Not long after this, I read the Prydain books by Lloyd Alexander, and soon after, Tolkien. Between D&D and my love of Tolkien especially, I started spending my free time (or time when my mind wandered; much of this was in class) drawing homebrew Christopher Tolkien style maps. To me, D&D and homebrewing go hand in hand. You don't play D&D without homebrewing, and if you aren't homebrewing, you aren't playing D&D. I recognize, of course, that this isn't literally true, but the two activities are so cemented together in my mind that it's hard to envision one without the other.
Anyway, I don't really recall too much what homebrew settings I've tinkered with prior to 2000 and the release of 3e. Often because that was because I took no notes and kept no maps and just fudged around in my head with them, or ran them without really spending much time thinking through the implications of the setting. But 3e launched at a time when, among other things, Geocities was active (followed by Wikispaces, followed by Google Sites, etc.) so every setting I've worked on since the launch of 3e was at least a little bit more documented than the ones prior to that. Although Geocities and now Wikispaces are gone (or at least no longer free to use) I've still got archives of some sort of them, and I at least know what the settings were and what I developed for them. Let's talk briefly about the settings I've worked on, and put them in streams; i.e., one evolved into another into another, before that stream "went extinct" and was replaced by another. This isn't exactly true, because one stream may have borrowed substantially from another (in fact, they always do) or become a hybrid of another two, or areal features may have spread across multiple streams, etc. But it's still useful to think of in terms of how we got to where we are today.
Dungeon Craft Setting: The very first setting I developed for 3e was based on Ray Winninger's Dungeon Craft series of articles, that actually started well before 3e came out, and can be seen maybe as a last hurrah of setting design methodology for 2e. The series didn't finish until after 3e was out, and of course, setting development rarely requires mechanics too much anyway; or at least, his methodology didn't really make too much reference to them.
In any case, because this was my first foray back into D&D setting design, or "regular" fantasy at all, for that matter, it was pretty standard and even rather vanilla. This was also influenced by the fact that I think Ray Winninger's own sample world of Aris was kind of that way too; it wasn't too divergent in terms of high concept. This one I'm not sure what I still have, because I quickly grew dissatisfied with its bog-standardness and evolved it into the next chapter in setting design.
Faerytale: This one was based more on a high concept; that the "faery" races were from an alternate plane, and were much more fey in nature. Elves were associated with a season, for instance, and there were winter elves and summer elves and fall and spring elves, etc. Anyway, this was my first (since 3e anyway) attempt to break away a bit from D&D itself, even though D&D was still the tool I was using. I wanted to mess around with the assumptions and not have the exact same assumptions that D&D itself had. I don't remember what else changed (nor how to find the correct Geocities archive) anymore, although I'm positive that either the link is kicking around in some folder in my email, or the files are archived somewhere on my old desktop hard drive, or something. In any case, I was happy enough with the results; so happy, in fact, that I didn't take too long before evolving this into an even more divergent situation; one specifically in which what the PCs do was going to be quite contrary to D&D normally, as well as further evolution of the mechanics.
Faerytale II: This was actually the exact same high concept as Faerytale, but I did two things that were notably different: 1) started replacing core classes with alternate classes, and other more obvious and significant house-rules (at this point, most of the alternate classes came from the Wheel of Time d20 game; because I didn't have anything else yet to borrow them from) and I decided that the core concept was that the PCs were supposed to be a kind of fantasy version of Mulder and Scully; secret agents of the king rooting out secret supernatural threats that most normal people didn't even believe in.
Because one of these evolved fairly seamlessly into the other, none of them were ever really finished, and I didn't ever actually use any of these except as an exercise to stretch out my home-brewing muscles. I also didn't really retain much, if anything, from these settings, other than maybe the idea of secret skulduggery and espionage as a major theme in a game that's nominally based on D&D; not normally themes associated with that game (although keep in mind that as a kid, I played as much Top Secret S.I. as D&D, and arguably liked it better in many ways anyway.) I do still kind of like the idea of the seasonal elfs; it makes them seem more fey and inhuman, but I don't really care for elfs of any kind most of the time these days, so even that good idea hasn't really had any traction. This stream finally died without issue, mostly because I was more distracted by other, sexier streams that were coming up on the side.
