How I Made My Next TTRPG Campaign Setting

I’m absolutely fascinated by your world map! My only concern’s from what I’ve read on Inkarnate’s terms and services, couldn’t they sue you if you begin to make profit off your game using their map software? I assume there’s a way around this since you’re using it in your own game? This is the primary thing stopping me from purchasing membership for designing the world map in my own TRRPG. :/
I’m considering buying ‘Wonderdraft’ but in terms of a FULL world map - what’s the better choice between these two? :x Battle maps would also be extremely useful; I know there’s ‘Dunegondraft’ for that (thanks to your other amazing video)! 🙌

Any feedback from anyone with experience on this matter would be sincerely appreciated! 🙏

Amazing & insightful content Icarus! 🔥
Thank you - Subscribed! (:

I love your currency part. And that everything is based on silver.

You really need to drop "The" from the names on the map. Makes it 10,000x better. (It's also not something you'll ever see on a real map)

Ok dude you won a subscriber... Incredible quality content. Bravo

Very cool. What software did you use to write the history, etc?

Very inspiring!

to be honest, this video is not so much "how i made my next setting" as it is "here's my next setting". I'd have liked to learn more about the process rather than the outcome.

Some of your systems like your currency and spellcasting focus for example are so intriguing to me. It's inspired me to make something like that when I start my next campaign!

hey. I think the video is great, but I don't get why you split your coin in two and then into five? surely it would be hard splitting anything in 5 evenly? wasn't the real life equivelent to split it in 2, then 4, then 8?

I wonder if it is possible to do this in foundry itself

I just want to know more about the "Se7ven vs Ratatouille" quest hook...

Would it be alright if I used your month names in my own worldbuilding on worldanvil? My articles are public, but I doubt I'll ever "publish" anything officially.

Amazing work! Love detailed lore and world building and yours is a work of art

hey so ik this is an old video but is there maybe a video on where and how you keep your setting info stored?

Hey, is this in any part based on the Black Company book series by Glen Cook? I noticed a couple of similarities and thought that would've been kinda cool if it was.

Just track time 1:1 out of session
You can go as far into the future during the session as you want but then you have to wait for irl time to catch up with them (which is a great chance to play other characters!)

Thanks for explaining your LegendKeeper pins. Sadly there's no one-time-purchase software for that sort of thing, but I've found that you can use the tool Obsidian and a plugin called Leaflet that does an okish job at letting you pin things on a map. But I've replicated your system from LK onto it and seeing how it goes. I'm feeling so much more organized now..

I got really interested on the Legend Keeper, but for the time being I'll have to make due without it. But it looks like the perfect solution to what I needed.

Talaawar or Talwar means Sword in some languages.

I am curious as to why you didn't include any information about divinity and religion. Is it because your world has almost non-existent beliefs or is it because it is something that you just wouldn't include in this kind of guide?

I'd never do this for any group because I have never met players that wouldn't drop out on a whim.

I would like to make a campaign setting but I feel like it'd be hard for me since I'm worse at DMing war, political, or really anything to do with intelligent NPCs. I'm better at doing monsters and other stuff like that.

If someone made a pdf like that for a campaign setting in my dnd group, no one would read it, wich is really sad, because is something so cool

I would love to see your templates that you have made, they seem so organized and structured compared to mine, I always found them impossible to make myself.

50+ pages for the players to read. Yeah, right, that's hardly gonna happen. I wish it was otherwise, but from my experience, it won't.

I've been non-stop revising and expanding my own D&D world since the beginning of my DM journey 3 1/2 years ago now. Watching this video has inspired me to really crack on with making some form of properly organized documentation. I have a lot of notes, lore and information but it's all over the place.

I had only recently started to pad out the history of the world and created a small document on the history/creation. That is one piece of the jigsaw in creating a book-style document for my players and for myself.

Incredible detail, a very interesting world on the surface and a chilled out video from minute 1 that has very much inspired me. I will certainly be subscribing for more.

