HB Campaign World--"Creation" Rough Draft

[Arashi Kirito]

Ok, so I'm extremely new to D&D and any other form of roleplaying, yet I am extremely compelled to run my own campaign world. I'm now in the beginning stages of creating the world and am creating the history of "Creation."

I just wanted to throw out what I currently have written up to get positive feetback, as well as constructive criticism. I intend to have a lot of history placed upon my world and back stories of races, cities, and nations so that I can bring it alive and immerse my future players in the atmosphere. Anyways, let me know what you think about my unfinished history of creation! :)

At a time before time even existed, there was a single entity born to nothingness. A semblance to what would eventually become known as "Mankind." This entity was composed of two halves, two personas. The right half, of pure, radiant light, devout and righteous; The left, a shadow-forged and maniacal darkness longing for chaos and destruction.

It wasn't long before the two halves of "God" were at each others throats, trying to influence their whole to each of their wills. Thus, the conflict between good and evil began, and as light cannot exist without darkness, so too were good and evil cursed to an existence of rivalry and bloodshed.

With neither persona able to gain influence over the other, they conceded to play out their eternal struggle through game; the material plane--the board; the Humans--the pawns.

The earth was molded of "God's" power, split evenly between both personas. It was composed of the divine, life-giving powers of the white persona--which came to be named Divinity--and the arcane power of the elements granted by the black persona--later called Arcanity.

The two powers were interwoven, infusing the world with both divine and arcane energies alike. The personas, Divinity and Arcania, worked together--for the last time--in the creation of humanity. Born of both light and darkness, human kind would become quite diverse in every which way. Individual alignments would vary throughout the entire spectrum from good to evil, and all of the gray area in between.

300 Year War:
only brief periods of peace were enjoyed as war ravaged the lands. Battle after battle was fought, leaving bitter hatred, suffering, the diminishing human population, and scorched lands as the remnants of "God's" conflicting wrath.

During the first period of peace--known as the "Divine era"--Divinity and Arcania took absence of their game, leaving the pawns to govern themselves. While there was no lack of conflict between pawns, both sides focused primarily on re-building. Meanwhile, the gap between good and evil began to wane as the bulk of humans took towards the gray areas between. They did so through necessity, greed, envy, lust, and/or other such manifestations that began to grow with the rapidly adapting race.

Note: Tired as hell, will add more of it later but it's time for me to pass out -.-

[Da'ath]

Take this as meant to help you, not to criticize you.

I think you're making a common mistake for new (and some old) GMs. You're focusing on details that aren't very important right now. Your creation myth should probably be a brief blurb describing your idea for the time being.

My suggestions are as follows:

Start with your map, be it the area you plan for the adventures to take place, or the entire planet in a rough fashion. A useful tool for this can be found here (Fractal World Generator). I suggest altering the random seed until you find something you like, while using the "spherical" map projection.

Now that you have a "world" or map area, you can use the terrain/climate generated as a basis for what sort of cultures typically dwell in the areas. Just rough overviews, nothing in depth.

Now that you have cultural overviews, religions should come easy: environment plays an important role in what sort of religion a people might follow, their beliefs, customs, and so on. It's also a good idea to start naming your continents, seas, islands, political borders for nations, kingdoms, city-states, and uncharted territories.

Populate your areas; what will make this interesting and different from any other campaign setting is your elven population might be desert based, coexisting with other roaming tribes, and the like, or it could be positioned in heavily forested areas as the norm. Determine if humans are the dominant race. In many settings, they are.

You can start putting "special locations" in, as well, which will be secrets your PCs won't know about: religious areas, haunted forests, "The Mountains of Madness", and so on. These things your PCs might stumble on or seek out later.

From this point, you can really start filling in the finer details.

If you've done all of this already, disregard this post; your creation myth looks fine as-is, though unless you have a one-world religion, these will vary from culture to culture.

[Arashi Kirito]

Already have a map. And I'm simply putting a history to this as I will with all of my cities/regions/temples/etc because I want knowledge religion/knowledge history to play an important roll. This is going to be a campaign that I continually work on and build on. The culture's I'll focus on later on when I start to further build up the cities and nations but I want to get all of the "gods" taken care of first as what they represent will have the greatest influence on the world as a whole.

Long story short the original god splits into two entities, continue creating races for their conflict, and eventually do battle themselves. While the god, Divinity, wants to destroy human kind (though they ignorantly revere him as the "good god") Arcania ends up sacrificing herself in order to seal Divinity into another existence. Doing so takes almost every ounce of her power and her composition breaks down and darkness then falls and splits into the forms of numerous Devils who inherit her Chaotic will.

Note: During this War of Gods, dragons are originally created by Divinity to wipe the world of humans. Arcania creates dragons of her own to oppose Divinity's dragons. In the midst of these dragons there are 10 generals, one of each ethnicity who bear an enormous power and lead his/her ethnicity of dragons.

Upon the fall of the two gods, these 10 generals instill their own reign over the world by forming the "Counsil of God." each of them divide the continents into 10 primary nations which worship them as their deity (though other nations could... or have perhaps rose over time. This is tbd.) The "Dragon Gods," as they are also called, have the ability to exist in another plane, to roam around as passing travelers, to be the king of their nation, or to simply use the nation and it's ruling bureaucracies as puppets in a play. While some toy with the fate of humanity, others sit back and watch idly; perhaps for opportunity, or perhaps due to lack of interest.

