I find annoying how many GMs play in trademarked settings like The Forgotten Realms or Golarion, rather than create their own. Post your original settings here.
Hard mode: You have to have PLAYED on it.
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>You have to have PLAYED on it.
Hehe, funny you say that.
The problem with my own settings is that I can't make up my own mind about what I want to do with them. Like do I want a classic scifi setting, some space fantasy, or scifi horror? I feel tempted to make each their own thing but then I don't want to be working on multiple settings at once.
Just make them connected multiverses. Like how Marvel and DC comics worked, each story was in the same universe theoretically.
Mix them all in one universe, they are compatible. You don't even need a multiverse
my setting is sleepy hallow inspired. great northeast american forests in a perpetual autumnal state. classical horror monsters stalk its woods and prey on the isolated villages. the human culture is halloweenish.
and yes the headless horseman rides the roads at night.
Ah sweet, another thread in which a bunch of anons yell into the void about their setting while not interacting with each other, while bumpgay interacts with everyone while not having a single thought in his mind.
>9001 replies and 666 images omitted. Click here to view.
Frick you all, you fricking uncommunicative Black folk, but most of all, frick you, bumpgay.
Every time I try to make a thread with actual cool discussion like old /tg/, some dude shows up that thinks that I'm bumpgay. What the hell you think /tg/ should talk about?
Feel free to post about your setting anon, I promess to give an in depth thought on it.
Have you considered just breaking up parts of it into the Galaxy? You are working with a space setting, space is big, wouldn't it be possible to fit these different aestethics in different parts of the setting? Part of the appeal could even be how these different aspects interact with each other.
Now I'm picturing some reto-futurist characters from a Flash Gordon setting coming across some massive space ark hard scify, while unknow to them some Aliens have found the ship and are starting to break away from their eggs.
This sounds cool anon. Which kind of adventure you had your players partake? I really like this feel of "solitary villages surrounded by wilderness and monsters during the modern age". Which system you play this in?
The vibe that I get is that GMs that don't use original settings tend to be less invested in the world and adventure than the ones that do. Unless you get a GM who goes full fanfic with the existing setting and totally reshapes it to his liking (but I have seem several that try NOT to do that).
True. homies could at least go overboard with the anime-ish things if that was the case. I don't think I have seem much systems and settings that actually try to give the player that "shonen experience". Which includes stuff like adveturer guilds, bereocracy and levels of power and etc. I know some people would think that they are limiting by they can be fun.
>pic
I can fix her
Published settings aren't all bad. I rather like Eberron.
That said, I'm running a campaign in my homebrew setting, but it'd be a little hard to encapsulate here. I did up a bunch of custom races, and tried to have a kind of "fantasy real-politik" interplay of nations.
> Plebbit taste.
> Published settings aren't all bad, I like the most sóylentgreen option!
Sorry it's not to your taste, anon. What kind of setting have you brewed up?
Just saying Eberron is the most annoying and overused setting.
Steampunk was all the rage back then and now it's cyberpunk, fricking fadcows.
Eberron's not steampunk tho. The aesthetic isn't victorian, and shit runs on magic (usually bound elementals), not coal-fired boilers. Also it would've been late to the steampunk party when it was published.
>Just saying Eberron is the most annoying and overused setting.
Forgotten Realms would like to have a word with you. Hell, I haven't heard almost anything about Eberron since the 3e days.
>Just saying Eberron is the most annoying and overused setting.
You’re on crack or maybe just ignorant. Forgotten realms is far more annoying and overused as a setting. Not even close.
Thinking about it, must be that your ignorant.
i put them through
>finding source of abominations created with lightning in a laboratory
>tracking the headless horseman several times (he keeps getting away)
>getting lost in the woods and being stalked by a shadow wraith
>amongus style finding the cannibal witch in a village
>local church infiltrated by a demon
>shipwrecked pilgrims on the coast attacked by kraken spawnlings
we use d20 but have thrown out most of the dnd associations.
All threads on tg should be either generals or elf porn. Nothing else.
What is the source of the image?
Game is Darkest Dungeon. Artist is Lorenz Nuti.
Learn to saucenao, homosexual.
What's the link?
>The vibe that I get is that GMs that don't use original settings tend to be less invested in the world and adventure than the ones that do. Unless you get a GM who goes full fanfic with the existing setting and totally reshapes it to his liking (but I have seem several that try NOT to do that).
Ah, ha. I was about to post the near opposite of that.
GMs that play in their own setting? That' basically every one where the GM has been too lazy to actually read up on a setting and just sticks you in generic fantasy land.
And that is fricking common as shit.
DMs that take the time to meticulously craft their game world and using tools/proper to build their own setting and really gets into the history of it? Well that's just as rare as a DM actually willing to dive head first into all of the established lore of a setting.
>Dangers
Dangers of OG setting: The fricking rails. So many DM designing their own worlds are just trying to short cut being a novelist. Making a world is one thing, but they also then make the threat, the villain, and required steps to beat the villain and suddenly you have DM story time. Which is bad.
Dangers of Fanboy diving too hard into a setting is Established NPCs. Either their unkillable or overpowered which can ruin certain story beat because they might as well become a DM-NPC. Even worse if the this spotlight-NPC starts escorting the PCs along to do their tasks.
DMs that use established worlds aren't shit. DMs that make their own worlds certainly shouldn't be praised for coming up with their own Sonic-OC worlds. DMs that are too far up their ass about one type being better than the other what are truly shit.
What it really comes down to is play to your strengths as a DM.
Moral of the story? Don't use argumentative thread titles when you just want to chat about creative ideas.
> Original Settings are Superior?
Lol, no.
I find it annoying how so many original settings are just FR with a splash of anime.
There's only so much you can do while retaining compatibility with D&D
4e is unironically the best fantasy anime system out there. That's probably the reason it was so hated.
OP is correct and was not a gay for once.
My setting is Weird Fiction, Pulp, Gothic Fiction and Old Sci-fi inspired - a lot of Princess of Mars, plus some Tarzan and Lovecraft, and a whole load of Clark Ashton Smith. Also a lot of the Dying World type stuff of Vance, Wolfe, Hodgson and Harrison.
