I'm new to DMing so I started with the D&D 5e Essentials Kit, but I couldn't resist tinkering. I've basically ditched the main story and have just been trying out different ideas, using the town of Phandalin as the setting. And sometimes I remember there was a dragon... It's a bit messy, but the group knew going into it that this was an experimental campaign while I learned how to DM and they relearned how to play (we hadn't played since before COVID).
But I've begun working on a nautical, pirate themed campaign for our next one. Many years ago, for fun, I started making maps of this place called "The Greschen Isles". I even started writing a short story set in that world, but it never really went anywhere. It was basically just my first attempt at making a map. But when I got the idea to do a sea-faring adventure, I decided to take that map and some other island-centric ones and combine them into a new map, which doesn't really have a name yet.
It's all very much a work-in-progress, seeing as how I only started on it a week or so ago. I've mostly taken to drawing islands and then coming up with ideas for them later. Like, for example, the lazily named "Haresehead Island" is going to be a community of Harengon simply because the island ended up looking a little bit like a rabbit. Not the most creative thing, but given that one of my players is a Harengon, it could be fun when the time comes.
I haven't really figured out what the overarching plot of the setting will be though yet. I know that Lehren City will be the starting point, as it's clearly the political power house of the area, given that it controls most of the islands in the Bay of Lehren. Maybe some sort of quest to explore and document each island...or just keep it loose where the group is just a crew of pirates and I do an "Island of the month" approach where each session is a different island that they can choose to befriend, plunder, or simply explore. I'm sure if I keep drawing islands it'll come to me :P
So it's not one I created but I've modified some of the lore, tidied up the main story, added quests, NPC's and monsters in to the Thylea setting used in Odyssey of the Dragonlords.
Its an amazing campaign and the setting is wonderful but there's definitely errors and inconsistencies throughout the campaign that need ironed out and I think it probably could've done with another pass or two by the editor before it was released.
I tend to create a new world for each campaign, but the one that's most uniquely mine is a sort of Shadowrun/cyberpunk hybrid that I've created for use with DnD's 5e rules. Perhaps because this one is the most uniquely mine (and thus there's always more things I feel I need to fill in), we've barely ever played in it.
I'm currently running my first proper campaign, and I've made a custom world for it called Enceladus. It's a pirate setting and the world is a vast ocean with many islands spread throughout. My players are sailing with Captain Grom in pursuit of the 7 Orbs of Power, aka the 7 Orbs of Namissual, which grant a wish when collected together. The players found a magical map which gives them riddles one by one leading to each orb. When they found the map, they also found a suicide note from the last person to have their wish granted (around 30 years ago, players don'thave this info). They learned that he and his wife were unable to conceive, so they sought out the orbs to have a child. The wife died in childbirth and genie who is bound by these 7 orbs saw this as a potential opportunity to escape, so he claimed the child (a water genasi) as his progeny. Unknown to the players, this child was raised to become a ruthless pirate instructed to seek out and slay anyone searching for the orbs, but more importantly she is to try and collect the orbs herself to use them to free the genie. They players just acquired the first orb last session by defeating a medusa and freeing her from her curse. The next orb is held by an undead pirate captain named Morgrim in a sunken ship graveyard. Feel free to ask any questions, it may help me develop the world more.
I used to have one, but eventually came to the conclusion that creating a setting is a worldbuilding exercise that doesn't help with running a campaign all that much. Lately I've been building my campaigns by starting with a few one-page dungeons and doing whatever work is needed to fit them together.
I work at a Elementary School and do a homemade ttrpg with them.
Recently I've been playing Starfield so I thought I might as well use that world and lore since it's fresh in my mind.
It's been great. Makes improv very easy since you got a lot to draw from. Plus it helps that they don't know anything about the world so they get to discover it as we play.
And since I don't use guns in my campaigns it's easy to change all the guns to starwars style blasters to make it kid friendly.
Magical school residence hall where the real life RAs get to play Adventurer RAs for the night (the team loves it)
Dystopian Narnia where the Pevensies were betrayed by Mr Tumnus and it has been a thousand years of winter. I had plans for it to expand to other childhood fantasy stories gone wrong after they beat Queen Jados via the rings and hopping into the puddles in the wood between the worlds.
My homebrew system is called trailgoblins. It’s played on long hikes while the players are traveling through wilderness in real life.
To play, choose a loadout before you begin your hike. Spear and shotgun is popular. Then sometime during your hike (either from a timer or upon arriving at a spot that looks good for a fight) the players roll for type of monster and number, and also the monster’s disposition and tactics.
Each fight usually only lasts a few minutes. But huge set pieces isn’t the point. It’s attrition. Once I played on a solo three day hike through the Santa Cruz mountains. By the final day “my character” was down to 3 hp and had nothing left but a broken sword. Then three hobgoblins appeared on the trail ahead and I rushed heedlessly to my death.
