Dungeon Masters, if you’re creating your own homebrew setting and having trouble bringing it to life, simply run a campaign in it! It may sound counterintuitive. Why would you run a campaign in a setting that isn’t finished? Here’s why:
- Character Creation: When your players are creating their characters, everything they choose will influence your setting. From their backgrounds, to their species, to the deities they worship; all of these character aspects will help you understand what parts of your world you need to flesh out first, and their choices might even provide some inspiration on how to start!
- Exploration: As the party slowly explores your world, this gives you the opportunity to drip-feed lore and create rich locations throughout the campaign. Not only will this take the pressure off of you to have everything prepped upfront, but it will actually enable you to build locations and environments that are relevant to the story at hand!
- The DM’s ARK: When creating new environments and locations in your world, you can easily lean on the DM’s ARK for assistance with some of the more granular aspects, like what weather patterns a specific city would have based on its surroundings, or what the economy would be like depending on its size and location.
While starting your campaign in an unfinished setting may be scary at first, giving your players the ability to run around, explore and organically influence your world will do more for it than you ever could alone. So, if you’re hitting a creative wall with your setting, just run a campaign and your inspiration will be back in no time! Happy gaming!
Leave a Reply