All right, Veeky Forums I need help building a fantasy world for a 5e D&D campign, as an added bonus, pretty much everybody who wants to play is completely new to ttrpgs, myself included, will you please help me build the framework?
Google doc is here
docs.google.com
Go here, no reason to create a thread.
I don'tknow how helpful this is but remember that you can get goofy and have fun. In my setting the fey are a displaced people who the "civilized races" banished to a pocket dimension.
Which is all well and good but it's been over 300 years and when my players accidentally opened a portal and the Wild Hunt came through it was a bunch of weirdly attractive people in fantasy disco gear blasting strange horns, two stepping and boogieing through the streets, and running people through with polearms.
I did nobody responded there for over an hour. no help is yet forthcoming.
OP here is a good map maker inkarnate.com
It's easy to use and fun to work with
Here's my map that I am currently working on
pls donut steel
Is it a free tool?
Yep, 100% free
You should try asking specific questions.
A question like "help me build a world" is way too general for anyone to really help you, particularly in a /wbg/ thread.
Maybe try thinking of some things you'd like to have in your world, or think of things you have trouble doing like "How do I make realistic-looking continents?" or stuff like that.
At least have an idea of what kind of feeling you're going for, because for example for some people is great but other people want nothing to do with that kind of stuff.
>You should try asking specific questions.
This.
I'm happy to spend all day throwing ideas around, but it depends what you're looking for.
Elves that walk on the sky? Continents that randomly teleport without anyone noticing until they try to travel from one to another? Trees that burn forever due to combustible sap? A BBEG whose motive for destroying your home town is it's the source of a devastating plague and it's the only way to save the world?
I don't have much of anything fleshed out even ideas, thats why i made the thread i've got a week to make this and still need to talk to everyone who's gonna play and build their characters and so on.
.
But alright what do you think of Unified elves, No Lolth, but Drow still exists and while they still prefer dark places they are surface dwellers primarily in the same nation/City, the rest of elven-kind lives in. What do you think? Can i do this better?
>i've got a week to make this
You're going to want some small, bottom-up worldbuilding. Forget the world, forget continents. Your players are going to start out in a region. Flesh out that region. What do you want in it?
Nearly anything you can think of can easily be placed in a larger world later on and still make sense.
>No Lolth, but Drow still exists and while they still prefer dark places they are surface dwellers primarily in the same nation/City, the rest of elven-kind lives in
Then what's the point? This just makes them elves with a different paint job.
At least figure out what kind of feeling you're going for.
Serious and realistic? Silly and balls-out? Heroic fantasy in a standard high-fantasy setting? Do you value internal consistency? Do you want the world to obey our physical rules or do you want your world to be a flat disk on the back of three elephants and floating continents?
"Help me build a world" is just too broad for anyone to do anything. You need to get started.
To help you get started, answer this question: "Why am I going to all the trouble of building my own world instead of using an existing one?"
Also:
>a week
That's a really short amount of time to build an interesting world. Some people have been building the same world since they started doodling in their math notebook in school.
Best advice here is to forget building a world and focus on getting a region for the players to use. Answer questions as they come up, don't try to flesh out the entire world.
>pretty much everybody who wants to play is completely new to ttrpgs, myself included
Go play the 5e starter set. Use the premade characters. Trust me on this.
Make your own world after that, if you want to.
So that drow aren't pieces of shit in this universe, i never said, i wouldn't make them have a propensity towards devious cunning, and some mild sadism, or that they'd worship the same gods as the rest of the elves.
They don't want an existing one, or at least the host of the game doesn't, still have to check with all the rest of my players, we're all new. i'm working on cultures in broad terms leaving refinement up to the players at the moment. I will build a Starting town and the 2 or 3 major cities within a few hundred miles of that town, I'm just kind of the only who has the books, and the only one willing and able to DM.
You still haven't told us what you're looking for.
>i never said, i wouldn't make them have a propensity towards devious cunning, and some mild sadism, or that they'd worship the same gods as the rest of the elves.
