Just wondering about the various worlds employed by DMs on these boards. This is not, I repeat, NOT meant as a thread to discuss various strengths and weaknesses of worlds, which one is better or worse, or anything of that sort. I'm just curious.
Your options are: Greyhawk, Forgotten Realms, Eberron, Other Published, and Homebrew.
Feel free to include notes explaining the Other Published option if you wish, though I'm certainly not requiring it (since I don't know that many and wouldn't know what you're talking about more than likely); and feel free to note if you mix your play settings around (but list which ones you commonly use).
If you use a homebrew, please note it you use a consistent world, or make a new one for every campaign/whenever the fanct strikes you.
I'll start: Homebrew, consistant world. I've tried running FR a few times, but feel I've done too much work on my homebrew to switch, though sometimes I feel the urge.
Homebrew. Depends on the DM - we have more than one homebrew world.
As ever,
ACE
My last campaign, which lasted from L1-18 and my current campaign (started at L5 currently mid nine) are based in the same campaign setting.(homebrew- alternate earth/steampunk with definite borrowed Eberron elements)
The current campaign takes place 113 years after the last, and deals with the mess the first party left behind during the climactic dragonwars that provided the backdrop for the last campaign's denouement.
I will probably continue to use this setting for future games (either the "past" or "present" incarnation) because, of all my homebrews it is the most fully fleshed out and documented.
I almost always use homebrews because player knowledge of the official campaign settings makes for some pretty exasperating situations with the group I run.
Before that I ran a campaign (L1-15)based in the Starspire Mts. in the Forgotten Realms, which, until Eberron was my favorite official setting.
Just got done with a nearly year long Forgotten Realms epic level campaign *phew*
Just starting a Greyhawk campaign, but the guy who I'm running it for (new player I'm indoctrinating--heh) lives in Salt Lake City so we only hook up every other month when the stars are right. Awesome game though--set in the Empire of Iuz (hoping to use Age of Worms as a backdrop, but not actually run them through the adventure path per se, just use it as history).
We're also playing in a great Wheel of Time game (based on the Robert Jordan novels--great cultures, Lord of the Rings-esque storyline, almost all humans, only women can use magic cause men go nuts).
Online I'm in a game set in Mystara (the junk drawer setting of all settings--but in a good way, there's aliens in glass cities, multi-planar empires, wierd cultures, a hollow world where dinosaurs and classical cultures live, high level characters become gods.)
I'm also greatly looking forward to getting back to some campaigns we've begun that were great fun:
Dark Sun (savage desert setting in the wake of ecological disaster of global depleted incarnum energy)
Planescape (plane-hopping around the Greyhawk cosmology from a great floating metropolitan city of neutrality to everything from demons to modrons to angels)
Ghostwalk (Really good one book setting with its own cosmology and the option to play benevolent undead)
Dragonstar (wonderful hybrid of space opera and high fantasy),
Iron Kingdoms (awesomely dreary gothic setting with a tech level staggered between colonial america to WWII)
Finally there's a freakin' awesome homebrew called Saratiel that Galin is running (Grimcleaver system, Gestalt classes, Prestige Classes as regular classes, 15th level game using all the books--yeah it is THAT crazy!)
We have a full plate and are lovin' it.
Planescape: inclusive of Greyhawk, FR, and briefly Athas [during the 20% or so of the campaign that took place on the prime material rather than the planes).
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Homebrew, persistent across multiple rule sets. I originally started designing the world when I was preferentially running Rolemaster, but I've probably run it most with Fantasy Hero. I still have a Fantasy Hero group in the southwest, but I'm running D&D in the northeast.
I've also run Glorantha using various editions of Rune Quest, Champions and Traveller in homebrew worlds, and in a shared world that I created (not in my base world).
I mainly use one of 2 consistant homebrews, but I have been known to use Greyhawk(rarely), Forgotten Realms(alot), Dark Sun(when I can find the people who like the setting) Planescape(when I want an epic game) and on ocassion I run games in the systems for Vampire, Rifts, Star Wars, Cyberpunk and my brother-in-law runs MERP(middle earth roleplaying).
man i cant even list the number of world i have used in my games... mostly FR for D&D ( i just love the world ) but i have made up alot of them i even like to do cross overs ( D&D guys find themselfs in rifts!!!!! "I told you not to put that portable hole in the bag of holding!!!!" ) etc... mostly i would be useing FR i enjoy the set up they have and love the drow... but the best thing ever is to have a Elf walk into Chi Town at 2 in the morning... poor poor elf. anyway yeah i tend to make my players make up our home brew worlds as i make the game >:) takes some stress off.
Hey guys what does "consistent world" mean?
