To wite it up or not to write it up

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Teyrnon

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I've been thinking about pulling together my notes for my homebrew fantasy world and putting a definitive version of the setting on my website. I ran several campaigns in the setting covering about 800 years of history. I'd probably go with the original time period with the various modifications to various elements that were brought about by actual play. Not all of my initial ideas quite survived contact with players and had to change on the fly. It was originally run in AD&D 2E and converted to 3E when that came out. It was briefly run in a homebrew game system that doesn't really deserve mention but there we go.

The question I'd like to pose is this. Is this worth doing? Does anyone ever find value in reading some fool's homebrew campaign setting?
 
If you do it over time in a series of blog posts, yes. As an example look at Patrick Stuart's posts outlining his world of faerie on his blog. But make sure to break it into a series of short paragraphs, huge blocks of text are near unreadable online.
 
As long as you the person doing the heavy lifting is having fun as well of course. Beyond that I'll just second the above advice about breaking the setting into manageable for the reader.

Also I did not know that about Patrick Stuart, that is cool:shade:.
 
Go for it if you have the time and enjoy doing it. :thumbsup: Readers will either dig it in whole or in part or else shrug their shoulders and stop reading, what's the downside? Just be sure to make it an entertaining read and not just a list of dates and events. Nobody reads those. :thumbsdown:
 
Dang, everyone already gave you good advice. I don't have much to add save to repeat what everyone else already said. Do it and have fun, keeping your exposition in manageable bites. Exposition works best when it is succinct and evocative.

I know that verbally, players tune out after 2-3 sentences of exposition so I feed it to them in small bites.
 
Does anyone ever find value in reading some fool's homebrew campaign setting?

Only if it doesn't resemble the fifty-level million such settings already published or on somebody's existing blog.

All D&D campaign settings look the same because they're all based on the same ruleset, which has a lot of setting assumptions encoded into it. If you want to write it up for its own sake, go nuts. It's your blog, prep is play, etc. But if you want to know if anyone will ever read it - probably not. If that's the only reason you're doing it, save yourself some time and go re-watch LotR or something.
 
Go for it. If you love that setting, then... That's really all that matters. Hopefully, you'll get others into it. Maybe not. Do it anyway!
 
I've been thinking about pulling together my notes for my homebrew fantasy world [ . . . ]

The question I'd like to pose is this. Is this worth doing? Does anyone ever find value in reading some fool's homebrew campaign setting?
Making something concrete can be a very productive exercise as it engages parts of the brain that just thinking at a high level doesn't. Once you start drilling down into detail - maps, random encounter tables, writing up NPC motivations and resources and suchlike. As an incumbent campaign setting you have probably done quite a bit of this already, but 'finishing' it can pull out useful ideas and other material that you can re-use yourself.
 
If you do it over time in a series of blog posts, yes. As an example look at Patrick Stuart's posts outlining his world of faerie on his blog. But make sure to break it into a series of short paragraphs, huge blocks of text are near unreadable online.
To add to this, if you do it as a blog, try and have all your early entries present something about your setting this is a clear playable hook. People can start coming to your blog for bite-sized ideas and gradually acquire a taste for the setting around them. Over time, you can afford to slip in more esoteric information about your setting.
 
The question I'd like to pose is this. Is this worth doing? Does anyone ever find value in reading some fool's homebrew campaign setting?

Absolutely, yes. It's always better to write these up than to leave them in people's memories where nobody else can see them.
 
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