I don't start with the world or maps or other environmental factors. That's sort of putting the cart before the horse inventing things that you won't necessarily need.
Instead, I think of a dramatic story, a situation that has a dilemma which can be overcome, and then fill in what is needed for this story to take place. Much more efficient than starting from the whole world and trying to populate it with stories.
Unless you're specifically going for the sandbox approach, in which case, you don't need anything really just some dice and a spreadsheet to roll on.
How do you start?
Do you build a new world?
Do you begin with quest`s or citys or a map?A how do you start building your campaing that is?
And offcurse if players wanna speak ther mind, do so :)
Thanks alot guys :)
I usually start a campaign from a narrative perspective.
That is I like to think of a few important happenings/people in the campaign worlds past and develop a history for the world.
I then bring that history forward until I find a point where I believe it would be ripe for a group of PC's and start adventure writing there.
This usually gives me several cultures and landmasses to work with along with current ruling bodies and important personages. It also usually gives me a current set of "World Problems" that the PC's may eventually end up encountering based on their choices.
In all honesty I usually end up writing around 100-200 pages of back story for most of my campaigns before I even stat out anything.
This all comes with the caveat of the fact that it is my personal preference to run Organic, Sandbox based campaigns. My players seem to like it so I do it.
As for mapping, well I am a terrible artist and my maps are usually either graph paper based for specific buildings/locations or continent sized so I can fudge details due to my atrocious drawing ability.
Hope this helps.
The first thing I start with is "Why?"
As in, what inspired me to make the world setting?
The second thing is "What kind of adventure(s) do I want to to place in that setting?
Between these two ideas, I can get an idea of what needs to be created and how important the elements are. For example: A campaign of exploration beyond the frontier needs less detail about the PCs home nation(s) then does a campaign centered on political intrigue.
i usually start with a cosmology. how was the world created? where did it's gods come from, and what are they like? those answers shape (literally) the map and can bear directly on the history of the world, which in turn sets the stage for creating/assigning cultures for different regions and figuring out how they relate to one another. from there i design relevant locations in more detail (remembering their cultural/historical development while doing so)- this way the have an internal consistency, and a sense of being 'lived in' that make for greater verisimilitude.
In my opinion, it comes down to personal preference to a large degree. I've come up with game ideas in both ways, but personally I find that I usually work best starting with the basic plot idea and then working from there. I like using published campaign settings to help me out with some of the work though because I can usually just browse through areas in campaign books, and find some place that fits the rough idea well enough and just plop the whole story arc down in the appropriate location.
My first campaign, I started out REALLY small. I basically just created a dungeon to run my players through and tried to put in a smattering of interesting encounters. Then based on how they got through that first dungeon and the things they learned (as well as the things *I* learned about their characters and their backstories) I began to branch outward. In many ways, that was still my most successful campaign.
As another fairly new GM who's dipping his toe into custom campaigning, I'm building the world first.
It's just like when writing a story IMO, it's much easier to get mileage out of a "complete" world than it is to expand your world after you've started a story in it.
I built a world, but I had a lot of campaign ideas in mind first. I wanted to get serious and make something really detailed and complete, and I wasn't going to invest that time if I could only get one good campaign out of it. So I made sure, as I was world building, to leave lots of potential for different adventures.
Also, I try to do as much of my nation-building after doing the map. In the same way that the events in our lives shape us, the geography of a region does a lot to shape the nations that spring up there. However, I often have to go back to the map and change a few things to suit ideas that come up during the nation-building process.
I find culture and civlization really really really really fascinating, so nation-building is the most fun for me. I like imagining strange governments and how they came to be, what effects they have on the people and their lifestyles, how they deal with their neighbours, etc.
From there I start building histories, though it's always good to leave lots of room so that you can insert important details to suit your campaign background.
I wrote my own pantheon, too, though I didn't stray too far from "the norm". The main thing there was to come up with a creation myth and a sense of how the cosmos fits together. I decided on a hierarchy where the most powerful gods are also the least human, the most difficult to understand, while the lesser gods tend to be more relatable. While I was coming up with concepts for deities I started making lists of how many alignments and domains were being represented and did my best to fill in all the gaps.
Having a calendar also helps. Knowing the date and being able to accurately chart the passage of time, the arrival of seasons and holidays, etc, can lend a ton of verisimilitude to the game and give players that immersive experience.