I use a homebrew. The first world I ever ran was Dragonlance, then FR, then a short campaign in Kara-Tur (which I guess is also FR). I remember in the FR campaign we only had the vaguest idea of the geography and culture of the world. It was pretty much a hack'n'slash generic game where "Waterdeep" was the only city we ever mentioned. And we never went there, or anywhere else really. We were too busy dungeon crawling. None of the background of the world became part of our games.
Dragonlance was a different story. We shared DM duty and I remember my red-robe wizard was killed when my friend who was DMing that week ambushed our 4th level PC's with Lord Soth. Ah, to be a 13 year old gamer again!
Once we got old enough to play without maxed out PCs and TPK DMs it was homebrew all the way.
Homebrew; use some old Judges guild stuff; city maps and whatnot but all my own npc's and npc's who were once player characters from nearly 30 years of DMing. I like to mix in stuff from various popular books, but I think I already said this on some thread somewhere.
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Greyhawk for convenience's sake, though the setting doesn't play as much of a part as I know that it could. Being in school, as I'm sure many of you know, means that you have to take extended periods away from the game now and then, players constantly drop out, etc., so running games in the default world is just the easiest way to go. Hopefully once I settle down in one place for an extended period I can get a campaign with more of a focus on setting going.
On a related note, do any of you live in the greater metro Atlanta area? I'll be moving down there next fall and will be desperately searching for a game.
I meant consistant world in regards to keeping the same homebrew for each game you run, or creating a new for most campaigns/whenever you felt like it.
I'm amazed at the number of people that run homebrews. Thought there would be a lot more people that actively used published materials. Keep the posts coming. Just out of curiosity, why do most people use homebrews? Creative urge or a desire not to be pinned to the cannonical lore of another setting?
I'd say it's the creative urge that keeps me in Saern. As I said before, I jsut feel like I've worked on it too long not to use it. Another major reason for not switching to FR for me is apprehension over dealing with a lore-buff of that setting (not that I've met any yet).
I DM in Eberron and in my homebrew world of Dweross, which has gone through many alterations since I created it five years ago.
Well in the 19 years I have been playing, I've run campaigns in GreyHawk, FR, MERP, Dragonlcance, Planescape, Spelljammer, Athas, KaraTur (also FR I guess), and ROKUGAN (my absolute favorite)! I have also run a couple of home brew ones (but alas they were not too memorable as I was young and they were hastily constructed). I have also run other games than D&D (including Shadowrun, Earth Dawn, Vampire the masquerade, Werewolf the Apocalypse, Mage the ascention, Star Frontiers, Gamma World, GURPS, RIFTS, and Star Trek, even Star Wars). The last game I played in was in our other DMs Home brew world called Greakor (very interesting...had a really original history...and was progressively introduced to us because most of the world was unexplored...too bad we had to move and I never got to explore more of it).
To break it down for the poll: The world I have most OFTEN used when I Dmed was Greyhawk. When playing, the world most ofetn used by other DMs was Greyhawk as well. ALthought my FAVORITE still is ROKUGAN!
Be safe all.
I run a generic fantasy pseudo-GH Age of Worms homebrew. I typically play in Greyhawk.
In the past, I have run a homebrew Evil, Greyhawk, and FR. I am gearing up for some Eberron, too.
One problem I have with settings is that there are too many I want to try, and some not my whole group is keen on. It would be nice to try some others from time to time.
Homebrew, kept fairly consistent between campaigns. The world in question has a few joke names though: the Wurl, Wigh, and Wib rivers all flow into the Innanit river (insert chuckles or groans here) (somebody else designed the world, though)
Mythic Earth/ Greyhawk hybrid here.
Mystara is my World of choice. Have been running a slightly Homebrew version of it now since the late 70s early 80s.
I've tried Greyhawk, FR and Savage Coast and I keep coming back to D&D Mystara.
I wish they'd put out a 3.5 version of it. I'd be one of the first to pre order that bad boy!!
i tried Greyhawk. I tried Forgotten Realms. In the end, i ended up going homebrew, but grabbing a lot of stuff from most established worlds in the process. the 'set' worlds...in trying to make them my own world for my own campaign..seemed almost as easy to just start with my own world
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I've only been back to gaming for about a year now. In that time we started an Iron Heroes game in a homebrew world, and an AoW campaign in Greyhawk. Both games have been on hold for awhile because of the busy schedules of the players.
Although I don't normally DM, I am considering running the newly revised Ravenloft adventure for the group. If I do this, it will probalby be in Greyhawk, with my second choice being FR, and my third being a hombrew.