So a few human kingdoms left struggling for influence on a world that is slowly being reclaimed by the original alien inhabitants, while in the background the universe is winding down and the secret societies and occultists are making their plays. Lots of rayguns, swords, airships, horrible monstrosities and halfnaked heroes in the barely understandable ruins of what came before.
Sounds awesome.
Savage Worlds?
Actually Reign (ORE) of all things, with a lot of homebrew bashing, since commanding Airships and their crews became a big part of it.
this kind of thing gets my dick hard. excellent setting, love to see gems like these incorporated into settings.
is this like... post appoc or something?
same world over and over is my jam! love seeing a setting evolve from players changing it
i ran forgotten realms for ages and it was a huge mistake. i also played in it for ages and that was also a mistake.
>giants won the war against dragons
unbelievably based anon. there is nothing wrong with the quest and dungeon design approach.
>unbelievably based anon. there is nothing wrong with the quest and dungeon design approach.
Thanks man. Unfortunately when I threw together the oneshot, 5e was new and I hadn't enough experience with it to understand its flaws but I did see how boring they made dragons for fighting so I said screw it I always thought giants were cooler anyway. Since it was most of my coworkers' first game but they knew about Dungeons and Dragons I figured it was a nice way for them to get the "dragons" half of the name without having to actually experience the disappointment of 5e dragons. And like thank fricking christ none of them had watched critical role or other twitch/youtube player shit, because it meant I could focus more on dungeon and quest design and making that fun without having to fricking do funny voices or whatever. I know that thinking back to the 90s and 00s when I first started playing, the things I remember most are barely surviving (sometimes not surviving) dangerous and mysterious dungeons and shit. So I just wanted my coworkers to feel a little of that magic I felt when I first got into it.
>is this like... post appoc or something?
Well, no/yes. The deep lore the players are yet to discover is that this is actually a playground of extremely powerful, yet flawed creatures who created the reality in question as a way to entertain themselves. They as a consequence created the grand race (sometimes know as numbers of stone), a less powerful and creative lineup of consciousness. They also created the great race (known as numbers of wood) that was even less powerful, however more creative. Then the two created races created, under the guidance of the creator race, the petty race, the first truly mortal and free race, infinitely weaker than any other creatures. The petty race carved itself bubbles and tunnels in the infinite stone space and created plants and animals and the climate and eventually created its own powerful race of creatures, the lesser/petty numbers, be it by great individuals achieving perfection, be it by sacrifice, faith, bloodletting... until at one moment, the petty race realized it's existence and suffering is purely for the amusement of the great and grand numbers (they didn't know of the creator race, but they suspected it). So they just committed a grand and universal coordinated suicide.
The grand, great and lesser numbers then kept bringing in more and more species and races out of their own imaginations, resulting in what was once a perfect and habitable series of tunnels and spheres becoming increasingly hellish.
At one point, some of the lesser numbers realized the cruelty and evil of everything, so they arranged a massive coup against the great and grand numbers.
That's how the first number-killing and the first worm wars began, as numbers rose against numbers and countless numbers and lesser races died, while the worms, maggots and flies, feasting on the dead numbers, started to grow. In the end, the worms became so powerful they almost killed off the numbers. (The current sun in the sphere everything is occurring in is almost eaten out by the worms).
And the canonical reason for everyone being where they are is that the numbers simply found an empty sphere and summoned things into it.
The current numbers present to the players are:
>Mother Hydra/Frenchie, the turkish sea tyrant number, who is actually only 1/4 petty number and got imprisoned by her father for an attempt to impregnate her own mother
>Mask, 1/2 grand number, the uncaring leader of the biological abominations and fleshcrafters
>Flint, not discovered
>Thasaidon, a full blooded petty number, lord of necromancers, dominator of all living and dead, the current leader of the germans
>Cat, half petty, half great number, a lazy, hedonistic, nihilistic number residing in the great city of bokrug, with the ugrikhans and treemen
>Eyes, a very human-esque and female, but pitch black in colour, 1/2 petty number, a number discovered on the edge of death by the masks and rescued, currently being nursed to health by the arabs
>The forest door, unknown, the source of the arab space-bending cult
>Bokrug, the governor, a full petty number, was such a good governor in the past his city committed collective suicide to praise him. He doesn't remember how he became a number, so he's stuck looking for them
>this kind of thing gets my dick hard. excellent setting, love to see gems like these incorporated into settings.
Thanks, I appreciate it. I've run a few campaigns in it and expanded it out a bit each time. People seem to treat worldbuilding and playing as entirely separate things but that's not been my experience at all, test-driving a world is wonderful for helping figure out what works and doesn't in worldbuilding.
I am hard. Please tell me more.
If you play OSR and DM properly there’s no reason you can’t create your setting as you go
what's even the point in creating a setting if the players dont care? I just do as this anon said maybe I'll have a notepad open with plot points that I stole from other media
Currently running campaign where players are galactic Blue Helmets. Generic as frick for the most part, but aesthetically the United Core Systems has early Halo humans aesthetics. Because airdropping an ethically-diverse cast of alien spec-ops via hovertech Osprey is the shit.
ZOGbot hands typed this post
>ZOGbot
>(Un)involved in Peace
>Ethically-diverse
Anon proves he has no comprehension
I've actually played in my mishmash setting. It has WH40K somewhere in its core, but it is pretty much overshadowed by all the other stuff I've thrown in (which is, like, everything I've liked - Star Wars, Battletech, Mutant Chronicles...)
I've GM'd several Dark Heresy games using pretty much original rules. Frankly, those short campaign proved that we either need another system or a lot of modifications to Dark Heresy combat. Unfortunately, since these are strictly live plays, we all have to find some free time, which is not happening so far.
I have made a setting which statted from my 40k headcanons and slowly evolved into its own thing. Really interested in hearing about yours.
Well, gladly. I would also gladly read about yours.
Mine is pretty much built on a rule of cool above all things. It is not that grimdark, uses mostly 80's canon and overall just funky metal stuff, though rather serious at the same time... or so I hope. I've already wrote a bit about it not that long ago, so I'll start with reposting that.
This is indeed the best way to put it.
40K works the best when it is rough canvas for you to work with.
I throw in Star Wars, corporations and whatever else.