Dark•Heritage Mk. I: At some point during this phase, I was at home, my wife was out with some girlfriends, and I popped Attack of the Clones in the DVD player, skipped ahead to the actual attack of the clone troopers, and found myself really caught up in the idea of this Mars-like environment as a setting. Hey, southern Utah-esque Bloodlines was already mostly there, right; what if I renamed it, and made it a bit more overtly Barsoom-like? That's where the first Dark•Heritage came from. My geography changed quite a bit; I actually had gigantic Tarsis-like volcanos, and a gigantic Valles Marinaris feature. But this was basically just Bloodlines with a new geography. It gradually got more and more alien and I made it more and more like Barsoom and Leigh Brackett's Mars in terms of wildlife, monsters, etc. It gradually started to take on some steampunk-like elements, mostly borrowed from Iron Kingdoms (I liked steampunk for a while exactly right up until I saw what the steampunk dress-up movement was like, and read a few romance novels disguised as steampunk fantasy. At that point, I decided I had no interest in the genre anymore.) Although I never really liked China Mieville all that much, some aspects of his world-building from Perdido Street Station made their way in. Finally, at some point, I got to the point where the setting had to be rebooted because my ideas were diverging too much from where I started. I actually ran this briefly.
Dark•Heritage Mk. II: I ran this one slightly less briefly; in fact, I think we had a rather successful little campaign here with my old group which has all fallen apart and gone our separate ways now. Two significant high concept ideas inform this version of the setting, which differed from what came before and after. Rather than plane-touched races, I modified the races to be Bred; they were former slaves who were bred like breeds of dog, sheep or horse into what they were. The old slave-masters were long gone, but their legacy remained. This actually borrowed some secret history that wasn't terribly different from Warhammer 40k and Tolkien's Silmarillion-stage stuff. The other major high concept change was that for some reason I revisited an old idea I had long had for creating a sundered world of floating islands that had to be traveled to via flying ships. The world was divided into "zones" separated by persistent cloud-layer or other features that made them distinct; at the very top were cold, high altitude islands where the aasimar lived, below that was a sunny jungle continent, below that was an overcast zone of smaller, sorta Medieval like kingdoms, and below a persistent storm layer and below everything else was the Night Zone; a terrifying zone of darkness and vampires.
I obviously am not using that any more, but I do still like it, and one of these days, I'll probably figure out what to do with that idea. Anyway, I got kind of stuck on those ideas, because they happened to be current when I started running the game. Before I was done, I had decided that these ideas were too weird to be my "main" area of setting development, so I was ready to drop them as soon as I had the chance.
Dark•Heritage Mk. III: Borrowing now the geography of the Tarim Basin during the heyday of the Silk Road, this was back to Barsoom-like desert stuff, although now I wasn't trying too hard to be all pseudo-science fictiony and was happy to simply be fantastic. This version of the setting actually got really significant development; I had a wiki, drew maps, wrote thousands of words, etc. In the end, I finally decided that I was getting caught up too much in weird, esoteric questions of world-building and was focusing on stuff that had no bearing on whether or not the game would be fun. Trying to decide what certain cultural touchstones would be like is fun, sometimes, but I wasn't there to write some kind of weird ethnographic anthropological report. This version finally just kind of faded away as I remembered that I needed to just be fun again. Ironically—or I dunno, maybe this isn't ironic—this happened because while I was doing all this, I needed some actual D&D settings, and working on those brought my Dark•Heritage stuff around. But by this point, I think we need to explore another stream; those D&D-like streams, which then became the foundation of the next phase of Dark•Heritage.
Leng Calling: Somewhat tongue-in-cheek reference to a cheesy Falco song, this was another setting that I started noodling around with just for the heck of it that was deliberately meant to be more D&D and generic fantasy like; probably because even before I gave up on the direction Dark•Heritage was going, I was subconsciously aware that it was becoming too weird. Originally developed for me to noodle around with fiction writing, this setting featured more familiar type locations, a big sea surrounded by a pseudo-Spanish nation, etc. In reality, it was the first real Dark•Heritage Mk IV geography, although it wasn't designed as such, and it wasn't meant to be. It was meant to deliberately stand in contrast to Dark•Heritage as it was at the time, where I was neck-deep into Mk. III.
Demons in the Mist: Another tongue-in-cheek setting title, this was based on me shamelessly stealing the high concept from a friend of mine and coming up with this setting in which a toxic, demon-infested mist had flooded the world, and only the tops of mountains, tepuis and plateaus stood above the mist. Airships and tunnels and other things connected the various islands that rose above the mists, but going into the mists itself was seen as tantamount to suicide. The only reason I did this was because some friends of mine wanted me to run something. I whipped up a few geographical features and started running this before I'd even really developed very much, so much of the setting development happened literally on the fly. I also had decided for whatever reason that this was doing to be "D&D without the iconic D&D elements" so most of the races (except human and half-orc) were replaced with humanoid creatures from the monster manual (we had a shifter, two humans, two hobgoblins and a half-orc, if I recall when the campaign started) and instead of magic, there was only psionics.
