What are the coolest thing about your Homebrew world?

inspiration
#1

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Hey everyone!

I thought it would be cool to see what awesome and unique things people are doing with their homebrew world’s or how they change or tweak existing world’s to fit their own vision.

I find that I always have one little piece of a new world project that i end up focusing on way more than any other.

For me recently it was dwarves. Just trying to flavor them to my liking.

So what is that thing for you, it can be anything… a monster, a town, a secret organization, a villan, or a new race and so on.

#2

For me, it’s always the Big Bad — a lesson I learned from watching a ton of Buffy. I have to have a clear concept of the main evil in the land. Usually, if I have a clear picture of that, everything else falls into place and becomes easier to imagine. I tend to work backwards and reverse engineer everything.

#3

So about my Dwarves…

What makes them different… Their are a Hardy folk, becoming the hardiest dwarf is a constant pursuit. And the keep track of their acheivements that have beads woven into their beards. They are like the merit badges of the dwarf world.

So the things that make a dwarf Hardy are a combination of their strength, their ability to hold their beer, and their ability to fight.

Every 3 years they have a brawl of champions. An enormous stone disc sits in the middle of dwarf country and a country with brawl takes place here the winner of the tournament will be the ruler of the dwarf kingdom till the throne is taken from them in the next Brawl of Champions.

Aside from those things they are pretty much short, grump old dwarfs that spend their time mining for gems, drinking bear, hunting goblins, soaking in a dwarvish bathhouse, or participating at The weekly fight night.

#4

The World I’m currently building revolves around a demon realm with demons how I’ve always imagined them. Humanoid, but with cool powers but also variety among themselves, such as different subspecies (which are the bioforms here). If they were to enter the normal realm, they’d boast quite some power, as it should be!

The strongest demons have wings, great strength and some can even turn into dragons! Making them natural conquerors and leaders. Different demon lords are controlling different areas, and some are eager to expand their area.

Other than that, it’s a high fantasy setting with most of the typical stuff such as medieval style weapons, magic and whatever else pops into mind at the particular moment. I like the freedom of being able to build upon it later, too, and I look forward to seeing it evolve further.

#5

I’ll say that all your ideas sound pretty cool. :slightly_smiling_face:

In my own, current D&D 5e campaign, the sun has been possessed through a dark ritual by some evil eldritch entity… gotta wish my players luck! :laughing::smiling_imp:

#6

The coolest thing about my homebrew game is it takes place in an ancient kingdom in decay. Players are just discovering that they’re experiencing a grim fairy tale, rather than the traditional horror baddies. There are vamps, werewolves, and more, but their lore is tied to a subtle link between the Fair Ones and a lingering curse in the players’ world. It’s inspired by Bloodborne, Castlevania, Changeling, and a few others. :slight_smile:

#7

My world IS a Final Fantasy!
Crystals! Monsters! Untamed wilds!
Mana does not restore unless you draw power from rare crystals.
There are old world ruins everywhere with magical places and even magitek warfactories!
Esper spirits you can bind yourself to and summon their power.

But I agree with @Alex
It’s all about the Villain of the story!

#8

What I take most pride in though. Is that my setting is a mash of FF, tribes/clans, aztek/muricanindian mix, almost iron age level tech

#9

That is quite a mix of things!

#10

I don’t even know how to imagine that! :joy:

@GMagnus sounds like a lot of fun!
@Chaologic I’d love to see what it looks like!

#11

What I believe to be the unique feature of my world: Minotaurs pretty much replace Orcs. But they are almost always sea faring. Although they are found deep inland via rivers and portages.

Think Taurens from WoW meet Viking raiders in Britain circa 878 AD.

#12

I like that idea… Minotaurs replacing orcs.

One idea I’ve been playing with is Gargoyles as a prominent race. Making them the other side of the coin to the teifling race.

#13

GODS

I’ll be hard-pressed to recall a game I played where gods wheren’t just invented by the players or too over-developed while not being a strong force in the world. They always seem like this distant thing, far off from mortal affairs.

I WANTED COOL GODS! but also wanted characters to care about them.

So I took the biggest player “alignment” archetypes around and made them USABLE gods.

Ao - Creation, the Architect.
Sol - Healing, the Sunlight.
Gaia - Nature, the Mother.
Selune - Magic, the Moon.
Hunger - Destruction, the Devourer.

So the three gods in the middle are visible at all times, one is the sun, the other the earth, the other the moon. Special bit is that gods are pure light beings and they solidify into rock when they die, so the earth and the moon are actually the dead bodies of the gods!

I then just ran with the idea of having the gods be everywhere physically and it works wonders, not only for religious characters. The wizard studies under the light of the moon, the cleric always meets the sunrise while the assasin waits for the sun to set, the druid feels the wind to hear the goddess…

Generally, players became way more involved with the “higher powers” that run everything that exists, while making it way simpler for me to keep them in mind while world building around them.

#14

Dude, I might just Ape this from you!!!

I love how you basically just threw out every other God but what the players actually mess with.

Aswell as making them highly interactable.

#15

Absolutely steal it! As I’ll do myself with a lot of stuff around this thread haha. Specially @Dragonlair’s minotaurs, they’re just so cool!

@GMagnus I constantly find myself going back to FF ideas for world building, I love me some pre-FF X flavour (IX and V for me are thr greatest!). It’s awesome stuff that always inspires me, like the way I did “souls” of living creatures, returning to the “god” that grants a litteral par of them to give them life, to purge and reincarnate. This allowed the hunger/blood magic to be super evil as it uses souls to fuel its power, which litterally kills the gods a little bit and reduces the overall strength of living creatures. Also the strong elemental themes always felt like home for me, probably because I also played a lot of wow and watched Avatar too much as a kid haha.

#16

Wow, I absolutely love this idea.

It definitely sounds like a way better than the gods some of the systems conjure, where yes, there is lore but you have to spend a lot of time prepping to remember the name and know the full context; even as a player. That’s an aspect of DnD that’s made me feel quite detached at times.

#17

I’m really loving this. If it works so well, I might just toss my demi-gods out of the window and use that instead! Haha! :smiley: