Creating your own world to experience adventures in is a dream for many fans of the fantasy genre. Most of them have probably already given it some thought or made a few notes, but haven’t made much progress. Creating your own homebrew D&D world can quickly turn into a huge project. That’s why I want to give you a few tools here that can help you get started.
Where do I keep my documents for my homebrew D&D world?
I can only recommend World Anvil to anyone who wants to try their hand at creating their own world. This platform allows you to create your own wiki for a project and use linked articles with images and even interactive maps. You can read more about creating your own world maps here. There is a limited free version, which should be enough to find out if you like what’s on offer.
Personally, I really enjoyed sending Wikipedia-style articles to my players to introduce them to my homebrew D&D world. But it’s also just a good way to work in a structured way and slowly expand the project.
If you don’t want to spend money, but you already know that your project is going to be very large, it might make sense to start with a different program. You can use Google Docs or note-taking programs such as Notion. Here, too, it is possible to link pages and make connections between places, characters and events clear.
If you want to send your notes to your players, but also want them to look good, I can only recommend Homebrewery. You can use it to make your homebrew fantasy D&D world look like an official Dungeons and Dragons rulebook.
First steps to creating your own homebrew D&D world
Once you’ve decided where you want your documents, it’s time to get down to the content. But what’s the best way to get started?
There are two very different approaches: from the outside in or the other way around. This means whether you start with details (such as a single city or person) or think about the “big” things like continents, factions or territories first. I think it really depends on how big the project is going to be and why you are starting to create this world.
From the outside in
This is probably the more intuitive way to create a world. You start with a map of the continents and divide them first into regions, then into realms or other smaller parts. This makes the overall context of the world relatively clear and allows the imagination to run wild when inventing the most diverse and varied areas.
With this approach, you quickly commit to a large project. This is super exciting, but can also be a bit overwhelming at times. Especially if you get lost in the details but still have a lot of “white” space on the map, you may feel like you’re not making any progress.
So if you fancy your own huge homebrew fantasy world like in The Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones, this is for you!
From the inside out
With this approach, you start with the small things in the world. Perhaps you start by thinking of a village with a few relevant characters. Then you can build on this and describe the surroundings to make the world “grow” in different directions.
This type of world-building is a little less overwhelming (although it’s still not a small project) and can help you to have a few places that you can get excited about relatively quickly. It’s also good for D&D if you can start inviting players to your world relatively early on and build in some kind of dynamic growth.
For such a world, you could think about playing a West Marshes campaign in which there is a central location from which the group experiences its adventures. You can find out more about this here.
Do you have any other tools or tips for creating your own homebrew worlds for D&D? Feel free to leave a comment so we can incorporate your opinion to help more fantasy nerds build their own world!
Image sources: creator.nightcafe.studio / World Anvil / Homebrewery
