world creation


Homebrew and House Rules


Well, toying with several things atm for a couple different games had me explaining a couple things to new players. One asked me something that made me pause for a minute. "How do you create a world?"
He was asking about the initial crunch aspect for the world itself, IE geography, weather, etc etc. I said I usually get ideas from a odd map or from something that looks like a interesting land form. I am always taking pictures at my job of odd shapes of spills or stuff like that. I then sit and think about what kind of world would look like that and go from there.
I was wondering though, to see how others come up with it.


I'm really not sure I can articulate a proper answer. When I created my world, I just... sat down with a piece of paper and started drawing. I had a basic idea of a theme or concept, but as far as the actually landmass, I just... started drawing.


Sometimes I have a theme like 'Norse', 'Greek', 'Egyptian' or similar. other times I have a map I draw out or an idea for a geological formation that seems cool. Sometimes I even go based off of plants or animals I might like to see.


I can tell you how I did it, but I dunno if that will work for other people.

I have run virtually every campaign I have run in 30+ years in the same campaign world. I basically grew the thing organically to a certain point, then decided to start with a cosmology and work down to meet in the middle. It went like this:

My first dungeon was created in an afternoon. I had just played my first game as a player and found that I really liked the game enough that I wanted to try being a GM myself. So the next day, as I sat at my bank teller drive-up window waiting for cars to drive up, I began drawing a small ruined castle. I just let my mind wander and ended up with three floors full of rooms which I populated with some random monsters that just seemed to make sense for living in the castle.

Then I decided that the castle, which once was on a small hill, was now on an overgrown island in the middle of a river. So I drew the river and some forests and a road on one side of the river.

That was the setting for my first session. The party had been sent to investigate some disturbances on the road and found the castle and we spent an evening having fun in the castle. Over the next week or so the party busily started clearing out the castle and I realized that my game was going to end pretty soon, but the players wanted to keep going. So at work again I decided that the castle, island and river was part of a larger land area and added some mountains to the north, some desert to the south and added a small town nearby.

That allowed the campaign to continue for a few more weeks, but soon that content was nearing its end too.

That's when I decided that I could not just keep growing the world as the party explored more, and I decided to create an entire cosmology, a solar system with multiple planets, laid out the main planet's continents and major islands. Added multiple mountain ranges, rivrs, lakes, seas... All of this was drawn freehand on typing paper (which was the sturdiest paper I had at the time). I have since scanned that first map of the continent and a portion of it is the banner on my blog.

Soon enough I realized I needed nations, an economic system, political entities, trade guilds and a cast of major NPCs who were the movers and shakers of the world.

Now I have notebooks full of information for my campaign world and I am still growing it today.


I started with into the unknown. This was a dungeon under Portown. I added 2 levels below, and mapped out Porttown. It seemed oddly like a paralel to medeval England, so I set it in Mage Earth. Basicly every story and legend really happened. I set it on the coast of England, right on the opening of a river, and set it in the time when some monks found what they thought was King Arther's grave.


I do inside-out world building. I start with a local area - a single town with a dungeon and the geography within say 20 miles. For example, the campaign I just started (2 sessions so far) is set on a sub-arctic mountain near a dwarven mining town. They probably won't even leave that mountain until level 3 at the earliest. While I have given the global geography some thought, I have very little designed beyond the mountain and the immediate surroundings.


Adamantine Dragon wrote:

I can tell you how I did it, but I dunno if that will work for other people.

I have run virtually every campaign I have run in 30+ years in the same campaign world. I basically grew the thing organically to a certain point, then decided to start with a cosmology and work down to meet in the middle. It went like this:

My first dungeon was created in an afternoon. I had just played my first game as a player and found that I really liked the game enough that I wanted to try being a GM myself. So the next day, as I sat at my bank teller drive-up window waiting for cars to drive up, I began drawing a small ruined castle. I just let my mind wander and ended up with three floors full of rooms which I populated with some random monsters that just seemed to make sense for living in the castle.

Then I decided that the castle, which once was on a small hill, was now on an overgrown island in the middle of a river. So I drew the river and some forests and a road on one side of the river.

That was the setting for my first session. The party had been sent to investigate some disturbances on the road and found the castle and we spent an evening having fun in the castle. Over the next week or so the party busily started clearing out the castle and I realized that my game was going to end pretty soon, but the players wanted to keep going. So at work again I decided that the castle, island and river was part of a larger land area and added some mountains to the north, some desert to the south and added a small town nearby.

That allowed the campaign to continue for a few more weeks, but soon that content was nearing its end too.

That's when I decided that I could not just keep growing the world as the party explored more, and I decided to create an entire cosmology, a solar system with multiple planets, laid out the main planet's continents and major islands. Added multiple mountain ranges, rivrs, lakes, seas... All of this was drawn freehand on typing paper (which was the sturdiest paper I had at the time). I...