Sometimes in my hikes I like the structure a narrative like trailgoblins provides.
There's two settings I've been working on and I've kept them open ended enough to allow for any sort of story or game types.
The main one is Enundra. It's a super earth that suffered so many apocalyptic events, the planet has split into pieces and is held together by magical laylines, the roots of a moon sized tree and the full attention of a few gods. There's stable chunks like Tegrin that's good for DnD/PF games, but there's also the magicless Boiling Seas that we use for steampunk/airship stories, the endless battle for Shorgraf that we've played war games on and plenty of other things we've shoehorned in.
The other one is Weird World. It started off as a joke game we played when players were missing important sessions but it turned into a setting we wanted to explore. It's a chaotic version of earth where every fiction is real and players can be/do anything. Well, anything so long as they can sell the logic to everyone else and follow their own rules. Do you want to play a 5e tech druid, or a Call of Cthulhu style flat-earth investigator, or a Ravenclaw cyberpunk or an uber driver with a tardis? It's all allowed and it's glorious.
Last custom setting I ran was a "paranormal investigators in the '30s" storyline using the Savage Worlds system. Was very careful to let the players anchor key historical events and locations, and then diverge from there.
The absolute best feeling was when I could guide the story in a way that the characters' actions created events that the players didn't know actually happened, and that local urban legends contain the supernatural elements.
Example: they chase an arcane body-hopping evil down the Florida Keys, culminating in a mad gunfight against cultists. They finally force the evil "into the open" by killing its last host in a graveyard, where there's nobody to hop to. Big storm, rumbling ground, and the living dead erupt from the soil. Three waves of combat (to give the dice-rollers some fun), with the storm worsening each time. They finally vanquish the big bad, and the storm essentially wipes the island into the ocean. The survival part of the story provided an epilogue.
It was about a week later that the players learned about the Labour Day storm of 1935 and the associated urban legends.
My campaign setting was basically 1990s United States. The game was Delta Green/Call of Cthulhu. So yeah, not original at all for this game. But it was fun, you can put almost anything in a world like that.
Mid fantasy world that exists over top a super high fantasy/tech that was wiped out ages ago. As players find and figure out more of the old world stuff the chances of the things that wiped it out waking up increase.
I'm new to DMing so I started with the D&D 5e Essentials Kit, but I couldn't resist tinkering. I've basically ditched the main story and have just been trying out different ideas, using the town of Phandalin as the setting. And sometimes I remember there was a dragon... It's a bit messy, but the group knew going into it that this was an experimental campaign while I learned how to DM and they relearned how to play (we hadn't played since before COVID).
But I've begun working on a nautical, pirate themed campaign for our next one. Many years ago, for fun, I started making maps of this place called "The Greschen Isles". I even started writing a short story set in that world, but it never really went anywhere. It was basically just my first attempt at making a map. But when I got the idea to do a sea-faring adventure, I decided to take that map and some other island-centric ones and combine them into a new map, which doesn't really have a name yet.
It's all very much a work-in-progress, seeing as how I only started on it a week or so ago. I've mostly taken to drawing islands and then coming up with ideas for them later. Like, for example, the lazily named "Haresehead Island" is going to be a community of Harengon simply because the island ended up looking a little bit like a rabbit. Not the most creative thing, but given that one of my players is a Harengon, it could be fun when the time comes.
I haven't really figured out what the overarching plot of the setting will be though yet. I know that Lehren City will be the starting point, as it's clearly the political power house of the area, given that it controls most of the islands in the Bay of Lehren. Maybe some sort of quest to explore and document each island...or just keep it loose where the group is just a crew of pirates and I do an "Island of the month" approach where each session is a different island that they can choose to befriend, plunder, or simply explore. I'm sure if I keep drawing islands it'll come to me :P
So it's not one I created but I've modified some of the lore, tidied up the main story, added quests, NPC's and monsters in to the Thylea setting used in Odyssey of the Dragonlords.
Its an amazing campaign and the setting is wonderful but there's definitely errors and inconsistencies throughout the campaign that need ironed out and I think it probably could've done with another pass or two by the editor before it was released.
I tend to create a new world for each campaign, but the one that's most uniquely mine is a sort of Shadowrun/cyberpunk hybrid that I've created for use with DnD's 5e rules. Perhaps because this one is the most uniquely mine (and thus there's always more things I feel I need to fill in), we've barely ever played in it.
