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Nerdarchy > Dungeons & Dragons  > Era of Digital D&D Homebrew and Worldbuilding

Era of Digital D&D Homebrew and Worldbuilding

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Over the last few years Dungeons & Dragons has started to evolve into the digital landscape. It started briefly with fourth edition D&D with the hope people could game over farther distances but the project was never completed. Games can now be played online with people across the globe thanks to programs like Fantasy Grounds and websites like Roll20. Today I want to look some of the tools that have come to us for worldbuilding and designing homebrew games. Since Critical Role has become a flagship for geekdom, homebrew games have become more and more popular. Here are a few sites and programs that can really help ease most burdens in the world building process.

Thor D&D worldbuilding

Worldbuilding in World Anvil

First up let’s look at World Anvil. This is probably the newest site on the list but the load of homebrew content you can build is astounding. World Anvil is a wiki style world designer that lets you build settings for D&D, as well as many other game settings. The site lets you work on building specialty items, species, geography, natural law, ethnicity, build time lines and host maps just to name a few options. The site has its own Discord community to help budding creators and offers a myriad of options.

There are a few down sides though. Due to the site being under development there are a few unfinished things. The character section doesn’t let you build stat blocks in it but does let you copy stats from other sources. This may sound minor but for me this was a bit irritating. Secondly it is a free with subscription option. I don’t mind subscriptions usually, but I didn’t find the difference in what you got for signing up was an enormous difference to what you get for free. As the site expands and develops more I would expect changes. However, it’s still early on.

All said and done the site offers you a significant amount of detail work to be put into your game world. I’m really looking forward to watching this site grow and the Discord guys are aggressively helpful. This site raises the bar for homebrew content. World Anvil also gives you the opportunity to look at other homebrew worlds made by other people, so you can get an idea of the format.

If you would like to contact these fine folks, you can find them on Twitter and Facebook.

*UPDATE: World Anvil reached out to let us know Stat Blocks for Spells, Items, NPCs, Monsters, Background and Races are in fact able to be posted in your articles, and recently added the ability to have full character sheets for your characters into your articles. World Anvil is also working on a massive RPG update – stay tuned to the Nerdarchy YouTube channel and right here on the website for more news about it!

City of Brass

Next on the list is City of Brass. This site deals primarily with D&D as well a worldbuilding tool for other games like Pathfinder, Fate Core, Modern D20 and more. There are some excellent features to this site and I really hope to see it expand. There’s a campaign section under groups, under Game Master you get your story builder section as well as World Builder and Creatures. It even lets you do custom rules for spells and items. Each section also gives you a bit of a walk through or tutorial for some added guidance. City of Brass has their own YouTube tutorials found too.

They can also be found on Facebook and Twitter.

City of Brass is also a subscription-based site though it seems to give you more for your buck signing up. For a run of $5 a month you can basically build until you brain explodes, and you run out of ideas. Much like World Anvil you can also look at homebrew content from other writers.

Realm Works

This one is bittersweet for me and the final one I’ll look at today. I’ve used Realm Works for some time, and I’ve always been a huge fan of Wolf Lair products, but it was because key features of Realm Works broke I started looking at other resources. That being said let’s look at the product instead of whining how mine broke.

Realm Works brings worldbuilding to D&D, Pathfinder, Savage World and many more games to a new level. The program offers you in-depth brainstorming to allow you to map out the flow your story, in-depth town and settlement building going all the way down to the nitty gritty of dividing them up by town quarters. The program lets you create custom NPCs in HeroLab (another Wolf Lair program) and then import them in for you stat blocks. You can also link together events and quest lines building your own almanac as they term it for easy to find reference. There is also a fog of the world feature much like Roll20 or Fantasy Grounds so you can share your game and run it from Realm Works as well.

This is a program not a site, and it will run you about $50 US for the GM/Game Master version and $10 for the player version. The wonderful thing with it is that the program has a cloud server and you are supposed to be able to install it on any standard Windows operating platform. You can find a full list of requirements on their site.

