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What advice would you give (and any links you frequently use) to a new GM thinking about starting a homebrewed world to run campaigns in using the PF system?
It needs to make sense. If magic is common, it's common, think thorugh the consequences of that. If it's rare, it's rare, think through the consequences of that. What level of technology is it at? What state of cultural development? What are the consequences of those things?
If everything is internally consistent it makes it easier to get the players involved in the world and describe the way the world functions.
What would you consider the "Must do" before the first campaign vs what can be left until the game is going?
You need a country. Or a region, anyway. A governmental structure (even if it's just warring tribes), what monsters, animals, and races are common locally, and how they interact with each other. You also need a religion or set of religions, since Divine casters are such a big part of Pathfinder's rules. Particular details of the city/region the game is centered on are also super useful.
Names are also super useful. City names, personal names, whatever kind of names might come up. Having a consistent naming style per culture is very important in evoking the right feelings about divergent cultures.
What have you done that either didn't work, or you'd not do again?
I'm not thinking of anything. The last homebrew I did went pretty well.
If you've never done homebrew world design - what is your biggest reason or concern?
I've done it. The reason I haven't done it more often is basically that I like Golarion and thus only do it when I need a setting Golarion can't provide.
Love that donjon generator. Haven't used one of the maps in a game, but I've generated some really fun ones.
To echo Deadmanwalking, I haven't made a pass at building my own world in a long while because I like Golarion so much. Most I've done is create some cities and villages in some areas to meet specific ends.
My biggest thing is that I always have to remind myself not to be disappointed when my players inevitably want to leave the area I've developed and am super thrilled about to head just anywhere else at all. 'Cause it always seems to happen, lol.
I would say create the rules of the world, and then stick to them. There's a tendency for a lot of world builders to create kitchen sink worlds, where everything and anything is possible/represented.
While that can be fun, and writing in areas with real-world analogs is a typically used idea, its been done many times and in many ways.
Try to come up with a unique spin for a world that sets it apart from other worlds. Make sure the spin gives your world a unique feel without pigeonholing you into a limited concept.
For my own game world, I developed different time periods throughout the world where different themes are present. While there are certain themes that are always present in the world, there are others that change with time.
This allows me the flexibility to map an idea to the timeline, and then create the events that led to that time period.
It's also great if you have regular players - they can see the actions of their previous PCs have an effect on your gameworld. Sometimes even hundreds of years after their old PCs have died.
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Decide what is included, not what is excluded. Just because someone published a race or spell, etc doesn't mean you need a place for it in your world. If you include everything and the kitchen sink, your world will be like all the other settings that include everything and the kitchen sink (Ebberon, Golarion, etc). A limited palette of monsters and heroes will make it much easier to give your world a coherent and distinct feel.
What classes and races are in the world, why and how does that affect the world?
Then I build a region for actual play, a country guide and a deity list (if there are gods).
I would say the answers to those questions depend very much on the campaign you want to run. Some campaigns will be world spanning and require entire continents, or maybe multiple continents be fairly well mapped out. Others could exist entirely in just a single city or region. Some games will need a detailed plan of political structure, some will need you to be aware of all the underworld figures.
It will also vary a lot depending on GM style. Some are pretty comfortable making things up on the fly, others feel more of a need to plan extensively. You have to build enough ahead so that you feel comfortable with the world you have created. For the most part, it is likely your players won't actually keep track of, or often even be really aware of, most of the details in the world, likely they will just be focusing on the adventure in front of them. Often, the world is more important for inspiring the GM than it is for immersing the players.
I also think pretty much all of the specific advise above is wrong, or at least sometimes wrong for some people. You can make an interesting campaign world that is fun that doesn't make 'sense' if that is what inspires you. If you will be inspired to create interesting plots by having a lot of history, and you enjoy that sort of thing, then by all means write the Silmarilion out and develop an entire language before you run your party of dwarves and a halfling on a quest to kill a dragon. If you want unique mechanics, or are inspired by only having a world with the subset of the existing mechanics then go for it, but if you want the 'kitchen sink' that is fine too.
