Gruntfuttock wrote:

Has the art of DIY world building died a death?
 
Nowadays it seems from surfing the web that most GMs run games set in commercial settings (perhaps they always did?) Personally, I’ve always found stuff you had worked up yourself generally made for better games. Even if they were based on a book or film, you adapted it to a rpg setting yourself and deleted anything you didn’t like from the original property and filled in any blank spaces with your own stuff. Do people still do this?   

I think - or I hope - that DIY is still alive & well. Personally, I suspect the main reason so much online chatter is about published settings is just because those settings have big fan bases and because those sorts of settings provide a convenient "shared language," so they're just easier to talk about. Commercial settings have an additional advantage in that they're often well supported for online play, which probably also drives a fair bit of online chitchat.

But my personal sense is that there are still plenty of GMs out there either itching to create their own worlds, or bend existing worlds to their own molds.  I've got an 11 year old nephew who recently discovered D&D, and I suspect he'll drag his players into his own weird D&D/Pokemon/Harry Potter mash-up before too long.

Gruntfuttock wrote:

If you run your own worlds (including those based on other properties) what grabs your attention to enthusing about writing one?
 
If you only run commercial settings (and nothing wrong with that – I’ve done it loads of times) why is that?
Lack of free time?
Lack of inspiration?
You just don’t enjoy world building?   

As for me, i used to pretty extensive worldbuilding, but stopped when I realized just how little got used. Perhaps if I had a multi-decade forever group, it'd be worth it; but I don't. So I've since turned to short campaign arcs with little defined world surrounding beyond what's necessary: a town or two, a splash of religion, a handful of important NPCs with agendas, some little adventure sites, and few buried dark secrets. (I think the degree to which Lemuria is described out in the BoL book is just about right: just enough bones to give structure, but plenty of space to put flesh on those bones.)

What I've found over the years, in other words, is that I do prefer doing my own thing, but mainly in the form of making loosely interconnected adventures rather than a clearly defined world.

That said, I do draw from existing material. In some cases I've played in a mangled established universe, with little attention to details (eg, Star Wars). Some settings, on the other hand, I prefer mostly canonical (eg, Middle Earth or Dark Crystal). Curse of Strahd for D&D 5e is good more or less by the book, imo, as it's a good size, small enough to fit in my moldering brain, big enough to insert/change as needed. It really just depends.

Right now, I'm making an effort to take some of the "high concepts" I've back-burnered over the last 25+ years and get them down into some minimal form usable to someone other than me. I'm looking into BoL, in fact, because one of those projects comprises about 25 or so short adventures in a rough sandbox, and I wanted a relatively lightweight system to express those in.  Similarly, I've got a alt-history/B-scifi campaign pitch along the lines of "Barbarians of Venus Fighting a rocket ship incursion by the Solar Soviet Union circa 1974" which might be amenable to the Red Venus supplement of Everywhen.

There's around a dozen of these little "micro-settings" in my notes that are fleshed out to varying degrees with locales, npcs, and some scenarios, but still need appropriate rules systems to stat them up in.

DIY is just generally easier for me, I think. A big tightly wrought setting can be interesting to read or maybe play in, but not to run. It's too much work to keep everything straight; whereas I can intuitively improvise in my own world with little risk of spoilering the climax or something. Plus, a setting that is *too* tight rarely survives contact with more "chaotic" players.

And yeah, those limited episodic arc-based campaigns really are golden, imo. The smaller scale is more manageable; and since they're short, it's easier to hop between different games, settings, playstyles, whatever. It's the "sampler box" approach to gaming, I suppose.
 

Wow! That sounds like a great campaign - just my sort of thing.

I find that semi-historical is a great style of game to run and play. History is often so much better as a setting (with or without tweaks) than novels or films. Also history provides ideas for totally fictional settings. My Bronze Age 'Two River Land' campaign of demons and spies in a fictional fantasy world based on a map and setting by Finn Cullen took it's political crisis that was the backdrop to the PC's story from the succession of the English crown in the latter part of the 17th century (Charles II, James Duke of York/James II, and the illegitimate Duke of Monmouth). 

I keep wanting to run a campaign in a prefab setting. Mostly for the maps and general politics. (I'm constantly worried that my self-created maps aren't geologically or sociologically accurate!)

Only I can't really find a campaign setting that suits my taste. Even when I plan to use something like Pathfinder's Golarion, I find myself making changes.To the point where I wonder why I'm using the setting as a jumping off point at all!

For myself, I'm not a big fan of historical fantasy settings. Something about them just feels a little too mundane to me. (I do find it weird that there are all sorts of pseudo-medieval campaign settings, when we hit the mid-to-late Renaissance, things often switch to alt-history fantasy, rather than a fantasy setting with rapiers and firearms.)

-- Paul
 

For those that don't necessarily want to run their BoL games in the Lemuria setting that Simon created, another good option is Legends of Steel written by Jeff Mejia. This is actually a terrific setting (Erisa) as it's balanced much like Simon's Lemuria, but it is more of a classic setting without the weird bestiary or tech of Lemuria. Further, and this is where it can also work for those that like to create their own settings, the map of Erisa also references the Sulanese Empire but, other than an arrow showing the direction of the Sulanese Empire, there is no reference in the book of the empire. It's perfect for world building, and I've been working on my own map of the Sulanese Empire so that I can use it in a future game set in Erisa.