Troll Lord Games

Ok, so I love the Wilderlands setting. I have played it for many years. But long ago I had my own homebrew. I like the feel it gave me and the fact that I knew my world. I can, and have, made the Wilderlands mine, but sometimes it lacks that "mine" feel. My old homebrew was back in my 1st edition days. C&C has that 1st edition feel I like and I have given thought to re-inventing my old homebrew world. But it would be a lot of work and I am old and lazy.

Who prefers homebrew over store-bought published settings and why?

I personally prefer Homebrew as I feel it reflects the personality of the group over a published setting. With most commercial settings I feel like I am in the playground of someone else. The only commercial setting I have really gotten into in the past few years was WOTC's 'Points of Light' for 4e as it was so easily modified to the tastes of the group. My own preference for published material are products like Yggsburgh or the Haunted Highlands as they are easily dropped into homebrew worlds with little fuss.

Of course I say this as I am running an FR campaign for my main group. I'm always looking for a way to move them to my world with minimal fuss.

I prefer homerew campaign worlds, atleast while I am DMing. Largely because I really love world building, world building is half the fun of being a DM, for me.

The other part though, is all too often pre-built campaigns feel kind of uncertain to me. I don't ever feel like I "know" the world terribly well from a single campaign book.

The only time ive felt really drawn to a pre-built campaign world is if Ive read a lot of fiction already "in" that setting, to the point where I feel like I know the place as well as something ive built myself. Conversely, ive been known to run games inside the worlds of book series even if there was not a campaign book per se.

That being said ive had half a notion to pick up the system neutral forgotten realms book that WOTC just put out, simply because Ive had players clammering for Forgotten Realms forever.

It would depend. If the home brew is actually as awesome as its creator thinks it is, then yes, I'd like it.

There are a few reasons why I prefer published settings. Players can come into the setting likely already having some degree of familiarity with it, even if its just "I've heard of it." The setting is usually done in a far more comprehensive manner than my home brew has ever been done. Far more towns and villages, even cities, are given a name, location, and even description, and in some cases a very detailed description. Their maps are far nicer than mine. Bottom line, for me, is that the published settings go into far ore detail than I ever would on my own. So I do the same that you posted about in the OP, I make it my own. Literally. I don't care if I am using Forgotten Realms or Greyhawk, I do NOT care what "canon" is. My players and I make our own canon. I use what I want to use, and use it how I want to use it. I do not care what "official" is. I'll mix and match whatever I want, however I want to. So personally its been a very long time, many years, since I last felt like a setting I use wasn't "mine". I think its because I do whatever I want, and don't care about what official is. I literally look at it as my lump of clay. The clay has all these properties to it, which are like all the "official" info we are given in published settings, but I decide how that clay gets shaped. I decide how all that setting info gets put together. So I find it much less time consuming to remold a published setting into what I want, than to try and write everything from scratch. Especially since the settings I use have a framework I like and want to work with anyways. Plus their maps and books are far nicer looking than anything I would do. So all I have to do is note what I use as is, what I modify into something I like better, or what I am ignoring completely. The result is the "official" publication is actually a bunch of stories and rumors that may or may not be true. Then my players find out what is true, and what is false, by adventuring, and interacting with the world, finding out what "image" I am going with. So that is why I like working with published settings. Even adventures. I take what si there and turn it into what I want, even if that means my final version looks nothing like the original. My Greyhawk, Faerun and Airhde is not anyone else's. Its mine, changed by me and what my players have done. My settings have their own story that greatly changes it from what is "official". Greyhawk grognards would be deeply offended by how different my Greyhawk is from "canon". Same with Forgotten Realms people. I don't care. These settings are mine now. They became mine the day I bought them. I've done the same with Airhde and The Wilderlands, as well as the setting for Legend of the 5 Rings, Rokugan, as well as the "official" setting for Traveller. My settings are not published "canon". They are my "canon".

As for "home brew", I am fine with it. I've done it myself. I have my D&D setting of Cascandia. I just got to a point where I realized how much time and effort it would take to make Cascandia into a setting as rich as Greyhawk, Forgotten Realms, Wilderlands, and others already were. So I simply decided to work with what was already there, and twist it into what I wanted, and what my players made happen.

I have also played in the homebrew of others. Most were OK, had plenty of fun playing in them, two were really good. A shocking amount of work were put into both, and were really good as a result. On the other side, the home brews in a couple of situations were no where near as good as their creator thought they were.

Which loops back to what I said to begin with about published settings. Players coming into it have at least some idea of what they are stepping into. Since its published, a certain amount of coherency and professionalism can be expected. When joining a home brew, you don't know what your getting into until your already in it. If you like it, great. If you feel like you jumped into a sewage pool, not so great. So its a risk you may regret taking. Which is why I think players prefer to join games based on official settings. Its a safer bet that you will like the setting.