By far the most time-consuming (and I find boring) part is filling in the very specific details: city names, names of locations within cities, other locations, natural features (lakes, mountains, etc). It's suuper dull, but so is finding "a village" while exploring "some mountains".
It helps to have a sense of basic geography, medieval demographics, population density, and how and where cities crop up. However, there's no real need to get super realistic. This is a fantasy world, after all.
Just because you're creating your own campaign doesn't mean you have to create your own world. Using Galorian can save you tons of time on what is where in the world.
But lets say that you must create your own world. Be goblin-like. Steal. Steal lots.
Start small. Take a village or area of countryside from a system that's already been created, such as Galorian or Greyhawk. Then just change the names. You now have your own world. You don't need to make the world any bigger than the PCs will ever see. If your campaign isn't going to leave The Valley of the Sun for the first 3 levels, don't bother to make anything beyond the mountain ranges that surround the valley. After that, pick and choose other sections of land (with cities) from other worlds, such as Forgotten Realms or Dragon Lance, and attach that section to your world. Keep expanding until you have your own world built up over time.
Also, use your players. Do you have a player that wants to be from Moon Village on the other side of the valley, and you know that the characters will be headed there in a few session? Have that player design the village. Not only does that free up your time to work on the campaign, but the player will actually know the village, which makes character immersion much better. Imagine that! The character from the village is known the best by the player playing that character. :)
"Making your own world" doesn't necessarily mean you have to have everything 100% fleshed out, yeah.
I'm just saying if you're gonna do it you should at least have a good idea of what's going on elsewhere before you start. If the PCs aren't going to leaved "Doomdhom Town" for 3 levels, fine, but you can't be leaving that area and have no clue what's going on in "Nexton Ovehr".
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Starting a campaign -
Determine
World/Settingor create a new one(The latter takes a bit of work)
House Rules and start a word doc as a handout to the players as a refferance. Include in this character creation with allowed races ect.
Now comeing up with the story. I like the AP format actually, and will try to divide my campaign up into 4-6 smaller parts. Each part being unique in itself as far as enviroment and types of enemys, but with a connection in overall Goal.
I start with the ending. What is the Goal I want this party to achieve. Then I work backwards, ending with campaign specific traits I want to associate with this campaign.
"Making your own world" doesn't necessarily mean you have to have everything 100% fleshed out, yeah.
I'm just saying if you're gonna do it you should at least have a good idea of what's going on elsewhere before you start. If the PCs aren't going to leaved "Doomdhom Town" for 3 levels, fine, but you can't be leaving that area and have no clue what's going on in "Nexton Ovehr".
That's only if you want to incorporate national or inter-village politics, or if you want to track "off-scene" story lines for the purpose of the campaign. For example, if you're running a campaign where you have to stop a war, you'll want to track off-scene events of the neighboring country even though the characters wont enter that country for several levels. If that's the case, then you are definitely correct, and knowledge of those things are very important. But if your campaign won't use those things, then there's no need to plan them out.
For example, if you wanted to run a campaign that took place entirely in a single nation, then you may want to include stuff about the surrounding nations (if they're going to have any influence on your campaign), but there's no need to design them in detail and definitely no need to design anything beyond them.
I have always started with the central conflict or quest of the campaign. I usually come up with several for each campaign. Then I fill in the details that I need to.
I have been doing this for quite a while now, so I have a very large home brew setting made up of essentially of all the campaigns I have planned and run over the years, so now mostly what I do is come up with a story and then fit it into my world, expanding the world as necessary.
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I've done it a number of times, but apparently I do it differently than most people.
1) Choose a theme for the party. They're the main characters, and if they have something in common, all of their adventures will seem more natural than if they're randomly thrown together:
- A gang (or part of a gang) of thieves, con artists, and ruffians who grew up in the same ghetto.
- "Army brats" who grew up as camp followers, trailing around after their parents who are soldiers or camp followers themselves.
- Refugees from a war, cut off from their homes and families, living in a refugee camp together.
2) Design a first mission for the party. Again, this is to make their motivations for grouping together feel real and therefore make all of their later adventures more organic. In the three cases above, I might choose:
- The young gang want to join the thieves' guild and make their fortune through crime.
- The army brats want to set out on their own, spying on the enemy and bringing back the intelligence that will bring victory.
