Risus Monkey posted campaign notes for a D&D campaign from the 70s. Haven’t read it yet, just skimmed it, but it’s always interesting to see what others do – this document is definitely an antique by now. (Via Lecker Thac0.)
I’m listening to Episode 156 of The Tome Podcast, a discussion of World Building with Keith Baker, creator of Eberron. Excellent discussion – check it out.
In 2005 I started writing a “spelljammer” setting – basically a Spelljammer alternate universe. It never did get finished. This is a shame really, considering how much effort I already put into it. I’ve decided to release it as it is now, in the hope that someone might find some use for it.
The file is released under a creative commons attribution, sharealike, non-commercial license. Meaning you can share this file, change and edit it as you like, as long as you credit me for my work on it – and don’t use it commercially.
Enjoy!
I’ve been world building for as long as I can remember. As a child I owned many Lego bricks, and built many imaginary worlds from them – often space-themed, but there were more “mundane” worlds. Later, in the 1980s, my mother got me my first role-playing game, and I was instantly hooked. I used the prefab settings for a long time, but built my own modules and campaigns. At the same time, I began to fiddle with writing fiction.
In 1992 – and I believe it was November – some friends and I wanted to start a fantasy campaign. The system was GURPS, and the setting… well. GURPS comes with a strange fantasy setting based on real-world religions. We didn’t own the world-book, and to be honest it would not have been to our taste. After a friend failed to come up with a decent setting, I took up the job of Game Master. I told the guy I’d have something ready in two weeks. In these two weeks I built a fantasy world I called “Enderra“.
Map of Old Enderra (pre-Demon War), circa 1992
The Enderra campaign ran at a very irregular schedule for several years and eventually died. In the late 90s, we decided to start playing again. I was again the GM. When I started to prepare for the game I quickly decided that I did not want to use any of the prefabricated worlds. But I also thought that building a new world from scratch would be wasteful. After all, I already had Enderra – there were many things about Enderra that I did not like anymore. So I fast-forwarded Enderra by a thousand years, and built on top of what already existed. The following D&D campaign ran for years, and a friend of mine actually ran his campaign using the same world.
The creation of “Enderra II” marked the point where I became interested in world building for its own sake. I drew immense enjoyment out of the creative act of designing a world, a whole universe, and over the years I built several settings of all kinds of flavors. Most of them never got used for anything.
Recently (late 2007, early 2008) I started to look for other world builders… to share experiences, to learn, and above all to have people to bounce ideas off of. This blog is part of that effort.