If so:
1. What's the real world history of your setting (when it began, which ruleset etc.)?
2. What's the setting like? Genre, literary inspirations, aesthetics and so forth.
3. Why do you think PF1e is such a good fit for your setting?
4. Do you have any documents, maps, art etc. that you could share with us?
I run a 3e/3.5e/PF1e hybrid with my group who have been together for many years. We have typically played in Greyhawk, the Wilderlands and FR but for the first time I am finally interested in creating my own setting. It is more appealing the older I get (I think it is the other way around for many). So am looking for some inspiration.
My version of Greyhawk takes a lot of inspiration from the following sources:
- The typical Sword and Sorcery sources one might expect, but particularly Elric, Amber and Zothique.
- Mid 90's JRPGs like the Mana series as well as the Dragon Quest series and early Final Fantasy titles (these games, along with early western RPGs such as Ultima and Wizardry, aimed to replicate the D&D experience, almost to the point of plagiarism in some cases).
- 1980s-90s Warhammer Fantasy art.
- French Dark Fantasy comics such as Black Moon Chronicles (a comic chronicling the author’s own Greyhawk campaign during the time he worked with Gary Gygax at TSR)
- Japanese comics and animation such Record of Lodoss War (also based on the writer’s own 80s D&D campaign).
- D&D settings such as The Wilderlands of High Fantasy, Dark Sun and Scarred Lands.
I am not sure how all that will collide into my own flavor of setting, but the gears are turning. I will start with all that I have created for my Greyhawk and morph it into a separate map. I do a lot to portray my image of D&D and Greyhawk through the art I present in my documents, the way I portray various races, character options we use and so forth, but this is far from a homebrew setting. Although, like anyone running Greyhawk, I have to make up a lot of the locations.
Contrary to what some in the OSR world might conclude, I believe 3e style D&D actually does a much better job at emulating many of the Sword and Sorcery aesthetics and assumptions than AD&D did and believe that this ruleset works well for many of the above sources I list. Many knew this when 3.0 was released, but it has been lost to time as that ruleset evolved and the internet got ahold of it.
Anyways, would love to hear from you.
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World-building: I use historical context and some geographical separation (aka continents, harsh geological features to restrict travel) along with cultural development using magic. So historical fiction.
I use more physics/science than most which leads to more realistic physical models. In turn this influences details of the cultures and mythologies that spring from belief.
This way I have a setting for writing and gaming.
Game Model: hmmm... I'm using a new homebrew model but I want it codeable for a software GM. PF1 is too simplified. I don't see people wanting to learn a complex game system, so software is the answer.
Progress & Artifacts: I am on my 4th iteration (from say 1982). Now I have a 32 tile soccer ball world map as in the 1-3rd I used mercator projections. Several docs. Writing the Basic Rules now. I have 4 main cultures, several cities and adventures from my 3rd which I'm converting. I used black body radiation to model a power curve for spells, ability scores, and wealth as they all work together. I use MITRE design to model research and some other things.
I have my own font for "elvish" and another for intelligent constructs. Sadly I'm not a ConLang person.
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Azothath wrote:
Game Model: hmmm... I'm using a new homebrew model but I want it codeable for a software GM. PF1 is too simplified.
I am unsure what this means. What is a software GM and what do you mean by codeable?
PF1 too simplified compared to what? PF1e being more complex than 3e is why the majority of our ruleset is based in 3e and 3.5 and PF1 fills in the gaps and alters things rather than takes it over completely. My group likes a lot of what PF1 brought to the table, but it is far from simplified.
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codeable means the process or ruleset is designed to be converted into a software language like C++/C# or Java.
A Software GM is a program that navigates the ruleset and produces decisions.
PF1 is simpler than D&D 3.5. I am referring to the Ruleset not classes, monsters, etc. There's the model, then the development. There were developments in PF1, mainly; grappling, making all space square, spell condition/school description rework, crafting. Later you saw expansion of afflictions, etc.
AD&D used a long-term statistical model streamlined to mostly linear curves as Gygax was familiar with actuarial tables. That doesn't mean it was precise but a bit klunky for accuracy with rough processes(initiative, THAC0, weapon speed factors, damages, etc). Much was left to Home GMs to do, thus it relied on GM design and caveat.