The game was pretty wacky. One impetuous guy ended up pledging service to a demon lord because it was using the appearance of a super hot chick at the time. They ended up getting involved in a war between hot, naked Amazon chicks who rode dinosaurs into battle and who were fighting sentient gorillas. Two characters got their bodies switched; the lothario was stuck in the body of Fast Times era Phoebe Cates, and the hobgoblin pirate who was his best friend got stuck in the body of a gorilla. In the end, they destroyed the setting, and nonchalantly walked off, too narcissistic to believe that it would have any real impact on them personally. At one point, I actually introduced (temporarily) a mechanism by which you could get extra action points by quoting 80s pop songs and making them sound like they fit.
Although I don't think I really borrowed much directly from this game into my future setting developments, one thing that it definitely did was remind me to stop taking myself so seriously and just freaking run a fun game already.
Pirates of the Mezzovian Main: For another group, I needed to run a D&D-like game, and this is the one I came up with. It was also pretty crazy; I had a character who was a tall, skinny Ichabod Crane-looking moron who thought he was a dwarf born in the wrong body. I had a character who snuck out while the other PCs were asleep and did some anthropomancy in the guts of a reedy, cheap slave that he bought (the faces on the other players when they realized how he had these clues on what to do next!) Anyway, for this game I also developed what ended up being the geography for Dark•Heritage Mk. IV, although I didn't know it at the time, because that's not why I developed it. This was driven by two things; reinforcing the lessons of Demons in the Mist to just roll with crap, not take myself too seriously, and just have fun (I actually had one of my most successful moments of gaming horror in this game too; just because we didn't take ourselves too seriously didn't mean that it was all gonzo whackiness all the time either.) And secondly, that pirates was too fun of a concept to do away with because I was stuck in some desert paradigm. But before I jump into the next stream, let's talk about some epilogues that this stream managed to generate before it was done with.
Modular Setting Elements: This wasn't meant to be a setting per se, but rather a place where I could archive ideas that I liked that tended to make appearances in more than one setting; starting with Tarush Noptii and the original hobgoblin version of Kurushat. Some of these started out way back in the Leng Calling setting, made appearances in Pirates of the Mezzovian Main, and I knew that they'd make appearances again. In fact, most of them ended up getting integrated directly into Dark•Heritage Mk IV. This didn't end so much as it just became less modular, and I actually integrated them into the setting. So, I put a lot of work into this, but that work poured seamlessly into the next stream.
Freeport Fan: And finally, I used them in one more brief game before I left this setting behind completely; using an East Indies inspired geography, I threw Freeport into a new setting, using modular elements like Kurushat, Terassa, etc. and made this a kinda sorta sequel to Demons in the Mist. Even though it was in a different setting, it featured several of the same characters, and a very similar vibe; I started off with a Hangover-like high concept; the PCs had woken up one day missing a fair bit of their memories of the last few weeks, and had to figure out what kind of crazy hijinks they'd got up to in the meantime (one of them was married to a half-demon seductress with all kinds of corrupt political ambitions, for instance.)
Anyway, this was a post-ending hurrah; I'd already really kind of moved on. The game itself also kind of died with a whimper as scheduling and real life issues forced it to end earlier than I would have wished it to.
Finally, we get to the several years in which I worked in Dark•Heritage Mk. IV, which used the Pirates of the Mezzovian Main geography (mostly) with a bunch of Modular Setting Elements thrown on top of it, and, of course, I was back to something more like my standard racial selection. I also dabbled in a lot of other ideas, many of which actually eventually led to the evolution of DH4 to DH5, and I also finally got involved in the m20 system.
During this phase, I also spent considerable effort and capital in some space opera setting design, based, of course, originally on Star Wars, but I'm only talking about my fantasy homebrew, so I'm not really going to mention those.
Dark•Heritage Mk. IV: This is the setting that this blog was really mostly about developing for many years. As I said above, it gradually settled into the recognizable Mark IV setting, with the racial selection, the nations and geography, etc. that I'd been using for years. Although it originally started as both heavily house-ruled d20 D&D and equally heavily house-ruled d20 Past, I eventually used both house-ruled Old School Hack and house-ruled m20 to represent this, and the basis of my current m20 games starts here.
