Do you create your own campaign setting or use published settings

>>53998946
I make my own, usually.
As for effort, I am austistically detailed when it comes to a world, so if I know I'm running a campaign, I'll be Writing up pantheon, what each race is like, cultural details of major nations/states, Major political figures and political power structures, A short news clippet for the players to get a snapshot of current events, and I'll flesh out the first settlement almost completely.

>>53999022
Oh, Start with at least 3 to 5 pages.
I Expect to have a Travel guide-sized book when the bulk is complete.

>>53998946
I put a good amount of pages into mine, prolly like 50, simply because I made my campaign have enough eras and land to work for any story/campaign my players would like so I dont need any other settings.

>>53998946
I put the most work into the settings I never use, pages and pages and shit

The ones I end up using I put almost nothing into aside from the starting set pieces (initial town and dungeon/whatever), which I then add to as needed generally by the seat of my pants.

I devote my autism to learning existing settings rather than writing up my own

>>53998946
I use Forgotten Realms. I don't find it difficult to erase or write over any problems I have with it, and the absurd detail means I can either be as in-depth as I want, or gloss over things as necessary if I have to write my own stuff.

I write my own. Usually about a page of general fluff about what this world is and how it works, and then maybe 1-2 more pages going into detail about the major factions and players of said setting. From there, I make it up as I go along and as I see how the party reacts and handles things.

>>53998946
It's hard to measure what I write in pages, since what I do when I write a campaign setting is organize things into common knowledge and secrets, and repeatedly trim things down until I get important information down to a Dark Souls Item Description sized chunk.

That way I can feed info to my players at a steady pace but in small bites, which I find keeps them much more engaged than having long bouts of exposition wall of text infodumps. I also like to write short wikis (short is the important part here!) that players can peruse at their whim, and that I can refer to myself when I need to remind a player of something about their character's people or homeland.

>>53998946
Always my own, but it depends on the setting.

I base a lot on historical settings, so some of them have a lot of material, but it's mostly lifted from history. So like, I have a setting based on late-Song Dynasty China, and then a lot of the work is already done for me, not-China is the big human empire, the Dwarf lords of the northern plains are not-mongols, the Elven Isles are not-japan etc.

Some settings though are wholey original and have a fuckton of work put in on my part. Every races history, both their physical and cultural evolution, any gods in the work, major history, just the entirety of how the world got to where it was, and a ton of detail about how things are like now.

I do that because I enjoy it and can't help myself though, I find as a GM, it's generally better to establish tone and basic history/setting of the world, but then let the players fill in the rest with their characters. You're providing a setting for their characters to exist in and interact with, it's not the players job to learn and make characters to fit into your fan fiction world.

So like, I have a setting I'm hoping to run soon. Based more on Greek mythology than medieval europe, the Odyssey, stuff like that. I establish that it's a huge archipelago filled with a bunch of loosely connected, often warring city-states, establish who the big important top-tier gods are, and a handful of more minor ones, give the basics of the god's history (the equivalent to the titanomachy etc.) and then have the players fill in whatever's relevant to their characters. What is the city-state they hail from, and what is it's culture like, how has it shaped them? What gods do they worship, if they're not one I provided, what are they like? That sort of thing. I let them come up with whatever, then fill in the rest with detail more or less as I go.

I create many individual chunks to voltron-on to the main game at any point. Characters, locations, encounters, etc. I see where the players take it, and then pull out the appropriate voltron piece to move forward. The idea is to have seeds instead of spending too much time preparing.

>>53998946
I have built our current Dungeons & Dragons setting around the characters that the players created.

It's been a blast.

I always have a note pad and electronic versions as well to scrible down my ideas as I travel back and forth to work or whatever..

I currently have piles of random scriblings and a couple of note pads of more focused writings about the setting, the campaign and other stuff relating to the sessions.

My OneNote is full of magic items and NPC notes.

>>53998946
My own. I find it really irritating to work within the confines of someone elses work, especially if the players know the setting better than I do and complain about "inconsistencies".

As for my own stuff, it's hard to say. I'd estimate quite a lot of effort as I sort of worldbrew to pass the time/entertain myself, but most of it never comes up or gets written down. For settings I plan to run multiple campaigns in, I tend to have a 4-8 page primer for the players going over everything in broad strokes, and then a bigger, 20+ page setting bible for personal reference/more lore minded players.

I usually write up about 2 pages of story, 1-2 pages of notes and then just wing the hell out of everything else.