Worldbuilding: Where to Begin with a Homebrew Campaign Setting

You’ve been playing roleplaying games for a bit now. It might be Pathfinder, Dungeons & Dragons, Savage Worlds, or untold countless possibilities. The problem is you don’t like the setting. It almost fits the image in your mind but not quite. You’ve looked around, found some old campaign setting material at secondhand stores or eBay but no luck. So, what do you do? How do you make the world you want too? Don’t worry — Nerdarchy is here to help. Over the past month or so you’ll have seen some changes in the Nerdarchy landscape. We have Nate the Nerdarch and Kienata running the Nerdarchy After Dark late-night build sessions. We’ve posted some articles for items like World Anvil and Realm Works to help you organize things. However, none of these really give a starting point. Why not fix that now? Let’s look at how to start.

Worldbuilding your homebrew setting

It’s all from a dream

The setting is always important to the story. Let us start simple with the beginning. All you need is an idea, a vision, or dream – you don’t need a whole world right away. I recommend starting small, preferably with a town. Picture how you want the buildings to look. What’s the overhanging atmosphere? What are the people like? What is the economy? Are the people poor and destitute, a rich magocracy?

Most of these may sound like useless questions but it helps set the mood for the setting. The players can start feeling like they’re in the town so it helps immerse people in the world. Once you get the town idea, you can start working on the people. If you look at the old movies, especially old horror movies, they set an atmosphere for everything in the surrounding areas. It can work the other way though; a busy merchant town can seed a lot of adventure hooks to get people to explore your new world concept and campaign setting.

There’s nothing saying you must start with a town of village. You can always start with the landscape. Sometimes it’s easier to start with a lush serene landscape of rolling hills and valleys, animals frolicking in the glade among the heather. Maybe the area resembles something from a movie, like Avatar, with vibrant jungles and unique creatures. Perhaps though it’s a desert wasteland filled with vile creatures and dangerous deserts.

I know a lot of people who start this way, and to an extent it’s one of the ways I expand things most often in my games. I get an idea, either from a video game or movie, then gradually tweak it in my mind to how I want it to look. Once I know how I want it to look I sketch it out either on graph paper or in a program I use called Campaign Cartographer which I’ll talk about another day. Once I get an idea of what the land looks like I start adding hamlets, towns, castles, etc.

From there you can start working again on surrounding areas. Surrounding areas could include things like forests, lakes, farmland or even snow fields. Again, you may be finding yourself asking why does this matter? All your players want to do is kill things. But that’s just it, if you don’t build the environment there isn’t going to be anything to fight. If you want to develop a life and hardship for your imaginary village you need to build an environment. Once you built it you can start asking other questions, like what animals live in the grasslands? Do I want goblins, elves or ogres hiding in the woods? Maybe I should make that mountain a volcano and add a red dragon. As you muse and daydream where you want your homebrew world to go you can start using the environment to make your story. That said some people start with the story to make the world, but it generally comes down to the same questions.

How to keep organized

This is a section I can’t stress enough and, in my opinion, the hardest. Don’t go too big too fast. I did that and invested a significant amount of money I didn’t need too. When starting with homebrew for anything, be it campaign settings, monsters, classes, etc. all you need to start is a binder, some paper, and an excellent quality writing pencil.

Don’t even bother working on the computer to start. Jot your ideas down, slowly sketch out the rough landscape and see where it leads you. It’s all right to make changes as you go because that’s how the world evolves.

As you start shaping everything you’ll start thinking about lore for worlds. For instance, say a village celebrates on a particular day every year to commemorate repelling a goblin horde. This is a great side note you can use for adventures later. Write it down on paper and stuff it in the binder.

Once you start getting more comfortable with the ideas and start writing more things then add these notes to some sort of text document on the computer. As you start sorting things out more and want to work on the finer details for cities or landscapes then start looking into things like World Anvil, D&D Beyond, or Campaign Cartographer.

Remember, starting out doesn’t mean go big or bust. Build an area then run an adventure in it. Get feedback from your players and ask them what they thought of it. Find out what they liked, hated, or would like to see changed. Every time there is a rewrite to a game setting it is usually because the creator wanted to take the world in a different route. This is a fantastic opportunity to make an epic adventure that will shake the landscape of the realm, so you can tweak it. If you find yourself wanting to change a realm but not sure how, just send the game to another area and tweak the first one. Characters will come back, and a random NPC can explain how a plague came through so there’s mutated natives now.

I already started, how do I make it better?

In my opinion, only time and playtesting make it better. I know that since I’ve start talking with people on the Nerdarchy Discord and writing more of my own campaign and setting the world has really evolved. I’m running a double party game in the world, getting feedback from the players, and I’ll admit I’ve swamped Kienata with papers on it.

Finding a way to get feedback is the best way to enhance your worldbuilding and homebrew items. Once you reach the point of being happy with what you have then you can decide if you want to digitize things. Nothing says you must make it digital but that is the way the hobby is moving. With things such as virtual tabletops, D&D Beyond, World Anvil, Herolab Online and other digital avenues, it has become very easy to start running things digitally.

You can start by building NPCs and monsters in D&D Beyond. From there customize your world and lore in World Anvil. Then visit Inkarnate for mapping or invest in Dungeon Painter Studio or Campaign Cartographer. These are some fantastic programs I’ll talk about in a future article but believe me when I say they make a difference. The biggest thing for me is inspiration. A movie genre, music, or even ranting and rambling about a book or topic. The best ideas come from talking about random things that just pop into your head.

The best way to improve on something though is own it. Make it yours. If you believe in and are passionate about what you build people will love it. Trust me when I say, as a Game Master there is nothing better than players asking you additional questions about your world or game after the session is done. It gives a very distinct feeling of accomplishment you can’t get anywhere else.

If you’re curious about any of these programs, please check out the links below, and hang out with Nate the Nerdarch and Kienata every Sunday, Thursday and Friday at 9 p.m. eastern for worldbuilding tips, theory class and monster mashups. Any questions for me you can comment below or find me lurking in the Nerdarchy Discord as Techrig. Sorry I’ve not gotten into social media yet, it still makes my eye twitch.

Most of all have fun with your games folks – a game is meant to be enjoyed. If you don’t have fun building it they won’t have fun being in it.

• Campaign Cartographer
• Dungeon Painter Studio
• Herolab, Realm Works, and Herolab Online
• World Anvil
• Inkarnate
• D&D Beyond

From the Nerditor’s desk

If you enjoy deep dives into D&D 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.

Like this?

Did you enjoy this post? Nerdarchy’s awesome volunteer staff of writers and editors do their best to create engaging, useful and fun content to share. If you like what you find here on our site, consider patronizing us in a good way through Patreon.

On top of reaching our goal of paying our writers, pledging gets you exclusive monthly content for your D&D game, opportunities to game with Nerdarchy, access to patron-only channels on our Discord and more

With your generous support we’ll continue to create quality content between our YouTube channel and blog, invest in equipment to increase recording quality, and eventually create original publications and products to enhance your tabletop role-playing and gaming experience.

Thank you for your consideration and as always, until next time stay nerdy!