Eldars and Humans are slowly coming together, but not because Guilliman/Yvraine. In my headcanon Magnus remained loyal and has been trying to repair/upgrade the Golden Throne and/or the webway he damaged for 500 years. Even though his attempts resulted in numerous improvements for the Imperium, he rather quickly came to the realisation that he needs the knowledge of the eldar, especially for the webway, so he slowly been influencing other primarchs to push for the unity with eldars from the very top, his biggest supporter being Vulkan.
Chaos is still very evil, but it relies more on xenos and demons of all kinds rather than legions. Legions are still most of organized of forces of chaos, but in general forces of chaos are just that - chaos.
Nurgle suffered the biggest loss and is almost defeated. He slowly switches his profile to technology, so his viruses are nowadays usually not human viruses but tech viruses (Dark Symmetry from Mutant Chronicles), yet some powerful demon might actually takeover Nurgle's place completely.
And in the Star Wars galaxy forces of chaos are pretty much entirely made of Yuuzhan Vong under the service of Malal.
Necrons are cool, but I use them old. Silent force of unknown times, made by who knows what and killing everyone for the same unknown reason. Death without any explanation, some of their ruins providing the biggest mysteries thus far discovered in the galaxies.
Ugh, a bit tired. I should've edit the post better. Anyway, I guess that is understandable.
Overall, it has quite a number of lore pages written at this point. Some moments are described better, some worse. I, obviously, mostly write stuff that is needed for a game, while stuff that is not needed only gets general notes.
>40K works the best when it is rough canvas for you to work with.
Completely agree, my setting was completely born out of this statement.
i heavily reduced the Xeno and Chaos interference (leaving them to the furthest corners of the setting) and focused on the human element. Three major human factions developed and some minor, some inhumans and some xenos too but they are less of a focus.
1) The grimdark not-Imperium is very familiar although much more rooted in Rogue Trader era feel.
2)The not-T'au became a human cyberpunk Nation based on Overcorps and their Noble-CEOs (ab)using AIs to regulate their resources and their society, with heavy focus on cybernetics.
3) The Hegemony is basically Space not-Advent (from X-com), humans worshipping an advanced Xeno race as deities, they have mastery on psychic technologies and gene-mods and a sprinkle of Eldar aesthetics.
Then you have the not-Republic which is a Star Wars inspired federation of hundreds of minor powers united against the major three, not-craftworlds of very genetically divergent humans, Marauders which are still humans but with a touch of Ork society and technology and so on.
Then there are inhumans: not-Chaos cultists/mutants who worship eldritch abominations from beyond, not-Dark Eldar who are ancient humans who escaped the Fall by giving into hedonism, and the not-Necrons who are the now broken and insane remains of the armies who fought against the Fall.
Xenos are as far from humanoid as you possibly can get, so you have the ever green space locusts, the infestation as a tech-cirus which can highjack both living and mechanical beings (straight from Warframe) and the grimdark version of the gems from Steven Universe.
Beside the human factions, the others have much less written on to preserve superstition and mystery
Your setting sounds like my setting if it will be given another thousand of years or so. In my setting Chaos and Xenos are slowly on decline, and there are indeed signs that Imperium will eventually turn on itself, the biggest strain between the Corporations which are now possible due to relatively save warp travel and the Church, which is vastly more powerful since Moirae Schism actually worked and now Ecclesiarchy and Mechanicus are one.
>not-Advent (from X-com)
Actually had to check what that is. That is way too new XCOM for me, the last one I've played is Enemy Within.
How do you handle your orks? One question I've been trying to tackle constantly in mind (luckily, players had not encountered any orks so far) is how to make the orks work...
I do not like them being shrooms (and the oldhammer variant of them being marsupials ain't fine either). Someone in /grog/ once told me that very, very long ago they were the usual mammals, but that is too blunt...
My current idea is that feral orks are usual mammals, while Waaagh-orks are getting their numbers via massive cloning handled by meks (especially since cloning is illegal in Imperium). So my Orks are kinda like Grineer from Warframe (funny you've mentioned it as well). Shrooms are still there, but they are just your usual agriculture, rather than the source of orks themselves.
Sounds less or more solid, I guess, but I'm still curious how you handle yours.
My Orks have been split between the marauders who have the classic waaagh! based society with the impossible tech which should not work, but they are still ultimately human, and the infestation which has the "ecology" of official Orks but instead of making full fledged bipedal organisms it grabs living/mechanical things and corpses and builds from there.
Thanks! It seems I go the opposite way, but it was still an interesting take.
Sounds alright to me. Even cool, I'd say.
As I've mentioned back in
I've ran several games in Dark Heresy. 1st edition. Combat needs to be either reworked hard or, perhaps, outright swapped for a different system (meaning the whole system gotta be swapped), because it is way too slow and crunchy.
I'm looking at Feng Shui as my primary candidate. It looks like exactly the type of B-movie styled game I want to run, but some anon several months ago pretty much told me that it all comes to the players to describe how they dispose of dozens of mooks... Not sure how it will work. But I will hopefully get to try it out next summer.
Maybe even later. Tons of life stuff are separating my gaming group, sadly.
Back on topic though, as for heavy modifications for Dark Heresy I have an idea to cut basic health in half (from 10 to 5 for an average human), but equip players and important NPC with personal power shields (since those exist in my setting and are sophisticated enough not to be found on every no-name gangbanger). This, I think, will enable players to take on packs of gangbangers without fear of dying, because otherwise Dark Heresy seem to be a rather... low-fantasy kind of a ruleset.
thank to you too for the exchange. It was a good read and i hope you won't mind if bring some of your takes into my setting.
>i hope you won't mind if bring some of your takes into my setting.
Never and not for a moment.
You are most welcome.
Do you guys play games in these settings? And if so, what rules do you use?
I played using Dark Heresy rules basically and i'm planning a higher level campaign heavily inspired by Warframe feels and aestethics for which i'm not sure what to use, thinking the Cypher System but i'm still undecided
Oddly enough, people enjoy new things and ALSO enjoy revisiting things they know. Beyond "different strokes for different folks", the same people enjoy both and different times and places and scenarios.
