RIGHT side, I'm black on the LEFT". So the Elves don't have some squabble with the dwarves. Why would they? They live entirely in different regions. You know what the Elves do have? They squabble with those bastard elves next door who believe the River Goddess is more important than their Tree God even though they each are venerated by both. But if they faced an existential threat from outside... they might make an attempt at setting aside differences to kick them out. Maybe. Depending on how they view the situation to get over on the other. "Eh I can probably beat that goblin invasion on my own. But you know who can't? Those River Goddess bastard elves after I kneecap them at the same time as the invasion!" 2) The Divine is real, but mysterious (as is all magic). Everyone has divine magic available as normal. There are clerics and paladins going around holy rolling stuff. But... No one has ever been able to travel to another plane. No one has been able to speak clearly with a god. High level characters can summon stuff like Devils and Archons with their spells, but they've never been able to go to where those things are. Spells like Augury and such still work, but no one has had a sit down one on one chat with the gods. Who the gods are, what they want, what they demand, why they do what they seem to do? It's all a personal question that many people have wildly different, and often conflicting, answers about. Yet it all seems valid. The cleric who swears their god is the only god that exists is casting down divine prayers the same as the polytheistic animist cleric who is summoning up lava elementals from the supposed domain of their volcano god. A third thing that comes up, but isn't necessarily major (depending on edition this is either bog standard or heresy): Magic isn't scientific. Like every spell is very personal to the casters who cast it. Wizards can't really "Go to school" to learn how to sling spells. There's no standard printing of say Cure Light Wounds on a scroll that can be copied and printed over and over. When you do magic, it's a reflection of yourself. How your own mind works. The connections and meanings that you create and take. So no one can really teach you magic. Because no one quite is exactly like you. All they can really do is try to open you up to experiences that will eventually allow you to figure out magic. And as such, magic swag is incredibly rare. The village blacksmith can't pound out +1 Swords. The local herbalist isn't making Cure Potions and Neutralize Poison potions in every village. If you want the swag, you gotta find where it is in the world. Dark, dangerous places no one has taken them from, for good reason. Picking the bones of the past before the devastation of the gods changed everything.
In my setting, every person has two souls: the Corpor and Aeter (or Body Soul and Spirit Soul). When you die, your souls split and go to separate places. The Corpor goes to an infinity expanding and layering realm beneath the earth called the Neath. There, they live their lives like normal with the other dead of their time period and location where they died, and are unable to understand the fact that they are dead. Still living people can travel to the Neath via ancient stone circles that require special crystals to activate. Meanwhile, the Aeter travels to the Twixt, an otherworldly plane where all beings not native to the material plane dwell (celestials, fey, elementals, fiends, etc), and spend time there resting amidst the native beings. They'll usually gravitate towards beings that posess the same alignment they did in life, who will typically reward, punish, and/or exploit those individuals for their actions. Then, when those people have fully rested and received the consequences for the life they lived, they are reborn and reincarnated into a new being and live life once. In this setting, resurrection also has the quirk that it can only bring back one of your souls. After you are revived, you may pick whether your Corpor or Aeter was brought back. If you choose your Corpor, then you suffer a penalty to all your mental ability scores, and all your physical scores if you chose your Aeter. You also gain a new flaw related to which you chose which I'll usually discuss with that player. The party must then go on a quest to the Neath or Twixt to recover the player's missing soul. I also add the bonus to resurrection spells that if you spend a ninth level spell slot or cast True Resurrection when bringing them back, they come back with both their souls.
I really needed this video, just last week I kinda broke down to my spouse (who is a player in my campaign) after our session about how I feel that my players are not living up to the potential of 'my' world and their characters (i.e. our bard refuses to cast spells cause he doesn't feel like it) and I was just frustrated. I put in all this work into an elder pantheon of Gods and I write all this backstory to quests for them to just talk and sit on their phones while they are getting information. Knowing that it's normal to have your heartbroken like that is good to know.