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there was this thread :
http://paizo.com/paizo/messageboards/dungeon/generalDiscussion/preCampaignS ettingPollPoll&page=1#101950
and the result so far was :
- Greyhawk: 70
- Homebrew: 33
- Forgotten Realms: 30
- Eberron: 24
- Planescape: 15
- Ravenloft: 15
- Dark Sun: 13
- Al-Qadim: 9
- Dragonlance: 8
- Mystara/Hollow World: 8
- Spelljammer: 7
- Ptolus: 7
- Birthright: 6
- Iron Kingdoms: 6
- The Styes: 5
- Wilderlands of High Fantasy/City State of the Invincible Overlord: 5
- Kara-Tur: 3
- Council of Wyrms (v.3.5): 3
- Freeport: 2
- Oriental Adventures / settings: 2
- Maztica: 2
- Wheel of Time: 2
- Scarred Lands: 1
- Diablo: 1
- Everquest: 1
- Ghostwalk: 1
- Midnight: 1
- kingdoms of Kalamar: 0
- Sundered Reaches: 0
- Warcraft: 0
for those who have not voted yet, do it !
(with a copy / paste, adding your votes !)
Homebrew all the way! Player knowledge never exceeds character knowledge of the game world!
Greyhawk
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Greyhawk
the thing is you already voted on "Pre-campaign setting poll poll" (name of thread that I bumped, in the Dungeon section).
I went through it very quickly, and Heathansson, Aberzombie & the Jade among others, have already voted also.
IIRC (from what I just read quickly ; I don't want you to believe I have THAT kind of memory !), you voted GH, FR and Homebrew...
We once did a homebrew Zelazny Amber-type campaign, where all the PCs were human and took "Power over Shadow" as their bonus feat at 1st level. They then gained skill ranks in "Shadow-Walking," enabling them to move through various campaign and homebrew worlds. Great fun, especially in terms of allowing characters to have unique backgrounds (they all came from different "Shadows").
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Greyhawkthe thing is you already voted on "Pre-campaign setting poll poll" (name of thread that I bumped, in the Dungeon section).
I went through it very quickly, and Heathansson, Aberzombie & the Jade among others, have already voted also.
IIRC (from what I just read quickly ; I don't want you to believe I have THAT kind of memory !), you voted GH, FR and Homebrew...
This was a vote? What did I say last time?
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Just out of curiosity, why do most people use homebrews? Creative urge or a desire not to be pinned to the cannonical lore of another setting?
Partly creative urge, partly it's because I started playing D&D in 1976, when prepackaged worlds were light on the ground. (And continued to play systems with few such resources when I drifted away from D&D.) Once you've made the decisions and invested the work to create a world, the benefits of going with someone else's world are reduced.
I use my homebrew both out of creative urges and so that I don't have to stick with the established history of another setting. There is nothing like sitting there having a player argue about FR according to the R.A. Salvatore novels. Plus there is the added bonus of not having the players know evrything in the world or what you MAY have planned.
Lots of homebrew, but different worlds most of the time. I think we do so to avoid continuity holes and sourcebook treadmills. We're currently playing in the Forgotten Realms, but only to the level of detail of a quick skim of the FRCS book.
Really, world is almost immaterial-- what matters is the campaign and adventures, which can usually be transported to any other universe without much change.
Planescape, Greyhawk, Homebrew.
I run both Home Brewed and Greyhawk. I have occasionally run short campaigns in Ravenloft, and Oriental Adventures-with a Chinese flavor rather than a Japanese one. I dislike the continual combining of Japanese and Chinese material with all Oriental adventures materials. I wish they'd separate the two, and I prefer all things-Chinese:)
Primarily Greyhawk, secondarily homebrewed. Often the Greyhawk is influenced by previous played campaign events.
Although I suspect we can make it VERY interesting by running a continual series of the published campaign arcs ...
The first place I DMed in was a "Homebrew" with a lot of Known World stuff ripped off more or less wholesale, mashed into a Mythical Earth sort of thing. Hey I was young, everyone was doing it.
I DMed Forgotten Realms and DragonLance for 1st edition, and did some Oriental Adventures/Kara-Tur stuff as well, since it tied in with Forgotten Realms. Through second edition I DMed Forgotten Realms, DragonLance, Spelljammer, and a little bit of Dark Sun and Planescape.
In 3rd/3.5 I have only DMed Forgotten Realms, though once in a while I get a bit of an itch to DM DragonLance again.
My group, when I was younger, would "mark their territory" with settings though, so when I was DMing Forgotten Realms and DragonLance in 1st edition, my friend DMed Greyhawk. When we moved into 2nd edition, he DMed Greyhawk and Ravenloft.
So, for those of you who do homebrews, or even those of you who don't, I guess, do you use the core pantheon or another "premade" pantheon, or do you make your own, or even mix premade gods with ones of your own design?
well, i have played in mostly homebrewed settings, with a couple of forays into fr and dark sun (a favorite of mine). with regards to the deities question, the last campaign i was in, we were developing the entire world (primarily the dm and me, that is), which included new everything, including deities and domains. we were trying to get it to the point it would be publishable, without feeling like it was a one-off of any current or formerly published world.
tog
When I was running my very first mish mash of a campaign, I used Norse, Celtic, Finnish, and Egyptian gods. I was a big fan of those pantheons of gods, so I wanted to include them. Ironically when the PCs left my "mish mash" world to go to Faerun, they were shocked to find that a cult of Set had preceeded them into this new world (at the time I was adding set to the setting, because he wasn't part of it officially until FR10 Old Empires came out in 2nd Edition).