I had several notebooks myself like that, and unfortunately they seem to have vanished in the last move I made. I am in the long process of beginning it again


I am in the process of working up a new campaign myself, and I always start with the theme and build the politics, geography, whatever around it.

This game's theme is based around digging through an ancient series of ruins as part of a guild that supplies magical materials to the civilized lands. I wanted an frontier feel, so I decided to make it a bit like an Old West frontier town, with major landowners embroiled in friendly and/or bitter rivalries. From that I establish that the town is the last vaguely civilized point before this vast badlands of ancient rubble, and that it is a melting pot of several other civilizations that have a border close to this area, not unlike Switzerland.

Other geography gets added as it becomes logical, but not before players NEED to know about them. Politics is a distant matter, as the town is fiercely independent and capitalistic. It doesn't care which major power is winning or losing, just that someone will buy the magical goods being dug up. Within this framework, I can add back-room dealing, religious orders, mercenary groups, bandits, weird monsters, whatever.


Necroluth wrote:

I am in the process of working up a new campaign myself, and I always start with the theme and build the politics, geography, whatever around it.

This game's theme is based around digging through an ancient series of ruins as part of a guild that supplies magical materials to the civilized lands. I wanted an frontier feel, so I decided to make it a bit like an Old West frontier town, with major landowners embroiled in friendly and/or bitter rivalries. From that I establish that the town is the last vaguely civilized point before this vast badlands of ancient rubble, and that it is a melting pot of several other civilizations that have a border close to this area, not unlike Switzerland.

Other geography gets added as it becomes logical, but not before players NEED to know about them. Politics is a distant matter, as the town is fiercely independent and capitalistic. It doesn't care which major power is winning or losing, just that someone will buy the magical goods being dug up. Within this framework, I can add back-room dealing, religious orders, mercenary groups, bandits, weird monsters, whatever.

A major theme could be trying to find the big iron meteor that crashed in anchent times before the competition.

Lantern Lodge

Me, I am a spontaneous GM, I describe things during a game usually without knowing anything about it till I tell the players, then I remember it and write it down.

I have literaly had a random encounter with a made up on the spot monsters I called Reaplings, and they eventuallt became the central motivation/bad guys for many sessions, with entire history all built on the fly.

The only thing about my method is you have to remember/write down evrything so you don't contradict yourself later.


Tark of the Shoanti wrote:

Well, toying with several things atm for a couple different games had me explaining a couple things to new players. One asked me something that made me pause for a minute. "How do you create a world?"

He was asking about the initial crunch aspect for the world itself, IE geography, weather, etc etc. I said I usually get ideas from a odd map or from something that looks like a interesting land form. I am always taking pictures at my job of odd shapes of spills or stuff like that. I then sit and think about what kind of world would look like that and go from there.
I was wondering though, to see how others come up with it.

I've used the same campaign setting my entire RPG career...mine. Started with a map, created the geography, divided the nations, gave them cultural backgrounds (many based loosely on real-world historical cultures), gave names to the mountains, lakes, rivers, forests, swamps, etc., created major and minor NPCs, cities, towns, etc., and decided where I wanted to go play. Initially I started with just a small section of the map, but as we played, we developed more areas. Eventually, we did a 200 year time jump, which allowed all the old campaigns and adventures to become historical events and background info, and moved forward from there.


I usually suggest a fractal world generator when folks ask, such as: donjon World Generator.


Da'ath wrote:
I usually suggest a fractal world generator when folks ask, such as: donjon World Generator.

Oh I used to use this all the time back in 3.0-5, but when I went without a comp of my own for a couple years I lost track of it. Thanks for posting it, I was also talking about this but couldn't recall the site. I can show them now and prove I am not a senile old man at the gaming store. LOL


Usually what I do, is: get a blank sheet, draw some coastline as inspiration goes, then look at what it looks like, then imagine what it could look like, then sketch mountains, forest, lakes etc.
Or since I'm not good at drawing, I often search the internet for fantasy maps, then when one catch my attention, I do some photoshop to erase the names and maybe tweak a bit the landscape. From there, either drawn or got from from internet, I try to fit kingdom in there with a vague background (4-5 lines of description at most) and I pick one of these to start my campaign that will be developping the world from the inside out from there.

So at first its a oustide in world design, but as soon as I have a general idea of what the different kingdom are and what general knowledge common people might know of any place outside their village, I do just the opposite and the world gets detailled as the campaing goes.


My campaign world-in-progress is set on a flat planet, which allows me to throw away all conventional wisdom about planetary physics, meteorology, etc. and invent fresh.

For a map, I researched and adapted a medieval map of the world prior to the discovery of North and South America. It's ideal for my purposes because, while some aspects of it will seem vaguely familiar, it really does look like an alien world. If you are stuck (or even if you're just curious), I highly recommend researching very old maps.

That said, the donjon map generator linked to above is also pretty cool.

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