I never went for the trademarked settings. I've gone down the "high-powered fantasy setting like you'd see in Forgotten Realms", but never... you know... bothering to include any of their garbage. Same tone, but my own jazz.
Sucking that corporate wiener as a source of creativity just seemed wrong.
I have the opposite problem. All I want is a by-the-numbers Battletech RPG experience, but besides the lack of GMs, especially in meatspace, the ones I have come across all try to "fix" what was never broken. From AU timelines that eliminate everything after their favorite era with hamfisted writing, to injected overpowered factions that are so high tech and infallible that the house lords get nervous at their very mention, to giving player characters literal force powers, midi-chlorians and all.
Nobody runs RAW because everyone who has played knows RAW is awful.
I'd play Battletech Star Wars. I can use an Urbie to shoot womp rats in Beggar's Canyon.
I want to hear more about Battletech Star Wars
I just take trademarked settings and flip the map up side down.
.
I like hexcrawl/space exploration so I don't usually write settings before hand other than selecting a tech/development level and the type of environment, or a bunch of stars with potential planetary systems.
During the campaign I always come up with new ideas for points of interest/locations/biomes/civilizations and instead of having to start a new campaign I just plop them down as appropriate and connect the dots. Seriously helps with GM fatigue, keeps the freshness in the campaign and the world grows organically with less slog and more nuance.
The one nice thing about an existing setting vs. an original is that everyone is likely to start on the 'same page' wrt. what it's like. Exempted from this IMO are Forgotten Realms and Golarion, which have almost no distinct character, no unified vision, and the people that play and run them tend not to use what setting details exist save the occasional name check. That's pointless, imo.
Building a setting is a fair amount of work even if you stick to making a skeleton and fill in details as you go. It's hard to make players care, too, on average. And of course there's the 'I don't want to actually play in this setting' guys, the sort who argue they should be able to make six shooters in a setting which has, at most, the earliest handguns. This is less of a problem in an existing setting. No one joins an Alien game and then asks if they can play a transsexual tickling cleric of atheism.
Oh. I'll try and describe it, since I lost my maps and drawings the players made for it.
Currently, the area I've developed is about the size of two afghanistans and includes:
>degenerated remnants of a turkish military formation that was subverted by a extremely powerful sea-goddess creature, leading to a coup, a civil war and a exiling of the turkish people to a volcanic island out in the ocean, with the turks nowadays acting as the global trade network due to the untraversable and dangerous of the lands
>degenerated alternate reality feudalistic east german university that settled in not-mordor, but worse, living off of strange thorned plants they pressed drinkable sap out of and stripped for iron thorns (unknown to them, they were quite literally settled in a bleeding hand of a giant). these guys had a rail network and quarried giant trees that separated them from the turks for a fuel source and were the most powerful faction for a long time, until the succumb to internal coups and necromancy, creating a truly vile mixture of necromancy, primitive incubators and industrial revoltion
>gongese, a race of idiot parasitoid fleshcrafter amoebas that ended up creating the most oppressive and dystopian society, think somalia, but mix it with a concentration camp, an egyptian prison, a sweatshop and a harem, mixing a race hierarchy, rampant rape, bodysnatching and mindless violence. they ended up allying with germans, then fell into a massive civil war that killed hundreds of thousands over a span of decades just as they were helping the necromantic germans
>an arab theocratic caliphate that became a dual state with reality bending forest cultists. pretty cool guys, ended up going down the chinese route of an educated administrative network, mixed with a massive class of dragon riding knights, a conscription system and a massive fortress built by mythical bugmen at the northern frontier meant to defend against the vat grown and gongese enhanced steel clad human legions in service of their necromantic overlords
>ugrikhans, a northern asiatic tribe that rallied under a series of charismatic warlords and left its original homeland after a massive underground horde drove them and a race of tree-men away, followed by a even larger necromantic horde, they currently live far up north, having been evacuated by the turks after their leader, a half human, promised massive sacrifices to his mother, the sea goddess. they currently have a city ruled by a micromanaging golem doing a excilient job at creating a authoritharian utopia out of nothing
>the tree-men are a race of memory transfering superhumans that keep failing, first in infiltrating the ugrikhan race, then at sparring with the germans over the platou seperating the two of them. currently, they are ruled by a revanchistic magic possessed sword wielding maniac who is held as the only person capable of killing the original necromancer still in power over germany's steel clad fleshcrafted hordes
>the masks, a cultic offshoot of the treemen inhabait the platou between the treemen and the germans and are a violent, backstabbing race of savages. their masks, a tribute to the original mask, an extremely ancient and powerful creature, has morphed them and changed them. no men have been observed amongst their kin, yet their reproduction continues and their numbers grow
>degenerated alternate reality feudalistic east german university that settled in not-mordor
What is this Banestorm on steroids
People pick trademarled settings when they want less work
But I don't have the pdf made yet. It's still in my google docs.
A mythic ice age world loosely based on the northern Black Sea shore 45 000 years ago. The core region is the Great Forest, through which the Harjokk river runs through. Vast steppes are found to the north and east, to the west there are mountains and to the south you come to the Marshes and the Salt Lake (sea). The land is inhabited by numerous tribes of neanderthals that the PCs come from. Enemies include dangerous animals, turbulent weather, hostile tribes, marauding flat-faced demons (H. sapiens) as well as monsters and evil spirits.
Been running games in it since 2017 and we keep coming back to it!
I should have added "and which system you play your game" because every time I see an interesting setting its what I want to know.
Yeah, so which system?
>Published settings aren't all bad. I rather like Eberron.
To be honest I like Eberron too, from the d&d settings its the most interesting.
Würm - Roleplaying in the Ice Age
1st edition can be found in english.
2nd edition is still only in french, but with a bit of determination and google translate it is 100% playable! (Non-french speaker here).
Eberron-poster here. Eberron benefited from being written from the ground up for 3.5, rather than essentially being a work of fiction that then had a ruleset applied to it. Additionally, you can see how parts of it are specifically a reaction to problems with other published settings.
To answer your other question, I'm running my homebrew in 5e.
>1st campaign
Homebrew world, centered on a handful of small nations recovering from a catastrophe most of them didn't have enough surviving records to remember. Each nationality formed around their particular method of development; magic for some, faith and theocracy for others, druidic eugenics for another, martial industrial capacity remnants, etc.