I just want everything in my campaign to be truly detailed and not just, oh the god of sun, yeah he's a cool guy man everybody loves light to see. I want to have interesting backgrounds (and perhaps controversy of belief for players and NPC's alike to discuss and argue over. They're going to have their own personalities, domains, agendas/motivations, histories, etc. I don't intend on this being some random quick campaign: it's going to be something that I build up and perfect over time.

[Mark Hoover]

You should ask yourself 2 questions when creating this level of fluff for your homebrew:

1. will the players care about this?

2. will this information be useful in the game?

If the answer is yes to both of these then try to work out how you'll reveal it to the players. It might be common knowledge in a handout at the first adventure or it might be slowly pieced together over the course of the campaign.

As to the story you've created it's very fun and engaging. It seems like the kind of thing I'd like to read more about. But that's just it: its a fun tale but ultimately just begins, ends and provides the players only with a reason why the gods are around.

I know in my homebrew of Karnoss I swiped most of the PF deities whole cloth. I've re-flavored a bit but otherwise left them be. I've run 2 campaigns in this world over the span of nearly 2 years. During that time no one has ever asked me how the gods got there or why.

I HAVE a fun answer if they ask. It involves law, chaos, mothers and naughty children. The theme of Karnoss is one of dark fairy tales, and the creation myth reads like one itself. But none of my players has ever questioned it. The gods ARE and the world IS, and knowing why won't change these facts.

Take for example Erastil. Currently I have a cleric of Old Deadeye in the game. She's never known anything more than "god of nature" about her own deity. However when we started the current campaign she DID say she wanted a big family, owed a debt to a local lord and wanted to use these to have a connection to the starting town. Before the game had begun I'd taken a day to craft an elaborate backstory to the Erastilin shrine in town, relating that to the god's own flavor text and had planned to reveal it to her but, knowing she really wasn't into that aspect of her character I summarized all that in a few sentences and went on to create her family structure.

Bottom line: know your audience. Craft what they'd want to hear. If you don't know specifically who your players are or what their needs are just yet, put yourself in their shoes and ask the 2 questions above. Your homebrew will thank you.

[Laurefindel]

Arashi Kirito wrote:

Note: Tired as hell, will add more of it later but it's time for me to pass out -.-

Making your own Campaign world will be tiring work - it can be fun as a creative expression process, but it is an incredible amount of work.

The two points Mark Hover made are perhaps the best advices you will receive; know your audience (and by extension, how this audience will interact with this creation) and create material that they will use and enjoy.

This does not mean creating material at the whim and preference of your audience, it means introducing them to material that is pertinent to their characters and giving tools for players to interact in your world in unique ways.

For example, I love The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, but Middle Earth can be a difficult setting to run because 90% of the material presented by Tolkien is irrelevant for the players. Middle-Earth campaigns still require a lot of work.

Quickly draw the main themes of your campaign world and write a lot of readily usable material for your players. Chances are that the name of the innkeeper will be more important than the ancestry of the first-age kings...

[Mark Hoover]

'Findel speaks true; she's crafted possibly one of the coolest, most unique random worlds I've ever heard of. Best thing about it is that it was made using a random challenge on these boards and that, in posting stuff about it, she's only put out a few sentences or a paragraph at a time! You read that little bit and go "Man! I need to get MORE of this!"

And that's another excellent point and why many homebrewers out there start with something as small as a single village to craft their worlds. You get the players interested with a little sample of the world, and then they say "Nice...what else you got?" You answer them with the next bread crumb and before you know it you've built an entire world that THEY'RE interested in.

You want to start with the creation story for your gods, that's fine. But perhaps introduces a small portion of it, to get the players interested. For example:

If one of the players is a cleric, have a worshipper (not a cleric but an ignorant zealot) of a somewhat opposed god walk up and just spit on 'em. When that player demands of the rival "What'd you do that for?" the guy replies: because during the Godswar your guy chickened and ran! If it weren't for your guy we wouldn't have to have WINTER" or something ludicrous.

Later have the PCs enter an establishment and notice a tapestry depicting the god of the cleric PC doing whatever the deity did during the Godswar. At this place have someone ramble on about how much better life would be if only the gods would make up, unite the 10 nations and do penance for Divinity and Arcania.

When the PCs feel they're part of the narrative and have something of value to contribute... they'll get involved and it will become everyone's story, not just yours.

[BiggDawg]

I think the Creation story you have going is good and that you should follow through on it. While the advice to focus on what is important for the players to see and hear is good, I think it is also important that you yourself have a clear understanding of what you want your campaign setting to be. Part of that is the Creation story.

While the Creation story may not be relevant immediately to a party of adventurers how the campaign setting was formed can impact play in unexpected ways. You never know what your players are going to throw at you so knowing the history of the setting will help you give reasonable and consistent answers on things.

Now this isn't to say that you need to have every detail of everything planned out ahead of time, but a good outline for the history of the setting, one that you at least understand is a good idea. Take all the time saving advice and use it as your creative passion determines appropriate. It is a lot of work to create a campaign setting, so make sure you enjoy the process, and just keep at it. A mountain of work steadily gets chipped away with persistence. Good luck!