I agree with a lot of what Treebore said. My DragonLance campaign is nothing like anyone's else. It doesn't follow the novels or any setting info beyond the original 16 modules. But we sure had fun playing there and made it our own, including the minotour Knight of Salamnia and lord of his own Salamnic lands.

That being said, I also like world building, but it is definately a huge time suck and takes a lot of dedication to make it really good. Which is why I'm giving considerable thought to starting up a homebrew.

R-

That is just the kind of opinions I am lookng for. I think waht I need to do is put a little more of what I want into the Wilderlands I am running. I fall into the "what is cannon" trap sometimes. Good advice Treebore!

My own homebrew, Arria, which I rolled out in the winter of 1992 was such a labor of love. I loved sitting down and thinking "what do I want to do next?" Knowing every part of that world, knowing that every part was mine - I didn't have to change something to fit how I wanted it to be...it already was the way I wanted it to be. And if I changed my mind, I changed it. I was the final authority on what was and what would be. And I knew my world - the players came in and learned of the world by exploration and reading what I gave them, not by reading someone's novels or the internet.

I love Greyhawk and the Grey Box Forgotten Realms. I let Arria languish for much of the late 90s, as games took us into the those two published settings. I just finished a campaign in Greyhawk and have spent much of the last four were there, spanning about 12 years. All except one year-long campaign (which was in my homebrew) back in 03-04 was spent in Greyhawk, in fact. But now I am finally prepared to return to Arria once more. Sadly, I lost most of my maps in a computer snafu and will have to rebuild those from the ground up. But I'm okay with that, honestly, as I look forward to drawing maps again.

So, while I love a couple published settings, I find true happiness is found in my own works. If you have time and dedication, it's truly rewarding.

Rigon wrote:I agree with a lot of what Treebore said. My DragonLance campaign is nothing like anyone's else. It doesn't follow the novels or any setting info beyond the original 16 modules. But we sure had fun playing there and made it our own, including the minotour Knight of Salamnia and lord of his own Salamnic lands.

That being said, I also like world building, but it is definately a huge time suck and takes a lot of dedication to make it really good. Which is why I'm giving considerable thought to starting up a homebrew.

R-

Your game had a real nice mix of what I was already familiar with, so I had a strong sense of "knowing" the world, yet you also made it different in very significant ways, yet it still came together to make a fun campaign. One that needs to be continued.

Lord Dynel wrote:So, while I love a couple published settings, I find true happiness is found in my own works. If you have time and dedication, it's truly rewarding.

Totally agree. Just for me I got to a point where I found it was easier to take a setting that was already out there and twist and mold it into having the elements I wanted, or have them be much more prominent if the setting already had them. Easier primarily meaning much less of a time sink. Primarily in laying out the world. I never had an idea where the geography was radically different from a "standard" setting. Cascandia still has mountains, lakes, rivers and Oceans, for example. So what I wanted to do was already out there, geography wise. So I hit upon the idea of just taking the setting maps and just changing everything else into what I wanted the over all setting to be.

So while doing that it hit me that I was fine with most of the "descriptions" of the settings, especially when it came to explaining geographical features and the various "vanilla" towns and villages.
The only things really different for my setting were how I had magic working, mostly due to its history. My setting would one day grow into a magic system with 9 levels of spells, but currently 6th level spells were the most powerful available. My other main changes were having Ogres and Lizardmen as intelligent and sophisticated societies.

So it was much easier for me to take a published setting and just totally revamp the "dressings" to what I wanted. Like all the many small towns and villages, all I had to do there is decide what changes I wanted to make to the percentage of races living there. Leave it human dominant, or make it lizardman or ogre dominant. Then I had to decide which areas to change into the Ogre and Lizardman nations. Which with Forgotten Realms was kind of easy, because they already had geographical areas dominated by Ogres and Lizardmen, so all I had to do was change those areas into civilized ogre and lizardman societies. Other than that, I just had to decide which human centered populations had significant numbers of the civilized versions, in similar vein to how many halflings, elves and dwarves lived there.

I also ended up keeping the "standard" Lizardmen and Ogres, because I decided to have their down fall progressed far along enough to have these versions in numbers.

The magic itself was easier. Plus I had the real reasons certain NPC's were well known be because they were making discoveries into 7th level spell casting.

The only real work I had to do after that was create the Pantheons for the intellectually advanced Lizardmen and Ogres. The hardest part of that, for me, was coming up with names that fit those races. All much easier than doing it all completely from scratch.