I just started a Warcraft story for my friends, wich is set in an alternate timeline. The new timeline starts at the war of the ancients, when Rhonin, Broxigar and Krasus went back in time, and changed things, so for start in our current game time, the nightelfs are friends with the orcs, becaus of Brox. But the main difference, this timeline joins in with the changed timeline of the Warlord of Dreanor, so most the orcs did not drink the fel-blood, they are in an alliance with the draenei. The First War still happened but it was Ner'zhul who lead the remainding forces of Hellfire Citadel to Azeroth, because Gul'dan is gone, Cho'gall and Blackhand is dead. But the second invasion was the Iron Horde and draenei forces lead by Durotan, who came to stop Ner'zhul, and the first time he sees the young Khadgar, he bows down befor him, and pledge his and his horde's loyalty to him. So the Horde and Alliance was never formed, the mag'har and humans are live in relative peace, but because Ner'zhul was able to open the portals he wanted (but this time in Azeroth, instead of Dreanor) they are in constant fight with the Burning Legion and with other worlds beyond the portals. Oh yeah, and the Shattering sinked Pandaria to the bottom of the sea, and all the pandarens were killed off/never existed.
I hope my players wont find this comment, cos they don't know everything yet about the changes. And also they would find out, I stole some idea from you for our campaigns :D
I just played DnD for the first time a couple days ago. The continent we played on was just made by rolling dice on a piece of paper. d20's were cities, d6 's were water, d4 were towns/villages. One of the cities was just a giant lighting weird (elemental). the city was in hollowed out legs and arms. We also included the guilds of ravnica. The Dimir wants to awaken the weird and the Izzet want the weird for power and research. It was really cool playing in an unique city!
In my campaign setting: The first day of the year is the hottest, and the last is the coldest. There is a "day zero" between them called "The Day of Upheaval" in which there are great natural disasters the world over. No months, instead just four 100 day seasons (Beltane, Verdure, Reaping, and Frostide). So a day might be spoken as "The 37th day of Reaping". It gets really interesting whenever the Day of Upheaval comes around. It's only happened once so far, and the characters were caught in tidal wave, trapped within a Leomund's Tiny Hut, which they had to exist to try and save the towns people swept up in the tidal wave. My players described it as their favorite session. It was great.
The setting I'm working on is on a moon that revolves around a gas giant that occasionally bombards the planet with magic purple space dust, leaving a barren magical wasteland in the southern most regions. I spent several hours researching how life on a moon would work, especially in regards to climate, day lengths, and the like due to effects like tidal locking. It's an interesting process for sure, and looking back I should have started on a micro-scale rather than a macro-scale because I write better like that. Great video, keep it up Matt!
One of my favourite general concepts is the gods being formed and powered by belief. It gives a lot of opportunities for cosmic plots to attain power, and gives the gods a reason to interact with the world. It also makes high level campaigns more interesting: the lich who wants to attain godhood now doesn’t just need to gather the artifacts and the sacrifices, he needs to convince the populace that he should be worshipped.
A campaign I was in last year was set in the Shadowfell, and it had a few homebrew tweaks. The gods were far away and could not easily interfere with the realm, so no clerics outside of Grave Domain for Raven Queen, and divine damage spells dealt necrotic instead. All necromancy spells could be cast one level lower than normal, and spells to do with raising dead/undead required no material component. Every character got access to the Spare the Dying cantrip, as death and life were not as clear cut in the Shadowfell as on the Material plain. Failed death saving throws were only cleared after a long rest, and any sources of light only gave off half what they would normally, and were not visible at all after 100ft. Anyone who had been on the plain for more than 48 hours did not require to drink water to survive, and there were no naturally occurring sources of it, but if you did drink any you would suffer the symptoms of withdrawal from it if you then started going without again. These small changes really helped give a feel for the depressing, oppressive atmosphere of the Shadowfell through game mechanics.
My setting has 13 gods who are actually entirely mortal beings. When one dies, the next creature to gain half of the previous god's power ascends to become the next god. Also they've all created one another (god of life created the god of undeath on accident, this results in the god of undeath being the only one that cannot reincarnate)
Last night I had a dream I attended a lecture by Matt, but so few people attended that it turned into more of a hangout session, just talking DnD and whatever. I remember Matt saying a lot of inspiring things, but not exactly what they were. Then I wake up and open up RU-vid at breakfast to see this video pop up - and wouldn't you know it, he said a lot of inspiring stuff! I've been insecure about the homebrew I've done for my very first campaign setting as a brand new DM (including revamping the magic system, capping player level at 10, removing interplanar travel and even removing dragons!), but this video really encouraged me to keep going. I do have some strong opinions on Fantasyland, after all. Thank you, Matt Colville for being the DM mentor my brain knows it needs! P.S: weirdest part of my setting: the main creator goddess created a world sheltered from other planes, yet filled with conflict to hear mortals in it create beautiful and heartbreaking songs about their woes. That's the one thing she couldn't create herself: music.
I have complex lore about the nature of minds, magic, and the undead. A mind is a bit of spirit from the Ethereal plane (a place of swirling energy of desire) & a bit of soul from the Astral plane (a place of placid energy of bliss). Undead are soulless creatures with spirit only, & so can never rest or be satisfied until destroyed or “set at ease” by finishing their unfinished business. You can’t kill a ghost with a sword, so every disembodied spirit is a little mystery about what it wants but can’t accomplish without a body or what “spirit anchor” that CAN be destroyed it is attached to. Clerics draw on astral energy while wizards draw on ethereal energy (resulting in animosity & persecution in some regions). So clerics don't “cast spells”, they “perform miracles” & don’t have to memorize anything each day. And I’ve reduced, removed, or made higher level a lot of wizard “zapping” spells; they’re too powerful. Also, very high-level spells & miracles require a wisdom check at each use or you permanently lose 1 wisdom point & become more eccentric, explaining why powerful wizards in particular tend to go insane and make cursed magic items and build crazy dungeons.
This is so great! I love custom worlds & campaigns! I never got around to replying to your tweet, because my oddities are very specific, but I've been slowly building a world (very slowly, like a couple hours a month slow) for the past few years that have some very specific things: -Dragons replace Beasts of Burden (Horses, Donkeys, etc) because they aren't intelligent creatures. Dragons also replace a significant amount of technology. Think Steampunk but instead of Steam Engines, things are powered by various different types/sizes of dragons...likes Flintstones but with Dragons instead of Dinosaurs! -The planet is actually a large earth-sized moon that is tidally locked to a gas giant. The area that never gets sun and has a purple sky (cause the Gas Giant is purple) is a wasteland continent where dark magic and evil monsters live. -Each of the main races (Elves, Dwarves, Orcs, Halflings) have their own continents but everyone spreads out so Half-Races are not terribly rare or looked down on. -Magic is SUPER rare, almost non-existent, except when Holy (ie Clerics) or from Nature (ie Druids) or if you can explain every spell as some type of science -No Humans (because I find them boring and uninspired) -All the gods are people who were able to unlock magic in the past and ascend (similar to Celtic deities)
I've been writing my own setting with a very, very different assumptions about the core mechanics of the world and the community's wider perspective on how I really shouldn't do that has been really discouraging as of late. This video and it's message were just what I needed to hear right now. Thanks Matt :)
My Dm started with a small world with two small towns inside of barrier that holds back an apocalypse style spell that wiped the world out. It was his first time DMing and he wanted to expand the world but the first quest was to not just stop the spell but reverse it. The idea behind it was it would give us a starting point and we could expand the world out while fixing it. So if we made our characters from different cities we either picked one (like Neverwinter) or made one and gave a general direction it is in (northern mountains) and he figured it out from there and it has been so much fun.
In one of the nations in my setting each village has one seat in the setting, no matter the size. As a result the larger cities have divided themselves into several small villages, meaning they are criss-crossed with canals and pairs of thin high walls with empty land inbetween marking the borders between the "villages", as well as sudden clear areas for grazing animals as each village is required to have a herd of sheep or other livestock.
The weirdest things in my setting are: The planes aren't separeted the same way for everyone (gods and others see them as one and just walk in a different direction to change plane) The only ways to change plane is by using the gate spell... Which everybody has forgotten exept for one book (that is in possession of my wizard player, who constatly needs to defend it). If you don't know the gate spell the only way is to know a portal hidden somewhere. So if someone needs to go to the city of brass for example, they will have to endure a journey into the Sahara equivalent to get to a portal, and then they will get to the plane of fire. Then if you know a portal you can just teleport yourself inside the portal, and it's essentially like a normal planeshift, exept you only can end up where that portal leads and you have to "unlock" every plane. (I'm still working on the details) Teleportation spells are two ways: if you cast a teleportation spell (depending on which one) you either open a sort of wormhole, or you just switch places with what is there (so you can dimension door where an enemy would be and, on a failed saving, you swap places. Inanimated objects automatically fai the save) The planet is in the shape of a doughnut. Obviously the hole is a crazy place, house to a ton of dangerous stuff, a big section is just a dragon graveyard, and in the center, where opposite sides are distant less than 1000km, gravity is f*cked up. Every specie of aberration has a specific creator, and it doesn't have to be a crazy magic user, it can be anyone who raises an animal in a way that is weird. (So like chimeras go back to every person who forced bunches of different animals together for an extended period of time. Then after a while, like in a pokémon videogame, a weird egg pops out somewhere and puff. You got a weird animal.) For all of these things I'm still working on the details and i don't actually know how most of them influence the game yet.