- The refugees want to mount an expedition to find their lost families.
3) Stop! Call for characters. At this point I stop writing. Write up a document that includes all of the above, plus anything else I'm already committed to about the campaign. This includes house rules, campaign setting if I know it already, character building info (starting attributes, equipment, etc.), and anything else the players will need to know in order to make characters. Also, as part of character creation I ask players to include motivations, goals, desires, fears, etc.
4) Write plot. Now that I have a group of main characters, I can begin writing antagonists, allies, missions, adventures, and whatever else I will need to make a good campaign. Now, it will be a campaign that truly features the players characters, using their histories, personal goals, etc.
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How do you start?
Do you build a new world?
Do you begin with quest`s or citys or a map?A how do you start building your campaing that is?
And offcurse if players wanna speak ther mind, do so :)
Thanks alot guys :)
I start by telling my player's the idea of the game i am planing to run in x time. After which i ask them what kind of character do they want to play. After getting a feel for the character they want to play i think about how to get them all together in 1 area so they can adventure. Once all of that is done i ask them to get together and toss out a few ideas amongst them selves about how the society works amongst them and have them flush out there starting village/town since they are the ones that lived there all there life. While there doing this i start to work on the surrounding area of said location and start branching out with a rough skeleton of were things are located on a map. I work the map until the entire continent is roughly flushed out being major city locations and region's geography. That way the players if they bother to ask for a map i can give them one. I also think about the Pantheon of world, if it has one, and the holidays that may coincide with the deities. Other things i plan is social structures of the major areas and what creatures would logically inhabit said areas and there surroundings. Like take a cave system for exaple. The cave in the front will have creatures like bears, bats, vermin, ext. In the back of the cave though, further from potential food sources, there will be little to no monsters but more of terrain hazards. The tunnel though could lead to ancient ruins though in which case i could have undead, constructs/golems, and maybe earth elementals since they dont need food. It usually takes me a month to fully create the basses of the game world along with some starting adventure hooks to get the characters going and a main story line to go with it. After all that is done its primarily up to the players on what thy do since i like to run open ended games.
I run every campaign I GM out of my custom game world that I've been using now for 30+ years.
It started with a single ruined castle on an overgrown island in the middle of a large river.
As the original party was clearing out the castle, I expanded the local area to include mountains to the north, a desert to the south and a sea far to the west. The party found a tunnel leading from a well under the castle to a cave in the mountains. That led me to create more surrounding areas including a blasted remnant of an ancient battleground the size of a small state.
About then I decided I needed to figure out what this whole area was like and ended up creating a continent the size of Europe which included countries and wilderness bordered on the north by ice and tundra, to the west by an endless sea, to the east by a massive mountain range and to the south by the desert which had grown to be Saharah-sized.
I ran it that way for about a decade. Then that wasn't big enough so I fleshed out the lands to the east of the giant mountain range to another large sea to the east and created some islands and another, smaller continent. South of the huge desert is now mostly wild jungle lands to yet another southern sea.
That's about when I started on the other worlds.
Maybe more than most people would want to tackle.
It's still growing.
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Also an added note is i let the players shape the world mostly through there interactions with the environment they are set in. Some of my players have gone through the trouble of creating there own kingdoms while others have committed complete genocide of a race. In one of my games a player killed all the gnomes and goblins on the entire planet and turned them all into undead that generate power for his city, cleans up the sewers, and act as an army.
Psion, one of my players' first characters is now a demigod with his own followers and a town named in his honor... He's no longer a PC though, he's now an NPC.
I start with a concept like: balance. from there i create opposites and a system of checks and balances. Then I draw out the world map with similar theme of balance in mind. Then I focus on small stories and fill in the blanks from there.
There is a theme of balance in my world. there is a council of white (good), red (neutral), and black (evil) clerics and mages. The Red council vastly outnumbers the White and Black, but what happens when the Red council who is supposed to represent balance, becomes too unbalanced because of their numbers. Well, have you ever seen the movie Equalibrium? That happens. The theme for my last campaign was that even balance when not moderated becomes unbalanced. Good and Evil had to work together just to be able to have the freedom to express themselves in what was becoming an increasingly oppressive and constricted world.
Many novelists argue about whether it's better to start with a detailed plot or with interesting characters. This is sort of like that. Start with what interests you.There is no single right way to do it. The popular modern advice is to start small and build up only what you need.
