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Ok friends. I know there's a lot going on in the world right now. We're going to go ahead with our How to Run a D&D Open World Campaign workshop. If you need to revisit it later, it will be here. Meanwhile, donate to the Portland bail/legal fund: https://www.gofundme.com/f/pdx-protest-bail-fund
And here's part 1 of the workshop if you want to catch up: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1286799679313805314.html
For my campaign, I switched up and decided to go with the "demon-haunted plague lands" idea, and while brainstorming with @mhelmes I was inspired to base it loosely on the amazing Russian sci-fi novel Roadside Picnic. Here's my map.
I made it on a whiteboard with dry erase for simplicity. If I were to run this campaign I'd probably take a really good photo and then use Photoshop to add labels, make layers for a players-only version, etc. This version of the campaign is doing to be more gritty than heroic.
You can see some stuff labeled right on the map, & then a bunch of letters. A few of those, I know what they are. A lot of them, not so much. I'm really curious what the dot in the Gravewood is, and the one just north of Greenveil Swamp. I hope my players will be too!
Because you have a rough idea for the story of your world (1 paragraph, remember), some things start falling into place. I know that A on the map is a town called Shenko, where the players will start. And Z is Klor, the Dead City, a ruin completely overgrown by forest.
Always remember that your goal here is not to tell a specific, linear story. You want to set up the conditions for a story to happen. So you want ongoing events happening in your world, NPCs with their own agendas. But you're not driving your players toward any specific point.
We're going to sidetrack for a moment here to talk about organization. If you have a way to organize various types of files, use what works for you. But I highly recommend Scrivener. Scrivener is designed for writing novels, but honestly I think it's even better for RPG campaigns
I won't go into every detail, but the way Scrivener lets you place all different file types in folders on he left pane, & then have 2 other panes with, say a map & a list of NPCs, or a dungeon map & the GM's text for it, is so useful.
This will really come into play later when we start using the various tools we have to shortcut worldbuilding. Because if you want a spot on the map to be a particular published adventure, you can literally drop the pdf of that adventure into a folder you made for that location.
Or if you write an adventure yourself for a location, you can make a folder for the map you're using, some cool images of NPCs and villains, web links to the monster manual entries of the creatures in an encounter, and so on.
Scrivener is not very expensive (no, they don't pay me). But I want everything to be as accessible as possible. Meg suggested a free app called Padlet, which also lets you share things with your players. You could also use Google Docs in a similar way. https://padlet.com/
Ok, here's the part where we fill in an entire region without killing ourselves. If you've been playing fantasy RPGs for a little while, chances are you have STACKS of material. Old modules. Dungeon magazines. 8 different monster manuals.
Now is your chance to use all that stuff! Get your old editions off the shelf. Find that monster from the Pathfinder Bestiary 4 that you never got to use. That OSR dungeon crawl you've been dying to run. If you aren't an old-time gamer, don't worry, I've got you covered too.
If you dig around DriveThruRPG or just search, you can find an immense amount of material that is free, pwyw, or very cheap. Dungeon maps for days. Free adventures. So much Pathfinder stuff is free online it's incredible: http://aonprd.com/Monsters.aspx
Whatever game or edition you play, I feel confident saying you could accomplish all this - maybe not quite for free, but without spending much at all, if you don't have a decades old collection of game stuff.
Now what we're going to do is adapt these various things to our world. This might be as simple as inserting your own NPCs. Or you might just use a dungeon map & populate it entirely with your own stuff.
The first step is to look at those interesting places you put on the map. Start with where the players will start, & flesh that out a bit. Do you have a book of NPCs? Use them to fill in the blanks, and spend the time to create your own from scratch for the really important ones.
If your campaign starts in a city, there are entire books devoted to fantasy cities. @KoboldPress City of Zobeck is a good example. Just tweak it to fit your world. Or drop it right in.
You will need to get comfortable adapting between editions, but I find it's rare you need to fully convert something. If there, say a monster or spell you want in one edition, you can find the same or similar thing in the edition you want. Reskin, rename, adjust.
My favorite thing to do is drop an entire published adventure into the map. What's at location M? I think it's @BruceCordell's classic Sunless Citadel module. Now in my Scrivener file, I have a map key, & I just note "M. Sunless Citadel." If I have a pdf, I drop it right in.
You can populate the map pretty quickly that way. Don't worry about adapting things right away. As your players move through the world, you'll see what hook ends up drawing them toward something, and you can adapt better once you know these things.
I personally think every world needs a megadungeon. That's what Klor, the Dead City is in mine. Luckily, a TON of megadungeons have been published over the years. These are perfect to plug-n-play into your world.
Oh, remember the list of Cool Things we generated in part 1? Those weird, meaningless names are starting to weave together with your overall backstory, the places you put on the map, and probably some ideas your players have given you.
I know that in my world, there's a conspiracy that smuggles artifacts out of the forbidden demon-haunted lands. The League of Heretics! There's also a group of humans who live in the forbidden zone worshipping demons, warped by magic and evil. The Festering Court!
There's a story here, but the players could hit it from any angle. Maybe they just want to explore the Dead City. Maybe they want to figure out what caused the demon plague and find a cure. Maybe they want to uncover the conspiracy. Or join it!
We started out building a big section of world and building in toward our players (but only sketching). That's the opposite of most campaigns. But now we switch gears and start responding to the players and the story they generate. That will be what we cover tomorrow.
Remember that this technique adapts to you. If you prefer running published adventures, lean on those more. When you're in the mood to write a dungeon crawl, find a place in your world to stick a dungeon crawl (if it happens to be right in your players' path, hey who's to know?)
I think that's all for tonight, but if you have any questions about filling a world with published material, adapting things, or making a widely disparate collection of RPG odds and ends fit into a single campaign, I'll be around. Thanks everyone.
Oh, if you're an RPG publisher, or you publish material in the DM's Guild that fits what we're talking about here, please add your links to this thread!
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