I feel very lucky that I have players who are almost as interested in exploring the weirdness of my world as I am in creating it. Some of the weirdest parts of it: -The whole world was a zoo for earth animals created millions of years ago, those aliens have since degenerated into beasts (displacer beasts are their descendants) although a few transferred their consciousness into robots and still inhabit the world -those remaining aliens have a secluded island where they have made an engineered island inhabited by tiny sapient marmosets (elves, distinct from true elves which are a species of human), sapient rodents (gnomes), and sapient beavers (nixies) - chromatic and metallic dragons are the feral pets of these aliens who originated from highly genetically modified insects - magic is a consequence of adamantium (III) tricyanate (aka mana) which, when stimulated by a small amount of electricity, will briefly open a wormhole to one of 12 other universes - playable races include standard fantasy races (elves, dwarves, etc) but also goblins and bugbears, which are monkeys most closely related to langurs, sapient crocodylomorphs, sapient elephants, quadrupedal troodontids, three species of maniraptoran dinosaurs, giants (only 9-14 feet tall) and sapient natural dragons (descendants of cretaceous multituberculates) that doesn’t even cover a fraction of the little weird details of this just under a decade long project
The act of writing settings and rules itself is a pleasure, I've spent way too long doing this and I don't regret it one bit. I run DnD without bogging down my players with my writing but I elude to it enough that they can delve into it should they wish. It works.
In my campaign, mind flayers are actually descended from Unseelie eladrin. The logic being that elves (and eladrin, in particular) are extraordinarily long-lived, so they might see it as a waste whenever one of their own dies. They wanted to retain all of the experience, knowledge, and wisdom even after death, which is why they made the first Elder Brain--to store the consciousness of deceased elves.
I kinda stole the idea, but imagine a 50 mile in diameter tube with no beginning or end where everything is falling at the same rate. Anything that is lost or forgotten in the multiverse gets dumped into, turning it into the garbage chute of the multiverse. Debris tends to collect into island and people rise or fall from these island as they build homes and towns and even kingdoms in this strange realm they're trapped in. For once something enters The Fall, it can never leave. There's no known top or bottom and the Edge is seemingly infinitely thick and, relative to everyone, going upwards at extremely high speed and pretty much belt-grindering anything that touches it. No magic can teleport you out, no gods can hear your prayers....though SOMETHING seems to give power to those that call their gods for it. Thus scavenging is an important part of the setting and survival in it. Since they only things within it are what "falls" in, there's odd scarcities players don't normally deal with. Food and water are far more valuable since there's no aquifers or rivers and little arable land. Metal, wood, stone, basic materials are pretty hard to come by and people have to make do with less and get creative. I didn't explore this part as much as I should have in my game but I realized pretty quick my players weren't digging it so I let it go for the most part. Diversity and strangeness is the biggest factor, though. The setting can have ANYTHING in it, so tends to play like Fallout/S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Planescape. I started my players in a bar and had them encounter a mid-level devil chatting with a kobold while a 6 and a half foot dwarf with a shotgun tended the bar. Want a gang of sentient fungus men to attack the players? Go for it! Locations as well, maybe an entire wizard tower was banished to "the abyss" and ended up there, with its very confused occupants now trapped in The Fall and trying to survive and figure out what to do. I mean, what happens to stuff that drops into a "bottomless pit"? I also had fun making the map for it since it was vertical instead of flat. Players took awhile to get used to that.
@@jamesforgie6594 Go for it, that's basically what I did after finding the idea in the /tg/ archives while looking for that Mars horror game story. Like I said, the scavenging aspect was really downplayed in my game with magic since my players didn't seem to keen on it. Basically had the denizens of The Fall scrape dust off the Edge and use a jealously guarded magic to create mass amounts of land and certain materials from it. They had started making discs nearly to the Edge in all directions and layering them while putting their kingdoms on them, creating a kind of layer cake/apartment building sort of civilization.