The heck with that, I say!
I started building a world some thirty-six years ago, right after reading The Lord of the Rings. Not surprisingly, it was a thinly-veiled rip-off of Middle Earth that I had the temerity to consider unique. But I kept working on that world for at least a decade, doodling maps or making up stories and characters. The maps were my favorite, and so there were a lot of maps. Mostly of just one small region.
Over time, my players explored more areas and I expanded the maps, eventually filling in a whole continent. The maps continue to go through changes, even after the better part of four decades. I like fiddling with maps.
That said, every adventure changes the map a little as I decide that this story needs a village here or a river there.
In the end, the best advice is to start with what makes you interested in playing. If that's maps, great. If it's story or characters or simply a cool idea for a role-playing challenge, that's all fine. Play to your strengths; the rest will come with experience.
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@Adamantine Dragon
Wow were both cut from the same cloth on this. Ive been running my game for roughly 25 years now. Thanks to psionics i have space travel for the one of the nations on my world that is comprised completely of merchants and explorers. I wonder do ur games also go beyond level 20? The reason i ask is because the only way i came up with challenging players beyond level 20 with the restrictions i set in game was to have them go off planet to fight monsters with character levels under the same restrictions.
I dont really have the time or energy to create whole campaign worlds anymore (plus the skill with which professionals do it has kind of made me slightly embarassed at my own efforts), but when I did I generally followed a top-down approach. I would begin with a map of continents, work out if there was anything particularly unusual I wanted to place somewhere or any specific theme I was interested in making a 'feature' of the setting.
Once the bare bones was done, I'd consider the story I was expecting to develop, find an appropriate setting for that within the world and flesh out the country I expected the game to start in. The last few steps would be to zero in on the actual site of the first adventure and kind of "work out" towards the framework I'd established.
Whenever I tried to begin from a local area and expand as the game required it, I always found it uninspiring. I'd work outwards and gradually find myself caring less and less about the world and making excuses to do something else (or to work on a new campaign and scrap the old one). Logically, it seems to make more sense to only build what you need, but somehow it never seemed to grab my imagination the way it did when I started with the 'big picture' stuff.
My world is more or less run by a cabal of high level casters, mostly wizards, mostly elf, half-elf and human wizards in fact. They operate behind the scenes.
Each country has its own political system and I have most of the main characters (Kings, Emperors, Lords, etc) created and documented in that country's description.
I've got a high level continent-spanning economy which includes things like the supply train for giant freshwater shrimp from an inland "great lake" to all the major countries, the shipping lanes across the ocean, what goes up and down the major roads and rivers and what the major industries are of each area.
Right now the world is under attack from another world whose orbit has brought it in range to launch meteoric demon-infested pods which land and open to disgorge rampaging demon-beasts. This happens every millennium or so.
On my main world's largest continent there are places to run any sort of campaign you want, from a low to almost nil magic item style all the way to magic as technology in the major cities of the richest, most powerful nation.
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Psion, one of my players' first characters is now a demigod with his own followers and a town named in his honor... He's no longer a PC though, he's now an NPC.
Lol i have a player like that as well. It was an old 2e wizard that got "promoted" to god of magic. The things he did in my game. That butt hat with the help of another player set off the magic equivalent of a nuke on my world using spell research to create a sphere of force that he can cast into. He then divided the sphere with a wall of force and opened a gate to the positive plane in one are and the other opened a gate to the negative plane. He proceeded to run like all hell and had that thing take out the island they undead horde was on. He also at one point with help of an NPC of mine destroyed a star system so the stars could never be aligned properly to stop cathulu esq crud.
The very first thing I do is decide if I want to run a published setting (like Golarion for Pathfinder, the Fallen Lands for 4e D&D, or another setting like Dark Sun, Mystara, or Forgotten Realms) or if } want to make a world of my own for the game.
If it's the former I go heavy research mode--try to find a part of the world map I really like and haven't used before--I research all the countries in the area, the conflicts and politics. Then when I feel like I know it really well I try to boil the region down into a bullet list of possible starting places for my players to use in making characters. When I get the characters they've made I try to find something they would all care about enough for them to meet up and try to resolve it together. That forms the first sketchy ideas of what the big plot might be--but mostly I just follow the exploits of my characters, presenting events or NPCs as they go along. If they jump the track and follow an event or NPC, then that becomes the new plot. If they don't then it adds nice background detail to the world--the feeling that there's a lot going on out there beyond just what the PCs are doing.