My question would be: How do you balance the level of each encounter? If it's a fairly open world where they can go anywhere then they could be any level when they reach one of these points. This would make it difficult to plan ahead as the level you pick might be too low if they find it later or too hard if they reach it sooner.

A Black Company fan I see!

This is an amazing video.

if you know the calendar can be complicated why just not keep the real world one?

Absolutely amazing man! keep up the good work.

The level of detail in this is insane, I'm 99% sure in a good way, but maybe 1% not 😅.

I do think though that things like renaming days, months etc is not only pointless, it's actively harming to immersion because it feels like homework.

I always remember an author intro to the book nightfall by isaac asimov quoted below because - as in most things - asimov says it better than I ever could.

"Kalgash is an alien world and it is not our intention to have you think that it is identical to Earth, even though we depict its people as speaking a language that you can understand, and using terms that are familiar to you. Those words should be understood as mere equivalents of alien terms-that is, a conventional set of equivalents of the same sort that a writer of novels uses when he has foreign characters speaking with each other in their own language but nevertheless transcribes their words in the language of the reader. So when the people of Kalgash speak of "miles," or "hands," or "cars," or "computers," they mean their own units of distance, their own grasping-organs, their own ground-transportation devices, their own information-processing machines, etc. The computers used on Kalgash are not necessarily compatible with the ones used in New York or London or Stockholm, and the "mile" that we use in this book is not necessarily the American unit of 5,280 feet. But it seemed simpler and more desirable to use these familiar terms in describing events on this wholly alien world than it would have been to invent a long series of wholly Kalgashian terms.

> In other words, we could have told you that one of our characters paused to strap on his quonglishes before setting out on a walk of seven vorks along the main gleebish of his native znoob, and everything might have seemed ever so much more thoroughly alien. But it would also have been ever so much more difficult to make sense out of what we were saying, and that did not seem useful. The essence of this story doesn't lie in the quantity of bizarre terms we might have invented; it lies, rather, in the reaction of a group of people somewhat like ourselves, living on a world that is somewhat like ours in all but one highly significant detail, as they react to a challenging situation that is completely different from anything the people of Earth have ever had to deal with. Under the circumstances, it seemed to us better to tell you that someone put on his hiking boots before setting out on a seven-mile walk than to clutter the book with quonglishes, vorks, and gleebishes.

> If you prefer, you can imagine that the text reads "vorks" wherever it says "miles," "gliizbiiz" wherever it says "hours," and "sleshtraps" where it says "eyes." Or you can make up your own terms. Vorks or miles, it will make no difference when the Stars come out."

How big is the map we see? It seems like the island is cramped with so many cultures? How big is the island?

I am trying to imagine my players actually caring enough to read a pdf. my table is the worst (family)

This was insanely helpful and inspired me quite a lot

okay ubisoft

100% thought you were saying Dual Cities

Can you make a video on how you made the book on Publisher? I have the system but lack the know-how.

Absolutely loving these tips, but damn is it making me feel like my own world pales in comparison to this lol.

Does it ever come up that your Autumn season has an extra month than the others? Is there a canonical reason as to why?

Meanwhile I’m planning to use Dwarf Fortress to generate a world and history for a DND campaign

My favorite way to make language relevant is writing. NPC notes and random books should all be written in relevant languages. The dwarvish necromancer wouldn't have a post-it note in common, he should use dwarvish

Anto - I may have missed it, but is there a long-term overarching storyline that is progressing in your world that the players can either connect with or not?

Anto, your spellcaster focus status is SO cool! I was captivated all the way through this, and you've inspired me to try my own!

woahhhhh I had no idea Legendkeeper was a thing. This is a game changer! Thanks so much for this video. That's going to help me organize my world sooooooo much!

I want to really thank you for sharing your tools, your thoughts and everything!
I won't be able to make a professional looking campaign booklet like you did. Not right now, at least. But knowing your tools and thought process really, really helps me make leaps I wouldn't have made by myself!
Thanks a lot for sharing, Anto / Icarus Games!!

damn, love the black company influences you have on the world. Always wanted to run a campaign in a similar setting