The only real advise I can give beyond build something that you love, is to be aware that it can be quite an investment in time to get it to the point where you feel comfortable running a game, and that investment will probably continue after a game has started. This is in addition to the standard time spent building specific adventures and encounters, so if you want your own world, you need to be prepared for that.
It is though, I think, one of the most interesting and satisfying acts of creation you can do, and in general I think GMs run games better in worlds that they love. You will seldom find a world you love as much as one you have created.
There's a lot of good info here, even when it contradicts other info given here. The thing that I always look for when designing my own world is to come up with some sort of hook that makes my world different from all the other readily accessible published worlds out there. I mean, if you create a world that is essentially Golarion but with different names, then you might as well just use Golarion. So what is it about your world that makes it unique? Are drow actually the good guys? Is there only one god? Are humans the only race? Are humans a minority race? Etc., etc.
Then, once you have your hook, I usually go with the less is more approach as well. Early on, odds are your PCs will not have easy access to lengthy travel (depending on the world of course). As such, you probably only need to detail one small region (especially if you add some natural boundaries like oceans and/or mountain ranges). Maybe toss a couple towns or villages into this region and then look to the starting locale and really detail that location. Who are the leaders? What kinds of goods and services can you get? Is there a military presence? In general, what is the culture of the town?
As for history, you really only need to detail enough history to explain current conditions/relationships in your starting region. Are tensions between the starting town and the neighboring town on a knife's edge? Why? Are dwarves completely distrusted in this region? How come? That will be enough initially to give your players enough information to explain reactions from the locals.
Finally as mentioned, you do need to figure out the religion of the world, simply because it matters to divine casters (much like you need to figure out how much magic there is).
Now, all that said, I personally am a big fan of writing up lots of detail about my worlds. However, its important to remember that there is a pretty good chance that a lot of that won't matter in the long run. At least as far as the campaign is concerned. It doesn't matter if Nation A fought a 500 year war with Nation B if the party never goes into either nation for instance. That doesn't mean though it won't be fun to write and keep in mind just in case your party decides to wander off the beaten path somewhere along the line. Just don't expect your players to have memorized all of that. In fact, it may actually be good if they didn't remember all that because this then allows for all those pesky Knowledge skills to come into play. After all, its not supposed to be what the player knows, but rather, what the player character knows.
One of the most useful things I've found is after getting a general feel of the "theme" of the world (high fantasy/risky magic/grimdark/steampunk/etc) map out a moderately sized city within the world and go to town fleshing that out. Like 20+ pages of notes for that single city BEFORE including maps, dungeons, quests and so on, and then lightly detail the surrounding area. Your PCs will invariably get bored of the hyper fleshed out city long before you're finished with it and now you have all this rich detailing that got ignored that you can plug into the next place they visit. If you slightly tweak the remaining information upon visiting each new city, you can easily recycle the rest of your work for the entire campaign while actually saving yourself a fair bit of in between session prep.
As far as non-urban areas go, you generally can get away with leaving things VERY note light until you actually get there. "To the north of the city X is the Y Swamp, it's Z large and 3 commonly encountered creatures there are A, B and C," and that's it. One simple sentence and you've covered an entire marshland that could span hundreds of miles to a side.
Take a look. I think you'll enjoy the nostalgia factor. Plus there's a lot of darn good advice in there.
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My couple or few cents:
Before you begin world design, think about the game you're running. What rulebooks are you using? You want to be sure your world supports the rules of the game, and vice versa. For example, if the world uses magic, but the rules don't have a magic system, you've run into a problem.
Think about ahead of time the rulebooks you're allowing and any exceptions to any rules-as-written you're willing to make. I will also note, based on personal experience, it is easier to design a world for rules-as-written than both change rules AND design a world--certain parameters are set for you which can actually make things easier. This doesn't mean homebrewing rules as well as world design isn't bad, but I wouldn't recommend it until you've got some world design experience under your belt. (So your first world might look fairly standard, but your second one you start playing with new races, etc.)