Cult of Undeath: Cult of Undeath was my attempt to see how I could run a Paizo adventure path, but mutilated, mutated, clipped and otherwise made more up my alley. I ended up developing an alt.Ustalav so I could run the setting there without feeling like I was stepping on their intellectual toes while talking about all of the changes I was making to it here, and I even ended up modifying my Dark•Heritage m20 game into something more D&D like. This eventually evolved into Fantasy Hack, my full-blown alt-D&D.
Timischburg: As Cult of Undeath was more successful than even I thought it might be, I decided to actually develop that setting more fully. It was originally meant to be little more than a slightly deeper dive into what was essentially one of the modular setting elements from way back when I still was doing Modular Setting Elements, but it ended up expanding considerably. But I didn't really put too much flesh on these bones, because although I liked the direction it was going, I liked it enough that it was eclipsing the ideas I had for DH4; in fact, I thought these were better ideas. But instead of being separate, the two were converging in many ways as I was bringing DH ideas into Timischburg. Finally, I decided to formally combine them, and do so with a few other significant borrowings while I was at it, but let's not get too far ahead of ourselves yet...
Dreamlands Remixed: One of just many abortive setting high concept ideas that I spelled out here over the years, this one at least had one major element developed a bit; the country of Lomar, borrowed from Lovecraft's Dreamlands series, and combined in many ways with CAS's Hyperborean Cycle (as both Lovecraft and CAS themselves joked about at times.) While it's too much to say that this was really a setting per se, this Lomar development did, at least, get swallowed up and integrated into DH5.
Mammoth Lords: I didn't really talk too much about this here, but I did do more development on it than on many other ideas; I had a wikispaces page, I had a notebook full of maps I sketched and notes I'd jotted down. This needed some work to be usable, but it was also further along than a lot of other high concept lines I'd thrown out there and then not done much with. It ended up lending the majority of its geography to DH5, so it's a significant element of where we went next.
Before I get to DH5, based on these elements, I should probably point out two other setting design noodlings that I've done that I'm still trying to figure out how to integrate, because I kind of want to in some respect.
Odd D&D: This initially had one of the same conceits as Demons in the Mist; D&D, but with none of the basic, iconic D&D elements, focusing instead on some more esoteric options for classes and races. What will probably make the cut from the stuff I developed for it is the concept of the lizard and snake-men kingdoms. The rest of it was specific to that mini-setting, rather than something that can become a modular add-on to DH5. I don't know for sure how much the lizardmen and snakemen kingdoms will really feature in DH5, but then again, I don't know how much Baal Hamazi or Kurushat or Gunaakt will feature either, or even Lomar, even though they're all explicitly part of the setting. For the most part, to include any of those, I'll have to actually expand the map, or leave their specific location undefined and just have them feature as spies, visitors, or other weirdos who are from beyond the borders of known territory.
Realms Traveler: I talked a bit about the 4e cosmology and how I always liked it; in point of fact, I'd actually developed (vaguely) some similar ideas with regards to Leng Calling, and while extradimensional travel isn't really something that I'm all that interested in because presumably your actual setting is interesting enough that it isn't necessary, I'd still kept those ideas in the back of my mind, as an even more optional modular element. I had, however, spent a little bit of time thinking about what it might look like if I specifically desired to have a game that traveled the realms of gods and demons and weirdo aliens; kind of the high concept of Planescape, but without all of the D&Disms (not to suggest that I wouldn't borrow tons of realms from my 3e Manual of the Planes book, as well as Monte Cook's Beyond Countless Doorways and Paizo's Distant Worlds all rolled up into a single cosmology that played out like "Wagon Train to the Planes" (a kind of pun on the phrase that allegedly Gene Roddenberry used during his pitch for Star Trek to the studio; Wagon Train to the Stars.)
Like I said, I don't know how much planar travel (I don't even like the term plane or planar, because it sounds too specifically D&Dish, although I know Blavatsky and the theosophists used similar language, and it was therefore picked up a bit by Lovecraft and Moorcock and others. Maybe I should call them exoworlds?) will feature in DH5, but if it does, I want to keep this concept in my back pocket for how to actually do so. Echoes of Asprin's Myth Adventures will probably inform this from a tone perspective moreso than anything like Planescape, but that's a somewhat more distant concern right now anyway.
Dark•Heritage Mk. V: And that gets us to where we are now; the already fairly highly derived DH4 gets smashed together with the geographies of Timischburg and Mammoth Lords, and a few other elements bolted on, and we've got DH5. Something that I don't actually spend tons of time developing, because so many of the smaller elements of it are long-lived already and can be adopted without much change, but which I expect to be my homebrew go-to for many years to come still.
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