The best D&D world I've played in is, of course, the homebrew one I made with two good friend a few years ago. I don't want to catalogue all of its greatness here, but the way we created the setting was amazingly good. I'll use the Church of the Wisdom Kings as the best example of our collective world building.
Originally, we wanted a morally clear orc-killing game. Knowing me and my friends, we drifted from the original goal a bit, but were all pretty happy with where we ended up. The way we did it though was pretty fun and ensured that everyone could have a say in the setting. That's because we made it all up.
The basic rule: whatever you introduce, you get to define.
So we figured there'd be elves and wizards and dragons, but we didn't have any fixed ideas from the beginning. If someone chose to play an elf and wanted them to be a strange race of hermaphrodite immortals, that's basically what they'd be. So I ended up playing a cleric (well, cleric/crusader with a reflavored Ruby Knight Vindicator prestige class). I didn't want to just worship one god, but a small pantheon, cause that seemed awesomer. So I thought about it and came up with the idea of a quartet of "Wisdom Kings" who were closely tied to the religion of the empire of Man. I wanted to call upon more than one deity, and one of them was a fierce warrior based on Fudo Myoo who would drag people kicking and screaming towards enlightenment if necessary.
Now, our human empire was based on my friend's reading of the Lawful Evil stuff from the old Complete Thief's Handbook. He wanted a hobgoblin-run city, so he tweaked my idea of four good deities which presided over the state religion alongside the emperor cult. He handed me a sheet of paper with the names of four lawful deities on it: Constantius, Wodin, Tyrannus, and Anastasia.
It was perfect. Not my original plan, but I could see the wisdom in it. My deities were harshly lawful and it fit our concept of going with a law v. chaos scheme instead of good v. evil. The whole thing worked well because we had originally decided we'd be building the world cooperatively, and we exercised some humility so we could let the others inject some more ideas into the game.
It'll be hard to top that world. I still love what we did with the idea of prehistoric gigantomachy (The founder of the Empire and future wisdom king and wizard's guild founder, Wodin, discovering wizardry and banishing the ancient blood gods), the wizards' guild, and everything else. But when I get the chance to run or play in a long-term campaign in the future, I'm definitely going to be solititing advice for some communal world building.
Originally, we wanted a morally clear orc-killing game. Knowing me and my friends, we drifted from the original goal a bit, but were all pretty happy with where we ended up. The way we did it though was pretty fun and ensured that everyone could have a say in the setting. That's because we made it all up.
The basic rule: whatever you introduce, you get to define.
So we figured there'd be elves and wizards and dragons, but we didn't have any fixed ideas from the beginning. If someone chose to play an elf and wanted them to be a strange race of hermaphrodite immortals, that's basically what they'd be. So I ended up playing a cleric (well, cleric/crusader with a reflavored Ruby Knight Vindicator prestige class). I didn't want to just worship one god, but a small pantheon, cause that seemed awesomer. So I thought about it and came up with the idea of a quartet of "Wisdom Kings" who were closely tied to the religion of the empire of Man. I wanted to call upon more than one deity, and one of them was a fierce warrior based on Fudo Myoo who would drag people kicking and screaming towards enlightenment if necessary.
Now, our human empire was based on my friend's reading of the Lawful Evil stuff from the old Complete Thief's Handbook. He wanted a hobgoblin-run city, so he tweaked my idea of four good deities which presided over the state religion alongside the emperor cult. He handed me a sheet of paper with the names of four lawful deities on it: Constantius, Wodin, Tyrannus, and Anastasia.
It was perfect. Not my original plan, but I could see the wisdom in it. My deities were harshly lawful and it fit our concept of going with a law v. chaos scheme instead of good v. evil. The whole thing worked well because we had originally decided we'd be building the world cooperatively, and we exercised some humility so we could let the others inject some more ideas into the game.
It'll be hard to top that world. I still love what we did with the idea of prehistoric gigantomachy (The founder of the Empire and future wisdom king and wizard's guild founder, Wodin, discovering wizardry and banishing the ancient blood gods), the wizards' guild, and everything else. But when I get the chance to run or play in a long-term campaign in the future, I'm definitely going to be solititing advice for some communal world building.
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