It does really depend. To me, to make each campaign somewhat unique I play up the strengths of the setting. I feel that the setting can really set the tone of the campaign, and make it memorable. Personally I mix it up from campaign to campaign. I use my homebrew world of the Rhuinlands, which is nice because I know it so indepth and well. Homebrew can be a challange too it you are not prepared to make up answers to questions you never thought players would ask. I also play in the NecroWorld setting which is essentially 75% homebrew anyway. My other go-to setting is Greyhawk. Since this world so well developed (in the sense of nations, history, and people) it's easy to create mood, tone and in particular depth. I think if the players can "feel" the depth of a setting, that can immerse themselves in it a bit more easily. But deep history could also make players feel like outsiders. They can feel that they have no idea how to play in such a big, detailed world. Sometimes players think they are doing something wrong in these well-developed worlds and think they are playing against the grain, which can hamper roleplay. It's emportant to encourage the players/characters, regardless of setting, even if it somewhat goes against the typical aspects of the setting, in my opinion.

~O

Here's another vote for published settings. I don't have the time for 'from scratch' world building. That being said, I only want/use bare bones campaign settings, and fill in the rest as I envision it. My C&C campaigns are World of Greyhawk, based on the 1983 boxed set. If it is not in the boxed set, then it is up for interpretation or revision. If it ain't on the Darlene map, then maybe it's there, maybe it's not.This allows familiarity for the players, without the ability to know the setting better than I. It gives all of us a solid framework with which to work in, and make our own.

Treebore wrote:

Rigon wrote:I agree with a lot of what Treebore said. My DragonLance campaign is nothing like anyone's else. It doesn't follow the novels or any setting info beyond the original 16 modules. But we sure had fun playing there and made it our own, including the minotour Knight of Salamnia and lord of his own Salamnic lands.

That being said, I also like world building, but it is definately a huge time suck and takes a lot of dedication to make it really good. Which is why I'm giving considerable thought to starting up a homebrew.

R-

Your game had a real nice mix of what I was already familiar with, so I had a strong sense of "knowing" the world, yet you also made it different in very significant ways, yet it still came together to make a fun campaign. One that needs to be continued.

Perhaps...

R-

Purchased stuff has the advantage of being ready, at least as far as it's mostly sort of there, with names and maps and whatever... already written down. Home-brew has the advantage of being individualized, unknown, and an admixture of whatever elements, reagents, and unguents you can manage to slapdash together to make Franken-campaign. They both have their place, and they both have neat stuff, amidst other pros and cons a bullet list would have to shoot. But... in the marathon of gaming events, I find these truths to be self evident: home brew is created unequal. It is better. More vivid. More original. More... just more. When the DM has the time, the energy, and the drive to do something with it.

Failing that, it takes a tremendous effort to "get into" a given setting, to learn its micro-interlocking Lego-sity and be able to have it feel fluid, real, or just not like the DM is reading the next line of a play three moments before the players skip to the Final Act. I feel the same with modules and its why I don't like them... if you have the time it takes to throw a grapple down and force a published adventure to submit to your whim, you have the time to draw up some quick notes and sketch a small map...

But, anyway. Yeah, my feeling is that home brew is like beer. And that goes in many senses.

I have been leaning more and more towards homebrew settings these days. I think they come with less preconceived expectations, as in if the players know what campaign world you are in, they sometimes compare the tweaks you have made to how the campaign was written. I also find myself spending more time trying to memorize various aspects of the region we are in instead of moving along more fluidly.

Now that isn't to say one can't yank good stuff from other campaign settings and drop them into a homebrew. If you need a city, grab a city map from a published product and drop it in. Because you have "transplanted" it the players don't expect things to be a certain way with that city so it works out.

I recently did a blog post on homebrew settings versus published settings and whether they were really time savers or not. I am starting to think not as much as I used to think they were.

Sounds to me like you allowed the "canon" to bite you in the butt. I don't give a crap about canon. Canon becomes what actually happens in game, so if I say that neighboring country/city whatever hates or gets along with the area the PC's are currently in, THAT is canon. Not what the books say. What matters is that I be consistent with what I have happen within the context of the game, not be adherent to what is written in the setting books.

That is why I like working with published settings. They are a framework upon which I build what I want to be "canon". I never, ever worry about what the books say unless it is something I decided I wanted to use when I read the setting over. From then on the real history of my new setting is determined when it actually happens in game. That is when I worry about fixing certain facts in stone. Until then its all Bards tales. The truth isn't known until you find out for yourself. Even then its no guarantee. You may have ran into some one or some thing with a secret agenda, that benefits by keeping the truth a secret. One day the players may find out the real truth, or maybe not.

Here is the key thing. I may have thought it wads the truth when the players initially learned about it. Several times I would later read an adventure that I want to integrate, and I would think of how I could add it in, what kind of connections I can link back to the party. Several times I did that by having things the players knew turn out to be lies to hide what is going on in the adventure I have now chosen to run. So even I am not beholden to what is believed to be "truth" when I am able to think of ways to change that truth into a new truth with a plausible story reveal.

So for me, published settings do save me a lot of time. They save me the time of drawing up maps, describing most towns, villages and cities, and even most NPC's I am able to retask to my purposes. I also save a lot of time by not worrying about what "canon" is, until its time to decide what it is within the game itself.