>2nd campaign.
Same world, but a precurser that was the early-civilization eras when the ships that landed and whose sleeping crews would form the majority of the humanoid population arrived.
>3rd campaign
Extension of the 2nd, now into a solar system where the events of the previous game set the baseline expectation for the endeavors of this one, been on hiatus but now working in earnest to piece the events back together and start again post 1-year time-skip while the majority of the party was on an exploratory ship bound in an arc out to the edge of the system's Oort cloud and back. 5 worlds, each unfortunately very 1-note in environmental presentation due to my knacks and abilities as a DM at the time, will be adjusting for more variety in the future.
>4th campaign
Random Map Generator to create the world, use the built-in cultural and religious mods to get the last century or three of history as to who's what and why, create a pre-existing group or organization for every single class in the game and make sure that each player knows what sorta group they're signing on for, and if they want to multi-class they can cozy up to the guild associated with it. Spent a lot of time hunting down spooky body-snatching aberrations.
>5th campaign
Same world as 4th, different part of the world, gang/warlord conflicts between segments of a kingdom with a long-negligent nobility that are basically kept in power by whichever cartel holds power in the capital to keep the other kingdoms from getting grabby. Coming home to prevent a take-over of their own home town by taking over the ones trying to take them over.
>6th campaign
Start off ripping off The Magnus Archives, realize there's a better finale halfway through, veering toward that now. Still in progress, and used The Quiet Year to make the setting with the group, in a fashion as presented by The Adventure Zone for their Ethersea campaign prologue.
>7th Campaign.
Same world again as 4th and 5th, but again a different part of it. 3 bards roll up after getting chased off the other continent into Dwarfland's Ellis Island across the channel from the mainland, and in attempting to find a place to chill for the night, accidentally make a pact with the spooky darkness beneath the tavern to help it smuggle outsiders from the Lands of the Wild Undead into the city.
"So, we've gone from sneaking people over the border
to trying to convince the leaders of the area to Let those people over the border
to trying to get Clothing & Outfits decked out enough to convince the leaders of the area that we're speaking for the king so that they'll let those people over the wall
to let's get the tailor EPIC QUALITY MATERIALS to get the tailor to make us clothes good enough to make it look like we're speaking on behalf of the king to convince the leaders of this area to let those people over the wall
to let's rob one of the boats in port to get the EPIC QUALITY MATERIALS from SOMEONE ELSE to give to the tailor to make into clothes that will be good enough to make it look like we're speaking for the king so the leaders of this area will let those people over the border."
There's probably been a couple others along the way, but yeah, homebrew's my happy place because I either Know or can make up on the spot stuff when players go outside of what I'd originally meant or considered for any given session or matter.
Ok I got one now and yes I have played on it.
Its a planet with 4 gods that everyone can get stuck while doing teleportation/warping/portal travel.
There is aliens, spaceships, cybercreatures and sword and shield, as to explain tech is not overpower because most dont work the right way cause of god shenanigans, also any one can worship any god and ascend or recive power throu godlink.
So far not much lore but the gods and biomas I made up when I my players got their. Also all dungeobs are trial by the gods.
Never met a single GM who run "trademarked setting" in my life. And I'm in this hobby since '98, which is potentially longer than you are alive, OP
Well, if you never played on Golarion, Eberron or Forgotten Realms it sure means that nobody ever did. Thanks for clarifying it up.
The world I run for d&d is a (potentially) infinite flat plane. If you have a boat (or an airship) you can travel unreasonably large distances and access untouched strange lands. The maximum speed of magic is the speed of sound in air, which limits magical communication. Teleportation magic and linguistic magic are raised in level and limited in speed. This is supposed to reinforce the "scale" of the world. As a result, even wizards tend to employ birds or dragon-riders for long-distance communication. Horses are also cool. I like games to involve travel.
I think it's interesting that everyone steals from shitty FR and Golarian when it's just as easy, if not easier, to copy ANY setting you like flat out.
Like, I've copied Anime Settings (Naruto is unironically a good setting for running a 3-4 person TTRPG) and videogame settings (TES literally blows the frick out of the majority of modern fantasy TTRPG settings and I'm surprised it's never gotten an official conversion). Like even if you don't want to be original, just use a fun setting that's not slop.
I litteraly don't care either way as long as people actually PLAY. Worldbuilding for its own sake is like masturbation.
My setting started super generic and became more and more intricate as my friends and I played more campaigns in it until it was a pretty fleshed out. I will only add background when needed and will improvise things in game then canonize them if they were good ideas.
Friends who spend years polishing their setting and never allow us to play inside it because "it's not finished yet" are so cringe.
I'm a forever DM not because I'm any good at it but because I actually pick up the phone and set up the session.
Saying worldbuilding for its own sake is like masturbation when it comes to TTRPGs is like saying that working out or eating healthy is just masturbation for sports.
That said I agree that settings need to be played in. Not doing that is like the inverse, claiming you're gonna be a great sports star but never actually playing.
i have mixed feelings about them. i feel like when done well they're as cool as usual, and you and your players could build out the world together.
but it's a lot easier having an actual guide book to the setting that sets out a lot of the basic ideas too.
I just came up with a setting for my coworkers when I agreed to run them a one shot like 6 years ago, that ended up turning into a campaign.
>Giants won the war against the dragons and became the dominant species. Dragons wipe out, but left tombs everywhere to plunder
>Humans are basically the byzantine empire, appeared out of nowhere at one point in history. Little hints they are from a different plane of existence (ours) and were driven to this world by unstoppable invaders (mind flayers)
>sun elves sided with the dragons and were a fallen society until they became religious zealouts on a jihad against the rest of the world
>dwarves and gnomes sided with the giants and now form the richest and most advanced city states underground with crazy beaurocracy and cutthroat politics
>Orcs are just dumb savages, mostly pirates that raid human ships
>halfings were native to the lands the humans settled and assimilated almost instantly
>they haven't seen drow yet
>wood elves are in the woods and after the defeat of the giant v dragon war have basically reverted to savages but maintain their history orally
>The top of the Giant ordnung mysteriously left for a different continent a few centuries ago, leaving Giant society to begin to crumble in the lower ordnung
Each quest the party gets is basically a different dragon tomb, filled with riches and ancient magic and uncover more mysteries about what happened with the dragons and giants.
