There are many beautiful fantasy campaign worlds out there. 

I recently backed the World of Myrr project from Cawood Publishing. I was a huge fan of their monster books and Andrew Cawood has been good to me. (Anyone who sends a free die along with my order is aces with me.) It just recently released on DriveThruRPG if you want to check it out through my Affiliate Link. There are also some excellent maps along with the PDF.

I have run, played, read, messed-around-with many different campaign worlds for Dungeons & Dragons and other games over the years. Some of them serve as inspiration for what I’m working on now. There are also plenty of games with settings baked into them such as Pathfinder 2E, FateForge, and Aether Nexus just to name three. Nary a week goes by when I’m not learning of a new campaign setting or world guide.

Is there nothing new under the sun?

With so many great older creations for mostly D&D/AD&D, why would I need to create my own world? Truthfully there have just been certain fantasy itches that the old D&D worlds don’t adequately scratch. No one campaign world seems to have it all for me. Maybe I’m just too picky. I don’t know.

It would be great if there was just a big menu, and I could go down and choose ideas that I want or don’t want to allow in my game. Instead it almost feels a lot like reinventing the wheel every time I sit down to world build. I’ve even gone so far as to brainstorm lists of wants and don’t-wants in the past. Unsurprisingly a lot of D&D properties end up in the “Don’t Want” column.

Once upon a time I tried building a world without all of the Western fantasy tropes such as Elves, Dwarves, Halflings, and other things we’ve become accustomed to in D&D. It looked a lot like Skyrealms of Jorune minus all the weird nomenclature. I’m super determined to use the Dragonbane rules for this game, so I’m leaving some things such as Kin alone for now.

Otherwise, I want to bring in some things that might seem a lot like cultural appropriation under other circumstances. Although it might be a bit hard to claim that if I’m creating the whole thing from the ground up. Wait until I start bending the laws of science and nature a bit. I might have a whole new crowd mad at me.

One last reason before I go.

It’s fun. I love coming up with all new frontiers to explore. I often wonder what it’s like to go somewhere new that no one has ever seen before. What’s it like to meet people no one from our part of the world has met. Because it’s fantasy roleplaying, I can also ask what it’s like to fight the monster that no one has dared approach before.

Perhaps I also think there might be years of pent-up worldbuilding waiting to come alive that no setting has delivered yet. I’ll get more into this whole concept tomorrow. It’s my last real dig at WotC for 2024.

Let’s not speak further of WotC and their creative bankruptcy in this series, though. The next time we meet, let’s set up the hexcrawl that will become Hex-A-Day 2025. We still have to lay the foundations and explain how my main characters step over from the Misty Veil into this as yet unnamed world.