How important is geography to building a world for DnD

How important is geography to building a world for DnD

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It needs to make sense or the more perceptive players will bombard you with questions and have their immersion broken.

Not even remotely.
If your setting is high magic, then you should focus on making it weird as fuck.
And while I agree that Coasts are great, fucking everything always happens around coasts, so try to remember to put interesting things ON THE FUCKING CONTINENTS.

Also: if you don't have at least *a few* floating Islands/wandering land masses, you're doing it wrong, in my opinion.

Depends on your players.

Some players don't give a fuck, other players start asking questions and not getting immersed.

Start with the province, then the country, then the continent. Build outwards, each level takes a lot more thought then the last.

The more prep-work, the better the end result, the happier your gamers.

Yeah, thanks that is in the DM's guide, I only have the upper left continent

I will say that weirdness needs to have a theme and/or a purpose.

I think this applies to most things

Yes and no.
It's always good to have the weirdness be useful, but I wouldn't suggest trying to actually make things "thematic".
True, that is often the case with commercial settings, but it's one of the aspects that bothers me.

I don't like that those mountains are "Fantasy Transylvania" and that N-E country is "!Russia". While these give an immediate feel to what kind of adventures you can have there, it also makes the world feel very artificial.

I prefer to just make things bizarre and non-conforming to realisitc expectations.
" If the Mountains move every sunset, and but this has the effect of draining magic in the region, what does that do?"

Flesh it out then OP.

Put in your mountains first. Rivers next, rivers drain down. Generally, land to the west of mountains is fertile and lush, to the east, dry and desert like. Rivers carve valleys, and empty into lakes. Some flow to the sea. Where are the ice caps? Did some lakes start from glacial melt? If so, the land around them is probably swampy, but further away, a bit hilly.

The interior of your continent, depending on size, is probably a prairie (large continent) or a forest (small continent).

If your mountains are granite, lots of crevasses, glacial caves. If your substructure is sedimentary, a lot of karst cavern structures (limestone caves)

What else are you looking for?

Yes, i am a geography major.

Thanks user do you have any resource I could look over?

My point is that there always needs to be a reason for weirdness. It's jarring if something seems out of place and there's no reason for it to be there.

Oh, I see what you mean.
I also disagree completely.

It's just geography. Maybe in the begining of time a nano-second lifespanned monster the size of a galazi sneezed and that's why there's a moon made of slime orbiting the planet.
Maybe some other shit.

But, at the end of the day, it's just geography and nobody knows why it *shouldn't* be the case.
If you want to explain to players why a landmass formed one way and not the other, you of course have the option to do so, but the reason it happend is completely unimportant, unless your adventure specifically deals with it.

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Danke Herr

I guess I just can't think like that. If something is irrelevant, why include it in the first place, you know?

>It's just geography

That's where you're wrong, the geography effects almost everything to do with the history, culture and current state of the world.

That's why I am sperging our about this

The same reason good movies have dialogue that isn't related to the plot. It adds character, the little details help make something seemed more fleshed out that in it.

My case is for high magic settings only, though.
There is this tendency to go "Age of Hyperborea" on settings and have them be quasi-believable and realistic, if flawed. But if magic is an inherent part of the world, shouldn't it also affect how things where formed from the beginnint?

I understand and am not suggesting weird geography shouldn't have an impact, I'm saying you don't *need* a reason to have something cool just exist. It exists, the cool thing is there and now the people of Pautua have to wear bags of sand for balast when they move across their island or else the weird gravity fucks with them.

I absolutely think it should affect how things work, I just don't like it when one place is the designated "Dark, scary lair" or some other city is where the good people come from. I similarly don't think the geography has to fit some kind of theme or serve the story in some way.

If your weird thing is caused by something, and the players can interact with it, then it ceases to be weird and becomes a system they can exploit (which is itself not a bad idea, but not what we're talking about right now).
If your players can't interact with it, then you get the Lady of Pain arguments when it comes to Planescape.

I think we basically agree with each other at this point, I'm just not communicating very well. I mention theme if only to have people avoid putting very disparate elements next to each other without any bleed over.

One of the least important things to think about when building a world.

If you get it wrong it can seriously mess your setting up, so it's not something to ignore. Thankfully, unless you start actually changing how the world works people will have already built in preconceptions to work off so you won't need to do much.

Only if someone actually cares about climatology in your playgroup.

You think astronomers get fucked over 40k?

Not very. Just avoid obvious mistakes like rivers that go uphill and shit.

What's more important is to have a variety of places to visit or set encounters and some overarching "theme" for the world.

You mean your DM doesn't track heat/cold exhaustion?