In my campaign setting, based insanely loosely on Skies of Arcadia, the world consists of four large continent-sized Discs (technically three, and a collection of smaller subcontinent-sized discs in close proximity), each of which float through the air. They are at the four cardinal directions, and which each rotate independently. The prevailing wind always blows from the same direction, which is perpendicular to the path the sun takes through the sky, though of course local winds can and do make that difficult to determine at times, especially as each Disc has its own magnetic field, making compasses useless for navigation off the Discs. The four Discs are thus the Windward Disc, the Dawnward Disc, the Duskward Disc, and the Leeward Discs. Each of them ranges from 3000 to 5000 miles across (except the Leeward Discs, which are roughly 1000 miles across), and are spaced at the four cardinal points of a circle roughly 25,000 miles across. They are linked to each other by chains of fairly-stationary islands , ranging from large boulders up to large islands the size of Hawaii's large island. Between the Discs and the Arcs that join them is the Expanse, the remnants and remains of the central portion of what was once the Great Disc, which the four Discs are the only large remnants of. It broke apart into the four Discs during the Cataclysm long ages ago. The Expanse is a twisting, ever-changing mass of roiling winds and unstably-orbiting islands with no charted routes that stay consistent over any but the shortest time frames. The closer and closer you come to the heart of the Expanse, the more and more dangerous, unpredictable, chaotic, and "eldritch" the place becomes. What lies at the heart of the Expanse, no one knows.
In my setting magic has been so highly regulated that spell casters have to learn how to use their spells reliably, this can be done through trial and error, finding an old tome, through a mentor type figure, or through their god/patron. So a sorcerer can make a ball of fire but to create a reliable fireball as written in the phb they need someone to teach them. Arcane casters have it worse since most wizards and sorcerers are either employed by the people regulating magic or hiding from those people, and bards are doing their own thing. Nature casters have it a bit easier being able to commune with nature or finding secret druid holes, and finally divine casters and warlocks potentially have it easiest since depending on the god/patron they can just learn how to use spells from them.
I invented a 10th level spell (it can be cast as a ritual at lower levels, but the lower the level the exponentially-more casters you need to even have a chance of success, all of them have to burn a slot, and all of them have to succeed at the roll) that grants temporary immortality (an oxymoron, I know, but it's indefinitely renewable). All magic is controlled and handed out by beings who have attained immortality by this method, and all divine magic is controlled and handed out by cliques of immortals who control most of the wealth and power in the universe between them. These groups call themselves "pantheons", and there is one for each alignment. In my mythos, initially there were only humans, but then the "gods" started altering their followers, blessing them with different physical traits to make them "better". Each "pantheon" basically invented a couple of races. I got the idea while watching Altered Carbon.
Love the videos. It really helps! I felt very inspired after watching this. Since completing the video I have complete two sets of Pantheon's for my world including some of the religious stories such as creation and end of the world stories, but also flush out a calendar, and it's not even 2 a.m. yet. I just can't stop. I'm in the zone!
As a bit of a dawn-of-history nerd, the idea of a prehistoric campaign setting makes me super excited. I have an idea for a setting that's essentially Bronze Age Fantasy centered around an equivalent of the Mediterranean Sea, in which humans (resembling the Ancient Greeks) were taught the arts of shipbuilding and sailing by elves.
YES! Thank you, I knew where this was going from the beginning. I sometimes have to fight my players to keep my changes, but usually they get it once I explain the reasons and can fit their character into the lore of the world.
Thank you so, so much for confirming that VODs of the campaign will go up on YT. Most stuff that happens on Twitch that I find interesting is in timezones far, far away from my own, so I'm very rarely on Twitch and instead mostly use YT. So that's great news for people like me. :-) Cheers from Europe and wish you guys all the best with your amazing projects!
Oh GOD I cannot wait to watch the new stream. I am so damnably excited for it. Your campaign diaries gave me a lot of help running my own game, but I also super loved following the story of your campaign setting.
Thinking about what matters most to me and how that has manifested in my setting is a neat trail to follow! I've put a lot of thought into extraplanar politics, for instance, and that surprises me not at all given how voraciously I consumed the Silmarillion. I like the old-school concept of gods who are not manifestations of cultural forces, but self-extant beings. I also made the major source of conflict in the heavens into Good vs. Neutrality. When you have phenomenal cosmic power, there are insanely inflated stakes for intervening in mortal affairs. Three of the gods are Benevolent, three are Ambivalent, and I'm still figuring out who the three Malevolent demon princes are, but they're mostly lurking on the sidelines.