It's not much different if I'm making the setting, except that I start from a world map and cosmology and some broad history, and then create a region of 7-10 countries in that world that I think would be interesting and different and give the PCs some fun character choices. From there it's about the same. I make a writeup of the world and cosmology, history, gods and countries. The players use that to make characters. I mine the character backgrounds for goals and agendas and try to find points of intersection that would bring them together. From there I just let them play off of each other and explore the world.
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My world is more or less run by a cabal of high level casters, mostly wizards, mostly elf, half-elf and human wizards in fact. They operate behind the scenes.
Each country has its own political system and I have most of the main characters (Kings, Emperors, Lords, etc) created and documented in that country's description.
I've got a high level continent-spanning economy which includes things like the supply train for giant freshwater shrimp from an inland "great lake" to all the major countries, the shipping lanes across the ocean, what goes up and down the major roads and rivers and what the major industries are of each area.
Right now the world is under attack from another world whose orbit has brought it in range to launch meteoric demon-infested pods which land and open to disgorge rampaging demon-beasts. This happens every millennium or so.
On my main world's largest continent there are places to run any sort of campaign you want, from a low to almost nil magic item style all the way to magic as technology in the major cities of the richest, most powerful nation.
Cool the primary world for me is set more in an early Renascence theme with the half - elfs being the most technological. The nations just recently developed are travel thanks to the players. The dwarf player of mine created the equivalent of a steam powered zeplen using an Orb of Infinite Water to create the steam pressure. Weaponry for them consist of a high powered lens to scorch enemies and canons that launch shards of glass to hit creatures underneath, sadly it has no fire power against other things in the sky with exclusion to the deck were casters stand to launch spells. The thing is slow as hell but it started a major advancement in abn air arms race.
I always start with a concept first.
For example, the campaign setting I'm currently working on came about because I decided I'd really like to see how my players deal with the idea of a magic-industrial revolution. Technological advancement in the world is driven by magical research, mostly undertaken by the military. The idea wasn't so much that magic does everything, as that magic replicates certain real life technologies. Lots of low level magic items with very specialised applications available readily, that kind of thing.
After I've got the concept, I build a setting and story around it. So in this case, the world is an empire where more and more people have started developing low levels of magical ability (lots of early level casters running around). The government have reacted by forcing a draft of all magic users into government service for a few years, which has in turn resulted in lots of casters in the military, leading to increased research into how magic can be applied to tactics and warfare in general. I won't go into actual story, as some of my group have been known to lurk on the forums here, but the PCs start as members of what is essentially a fantasy special forces unit.
How do you start?
Do you build a new world?
Do you begin with quest`s or citys or a map?A how do you start building your campaing that is?
And offcurse if players wanna speak ther mind, do so :)
Thanks alot guys :)
It depends on what you want to do. Do you want to build a world that can contain multiple stories and has sandbox elements? Do you just want to come up with a storyline and whatever settings you need for it (an AP in short)? The first is more work, but has more long term potential. The latter is easier to get going and could be expanded later on / continued to make a campaign world out of it.
I started out with a world. It was drawn up in about 1972 as a setting for Chainmail fantasy miniature campaigns. We had been at miniatures for a few years (Napoleonic, Seven Years War and Medieval) and we wanted to run countries, tax people, build armies and fight wars. It had terrain, villages, towns, cities, nations, racial homelands, political systems, major religions etc. all laid out for that reason. It had a history (it's nice to know why they are fighting). When we picked up D&D in 1974 I found it very easy to zero in and detail an area that was suitable for a campaign area.
Essentially I started out on the macro part (world) and filled in the details later. I found a lot of the details came naturally out of the high level details I had already developed. And a lot of adventure ideas were generated as well as developing sandbox elements (mega dungeons, wilderness adventure areas etc.). You don't need a million ideas about the nations etc, just rough details. Then pick an area that would be ripe for adventuring and fill in the details on it. Then the starting local itself and nearby adventure opportunities.
At that point you're good to go and you can expand on the details (and make changes as necessary), as the area your players are active in expands.
I should state that different methods work well for different people so ymmv.
