Worldbuilding Blog Episode 1

I discovered Dungeons & Dragons late in life. I was 31 when I played my first game and I was instantly in love. I read the 5E Player’s Handbook, Dungeon Master’s Guide, and Monster Manual cover to cover several times over. After years of being bored by computer games and PC-RPGs with no sense of choice, I had finally found what I was looking for. Almost immediately after starting, our dungeon master moved and we were left without. Being emboldened by the kind of courage that is only found in sophomoric fanatics, I volunteered myself as the new DM. It went…OK.

I took about a month to put together a campaign in such painstaking detail that I gave name and ages for dozens of NPCs that were simply in the background. I charted possible choices the group might make and how that would affect the quest line. I calculated XP for battles and play tested them myself. As any DM reading this knows, very little of that made it into the campaign. As always, the PCs decided to break the game in ways I couldn’t have imagined. They weren’t defying me out of spite or intentionally trying to game break. They simply had their own ideas of how to go about things.

I quickly realized that I had made two major mistakes, only one of which could be corrected: 1) I had spent far too much time thinking about what the PCs might do, when the truth is no one could ever know, and 2) I had chosen to use a campaign setting that had immense amounts of preexisting lore, Neverwinter. I had taken characters and places from the PC-RPGs I knew and placed them in the world. However, I found myself caught in a web of information overload that prevented my NPCs from taking the actions the story would benefit from.

I decided right then and there that I would not run another full campaign in a setting that I couldn’t be in control of.

Not being a person of half measure, I decided I would create my own custom planet; complete with ecosystems, trade winds, fault lines, the works. Why? Well that’s the best part:

I didn’t want a world that mimicked our own. I didn’t want nations and cultures that were just carbon copies of our world’s nations and culture with a few added monsters. No. I wanted a complete unique world with people that grew and changed and warred and developed technology and died and started again in ways that we didn’t. Thus, Revel was born.

This blog will be my diary of making this world and will hopefully serve to help others to create their own worlds. I’m certainly no expert on world building, and by no means do I know all that much about climates or cultures. However, they say you write what you know, and if you build it from the ground up, who could know it better?

#Revel #worldbuilding #other