On World Building

I'm pretty sure that every DM that has picked up a copy of a DMG has started, created and possibly finished their own world at some point.  I think the essence of this hobby really comes down to DIY, and at the heart of that is creating things.  Yes there are people out there that are perfectly happy to run cannon worlds.  Most of the D&D worlds are great!  There are people out there that create their own worlds and fit published adventures into them.

For a long time in the back of my head I've been thinking about where the 3 Toadstools adventures take place.  All of them were created to be open ended so that it would be relatively easy to toss the adventure into your own campaign world.

The fun thing about creating a world of course is starting with the map.  I always find when I'm doing that I start getting ideas of "what this place is going to be".  Etc

I do have to point out that, a few of the DIY worlds I've read have been a bit well... not boring, but I guess very similar to other worlds.  Which is fine!  I guess what I'm saying is that if someone is going to pay for something, well it better be right up their alley right? This post however isn't really about "selling a campaign setting" so much as its about just finally getting down to creating one of my own.

Latetly I've been getting quite a lot of inspiration from the following:

+Wayne Rossi blog, http://initiativeone.blogspot.ca/ specifically his OD&D setting - http://initiativeone.blogspot.ca/2013/05/od-setting-posts-in-pdf.html

+Martin Ralya blog http://www.martinralya.com/
Specifically his campaign setting Bleakstone http://www.martinralya.com/tabletop-rpgs/bleakstone-campaign-setting/ and hexamancer which is super fun! http://www.martinralya.com/tabletop-rpgs/hexmancer-procedural-hex-generation-system/

Of course I'll draw influences from Titan (AFF) setting which I've always dearly loved.  Did you know that the new version of Titan is available in pdf? CLICK HERE

And Black Marsh which is super awesome.

The question you might ask is "Why do this? when there are some many awesome resources out there?"  The answer is simple, because I can! and because I want to.

Do note that I started working on a campaign setting, however it wasn't exactly "traditional" fantasy per se.  I still plan to slowly work on that.  I may even just take what I've written for that and revise it.

The first thing I need to do is start working on a small little hobbit village.   In our old school sessions I was using Brymassen from Basic Fantasy.  The town is not detailed, and is just a base for one of the adventures in the Adventure Anthology.  (When you get a chance go over to the basic fantasy site, they have just released a bunch of stuff, including revisions of modules).

While I've stated in the past I'm not a huge fan of the 5e system, I do adore the DMG.  Reading thru that gets your creative juices flowing for world building, and coming up with interesting ideas.

So among the five billion other projects I have on the go, I'm going to start slowly world building, again.... yes again.  hahah