For a Pathfinder (or similar) game utilizing the core rulebook, where we are assuming you are not changing any rules, you know you need:
- A world that contains as common races all of the core races (plus any additional races you are including).
- A world that accommodates the existence of all the classes in the core rulebook. It's easy to accommodate for, say, rogues or fighters, but what about clerics and wizards? There are bards, so how are they trained? Are barbarians simply a type of warrior you find anywhere, or are they exclusively the result of a stereotypical tribal warrior clan? And so on. Think about not only where and how the classes exist, but how they are perceived by society, trained, etc.
- Along with this, you need a source of divine magic, such as deities or other forces that can be represented by domains, divine magic, etc.
--- This means you will have to design a religion as well. For a most-traditional fantasy game built with Pathfinder, this means you'll be designing multiple gods, each of whom possess at least 3-4 cleric domains, as well as possibly accommodate oracle mysteries. There should be enough gods of different alignments that a cleric of any alignment can be possible.
- You may also want to consider where arcane magic comes from, and how commonly it may be accessed and/or manipulated. How common are wizards, sorcerers, bards, etc.
- You need to have a planar cosmology that supports the rules as well: there needs to be a shadow plane and an ethereal plane, or various shadow spells won't work, nor will incorporeality. You need dimensions that Outsiders come from, some of which are dominated by concepts good, evil, or neutrality, both for the purpose of summoning spells as well as possible enemies, allies, etc. (You can decide these things don't exist, but then you're going to have to adjust some rules or rules explanations... and that's where things can get more complicated than you expect. I'm pointing this out because I tried once to make a "simplified" world that eliminated certain planes and the like, and realized I had actually made it harder for myself rather than easier as I had to eliminate certain mechanics or re-explain how certain things worked, which made a lot more work for me).
- Think about where monsters dwell, which are common where, who might be the most to least common threats, etc. This can also affect the geography you come up with--if you want to emphasize the existence of creatures who dwell in forests, your world may be heavily forested, etc. The Bestiaries also feature a lot of underground and Darklands creatures so your world may need a complex underworld as well.
Once you've done this, you can get into things like building your world proper, coming up with the land, nation, geography, etc.
This part is a lot more variable--and gets into a lot of "what works for you territory" (although ALL of it goes ultimately into "what works for you territory"). Others in the thread have discussed starting small vs. starting big. You might start with a single town and nearby dungeon, and add on whatever it is you need for your party.
Or you might build a whole world with gajillions of nations, politics, religions, societies, etc. Just note, as someone else did, your players need to keep track of things too. Too much too fast can get overwhelming (although a good world-builder/GM can introduce bits by bits at a time).
In addition to other advice (and I know I'm repeating stuff said elsewhere, bear with me), here's some questions you can try to answer as you build your world:
- Is your world very civilized, or is it mostly untamed wilderness with only a few bastions of safety? Somewhere in between?
- Who are three most powerful NPCs in your world and what do they do?
- What are the three most important historical events in the last 100 years in your world?
- Is there one nation everyone lives in, or many? How does character race tie into nation and culture--in other words, is there one nation per race (dwarf nation, elf nation, etc.) or are there nations where some or all races are citizens? A bit of both? Likewise is there one ethnic group per nation or several? Is there an easy way to tell them apart and/or is it important? How many languages are spoken in a given area? Does everyone get along or are there a lot of rivalries?
- Are the dangers people face mostly political and social (war, intrigue, politics), or mostly outside supernatural threats (corruption from evil outsiders, dragons eating peasants, orcs raiding the countryside)?
- Bearing in mind the existence of magic can improve standards of living, how "advanced" is the world? Are there major strides in agriculture, cottage industry, and engineering? Or is most of the world in a veritable dark age, where maybe magic only makes the lives of the rich and powerful easier?
- How does trade occur, and what impedes trade? What commodities are valuable? Who trades what?
Just some thoughts to get one started.