D&D: Five Ideas To Try In YOUR Homebrewed World
Making your own D&D campaign world? Why not spice things up with these five ideas for homebrew worlds for a start?
D&D is perhaps at its best when you sit down to make your own little weirdo world. It is one of the rites of passage as a DM, taking a mishmash of your favorite ideas and throwing them together to create a world for your friends to explore through the lens of their player characters. It’s a tale as old as D&D.
After all, in the early days, there was no campaign setting. It was up to DMs to figure everything out. And while you can go out and buy your own Greyhawk Gazetteer, sure, it’s even better when you plunder it for ideas to throw into your own world.
With that in mind, here are five things to try in your own homebrewed world!
Floating Continents
Let’s start with probably one of the oldest ideas in the book: floating continents. It’s a popular idea for a reason—they are cool, and there’s something that feels inherently fantastic and high magic about a big floating landmass. They immediately set a tone. And you can do so much with them.
There is, of course, the standard of “once upon a time there were floating continents/islands in the distant past, and now the crashed remains of them are littered with ancient ruins full of deadly traps and potent treasures.” But. That’s not the only route you could take.
It’s your homebrew world. Why not have the floating continents still be around? Go full on Chrono Trigger in 15,000 BC and just put a big floating island on the map for players to explore. Whatever you decide, it immediately tells you more about the world. Were/are there airships? Do people still have access to them? Who lives up and who lives down?
Legendary Beasts
Another page you can borrow is the idea of cataclysmic monsters that are like unto natural forces within the world. And not just in the “well they’re big monsters like Godzilla” kind of things—but D&D being magical and such, you can tie monsters to the world somehow. Maybe there’s a fire monster that’s responsible for the eruption of volcanos. Or use something like a Kraken who heralds the storms.
They’re not new gods, necessarily, but creatures with a warping effect on the world that are also physically present within it. It’s kind of like the ideas of the Weapons from Final Fantasy 7. The idea of a big devastating monster that is a calamity unto themselves is a classic fantasy idea. But where to begin? You might start with dragons (and their environment warping effects) or maybe something like the mythic monsters out of Theros, or even the elemental cataclysms out of Glory of the Giants.
Either way, dream big. Big enough to make the players as NPCs mutter protective wards against the demon of the north wind or whatever whenever there’s a harsh breeze.
A Different Shaped World
You can also change the way the world looks. I think a lot of people, by default, assume a big round orb planet. And that’s fine. It’s one less weird thing to have to deal with for your players. Most D&D worlds do this, even if they don’t do it explicitly.
But you don’t have to be like most D&D worlds. You can make that world a closed loop, like the Torus of Sigil. Or else pull the old “the world is a boundless expanse that stretches in all direction” trick. I mean, this is one of those levers that DMs don’t often mess with. But when you do, the creativity opens up!
Tie Classes to Your World
Also known as “explain why each class exists in the world.” DMs love making up lore that matters to the story of the game. And one way to do that is to think about how the various classes fit into your world. If Sorcerers have bloodborne magic powers, from whom do they inherit? Yes, the subclasses suggest some possibilities, but what does that mean? Are Sorcerers common? Revered? Feared?
How about Wizards? Can anyone decide they want to learn magic? Is it limited, something you have to have a gift for? What about Bards, where do they fit in? And so on and so forth. It’s easiest to do with classes that have magic, but Fighters can get in on the action too. Who, or what, wrote their combat technique manuals? Are there schools of sword and spear? How do they fit in the world?
All these are great questions around which you can hang some intensely character-focused lore.
Secret Worlds
Finally, a good “Secret World” is an amazing thing to play with. This can be as simple as like the Feywild or Shadowfell in standard D&D—an alternate dimension that exists just outside the edges of reality. Or you can get weirder with it. Maybe instead of the Underdark, you have a whole hidden world kind of “hollow earth” style within. Or maybe you have echoes of an alternate reality that once existed – a ghost of a former world.
Or maybe it’s just that your secret world is some truth about the world. The expanse most people think of as the entire world is only part of it—there are actually three other realities all on the same planet, just kept magically apart from each other. Maybe all of reality is in a starship, secretly enclosed.
This is a place to bury secrets for enterprising players to dig up and play around with!
Happy adventuring!