Some of your questions address Intellectual Property or design hallmarks. Obviously those can't be addressed in a public forum.
My boyfriend’s setting rather than my own which was used for a few homebrew campaigns. The key points being:
Broadly inspired by the early 17th century Scots/English border, so more guns than default Pathfinder and a focus on belonging to one of a number of feuding clans.
Races restricted to human, elemental-touched, half elf (‘fey-touched’) and ‘folk of the coven’ - grippli, catfolk, tengu, who were all descendants of witches’ familiars that gained sentience. Dwarves existed, but they were untrustworthy evil folk.
The world is probably not much larger than the British Isles, but with more islands under different rulers to allow for sea travel and competing naval nations.
Restricting races is something we have found really adds flavour to a world because it allows you to think about why those people and how do they relate to each other, rather than the typical menagerie of races you get in PF.
Neriathale wrote: My boyfriend’s setting rather than my own which was used for a few homebrew campaigns. The key points being:
Broadly inspired by the early 17th century Scots/English border, so more guns than default Pathfinder and a focus on belonging to one of a number of feuding clans.
Races restricted to human, elemental-touched, half elf (‘fey-touched’) and ‘folk of the coven’ - grippli, catfolk, tengu, who were all descendants of witches’ familiars that gained sentience. Dwarves existed, but they were untrustworthy evil folk.
The world is probably not much larger than the British Isles, but with more islands under different rulers to allow for sea travel and competing naval nations.
Restricting races is something we have found really adds flavour to a world because it allows you to think about why those people and how do they relate to each other, rather than the typical menagerie of races you get in PF.
Sounds flavorful. What setting does your group typically play in if not this one?
Are there any documents that could be shared about his setting?
Like, my homebrew is Pathfinder Golarion, but basically funny stuff (such as a massive war between the demons and the great old ones) happened and left its mark.
Rovagug got nearly free due to the carnage, and Golarion is kind of "accorded neutral ground", with both more stringent rules for "extraplanar behaviour" and more extraplanar influence because effing nobody trusts anyone else with Rovagugs prison.
Starfinder and the Gap gave me the idea for a post Rovagug breakout Golarion. Well, and Thundarr the Barbarian cartoon. Never did any development on that though.
I have had basically two homebrew settings which never got anywhere close to playable. The first was started, just barely, in 2e days, and the second in 3.0 but never got to the point where unique mechanics would have been introduced. The second was a generic D&D world, somewhere between Forgotten Realms and Mystara with a dash of Deathgate Cycle, though at the time I didn't realize that. We played something like two sessions before it was abandoned, though every now and then I contemplate writing a bit more but instantly ignore the idea in favor of not writing any of the other stuff I want to write.
The first is a postapocalyptic setting that is the result of how innate summoning for fiends worked back then (any newly summoned fiend could also summon creatures of their own) and the infinite number of fiends. The basic idea is that a tanar'ri and a baatezu encountered one another on some insignificant Prime world, started fighting and started summoning allies. Things got out of hand and the planet was overrun with warring fiends, leaving a desolate land that could give Athas a run for its money on how bad things were, only without psionics and more fiends. In the grand scheme of the Blood War this skirmish wasn't even a footnote, but it was the end of all the cultures on this world. The PCs would be from a secluded valley where a bunch of powerful clerics gathered and managed to keep fiends out. The resulting culture was intensely religious, intensely orderd and strict, and organized religion was dominant. I think I had recently read things like "A Canticle for Leibowitz" and "The Elventh Commandment" when designing the clerical organization. Every now and then I pull out the files and write a bit more so the project is not technically dead. More like a vaguely writhing corpse than actually alive, but not fully dead.
In both these cases if I were to actually get them to the point where I can run them, I would use PF1 because we are used to it and it does basically what I want.
My most detailed homebrew setting for PF1 was for a campaign that I called "Time of the Tarrasque." The premise was that the Tarrasque's infrequent periods of ravenous activity often reshaped kingdoms, and the very landscape, and only the greatest heroes of each generation dared face it--and its return was approaching. I intended to run the cmapaign from level 1 through level 20, with mythic rules introduced at some point along the way. But it required a massive amount of work to generate so much original content, and I burned out on the game after about 2-1/2 years (early 2017 to mid-2019), with the PCs only at 5th level.