Why haven't they either been assimilated or driven out? Why are devious sadists just sort of tolerated?
It sounds like you'd be better off taking an existing setting and putting stuff into it rather than building from scratch.
What are you playing, 5e? Just make it Faerun, Forgotten Realms, add a twist, add a plot, sorted.
It sounds like you're giving yourself a massive project with no real idea what to do with it.
World generator:
donjon.bin.sh
Civ generator:
donjon.bin.sh
Adventure generator:
donjon.bin.sh
Have a blast.
Without any input from your side, randomly generated material is as good as anything we might offer.
What kinds of culture would you use for the Drow with no Lolth? Moon elves are usually Nomadic forest dwellers, I want to keep them still about half divided, half unified so that we have Mon elf clans in a great forest.
I've got ideas, it's just, I've always had troubles putting them to paper and I work best under a crunch.
Did I say those were their only traits or that, that was the way the majority was? nope. Devious cunning, to me would mean to a natural talent for clever tactics/strategy, and mercantilism, and criminality. Full-blown sadism is rare, most don't have it as a trait, but it's just barely common enough that other species think they're generally cruel, because Drow warriors tend to be bloodthirsty, and somewhat cruel, not usually overly so, but still noticeable.
It was requested that I build my own.
>It was requested that I build my own.
By people who have no idea about the amount of work this actually involves.
Thank you, good sir.
>Did I say those were their only traits or that, that was the way the majority was?
You're barely saying anything, that's the whole problem.
I'm not even sure why a supposedly original setting needs to have Drow and Moon elves.
>They don't want an existing one
Find out why. Knowing what they don't like about a world can help you build your own.
Also, find out what races and classes the players want to play and focus on those.
Now, some advice from someone who has been in a similar situation (although I had been working on a world for a long time so I just had to make it work in the system):
How frequent are the sessions? Since you're all new, I can almost guarantee that you won't leave the starting town the first session, maybe even for a couple of sessions. Prepare a quest or two for the starting area. If they ask for details you haven't though about, say that they have to find out themselves in game or think them up on the spot (IMPORTANT: Write down everything you say about your world during the session, your memory will fail you).
Let your players do some work, give them a few details on their chosen race, make them write backstories and integrate the details they come up with into your world. They will also ask you concrete questions, coming up with answers will flesh out the world.
Random generators are your friends in your case.
Most importantly: Focus on what the players will see, hear and interact with. You don't have the time to waste it on stuff that doesn't directly affect the players yet, save it for later.
Remember: Your world doesn't have to be ready for the session next week. What the players don't know can't hurt you.
You have a point, but I also said they're family, and they know what i'm capable of, i'm just trying to get some of this done now.
Give me a moment to write up some and I will give you some guidelines, this is daunting especially for someone who has never played or DM'ed, D&D. as for the second one We're using the Players handbook as a base, and they want the standard races, why not include the subraces?
As for what I'd like, throw me ideas on how to make goblins giants orcs and all the other monstrous sapients typically encountered, more civilized, but not so much so that the other races have integrated them into society?
Which race would you use as a Precursor civilization to explain the ruins that dot the landscape, and the ancient tombs they will eventually raid?
As for the Elves, I Want them to be unified as one whole race, with some groups among the Moon Elves and Dark Elves and even a few High elves branch out, and create small settlements or wander the beautiful places in nature as a group, Is this a good idea? if you don't think that would work, how would i improve it?
So far it's just one asking for that but she's both hosting the games, and my aunt, and the kicker is she's pretty crazy, but I'm going to get them all together today, to build characters, and have them help me build the world through their backstories, but thank you for the advice.
>crazy aunt
>hosting
Boy this is going to go well.
Best of luck dude.
Haha, yeah well she can be a pain in the ass when she doesn't get her way but usually, is fairly tolerable, Bipolar type disorders really don't lend to stable individuals.
Fuck you. There's no fucking rule that all discussions of anything must be regulated to the most relevant general. OP is free to make as many fucking threads he wants about anything he wants.