Good luck and have fun. It is a lot of work being GM, and if you're not having fun at it then you are working too hard (no matter how much or little effort you are putting in to it). In short, have fun or run away from it :)
I'm running two campaigns, both in custom built worlds. The scope and scale of those worlds is based entirely on what I want the campaigns to be about on a very general level and what types of characters and character dynamic is going to be in the party.
Game one started as a mental project of what type of character have I always wanted to try playing and how would this play out into a full campaign. I had played in a game world with a new group and the DM there, despite being one of the worst I had ever played under, had some interesting concepts that I thought could be culled to create an exciting game experience for the players and let everyone do something they had always wanted to do; be MegaMunchkins. The base concept was character creation. I wanted PCs that were so heroic that even elite array heroes would quake in their presence. This became 25 point buy, plus racial adjustments plus a "super" hero adjustment of +2 on 4 stats and +3 on 2 stats. I'm sure you can imagine where this would put characters on a point buy system.
Based on the character creation mechanic, I then needed to decide why they had these stats which were across the board better than everyone else to begin with. Why were these guys special and not everyone? I decided this had to be purity of genetics plus mechanical/psionic/magical enhancements that only the players have access to. The players were from the true home world and lesser people (most all of the NPCs) didn't have access to these enhancements because they were removed from the true center of the universe and things start breaking down based on distance away from purity (introduction of chaos). You can see how this builds and starts creating an entire universe just on some few simple concepts of what types of characters you want to enable your players to play.
I had order and law in place to prevent the super-sized heroes from becoming super villains. I had a reason that the PCs would be going away from their perfect homes to the outer reaches of the universe to perform heroic deeds that didn't involve monetary prizes (adoration or follower feats became their payoff based on respect/worship they gained from the people they met and worked with)and a way for them to travel there and back which they didn't exactly control so they could still adventure at low levels.
There you go. A huge step of a campaign construction all flowing out of creating the character concept first. Figure out how can we enable the players in a world system that sounds fun to run and how can we structure things so the players start out wanting to work together. This seems to be a common theme among DMs doing homebrew custom worlds here. Good luck with your world build, but decide what types of PCs are going to live in it first
I think of a hook; some plot device to draw them in.
After that, I think of how the rest of the world fits around that/them. Most recently, I am running a campaign that centers around the party's reaction to a large nations army which is heavily supported by magic... thus making it superior to most other local armies.
After that, i created a world around this juggernaut of an empire that is coming to a local town.
I used many names and places from the Golarion world (amongst others) but changed many of the political dynamics and interactions. This saves me MUCH work. The basic motivations etc. of each nation/kingdom is largely the same, but of course altered to fit my world.
I don't need as many nations and places, so I cut out what i don't need.
I require a backstory from my players, and I either help fit their background story into my story, or alter my world to fit them. Sometimes i create whole new nations or angles of intrigue just to fit them in.
Do you know the web comic "Order of the Stick?"
The creator of said comic had a little project where he created a custom campaign world, documenting his thoughts and problems/solutions.
It is a very interesting read (even though he didn't have time to finish it).
You can reach it from here by clicking on the "Gaming" tab and then look for entries named "The new world, part x"
Sadly I can't link you to the first page directly since my company's net blocks the subpages.
I can link you to page 7 though.
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I'm going to play devil's advocate on the world building thing. Apologies in advance.
For a long time, I was a world builder. Months before the start of a campaign, I would start working on the maps, cosmologies, conflicts etc. I would have 10,000 years of history outlined. I'd have lists of races,local customs,languages and lost civilizations. And, in my opinion, it was a big waste of time.
Why? Because I'm never going to publish any of my settings materials -- I have no aspirations of becoming a game designer, and game settings make the bottom-barrel worst fantasy fiction settings. And honestly, unless you're going high-concept, most of the world-building process consists of reinventing wheels and making up nonsense words. Whether your giant city is called Greyhawk, Waterdeep, Absalom, Lankhmar or Bayonne, it's still basically the same thing. That goes for all the other tropes, from dark forests to dark lords. It's all been done before. That's not a bad thing, necessarily. Part of the appeal of fantasy RPGs is in the recognition of elements from favorite movies, books, and games. But the fact that your dwarves live in the Great Hollow Mountain instead of the Lonely Mountain or Five Kings Mountain does not add anything to your players' experience.