I heard similar advice from someone else recently: basically, don't change things just to be different. Be different because it matters, because it means something.
Biggest thing I incorporate into my world: the origin of abberations. Specifically, regarding beholders and aboleths. Beholders: because of their insanely powerful magical abilities, their insane egos, and the fact that they can dream things into existence, beholders in my setting are actually formed from the remnants of dead gods. When gods die, their shattered conscious mixes with elements of the far realm, and beholders (and similar abberations) are the result. Aboleths: to me, aboleths represent the spawn of an ancient far realm being, seeing as their unique attributes have an unmistakable element of divine power / immortality (to me). As for why they don't spread across the realms more or grow into fully divine beings like those found in the far realm, their original spawning being has died in some long forgotten war between the gods and the far realm. Therefore, there are no more of them being spawned from their creator, and they've been stranded outside the far realm, preventing them from further evolving. This also presents my favorite high level story thread, where the party must prevent an aboleth's cult from getting it to to the far realm. Beyond that, abberations in general are the result of matter from the far realm being introduced to the material/elemental planes.
He referenced my setting! Mine has no dwarves, the gods and lords of hell have disappeared, and demons are trapped on another plane of existence. Angels and devils, because they have no leadership, are fighting in the atmosphere and on the ground, causing massive collateral damage
I have an empire that has outlawed magic since the previous regime was run by evil magic users. People who are caught using magic are given the death penalty. I plan on making a campaign set in this empire soon and any player that wants to play a magic class has to take the criminal background which I think is super interesting.
The setting we use was created by me and my 4 friends I most often play with using the Dawn of Worlds game. I can fully recommend this method, especially if you rotate who DMs at least sometimes.
I have two fantasy settings, both of which are basically taking the D&D fantasy stew and dropping it into a different historical/technological era than the high middle ages (I am, of course, a history graduate); the first, which I've run a few Dungeonworld games in, is the Great Archipelago which is a 17th/18th century age of sail/piracy pastiche where the world was flooded by a dimensional mishap a few centuries ago and now the only landmasses left are a great archipelago of islands in the centre mostly run by humans, the remaining dwarf strongholds inside the peaks of mountains that poke through the ocean (which are rapidly industrialising using mineral wealth from the west), and the continent to the west where the snooty sort-of-fascist elves have been in a perpetual war with the orcs for centuries that they are slowly losing, which is what forced them to allow the dwarves to trade for their special minerals. The second, Funeral Games, is one I'm working on that transports the fantasy stew to an ersatz version of the ancient near East in the years immediately following the death of Alexander the Great. Kratia the Conqueror came from the human lands to the west and tread the ancient empire of the elves under her sandalled feet, upsetting the established order of a thousand years. Then she suddenly died, some say poisoned some say illness, leaving no heir and having put little effort into establishing an administration of her conquest. Now the land is in anarchy as her generals (who each have their own magical gimmick ala the Taken) have carved up her empire and taken to warring among themselves. The setting swaps castles and knights for deserts and sandals and a more bronze age flavour. Still to be decided- what exactly let Meat is conquer an empire that had stood for a thousand years against all comers (My current gloss is that the elves are very magical but in a nebulous Tolkien kind of way, whereas Kratia had the idea to actually use magic in warfare)? Exactly how syncretic do I want to be with real world ancient cultures? Can D&D magic be made to feel right for this setting or am I better finding a different system? How am I going to handle the widespread slavery of the real world equivalent cultures? How many Herodotus in-jokes is too many?
Building a setting around stuff you care about is extremely fun! I love exploring the ideas of various political structures and ideologies, so each city in my setting has a different political structure. One is run by the most powerful mage, one is run by the high priest of the local god’s church, one is a democratically run council, one is essentially an anarchical commune, one is run by a coalition of merchant’s guilds, one is a monarchy, etc. Once the players got enough money and renown to have a town start to build up around their castle, the main choices they made were informed by the failings and successes of the governments of the cities they’d been to. It was super fun!
Because I really dislike playing in wilderness/survival campaigns, my base world has an incredibly complex political landscape where I've mapped out every faction in every city and every town from the village level up to the international level. I also have extremely developed criminal underworlds because I was raised on mob movies.
It would be interesting to see a product release focused entirely on criminal underworld structures; how they vary between different cultures, their histories, structures, and VIP's. Definitely worthy of a DM's Guild product to be sure
@@mactireliath2356 I tried to base as much of it on real world criminal organizations as possible from the Five Families of NY to smaller warlords to huge white collar operations.