Shit like this is why people think generals are cancer.
Chill, and read the thread before you post, friend, I wasn't offended and explained why I made this he either didn't respond or understood and kept contributing.
>Running a game on demand for your bipolar aunt
Holy fucking shit. This is going to go so wrong, so fast.
>why not include the subraces?
Because they're pretty setting-specific.
You can take the drow out of the setting, but you can't take the setting out of the drow.
She's on her meds, and her husband and children, one 21 the other 14 both want to play as well as my brother who's 22, I didn't ask for it but it's what I've got, so I'm gonna do my best, and discuss this with everyone.
You can, you just have to be creative, and it was just an idea, friend, not a definite thing.
I'm having a hard time figuring out why entirely new players would demand an original setting.
It's all going to be completely new to them either way. The only difference is that an existing setting will have years of work put into it, while the original setting they're asking for will have been shat out in a week.
It's important in general, but I think in your case it's going to be more important. Also unrelated worldbuilding but still should be said in this case.
Make sure to discuss what everyone expects out of the game and what's everyone's tolerance. Also discuss limits, find out if there's anything anybody (your aunt, for example) is uncomfortable with (torture of NPCs, killing of children, spiders, etc.) and make sure to avoid that.
You just have to do more work than would be necessary if you
a) used the setting they belong to
b) used original subraces
You've got a week, and you seem determined to do everything the hard way.
Just go easy on yourself, ffs.
I don't plan on building all of it, in a week, just wanted some advice on building worlds and ideas in a more active thread that /wbg/ and to share my ideas and have them criticized and improved if possible, the only thing I really want to get done is general cultural behaviors of each race, whether sub-races or not. Like I said, I'm getting them all together today, as soon as my aunt wakes up, she's getting everybody together whether she likes it or not. I'm not fucking suicidal, and I know a world takes weeks, months, even years, of effort to build, tweak, and perfect, regardless of whether or not PC's are running around.
Use an existing setting and tell your nutty aunt it's original.
Bingo-bango.
I'm gonna do exactly that, user.
No.
Your funeral.
>the only thing I really want to get done is general cultural behaviors of each race
frathwiki.com
Thank you, I'll bookmark it and fill it out as things become more developed.
As someone who was in exactly the same situation as you, new DM, new PCs, Creating a world, i found it invaluable to draw out a large world map (in my situation its was a prison island) then plot a few main cities, some smaller cities and then just a bunch of generic points of interest (i used black dots so i can place more in pen later) on the map that can represent anything from villages to ruins to camps etc. we are slowly filling it out as we go.
make a reason for you players to be there and where they will start, then let them go free.
have a set quest or two for your story line (mine is escaping the island even tho no one has ever escaped), make a few generic quests (dungeon crawls and the such) that can be adapted on the fly to fit a situation (in case they don't want to play out our shitty ideas)
BANG there you go, got yourself a campaign and a world with only a few hours effort.
So far its working out very well for us, especially since the majority of my players are female trained actors irl, so to be fair its mostly social interactions over combat but maybe this will work well for you.
Thanks for the advice, doing that right now actually, with that map tool the user above Linked to.
awesome, that's what i used, i assumed you would have taken one look at that and went with it.
one last thing.... don't over plan, i planned out a lot of quests and npc.
probably used about 0.1%, trust in your ability to come up with things on the spot and steal from popular culture when ever you need too.
Have fun man.
You could give them castes or specific specializations. An user a while back spoke of his gestapo drow that I though were pretty cool
I'm also making a setting in a week, but it's fine. I'm just designing a city and the rest of the world's details can be left vague. Putting my own spin on 5 fairly standard fantasy races, coming up with a few city districts and pre-quest activities, and then designing the dungeon under the city people will explore. Using a simple d10 system. No problems
If you're totally new to this stuff, honestly just use a preset from somewhere, it'll be good practice and then you can work out what you liked and what you want to improve. Just keep player expectations somewhat low
How's this for a starting area guys?