Getting started

Ok, so I knew early on I wanted to create my own world and societies and things. The kit was all well and good, but I had some very specific things I wanted to be able to accomplish with this game and didn't feel like sticking to their script would work for me.

The main thing was that I wanted a completely open world, not a campaign. Welcome to Wherever, what do you want to do?

Of course there will be "quests" and challenges and things going on - but it is entirely up to the characters what to do or how.

So first thing I needed was a town.

I had bookmarked the medieval fantasy generator ages ago as a writing resource but for this it ended up being perfect. A few clicks and particulars later and we had Startead.

Line map of a small village with various buildings and a road through it.

I didn't come up with the name but I'm shite at naming things so off we go.

Now what?

Well, I'm a visual person and I realized after making this that I needed to know what was going on in the world before I could even think about this town at all. Is it in a forrest? Is it near mountains? How close is the nearest city?

Fuck. I need a bigger map.

Thankfully y'all are here for me on that too. Fantasy World Generator was also previously bookmarked as a writing tool but again, I was ready and soon had Harlinde.

Map of a fantasy world that kind of looks like a mushroom.

Doesn't look like much does it? Let's add some things.

We need general regions for our four main races to live on. I'm limiting the societies to human, elf, halfling & dwarf for my own ease of use.

Same world but with place names and some emoji on it.

Okay that's better. I've got two rival dwarven kingdoms in the mountains (Forlonde & Doridal) as well as a dwarven outpost in the south (Dorwine). Two elven lands (Nionengel & Gionevris). The main human Kingdom is Saunders up on its own penninsula. And the halflings live in the Parish.

Is this everyone? of course not. I'm not even sure this is the whole world. But it's enough to give my players some things to do and gives me an idea of what's going on.

I also started adding some emoji as you zoom in to give me an idea of what the terrain is.

Detail of fantasy map with the word "Tirine" and some various animal emoji.

For example, Tirine is a mostly human region that has some jungle and some plains. There's monkeys, snakes and lions. As well as crocodiles to the north.

I did this sort of scattershot, mostly as a general guide of like "wolves live here but not bears, maybe snakes."

So where is Startead?

In unincorporated lands near the sea. Between the Western Sea (as yet unnamed) and the dwarven mountains.

Oh yeah, and there's a dragon in them there mountains!

So this was the start of my world. I used the city generator to make maps of all of the cities you see above with a stash of other that exist in other parts of the world. As just the portion of this that is labeled covers about 30,000 square miles I should have a bit before my players wander outside of it.

But they are welcome to.