We haven't played this campaign yet but its mainly gonna focus around a town inhabited by necromancers and those with some sort of connection to necromancy, mainly due to the fact that its a safe haven for them. The reason this town is rarely attacked is because the "mayor" is a dracolich and nobody wanted to mess with that. People in this town though if asked are usually like "ah yeah, the mayor? hes a chill dude." This campaign is also sort of a joke considering one of the npcs is gonna be Paul Blart but thats whats getting us excited for it tbh.
In my campaign setting, the planar system is essentially a solar system. I added an additional plane for the sun and the Elemental Chaos is essentially an asteroid belt. The planets are basically bubbles that contain the planes, and there are ships that can travel outside of these bubbles and pierce through others. It is also heavily implied in my lore that the planar system the campaign is set in is but one of many, and there is even a race I homebrewed that are refugees from a far away world. There are cave paintings that seem to imply that Elves started out as plant creatures before they were lead into the Feywild (which is one of the prime material's two moons) by Rallathil and Sehanine, Gnomes were initially a practical joke on the mortal races by Garl Glittergold and nobody had ever heard of Duergar until the Dwarven house Unthror, which was thought to be destroyed, reared its head recently.
Thank you for the video Matt, this is exactly what DMs out there need to be hearing--that it is okay to have something different and fall in love with it.
My setting: Squid Samurai, Otter Gnomes, and Owlfolk among multiple races in a strange, twisted, multi county nation, a 100 layer hell, mechanics of renaming the two sun's affecting the time "pooling" as daytime "drifting" as nighttime. 9 months, 45, 9-5 poolingweeks, oh, and there's skeletonfolk, necrotic life exists and flourishes. And I'm still adding to my campaign stuff. Always be creative, always have new twists and turns as a DM
Mr Colville, Thanks to watching you and your video's this past year or so my friends and I have built an amazing world together. I had an idea for a massive city [waterdeep-like] built around a sealed god. [Went with Akadi] After we played a few sessions we turned it into a whole continent. After that, we restarted and I've been running the same consistent game every Saturday for a year! I take a lot of your advice and tricks and I apply them to great reception from my players. We thank you for the crazy fun you've helped us find ❤❤❤❤❤ [especially the one about having someone on the outside help make the decisions for the big bad guy.] I wish I could show you our Stormheim, I think youd really like it!
WOOO DND Stream. I replied to that Twitter comment, about my world, what I should have said: "Because Old Magic was broken apart 3000 years ago, there is no way to innately learn or produce 7th to 9th level spells, and any magic of 5th or 6th level is difficult. Hence old spell scrolls, and powerful magic that is passed from Master to Student are jealously guarded secrets." I based my whole world on that premise, on the idea of Old Magic being Broken in some way and now I have almost 50,000 words of my world built. I love creating own worlds, it's so in depth :). Thanks for this video Matt, hope it inspires many more people to create their own worlds :)
Love this concept. Thank you for giving such an impassioned voice for the need to be crazy, creative, weird, and in love with the world you build with your players :)
Wrote and Kickstarted my own Fantasy Heartbreaker -- a great experience and I heartily encourage anyone even remotely interested to release your beautiful, freaky brainchild into the world!
Our group made a generic continent map and our GM designed the part in which we started und everything else is either made by him before the session or by us during the session when we talk about places in the world. That way we once created a whole small state out of a dumb pun. And it was so much fun and laughing involved. And we do the same thing with another group on the same continent, they just started on another point of the map. As the GM of that group I love that everyone can have creative input on the kind of world we are building.
The best premise for a campaign I have ever designed was a world where the players essentially had to fight me, the DM. Fate actively and noticably changed events, acting as a sentient force. The universe had a plan for them, and unfortunately, it was a tragic one. Their attempts to fight their Fate was genuinely inspiring. I don't know if I'll get a game like that again.
In my setting I have a giant city thats made in a crater from where Tiamat was knocked down into the world during a great calamity thousands of years before the campaign. I also swapped Tiamat to be a dude and the Bahamut figure is a lady in reference to a previous campaign. Theres also an entire land made up of A Werebear society that is going to be fun to see the players reactions too.
My setting incorporates the perils of The Warp a la 40k. Basically, the more powerful or 'Noodley' a spell, the more likely and potentially worse it can come back to monch upon one's backside.
