Welcome to the Campaign Builders' Guild.
The original ideas of the CBG were founded by Xeviat-DM at the Wizards of the Coast Message Boards, and expanded upon over the course of several months to become the thriving community you see now. There is one sole purpose for this guild, this site, and these forums: to help with the creation of GM-created, homebrew campaigns. In an RPG market where there are literally hundreds of published worlds - some good, some not - it is difficult for GMs to choose a world to adventure in. Often times, they will begin work on their own, personal campaign, sometimes inspired directly by pre-existing campaigns, and sometimes inspired by nothing more than the memory of playing outside in the creek when younger. This site is to help mold those ideas, to shape those themes, and to inspire in even greater detail the creation of complete worlds and campaigns to play RPGs in.
The Campaign Builders' Guild is your one-stop source for information and communities centered around building and creating homebrew campaign settings, adventures, and worlds for role playing games. World building and campaign building is a craft and an art, to use the words of Raelifin, and goes far beyond just simply creating locales, NPCs, and adventure locations. These things must connect to each other in some sort of fundamental way. At the Campaign Builders' Guild, we will help you achieve a mastery of this art, either through reviewing your campaign setting, critiquing your adventure, or simply basking in the wonder of your campaign world. Go to the forums and ask for help for that new kingdom you're building, and ask for advice on the new magic system you're creating. And while you're here, please ponder others' works of art. Write your own reviews on someone else's setting, and play an adventure RPG in a new campaign world. You can't go wrong.
I am doing the same thing Weave suggests. I hate trying to make nations as a whole, but when I've attempted it, I steal the format from Wikipedia on a random country and then fill it out for the one I'm making. It just hits me as soooo tedius, though...
I actually used to have a lot of trouble with that as well, Xathan. I actually still do, but instead of creating a setting that relied less on nations and cities as LC mentioned, I decided to zoom in on cities and start a lot smaller. That way, I can make an interesting locale and branch out from th
The only thing I'm doing about languages is coming up with the basic pattern or structure. Like dwarven in my world is primarily consonant vowel paired symbols (like japanese), where each symbol is based on the consonant and then modified by which vowel sound precedes it. It's also a grammatically
I already have a phonology for the mother language and will likely just make an excell spreadhseet to handle changes into other languages. It's a bit of work to set up, but it should go quickly once it's up and running. I'll probably make my map beforehand so I know what words I need translated
I plan on making a mother language, and then putting that through two consecutive sets of morphological changes to give me a language. So frex, Old Norse > Old English > Middle English. Ill use other offshoots eventually as naming languages for borderland features, or if a game ever extends that f
I used to have a program that would generate an entire language when given a set of parameters, but have not been able to find it (or anything similar) since - and I'm way too lazy to make an actual language.
So who all makes their own conlangs for their setting? I'm embarking on that task, and am wondering just how much depth most put into it. I'm looking at an initial three layers of language changes.