I had been tinkering with the setting for many years before this campaign, and had been through a few iterations before it ever saw play. IIRC, I started working on it sometime during D&D 3E, so switching to PF1 wasn't too burdensome--and opened up a lot of new options as well.
One of my (rather too ambitious) goals with this setting was to have as much of it as possible being my own creation, rather than borrowing heavily from other settings or adventures, or real world cultures and mythology. I'm still very proud of what I did accomplish before I got overwhelmed. One of my successes was building a pantheon of gods from scratch, initially with the goal of covering all of the core domains and alignments with as few gods as possible (and none being standard PF gods). Groups of related gods (elements; celestial bodies; seasons; etc.) eventually became separate pantheons within the whole, and a few new gods were added along the way. I initially resisted having any of the pantheons being exclusive to any one race, so that I wouldn't need to make gods for every race. But as I fleshed things out, different races clearly would favor some pantheons over others, so became closely associated with those gods, but other races could (and often did) adopt them as patron deities, too. The only pantheon that remained primarily tied to only one race was that of the humans, which was a very late addition in the process.
In this world's history, humans had come from another continent, where they built a large empire that was ruined by a series of wars against titans. The remnants built ships to settle new lands, often coming into conflict with other peoples who were already there--elves, dwarves, giants, etc. The majority of humans retained their old gods and old, expansionist ways, while some groups broke off and made more peaceful contact with the natives, even adopting their new neighbors' religions in some cases.
I also sketched out a rough history of the world, with the migrations of various races, the rise and fall of kingdoms, and the Tarrasque's wanderings threaded through it all. Much of this grew fairly organically. Decisions about which religion a race or nation favored inspired cultural details (nonbinary, gender-changing, and poly gods made similar mortals more welcome among their worshipers). Religion often added another layer to rising conflicts, too (the "imperial" humans had bitter clashes with "heretical" humans who adopted other faiths, particularly the elemental religion that first arose among the giants, which were too much like titans to be trusted).
I had a fairly detailed Google Site that I maintained for the campaign while it was still active. That wiki was archived when Google Sites had a major overhaul some years back. I have just now re-activated it in order to share a link to it, but I have done absolutely no in-depth checking to see if anything broke in the transition.
I also have session summaries posted on my blog. This page gives link to each installment.
Tim Emrick wrote: My most detailed homebrew setting for PF1 was for a campaign that I called "Time of the Tarrasque." The premise was that the Tarrasque's infrequent periods of ravenous activity often reshaped kingdoms, and the very landscape, and only the greatest heroes of each generation dared face it--and its return was approaching. I intended to run the cmapaign from level 1 through level 20, with mythic rules introduced at some point along the way. But it required a massive amount of work to generate so much original content, and I burned out on the game after about 2-1/2 years (early 2017 to mid-2019), with the PCs only at 5th level.
I had been tinkering with the setting for many years before this campaign, and had been through a few iterations before it ever saw play. IIRC, I started working on it sometime during D&D 3E, so switching to PF1 wasn't too burdensome--and opened up a lot of new options as well.
One of my (rather too ambitious) goals with this setting was to have as much of it as possible being my own creation, rather than borrowing heavily from other settings or adventures, or real world cultures and mythology. I'm still very proud of what I did accomplish before I got overwhelmed. One of my successes was building a pantheon of gods from scratch, initially with the goal of covering all of the core domains and alignments with as few gods as possible (and none being standard PF gods). Groups of related gods (elements; celestial bodies; seasons; etc.) eventually became separate pantheons within the whole, and a few new gods were added along the way. I initially resisted having any of the pantheons being exclusive to any one race, so that I wouldn't need to make gods for every race. But as I fleshed things out, different races clearly would favor some pantheons over others, so became closely associated with those gods, but other races could (and often did) adopt them as patron deities, too. The only pantheon that remained primarily tied to only one race was that of the humans, which was a very...
This is super cool, I am going through the whole site now.
Ozreth wrote:
Sounds flavorful. What setting does your group typically play in if not this one?
Are there any documents that could be shared about his setting?
For PF1 we mostly play APs, so standard Golarion. Otherwise (depending a bit on group as we have overlapping ones), we use our own system, written by abovementioned boyfriend, with world background being fleshed out by multiple GMs
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