Its basic and vanilla as frick, but I always cared more about quest and dungeon design than world design, so yeah I have the stereotypical "empire" and "fallen societies" and sun elves are basically the islamic horde sweeping the world in the absence of the storm and cloud giants providing a nice external threat that isn't the mind flayers. I'm basic and I like it.
map file was too big, so i took a screenshot of it
Soulless
SOVL
For real
What you used to make this map? I want to start doing some similar things.
I actually didn't make it. My gaming buddy had gotten a new map making program and wanted a project to test out the features and learn it. So I gave him a few notes of names of places and shit and he came up with this. Its fricking great, but I'd be lying if I said I could make a map like this. I found an old screencap from the in progress and at the top of the window it says Wonderdraft. Hope that helps. Attached is the map I drew and gave him along with the notes.
I'm going to come back to this setting at some point. It was going to be my "default D&D" setting, but I never really got into 5e and now I'm working on 40k stuff and videogames so I haven't updated it in about a year. The last time I used it I was intending to make a small game with it, and I may try again now that I'm more experienced.
That's a lot of work you've put into it but your coinage sure sounds dumb.
"That'll be 30 smoos, please."
Yeah, well, Manx is a weird language. I kind of like it that way, just because non-decimal coinage will seem ridiculous to a lot of modern players.
I've never played or run in an officially-published setting, though I've stolen bits and pieces of them over the years. Most of my games take place in a setting that my players and I have built up over about a decade, spanning multiple editions of D&D, with a lot of mechanical homebrew to shore up the (various and glaring) weaknesses that the game tends to have in each of its incarnations. But we keep coming back to the system, even after trying and enjoying other ones.
I don't really know where to start on explaining the setting, though. I guess one unique thing is that it's fairly "young", as settings go--there's only one living creature or communicative immortal that's older than 1,000 years, with even the highest-tier fiends and celestials being only a few centuries old. No mortal race consistently lives past 110, so you get history falling into myth a lot more readily than you do in settings where an elf might casually remember the events of the prior millennium. This has meant that, over the various campaigns I've run, the players have gotten to see and take part in the establishment of major historical and cosmic events, such as the casting down of the fiends and their imprisonment within the nine-tiered city of Hell. But they don't know much history before the narrowly-averted apocalypse that split the continents and boiled away the seas 1010 years ago.
I wanted to run stuff centred fully in an urban area, so I just wrote a city, detailed out the government a bit, and left the surrounding areas vague.
Ran a couple one shots in it, a friend wanted to use it but the whole thing not just the one city.
It's nothing particularly special, just a generic low fantasy thing. The city I ran in was called Rivardern, capital of the Kingdom of Tridania in the 12 Kingdom's of Rivalon.(Red)
A lot of areas didn't get seen or touched so they're not fleshed out and are essentially just not!realworldculture.
The Green areas on the west side are an ancient elven kingdom the Orcs marauding it and a bunch of not!gaelic tribes.
The Blue in the top right is the land of the giants, they have a lot of lore, the other blue areas are controlled by norse inspired men which worship the giants as essentially gods.
Yellow at the bottom is not!arabia
Orange is not!spain
Lime is lizard tribes.
I could probably explain the details on the Kingdoms of Rivalon, particularly Tridania or the Jotunn in OK detail.
Anything else would just be me listing the basic ideas behind stuff rather than much of substance.
If anyone cares that is.
Frick wrong map image, I'm very moronic. Here's what I meant to post, that one is just the broad regions.
All the people's on the continent have been there a long time, but it's within known history that the southern continent is the cradle of all species, other than the giants and a precursor ocean species. But natural disasters and the slow spreading of undead and bad energy drove everyone to migrate north.
Is there a reason you decided to just go ahead and import the northernmost country in Africa into your setting?
ok roger
Your OC donut steel setting is almost always going to be worse, and reinventing the wheel is time-consuming and often comes to the detriment of adventure building.
Are you sure? My players have given me nothing but compliments.
They'd give you nothing but compliments if you were running FR, Eberron, Dark Sun, Midnight, Freeport or whatever.
In practice, worldbuilding prep is a zero-sum game when it comes to prepping adventures or campaign level-concerns.
>They'd give you nothing but compliments if you were running FR, Eberron, Dark Sun, Midnight, Freeport or whatever
I have never seem somebody praise these settings after a session, but have seem players compliment mine a lot
I've never bothered. I always just create unique stories in other peoples settings. I've never really tried to make my own roleplaying setting.
I've created rule systems, but not role playing settings. I've tried to create literary settings, but they aren't well suited to roleplaying.
The hallmarks for the setting of my campaign of 5 years are
>its tiny, inhabitable space compareable to slovenia stretched out by more mountains and a desert
>short history: 100 years
>character driven: all historical events relate to characters, PCs will have personal expirience with at least one of these
>early iron age setting with five city states
>five races inspired by alpine folklore that all have baked in dilemmas and are deeply tied to the setting and give you an immediate role in the world
>faction based play, its up to the players to decide who the badguys are, all factions represented by fleshed out characters to interact with or kill
>points of light style map with lots of ruins covered wilderness to explore and only the five cities as civilization
>no resurrection magic
>young world so stuff like necromancy is only beeing „invented“ during the course of thr campaign
My own setting doesn't have a world name, it's set in a late medieval early renaissance mega city called Thorngrov (think of a massive medieval Novgorod, but more Slavic names than Russian). The game is a thieves game with gold as exp, and lots of resource management to make sure that after making a big score it isn't too long before the players need to be out thieving again. While on the streets of the city the setting appears pretty low magic that is partly because the myriad byzantine laws of Thorngrov prohibit magic in public. Inside homes, guild houses and noble mansions however, all manner of strange magics occur, magical creatures are summoned and bargained with or held in thrall, and there is vast treasure to be had. Heavily inspired by WFRP (1st & 2nd ed), Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, Robert E Howard etc.
I fricking love this idea.
Post more of the setting if you have please. I did have an idea to include something similar in a setting of mine, so very interested in knowing how yours work.
