When I began to create my first homegrown campaign world I made a lot of mistakes that could have been avoided. I made too much work for myself too early. By following the guidelines and suggestions that I set forth in these articles you should be able to avoid those same mistakes. Now, I am on my third campaign world, and it has been in existence for over a year now and is still going strong. There is a lot of room for my party to explore, a lot of intrigue for them to investigate, a lot of wrongs for them to right and a lot of mysteries for them to solve.

These are the things that make homegrown setting so much fun for PCs and for DMs. Everything is new, everything is fresh, and the PCs are the only heroes driving the storyline. The party doesn’t have to deal with the shadows of people like Raistlin, Drizzt, and Elminster. They only have to compete with each other and the NPCs that they come along with are all new and surprising. The players can’t help but react naturally to each person they encounter because they have not read about them in some book or played against them in another game.

In these articles we will break down the creation of a campaign world into easy and manageable steps that any DM can follow and use to build their own unique world. I will guide you through the creation of a campaign world and how I came about with the ideas and knowledge I needed to design the world. But first we must establish a guideline, or a DM Rule for you to follow through these first few steps.

#1. DO NOT overreach yourself. By this I mean, start small. Create only what you need at that time, everything else will come with time. Each of us has a real life and we cannot allow the creative process to overwhelm us. I have seen too many projects die because the creator tried to take on too much. Now that this rule has been set, lets move on to a second rule.

#2. Gaming Operations Director. This is you. You are G.O.D. and have absolute authority in your world. The rules of physics, natural law, and player egos do not matter here. What you decide and declare matters and that is all. I would love to give credit for this acronym to the person who shared it with me, but I speak with so many different DMs every day and I cannot remember which one of them came up with this one. Now that we have some rules, lets break one of them.

We need to break the first rule to get ourselves started, and in doing so we will get the ball rolling for our imaginations. The first task is what makes your world different? What is the big deal about your world? Do giant dinosaurs rule your world? Do the elves of your world enslave the other races? Is the surface of your world a wasteland and everyone lives underground? Do you have major religions that are in constant competition with one another? This last is what my current campaign world deals with, four major religions devoted to the alignment axis that struggle with each other in epic ways. However, for the purpose of these articles we will deal with a different idea, let say that the surface of your world is uninhabitable and all the races live below ground.

As you can see this brings up many other questions. What happened to the surface? Can no one live there? How did all the surface races adapt? How did the subterranean races deal with this encroachment on their territory? There are probably many other questions that we will not answer at this time. But now we know a little about what we are doing and can go on from here. From here there is much work to be done and to be able to keep track of it you will need to be prepared.

To keep track of my campaign I have a three-ring binder devoted to the campaign world. Inside this binder I keep a notebook that I can write any inspirations or ideas that I have so that I can develop them later on when I am actively working on my campaign. Also there are sections for maps, adventures, PCs, NPCs, organizations and any miscellaneous thing I dream up. I would suggest that you also develop a system for keeping your world straight. As often you produce so much information that it is difficult to keep track of it yourself.

Now that you have a hook to work with and a binder set up to keep control of your ideas you are ready to move on. So, next month we will begin to cover developing the background of your world and setting a solid edifice for the rest of your world to rest upon.



John "Calitrojan" Sansom