Hey /tg/, I'm doing my first campaign (as DM) soon and I'd

world building is a slog. I'm doing the questionnaire from the general world building thread and sometimes I get cross eyed over writing and thinking of different answers for all my nations but its worth it to have some sort of background you can fall back on.

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Tectonic Order: Knights defending earth, goal is to colonize the entire world (including extremely hostile environments.) Gives bonuses related to adaptability, as well as those to mounted combat. While not using much magic, they do have powerful geomancers capable of altering nature.

Nation 2: While generally mages and warriors don't like each other, the Nation 2 was formed in order to keep peace in a resource-dense area plagued by dark energy. Their combat is much, much more defensive than offensive, as their sole interest is defending their land. Gives bonuses helping those who like to multiclass.

Nation 3: A true defender of faith, Nation 3's sole goal is to ensure that none of their God's children are harmed. While they care very little for invasions and expansion, they will make sure that those who harm their allied states-- all part of the Church-- will suffer. Gives religion-related bonuses, as well as some healing.

Nation 4: The absolute cultural capital of the world. While civilians focus on the fine arts and increasing quality of life, the nobility is renown for being powerful, well-trained fighters. While their army is much smaller than that of any other nation, due to them being an extremely small nation, they have plenty of resources to spare, and often hire mercenaries when times look grim. Economic, political, and training-based bonuses.

>>49622530
>Basically, the magic areas (not sure what to call them) are similar to planes but still part of the world.
You can call it the Otherworld or the Feyworld

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>>49622678
Hm. I like otherworlds, although does that still work if there's many of them and they're part of the same land?

>>49622530
In general, come up with cool locations to explore. "Boss fights" should not be mandatory for progression.

There are a few routes to go with building dungeons; they can be more realistic, with a sense of history, purpose, and naturalism. Or they can be a strange Mythical Underworld where the laws of reality don't apply. This can be combined to have a Silent Hill sort of approach, which is a good way to have a ticking clock because the players are going to want to get out before things get weird.

Timekeeping and bookkeeping are actually important; D&D works well as a sort of game of attrition of torches, rations, and hit points.

>A friend of mine who studies medieval warfare is helping me make their militaries realistic.

Hah

>>49622718
You should read up on Irish lore OP. They are filled with phantom islands that only reveal themselves certain times and magical lakes that act as portals to elven lands.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brasil_(mythical_island)

>>49622814
? Is there something wrong with that?

Anyways, thanks for the advice! Do you guys like natural dungeons or do you prefer ruins-- I feel natural dungeons is the right way to go, since the story revolves around colonizing, but if you guys feel man-made dungeons are more interesting, I'll try and incorporate them into the game when I can for my players.

>>49622530

>Basically, the magic areas (not sure what to call them) are similar to planes but still part of the world.

Demiplanes or I think 4e called them Desmenses or something. My pockets that lead to highly magical areas or even other planes are just areas called Overlaps. My fluff for that is stupid but it works for me.

>>49622895
That's basically what they are, yeah.
Also, what do you guys think of recurring enemies?

>>49622838
That sounds awesome! I was considering something like that but I didn't have much to go on, apart for them possibly being mirages.

>>49622530
> I'm gonna DM for the first time!!!

Start small, lay down the law of the land (table rules), and don't be partial to either the players or the encounters.

>>49622850
You might want to read up on hexcrawls if you want to focus on clearing wilderness for civilization. Really though, a dungeon is just a graph of personal-scale encounters traversed at a person-scale rate (like 1 node/10 minutes of game time), unlike hexcrawls which are normally traversed at a more abstract, long term rate (2 leagues of walking per day, for example).

>>49622971
I don't think my players will be too unruly except one-- he likes playing as a nazi-tier Paladin or Inquisitor, lots of genocide. Hoping colonialism will fill his thirst for genocide, but eh.

>>49623019
That sounds pretty cool. By the way, is there any place to read up on good mount ideas? I'd like to have a bunch of choices, since they're gonna be traversing a ton of different environments, and, as I said, the Tectonics are supposed to have different mounts for different terrains.

>>49623067
Just to explain on the mounts thing, (apart from the extremewly common ones like horses and mules) there's desert striders and camels that players can tame to use as mounts.

>>49622971
Also, how small do you mean? A short, quick campaign, or just try not to make it too complex?

Perhaps the balance of the nations' bonuses is a little skewed? Religion/healing sounds like a must-have bonus for clerics and pallys while multiclass bonuses may not be as attractive for most, especially if your players are also a bit new.

Hopefully, the multiclass bonus is significantly larger than some of the others, and hopefully, your players will pick nations more for RP purposes and less for the goodies.

My two cents at least. Love the setting btw, best of luck and have fun!

>>49625066
Yeah, that is true. The bonuses are mostly just skill-based, though, apart for multiclass (just makes it easier/more affordable, I guess), the training/money one is simmilar.

Also, although the Religion one may be skewed, it's the one where you can still be of any nation-- the church nation has embasies in every nation and quite literally anyone can have "trained under them", meaning that anyone can choose to rpelace their bonuses with those of the third nation's.