I'm currently running my first proper campaign, and I've made a custom world for it called Enceladus. It's a pirate setting and the world is a vast ocean with many islands spread throughout. My players are sailing with Captain Grom in pursuit of the 7 Orbs of Power, aka the 7 Orbs of Namissual, which grant a wish when collected together. The players found a magical map which gives them riddles one by one leading to each orb. When they found the map, they also found a suicide note from the last person to have their wish granted (around 30 years ago, players don'thave this info). They learned that he and his wife were unable to conceive, so they sought out the orbs to have a child. The wife died in childbirth and genie who is bound by these 7 orbs saw this as a potential opportunity to escape, so he claimed the child (a water genasi) as his progeny. Unknown to the players, this child was raised to become a ruthless pirate instructed to seek out and slay anyone searching for the orbs, but more importantly she is to try and collect the orbs herself to use them to free the genie. They players just acquired the first orb last session by defeating a medusa and freeing her from her curse. The next orb is held by an undead pirate captain named Morgrim in a sunken ship graveyard. Feel free to ask any questions, it may help me develop the world more.
I used to have one, but eventually came to the conclusion that creating a setting is a worldbuilding exercise that doesn't help with running a campaign all that much. Lately I've been building my campaigns by starting with a few one-page dungeons and doing whatever work is needed to fit them together.
I work at a Elementary School and do a homemade ttrpg with them.
Recently I've been playing Starfield so I thought I might as well use that world and lore since it's fresh in my mind.
It's been great. Makes improv very easy since you got a lot to draw from. Plus it helps that they don't know anything about the world so they get to discover it as we play.
And since I don't use guns in my campaigns it's easy to change all the guns to starwars style blasters to make it kid friendly.
Magical school residence hall where the real life RAs get to play Adventurer RAs for the night (the team loves it)
Dystopian Narnia where the Pevensies were betrayed by Mr Tumnus and it has been a thousand years of winter. I had plans for it to expand to other childhood fantasy stories gone wrong after they beat Queen Jados via the rings and hopping into the puddles in the wood between the worlds.
My homebrew system is called trailgoblins. It’s played on long hikes while the players are traveling through wilderness in real life.
To play, choose a loadout before you begin your hike. Spear and shotgun is popular. Then sometime during your hike (either from a timer or upon arriving at a spot that looks good for a fight) the players roll for type of monster and number, and also the monster’s disposition and tactics.
Each fight usually only lasts a few minutes. But huge set pieces isn’t the point. It’s attrition. Once I played on a solo three day hike through the Santa Cruz mountains. By the final day “my character” was down to 3 hp and had nothing left but a broken sword. Then three hobgoblins appeared on the trail ahead and I rushed heedlessly to my death.
Sometimes in my hikes I like the structure a narrative like trailgoblins provides.
There's two settings I've been working on and I've kept them open ended enough to allow for any sort of story or game types.
The main one is Enundra. It's a super earth that suffered so many apocalyptic events, the planet has split into pieces and is held together by magical laylines, the roots of a moon sized tree and the full attention of a few gods. There's stable chunks like Tegrin that's good for DnD/PF games, but there's also the magicless Boiling Seas that we use for steampunk/airship stories, the endless battle for Shorgraf that we've played war games on and plenty of other things we've shoehorned in.
The other one is Weird World. It started off as a joke game we played when players were missing important sessions but it turned into a setting we wanted to explore. It's a chaotic version of earth where every fiction is real and players can be/do anything. Well, anything so long as they can sell the logic to everyone else and follow their own rules. Do you want to play a 5e tech druid, or a Call of Cthulhu style flat-earth investigator, or a Ravenclaw cyberpunk or an uber driver with a tardis? It's all allowed and it's glorious.
Last custom setting I ran was a "paranormal investigators in the '30s" storyline using the Savage Worlds system. Was very careful to let the players anchor key historical events and locations, and then diverge from there.
The absolute best feeling was when I could guide the story in a way that the characters' actions created events that the players didn't know actually happened, and that local urban legends contain the supernatural elements.
Example: they chase an arcane body-hopping evil down the Florida Keys, culminating in a mad gunfight against cultists. They finally force the evil "into the open" by killing its last host in a graveyard, where there's nobody to hop to. Big storm, rumbling ground, and the living dead erupt from the soil. Three waves of combat (to give the dice-rollers some fun), with the storm worsening each time. They finally vanquish the big bad, and the storm essentially wipes the island into the ocean. The survival part of the story provided an epilogue.
It was about a week later that the players learned about the Labour Day storm of 1935 and the associated urban legends.
My campaign setting was basically 1990s United States. The game was Delta Green/Call of Cthulhu. So yeah, not original at all for this game. But it was fun, you can put almost anything in a world like that.
Mid fantasy world that exists over top a super high fantasy/tech that was wiped out ages ago. As players find and figure out more of the old world stuff the chances of the things that wiped it out waking up increase.