Also more art, I tried recritating that with AI, but nothing managed to capture the same style.
Sure. These are some bits of information I gave to my players to give them a flavour for the setting before they made characters:
Life in Thorngrov – Some facets and oddities of Thorngrov – Called The Great Maze, The City of Snow and Stone, The israeliteell of the North, The Abode of Bats.
Most residents of Thongrov are human, though Snow Elves are common, as are the Ymiri. The city is landlocked, though the river Voidanoi runs through the city, amongst miles of underground tunnels and ground level canals and aqueducts. The typical vista of Thorngrov is snow and stone. The streets are narrow and the basic unit of building is the stone tower.
Thorngrov is protected by two walls, one encircling what is commonly called Inner Thorngrov, the other partly derelict runs around most of the perimeter of the cityscape proper, although building work has outgrown this constraint in many places.
There are hundreds of mercantile and craft guilds in the city covering all manner of professions both legal and illegal.
Bridges stretch above the streets connecting many of the city’s great towers. Many of these contain stone pipes that function like aqueducts, funnelling melted snow to the inhabitants of the city.
Sure, where you got the image of the first posts? If they are AI, which prompts were used?
And frick, honestly I want to know more about the setting, like religion, the different people living there, some of the adventures and campaigns you had and etc. I fricking love the idea of a fantasy mega metropolis.
If you had a wiki or some notes on the setting I would love to check it out.
Though the armament laws are unevenly enforced from neighbourhood to neighbourhood, openly carrying most weapons is illegal for anyone other than the Castellan Corps, Clergy of a recognised faith (Thorn, Shubella, Astara, Bakkalon), as well as members of the aristocracy who bear the appropriate documentation. Sumptuary laws are likewise enforced sporadically, with bold Castellans even occasionally deigning to check the patens of nobility for anyone upon the streets in especially fine regalia.
The Hollow Palace, once the residence of Thorngrov’s now defunct royal family, sits across the city’s central square, opposite the Cathedral of Thorn. The site is rumoured to be used as a gathering place for the Four Masked Lords
The Red Lord – Wearer of the Mirthful Mask
The White Lord – Wearer of the Diligent Mask
The Yellow Lord – Wearer of the Odious Mask
The Black Lord – The Anguished Mask (rumour has it that the Black Lord has been the victim of recent political turmoil, and currently languishes in exile, or perhaps has been magically banished to some far off location).
The Masked Lords rule over the city, being appointed from amongst the most prestigious members of the Master Chamber, the conclave of guild and merchant masters, as well as other represented interests of the city. Men and women of this rank are known as Wandsmen, for the elaborate baton’s of office that come with their station. Their identities are a carefully guarded secret.
Although the players have only once met a single Wandsman (in service of the Red lord), as well as servants of the Black lord, who of course work tirelesly to ensure the return of their patron, I have decided that the White lord is essentially David Bowie's The Thin White Duke.
Any other particular questions?
My homebrew is fairly limited still to only a couple sessions and only consists of a shipping town with an academy and a caravan train to nowhere. It's so far only lead to harry potter parodying mystery and steam-punk one-shot shenanigans.
I've been trying to build up to a multiplanar oceans eleven style bank heist, but the motivations of the factions involved have been drifting towards TSR stuff, so I have been avoiding it until I come up with a better set of faction hooks. Deities and planescape nonsense is really tempting, no lies. But I know that dipping a toe in that lore just feels like a trap, so I have to come up with some organized fey trickery gangs or culture sooner than later.
My current project is a mesoamerican-inspired setting where the overdeity disembowelled themselves to create existence, then the gods born of their flesh created the world, after four unsuccessful attempts at making a species to worship them. Currently it's looking a lot like the Late Classic Maya period, however the god-kings are returning to their abandoned capitols after a centuries-long absence. I have a pathfinder 1e game lined up for this
>Hard Mode
A setting where the gods are sentient celestial bodies, and the forge god was killed and replaced by a mad collective-intelligence born from The Smith Empire of the second age attempting to combine the consciousnesses of all their construct war-machines in order to more effectively order them. The time period and region the D&D 5e campaign took place in was much like Anglo-Saxon England, with the Kingdom of Raedwald expanding and incorporating/subjugating regional lords. Unfortunately this campaign got derailed due to player drama and scheduling, however I am considering revisiting the setting by revamping its bloated list of gods and defining certain aspects of the world better.
i sat down with my usual group of players years ago and asked them questions, i asked them to pick a race/creature/animal/ whatever in a fantasy world.
i asked them details about the thing they chose. stuff like, who are their gods? what special tools do they have? what superstitions do they keep? what do their homes look like? ect
once i had enough on the races i had them take turns, one by one telling me a fact about the setting. one player said "7 moons" and another said "no lycanthropes" and another said "3 big land masses but mostly islands of varried size" and another would say "equator is a green belt around the globe, a massive forest."
it went on like this until we had enough details for me to flesh out a setting.
that shit sat on the back burner for 2 years before i ran the first game in in 1 year ago.
now we have a colorful world populated by:
>kenku
who closely guard the secrets of black powder, which is made by signing contracts with spirits of earth and fire. the kenku are deeply involved in the celestial bureaucracy
tend to be named sounds, creak, death rattle, baleful cry, giggles
>Minotaur
somewhat roman inspired noble minotaur who seek to elevate other races to their level of development and culture. they have strict hospitality laws and a strong sense of honor
>follow celtic naming conventions
>Ooze
once it was a mindless blob but when it picked up enough gems (all of which are ever so slightly magical in the setting) it gains sentience and a powerful connection to wild magic. they are a little alien as they spring into their new form fully sentient and only remembering flashes of their time as an ooze.