You may have noticed where I said you are “supposed to be able to install” and that statement brings me to the downside of Realm Works and why I have been looking at alternatives. After a Windows glitch I tried to re-install Realm Works and have had multiple issues prompting me to contact their tech support, and I’m sad to say I’ve heard nothing back. This is a big set back in my own game writing and a bad blemish for them I fear. Given that it is convention season and they are all over the place I’m hoping it’s just an oversight.

You can find out more over at their Facebook page or on Twitter.

Final thoughts on homebrew and worldbuilding

D&D has come a long way since I started. Worldbuilding is now a new culture people share with others through sites like the Dungeon Master’s Guild and DriveThruRPG. There’s also sites like D&D Beyond to help flex your homebrew muscles. However, I believe it’s the three above that will herald the flag for worldbuilding. [NERDITOR’S NOTE: When you get your next cartfull of stuff at the DM’s Guild or any OneBookShelf site use the coupon code DTRPG-Nerdarchy for 10 percent off on any order of digital products $10 or more, usable once per customer.]

I’m sure many of use will cling to some of our old books, much like Cityscape in D&D 3.5 or from 2nd edition AD&D the Castles and Catacombs guide, but their retirement seems on the horizon. With more and more people jumping in on homebrew games and the want to create I’m sure we’ll see these sites and programs evolve into things we never dreamed of and i can’t wait to see that happen.

From the Nerditor’s desk

homebrew worldbuilding

The Tome of Adventure Design from Frog God Games is available in their online store right now. Click the image. Go on. Click it.

If you enjoy deep dives into worldbuilding and adventure creation, check out the Tome of Adventure Design from Frog God Games.

Useful for a multitude of game systems, this book contains tried-and-true random tables to spark your imagination, help Game Masters prepare and gives creative resources to make your adventures come alive. It also comes with a clever on-brand acronym totally free!

And how about those acronym skills, huh?

Nerdarchy has an exclusive promo code for the Frog God Games store, available twice per user. STAY-NERDY-30 gives you a 30 percent discount on anything in the store.

What worldbuilding resources do you use? Do you have a method to your homebrew madness? Let us know in the comments below.

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James Leslie

Long time RPG enthusiast, I first started with D&D back when I was 7, then jumped back into it again at 14 when I could understand what I was reading. I've tinkered as a story teller in many different game systems from Gurps, to Vampire, to most recently in Savage Worlds: Rippers Ressurected, though I've never forgotten my love for D&D.

2 Comments

  • World Anvil (@WorldAnvil)
    February 20, 2018 at 4:32 am

    Hello James and Nercharchy,

    This is Dimitris from World Anvil! Well first of all thank you so very much for the mention it means a lot to us.
    In the matter of stat blocks I think you might have to make an addendum to the article. The time that this article was posted Stat Blocks for Spells, Items, NPCs, Monsters, Background and Races were already able to be posted IN your articles. Yesterday evening I have posted also the ability to have FULL character sheets for your characters into your articles.

    We are in the middle of a massive RPG update and I would really like this not to reflect negatively on us, especially since we are planning to come and talk about it with Nerdarchy very soon!

    In regards to the Subscription / Free accounts. The most major differences are
    – Private Worlds
    – Private Articles
    – MUCH more upload space and Bigger files to be uploaded
    – Access to a lot more configuration
    – And last but not least, access to use CSS to make your worlds truly your own.

    I really feel that these are significant differences between the two offered accounts types. I would really like to hear back from you and if possible for the article to be amended to reflect those. We are putting our sweat and blood to make this the best product we can and we will keep on that, but I just wanted to set the record straight.

    • Doug Vehovec
      February 20, 2018 at 12:03 pm

      Hello and thank you for sharing this info with us Dimitris! We can certainly add an update to this and share more about the update here on the site as well.

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