[For Everyone] Share about your Homebrew Worlds!

At some point many people who run games start making their own worlds and regions. I am always interested in listening to other people talk about theirs (also talk about mine).

So feel free to share stories, details, or other things. Maps, characters, histories, whatever. Shared joy is double joy and we just like to ramble sometimes.

So share your stuff, post some maps, ask questions and tell about things.

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most of my homebrew worlds start out light on detail, to enable players to get some of their ideas into the world before a campaign starts there

my 3 ā€œbigā€ ones are: Sara’Dreyn - On the world of Mote players come from a continent - Wadruz - that was believed to be the only civilized place for pretty much forever, 3 nations reside on this continent. To the west it is ā€œknownā€ to be death incarnate - the only person who came back from exploring there is a former gold dragon that is now a dracolich. To the east there was a recent change, a huge wave crashed into Wadruz and exploration vessels manned by sea elfs - who have no official nation of their own, but have been granted authority over the oceans and ship travel - discovered a continent they called Sara’Dreyn - dangerous unknown. The 3 nations of Wadruz decided to send a delegation there to share the bounties of this new foreign land, obviously none of the nations would have any ulterior motive when selecting their representatives for this excursion.

Variona - i’ll just leave the (sparse) world anvil link here

and the ā€œnamelessā€ setting from my current campaign 11 planets across 7 star systems connected by an ancient network of teleportation arrays, with a ton of different cultures in a somewhat strenouus, but peaceful coexistance/society by now the players have discovered that their whole universe is a segregated subuniverse created by an alliance of deities of death that felt like they were under appreciated and this subuniverse is on the brink of being breached by force by the gods from the bigger - probably main - universe outside, which might have unforeseen side effects on the mortals living in either universe

I do have some more info on each of these settings, plenty of it not written down in a way that can be easily shared, so if any of these interest you or you’d like to know a particular detail, just ask and I’ll see if I can (and feel like) accomodate you :smiley:

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I think I’ll add something

Since several people on this forum are in a campaign in this setting, I can’t tell you everything but I want to yap anyway.

My setting (The Straight(s) of Ahgin) is partially a world but most of the setting/lore is located in a massive sea straight in between two continents. The entire region is wealthy, fertile, a melting pot of cultures and an absolute drama show.

Just around 500 years ago the local supervolcano Theraz in the straight blew up, which was during a massive war between the massive goblin republican nation of Zagros and the elvish monarchy of Harashthar. The entire region that had suffered massively during the war was further devastated by the aftershocks of the eruption. The big nations fell apart and the entire political climate shifted.

Nowadays we are in a quasi renaissance, still magical, but less dependent on magic and science has progressed instead. New nations and countries have formed and alliances have shifted. The old giants are slowly trying to see if they can regain what they consider old glory, the wounds of war long forgotten. However, the new kids on the block do not wish to take that lying down. Additionally, even newer powers are trying to see where they can go.

As power spheres begin to form, people are trying to look for new and old technologies to better their chances of coming out ahead. And if you can’t invent further, you just dig deeper; and there is always something deeper. Is it the horrors? Yes, yes it is.

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The setting has a big focus on politics, history and archaeology. Several things were not fixed and I often develop details and cultures further. One fun thing I discovered is basic linguistics. I am no linguist but the way language shapes, how certain jokes or phrases make sense or work and how you might now be able to translate something because for that old culture this was so obvious they might not have written it down.

Also themes how history shapes us even if we don’t know it, how history can be changed by those with an agenda, how cultures develop in their weird settings and then succeed and fail. Often not because they were good or evil and more that because sometimes the things that made them successful screwed them over in times of crisis. That sometimes they fell not because of an evil empire or raging horde but internal corruption and humanoid fears, failures and desires.

Sometimes we figure out that there is a theme of eternal recurrence in how we rebuild and fail and sometimes my players talk for a long time with two gnomes (which are weird in my setting) about food culture and how an underground civilization with no access to dairy considers cheese an weird horrific thing, while praising the value of deep fried volcanic sea worms.

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The nameless setting sounds pretty awesome but I’ve always had a bit of a soft spot for deities of death. :slight_smile: How are the gods seen in that setting? Good/Bad/Neutral? If they are mainly death gods, is there a larger focus on aspects connected with death? Cycles of birth and decay, funerary rituals, rebirth/reincarnation etc?

the gods basically impersonated and basically became gods of creation within this sub universe, by now they fill all the usual niches of godhood and there is no general view of mortals, the spectrum goes from ignored to revered to feared to hated and everything in between or outside of those lines

Has been a while …


A city-state called Quetzaltintlan (Place of Beautiful Feathers) located in a mystical jungle.

The city-state itself had been conquered recently by the ā€œSun Empireā€ from the North and turned into a tributary-city-state. During the last events of that conflict (after the old King and his retinue retreated deep into the jungle never to be seen again) all local priests of the city-state mysteriously perished.

Quetzaltintlan is dominated by powerful clans-guilds, who mostly deal with feathers with magical properties, who in turn are ruled by new nobility send from the ā€œSun Empireā€.

These nobles also send new priests to fulfill the divine duties to give energy to the 5 gods of the jungle (all bird-gods obviously^^), with whom they are sadly not too familiar with.


p.s.:

  • flair-wise it was pre-Columbian Meso-American fantasy
  • PCs were all from the ā€œSun Empireā€ doing investigations in the city-state.
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I have run a bunch of campaigns and one-shots in Menagerie-world - a world stuffed with animal-lings that are half-done elves - so let me briefly talk maps.

  • My home campaign (Ducal House) is 3.5e, running since 2020.
  • Southern Reaches was an online open table ā€˜west marches’ in 2023
  • Bay of Princes was the open-table Brancalonia campaign run at the VALUE Friday nights from Aug-2023 to Sep-2024
  • Realm of the Reluctant King was the hex-crawl / open-tables I ran for 2025 up to now.

They have been four quite different campaigns, not even the same system, separated geographically on the continent to stop interference. It has been very handy for me because at this point the deep history of the setting is well established for me so I can easily answer random questions about faraway lands and deep time events.

I used the magnificent Azgaars Fantasy Map Generator for Ducal House originally, just to have a map, and for the other three campaigns (so far) I have been able to just shift geographic focus, look at how the biome, culture, realm and religion boundaries are different and the campaign settings just built themselves.

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