>typically name themselves after an object they recall, Jar, Pulley, Yarn
>goblins
intelligent inventors who live in tall spires of communal living areas and workshops. know a little bit of everything and have a natural talent for magic and alchemy. not afraid to burn down their own house for progress.
names tend to be adjectives, Colossal, Hopeless, Determined, Dishonest
>Kobolds
Extremely lucky little guys who fight in packs and are extremely in touch with nature. their luck rubs off on their allies and they fight in a way that makes their allies fight better. dont really have homes, live in nomad clans underground
names are typical kobold names: Yay-yap, Meepo, Snipe-yip
>Goliath
not unlike the Goliath of other settings in appearance, though the type of mountain they live on will change them, like those on a volcanic mountain will have jet black skin with shining obsidian calcium buildups. tend to live in small tribes atop the mountains or in rocky regions. worship the mountains as gods and can draw on the strength of their mountains.
names tend to be things like "bronzefist" or "stone toes" simple names that are a earthly material and an organ/body part/ whatever, we had a "Steel Liver"
>Furies
alabaster skinned beauties who are sent down from their sky citadels to fight for law. they fight unarmed and their striking beauty acts as a defense, making them difficult to behold and thus harder to hit (does not apply to the blind)
they worship sacred scribes who created the world but are no longer active (the players who made the setting)
names tend to be greek
the typical fantasy races are there, dwarf are playable just really rare as they tend to be xenophobic. elves too, but they are also rare due to having left the world ages ago and only coming back for the same reasons you or i might go to a freak show. Humans are in their twilight due to a curse but are playable.
overall i would recommend a method of world creation that gets your players involved as they will be super invested in the setting they helped create
I've been running my own setting for the last couple months now weekly, homebrewed species and factions. Been running it hexcrawl style, the players are government agents who are in the region to help keep the peace and also solve various crises that are happening.
The faction they are from is a burgeoning roman-inspired empire, that's taken over their little peninsula and has now crossed the mountains into a new region that's a big raised table valley and not yet conquered the mountains on the other side of the valley, just the lower land area.
It's got a lot of influence from Touhou, but it's mostly just a bunch of stuff I enjoy and think is cool.
I've made a sketchy big map and then I'm doing smaller more zoomed in hexmaps with all the various settlements more clearly indicated.
>329 KB PNG
>I find annoying how many GMs play in trademarked settings like The Forgotten Realms or Golarion, rather than create their own.
How about you DM then, homosexual?
Urban fantasy. Plenty of guns, I know how much /tg/ loves both of these things.
How's this for a space horror setting:
Centuries in the future, we still haven't solved the Fermi paradox, and humanity is the only life, even after FTL travel was perfected.
Suddenly, the lights from beyond the galaxy disappeared, as if snuffed out. When we got close and looked at the edge of the galaxy, there was a literally galaxy encasing wall of solid stone there. Like an enormous ball, it encircles the entire milky way. Humanity has just begun expeditions to travel into this otherworldly stone.
Okay, but its pretty bare bones on the explanation (tho I know you are likely just keeping the secret).
Most "original settings" are the same as the "official" settings with maybe one or two minor aesthetic differences that are in no way relevant to how I play the game.
I'd love to be impressed by someone's creativity, but most "creative" people with original settings are neither creative nor original.
What you think of some of the settings presented on the thread so far? Most pf them seem to have been played rather than just being window dressing
It's a post-apocalyptic fantasy setting (as in, an industrialized fantasy setting that underwent an apocalypse) loosely inspired by Wild ARMS.
>The setting's main focus is in a wild frontier area, far away from any centralized civilization
>There is a veritable "gold rush" as artifacts of a fallen empire sell for a fortune to agents of distant powers studying the fallen empire's magic, preparing to grow their influence or readying arms to go to war with each other.
>This gold rush has led to sudden upswings in excavation and ruin-raider groups, trading companies and transportation guilds, as well as boom towns appearing whenever a major ruin is discovered
>The empire fell in the midst of civil war, and some of its arsenals were among the first ruins to be raided, so powerful and arcane guns are plentiful among certain circles in the frontier
>Every two-bit idiot with a weird gun fancies himself an outlaw, and anyone who's met a real one can tell a pretender from a mile away
>The "wasteland" mostly consists of the wilds between hubs of civilization, and they are dangerous as all hell, with otherworldly incursions, rampaging demons and sleeping primordial dragons churning the earth as the old magics that kept them sealed start to fracture
>Like any Western worth its salt, all of this is fleeting. Someday, someone will unearth the last knickknack from the old empire, banish the last demon, or just settle the frontier. The major powers will either go to war and turn the frontier into a battlefield or work towards peace and apply their force to bringing their laws and authority. The day a prospector gets put before an imperial firing squad is the day the age of the outlaw comes to an end
Lanturian Empire - Being mostly 18th century Europe, formed by massive cities that grow in the middle of the Cursed Forest, connected by dangerous roads, airships and a massive train track. These would be largely regular human troops, but among them you also have State Wizards, War Priests of the Sainthood, Knightly Orders with special powers and some steampunk stuff. Picture them like Warhammer F Empire meets Bloodborne.
In general their goal is to try to tame the Cursed Forest and expand and kill off the beasts and nightmares that inhabit it (and they count the Wild Folk among it, as they blame them for the curse).
Original idea was to have a 3 way war between factions, but right now I’m planning on letting players control the human faction - and then later do an expansion with the others.
Ok frick it here we go. All of these except the last one also include the premise of the campaign I ran in it, under a "Who Are You?" heading.
Evil Immortal Empires: The Setting: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1CUmc176Dt195WI6NLgt_ro_gKRnH-Gdyh196qII_qV4/edit
Post-evil-empires monster hunters: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1gEUtXowGgIKPmwjvrqi9lX39OvBOmAbyAmiS6gScXpk/edit#
Post Cyberpunk (think like BLAME!): https://docs.google.com/document/d/1M3mNkYoEppL2HNhGBp_opCA86cA0GDxPhF9M2kecLLA/edit
Dieselpunk, with known magic, and catgirls (pic related): https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Fd4xInDgmJ23mRAxBa9VAS37HxnbKVdW3A-co7RRrdo/edit#
Post Apocalyptic Science-Fantasy: https://docs.google.com/document/d/14eBRErXkgCy2kOIrcDGDeHsgRW_8FR2uZMaf90MoWMo/edit#heading=h.l8ilsvietcy8
This one doesn't talk about the campaign premise though.
>Hard mode: You have to have PLAYED on it.
No, I refuse to abide by this rule
>thinking you know better than DnD's expert worldcrafters
Lol
Yes, I do
>You have to have PLAYED on it.
Everyone in this thread be like