Of course, you may actually enjoy world-building for its own sake, or maybe you want to do something strange and different. If so, I can respect that. But if you just want to play the game -- and that game is going to contain most of the elements in the rule books and bestiaries -- you're better off just dropping $40 on a published setting.
Tweak anything you don't like and flesh out the area where the campaign will start. Use the time saved to concoct three-dimensional NPCs and a compelling story. The players may not remember the name of that ruined city they explored, but they'll definitely remember what happened there.
Your mileage, of course, may vary.
i, unlike Kazred, enjoy the act of creating; for me, constructing a new world is an art, and i get into it like a painter paints or writer writes. that said, if your goal is just to have a setting for your 40-50 small adventures i think he's absolutely right- go buy one. the adventures will be just as fun and memorable whether they're set in Pelleville in the land of Mai'Bayzmint or some town in Varisia or Middle Earth.
I built my own. It isn't as detailed as Golarion, but it is big enough and detailed enough to not be exhausted by one, two, or possibly more campaigns.
I began with one question: What would be a huge historical event that would color the entire world, how it's citizens interact, and so on. I created an event that was more or the corruption of the Proteans into demons.
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Create a important powerful dark secret, who knows it, how do they hide it and why...
Then expect your pcs to ignore it and do random stuff, but now you know how things should be placed as they encounter less fleshed out areas of the world.
The benefit of making your own setting is that you know what is going on. who has time to read and fully understand how Golarion interacts with its self? Maybe your players, which could get annoying.
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i, unlike Kazred, enjoy the act of creating; for me, constructing a new world is an art, and i get into it like a painter paints or writer writes.
That's a great point and it bears repeating. If you have fun creating personal settings, don't let anything I said dissuade you. For me, the fun of GMing is in seeing my stories play out in unexpected ways at the gaming table. For others, the preparation *is* the fun. Follow your bliss.
The benefit of making your own setting is that you know what is going on. who has time to read and fully understand how Golarion interacts with its self? Maybe your players, which could get annoying.
Even though I advocate using published settings, I'm not a fan of RAW games for exactly the reason you mention. Trying to stay cannon is fast track to GM burnout and an empty wallet (I call it Forgotten Realms Syndrome).
I begin with what ever i think is cool.What have my attention.
Exsampel a)
When if just started 3.5 i played one char - a spellthief who was rubbish. Keept dying... At least once pr session. So the GM got tired so I took over the campaign - not I was new to 3.5 - so I spend my energy tying to my builds i found interesting - and since the campaign had the players traveling from plane to plane - I just made a new demi plane for each encounter. There was the beholder queen oracle plane, the mindflayer wortshipping psions at ethernal war with the duskblades 8they had some God as well.
Exsample b)
I wanted to make some crime/investegation type senario. So here I startede in New Cyre on Ebberon - told the players they all had to have some relation to Cyre. And then put 3-4 crime syndicates up in New Cyre.
Each had a timeline of event so even if the players didn't do anything random things would happen. Then I just placed the players in a tavern (because i hadn't tried it become - and you have to at least once) and let the playes sandbox it.
Exsample c)
I'm working on something new - I want to have the players play monsters in a world were humans are spreading killing all other races...
So i have started with the world, the gods, and have made very specific encounters. To try out some thing other than - there's the bad guys go kill them. So I'm doing alot out of making the encounters feel liek something new or something we have seen - with a twist...
Have a "save the villige", a "towerdefence", a "storm the casle", "the race".
Just start with what you think is great. What you feel like spending time on.
AND MOST IMPORTANTLY OF ALL:
stop while it's fun! If you ever feel that being GM is a duty. Then stop, maybe wrap up the champaing in one last session or two. But stop before you burn out...
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I made a blog post about world creation. Here is the gist:
World creation is different for everybody. The easiest and most effective way of creating an interesting world is determining one specific element or gimmick. Once you have that element, use it to inspire the rest of the world.
Below is a list of categories of world elements (and examples) to get you thinking. Pick whichever one inspires you the most, and branch out from there. If a major conflict will be the centerpiece of your world, consider who is involved? How the geography has shaped the conflict? Has a major event just changed everything?
In essence, don't try to build your world and campaign all at once. Start with the element that you have developed strongest in your mind, and use that to inspire everything else.