The DM: Well, you’ve had 24 hours. Do you have all of the answers to those questions from yesterday?
Unsuspecting Blog Reader: Eh…
The DM: Good, let’s proceed. First, you’ll take the six questions about ….
Unsuspecting Blog Reader: I don’t actually have them with me. My, er, cerebrus ate them. No, I dropped them. Yeah, that’s it.
The DM: Wait, what? You mean you didn’t write a 2-3 paragraph response to those wonderful, world-building questions? Oh no! How will you build a new D&D campaign without all of the answers? Now you get right back in there and start wri…
Unsuspecting Blog Reader: OMGWTF!
———–
Calm down, calm down. My poor attempt at humor was to illustrate how absurd it would be to answer the campaign creation questions completely, or in a single day. The fact of the matter is that you probably won’t have the answer to all of those questions, even when your campaign is production-ready. Some won’t be interesting, and some just won’t apply to your campaign. Yesterday, I only asked you to do two things with that list: a) start thinking about the questions, and b) add some more.
Today, I want you to do that again. Write down those additional questions, because those are going to be the most important ones in the process of building your own new D&D campaign world. Those are the things that are already on your mind, the things that most relate to the ideas you already have in mind.
I want to add another step to today’s tasks, however. I want you to write a paragraph or two about your world. It doesn’t have to be an overview; it could be a description of a single statue, in a single town. The important thing is that you put something out there. Even just a few lines would be fine. Get the juices flowing.
Here’s my “paragraph” for today:
Lenryn is a world marked by a war.
It is a war that pits magic against flesh, and mind against steel.
It is a world in its youth, where humanity has barely left its shacks and shanties and built its first stone building.
In Lenryn, the Eladrin govern with near absolute power. Whether it is in the style of Plato’s “Philosopher Kings” as in the Great Old Kingdom, or whether it is in the style of the soviet-era Politburo as in The City of the Collective, all politics in Lenryn are Eladrin politics. Even the burgeoning human city-state of Thorlaz, it is rumored, is secretly run by the Eladrin.