For the most part, in running the Realms I use the general pantheon as presented, but I never "scaled back" the deities for 3rd edition, and as such, still made references to the non human deities in Monster Mythology, for example, and I have thrown in a few forgotten demigods here or there that didn't exist outside of my own fevered brain.
Oh, and in my friend's "homebrew" setting that we are playing in right now, we are just using the general Greyhawk pantheon, sans any reference to specific NPCs or regions in the original setting, and (while I'm not sure) I'm thinking that its connected to the standard Great Wheel cosmology.
Homebrews almost exclusively when I run, but I have played in Dragonlance several times.
I prefer making my own worlds and for my current one, based around a giant trade city of Vushtankha I am working on new Gods. Homebrews to me allow for more flexbility in my story, classes, modifications, and some damn cool new prestige classes.
No matter what the world, I allways find that I need to have little tweaks. Worlds based on books I tend to spoil with my stories and tweaks so to remove that limit, I make my own worlds.
Plus world building is fun.
The standard D&D "pantheon" entirely misses the essence of polytheism. I use a very different religion system.
Perhaps, but real polytheism arose from a world totally different from that of most D&D mileux. In D&D people worship gods because they are there -- usually offering real rewards and penalties. Our brand of polytheism would be irrational within such a world.
My two cents :)
Jack
I use Tolkien's Middle Earth as published by ICE, but with lots of changes in the direction of things in the Fourth Age, so I guess it's a combination of Homebrew and Other published.
As for the why... when I started DMing, it was during 2nd ed and there were two other DMs in the group. Between the two of them, Dark Suns, Forgotten Realms, Greyhawk, Ravenloft, and elements of the other published settings were all taken. I needed something totally separate, with a Pantheon that was completely different. Also, I was a Tolkein Freak and they weren't, so it was mythology I knew and they didn't. Seemed a natural place to start when I found ICE's products.
As for your questions on Pantheon, I started with Tolkien's established pantheon but immediately started setting changes in motion as I never liked the Christian parallel in how he had things set up, at least not for a game world.... it's too unbalanced and too black and white. I likes shades of grey. :)
So, over time, three pantheons have emerged: Tolkien's (including Morgoth, left Sauron destroyed... he's a weenie.); Pandemonium (one of the few that hadn't been touched by the other DMs... that's my "hell"... "abyss"... "whatever"), and a third pantheon based on The First from the now defunct Crossgen Comics. Makes for fun times. :)
So, for those of you who do homebrews, or even those of you who don't, I guess, do you use the core pantheon or another "premade" pantheon, or do you make your own, or even mix premade gods with ones of your own design?
Definitely the latter. I like a world where gods like Thor and Llolth rub elbows with old player characters who "ascended" and obscure deities from our own world's diverse mythoi, as well as a few "made up" ones, like the Blood Trinity which provides the archnemesi for both my current and last campaigns..
If I do a homebrew I tend to follow the model of the official D&D settings. I'll have mostly new gods, but sometimes keep some of the gods that are often crossovers (like Lolth, or Moradin, or Orcus). Sometimes I will even pick a god to crossover that doesn't usually, just to switch things up a little--like maybe Malar, or St. Cuthbert. I guess I try to keep my homebrews feeling as much like unpublished "official" settings however possible.
I tend to avoid real world gods like the plague however, and where they are introduced I tend to spin them so they are "different" gods with similar names--"based" perhaps a little on real mythology, but otherwise fresh and original. You guys will be running into that in our campaign where one of the principle godesses is supposed to be Kali.
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The standard D&D "pantheon" entirely misses the essence of polytheism. I use a very different religion system.Perhaps, but real polytheism arose from a world totally different from that of most D&D mileux. In D&D people worship gods because they are there -- usually offering real rewards and penalties. Our brand of polytheism would be irrational within such a world.
My two cents :)
Jack
I contend that the D&D version of polytheism is even more irrational when you have actual evidence than in the absence of evidence. Any sensible person would "follow" all the gods to some extent. Even the evil gods would require regular propitiation -- sort of a deific protection racket.
Oh, and "faith" requires the absence of evidence by definition. I don't have faith in gravity; I don't need it. The same applies to a god whose works are produceable on demand. (FWIW, I think there's an argument to be made for gods preferring good salesmen to faithful followers: "I want sacrifices, not followers. Show me the dead goats!")