Setting up your first homebrew campaign can be a huge step in a dungeon masters set of abilities. You no longer had a publisher to fall back on if you need information. Everything you are creating comes from your brain! Which can be a scary thing, believe me, I know it!
When I start creating a new campaign out comes the notepads, graph paper, and colored pencils. However, I just found a great website that really helps me out when I’m keeping track of everything. It’s called Lore20.com and I’m happy to say that I have an account there and I’m using it constantly as I create me world.
Now, I’m not paid by them as a matter of fact I’m paying them to use the site. There is a free option but the paid option gives you a little more of an enhanced experience without any of the ads. I used it in the free mode for
months and it worked great!
I’m actually working with the team to add more functionality that I think would be useful.
Back to the topic at hand though. Creating a new world takes a lot of effort and time commitment from you, the dungeon master. You need to create the town where the players will put their characters into. There are NPC’s that need to be created. You need to figure out what the main bad guy is working on doing int he world, and how he’s going to do it! There’s a lot to think about, but let me give you some idea of how I work through each part.
The first thing I do is decide what type of village I’m creating for the players to appear in. My favorite is to add an ocean to one of the shores, this gives you the opportunity to have some sea faring adventures. I add some mountains and a forest for more bad guys. Maybe a swamp is in another part of the world close to them. oh, and definitely a couple of ruins sprinkled in for fun!
This gives you possibilities for many different types of adventures. You always will have a way to have a monster of the week that the bad guy is throwing at the players to slow them down. But each of these monsters could possibly let slip a little of the main bad guys plans each adventure.
So we have the map sort of created. The town needs to be populated with inns, shops, and whatever you like. I like to add a few different bars/inns that offer different quality of living conditions. This was the players can see themselves moving up in the world as thy go to different inns.
I like to throw in a blacksmith and a common goods store so that the players have a place to spend their money. I think an underground gambling den is a fun idea also.
I’ll continue this in a Part 2 soon.