D&D General Homewbrew Campaigns: How Old Is Your World?

[jgsugden]

When did you begin running games in your Primary Homebrew World. By primary, I mean the one you run the most, and if there is a tie, the one that is your favorite, and if you like all of them equally just make up your dang mind and stop being a problem, geesh.

If you started your setting by using a prepublished setting (like the Forgotten Realms, etc...), but it has changed so much that the setting no longer resembles the original source material, you can use your judgment on whether to call it Homebrew, and when you started to run it as a Homebrew. If you ran a faithful FR campaign until the Time of Troubles and then diverged from there, radically, and are still playing it, you can decide to use the start time of the first session, the first session after the divergence, or some other later date when the divergence became more radical.

Note that I am asking about the YEAR in which it began (to be used, not just planned), not the rule set. This is not limited just to D&D Homebrew settings. I use the AD&D rule sets to break up the time period as I suspect most people here run their setting using D&D rule set(s), and I thought the rule set would help people narrow it down, but that is just an organizational tool.

For example: If you started your campaign setting using the AD&D rules, but did so in the last year, you'd properly selection 5E ERA. If your setting is using Pathfinder rules, and you started it in 2010, you'd select the 4E era. If your setting is a Homebrew GURPS wild west setting and you started it in 1997, you'd select the 2E ERA. If you're running a persistent Paranoia game set in a Homebrew world that has met weekly since 1984, don't answer and go get help because you're likely really messed up by this point. Then come back and answer AD&D era.

EDIT: To clarify, the year it went in play, not the years and years of planning before it had play, is what I am asking about.

 

[jgsugden]

My PHW (Primary Homebrew World) started in the early 80s. It has been through many revisions, and sat fallow for a decade at one point, and recently underwent a massive overhaul / reboot when I moved from one coast to the other, but the core of it is still the same and started around 1983. It has been a struggle to make it work with so many rule changes, but it has been there the entire time.

I have 2 more 'secondary' settings that have seen hundreds of hours of play each (maybe thousands?), but I doubt either will ever be revisited again except as a one shot or 'crossover event'.

 

[TwoSix]

Voted for the participation trophy. I virtually never run the same setting twice. The only setting that I've run more than once was Eberron, and that was for different groups and they're completely disconnected.

 

[bedir than]

So, it's only been played in the 5e era, but the concept started getting work during the late-2e generation. I recently found a few lost notebooks with dozens of ideas, nations, towns, etc that I'll re-incorporate into the world as it currently exists.

 

[Charlaquin]

I’d call my homebrew setting 5e era, even though it’s based heavily on the default 4e setting, as I didn’t really start making the setting my own until 5e.

 

[Jack Daniel]

Late 90s for me, but maybe I'm cheating, because every new fantasy world I create just gets summarily dropped into the same galaxy as the first one. The various worlds I run games in are all canonically at most a few dozen parsecs apart from each other.

 

[prabe]

I tried coming up with campaign settings two different times during the 3E era, but ... the campaigns died. The world I'm running in now is less than 3 years old, but the campaigns I'm running in it are going substantially better. Variables include the players, the system/s, and me (it's plausible I'm better both as a world-builder and as a general DM now than I was then).

 

[el-remmen]

Aquerra, which is a homebrew I created and then ran games in (as did some others) began in the summer of 1989 when the 2E rules were brand new and I used the occasion to stop running games in the mix-mash D&D Known World/Greyhawk I had been using. The last campaign I ran there ended in 2009, while the last campaign run by anyone there ended in 2016.

Sixteen campaigns total were run in those 27 years. Some were TPKs at level one and the longest lasted shy of six years with PCs at 12th level.

Currently, I am running a 5E campaign in a newish homebrew. Essentially, I took one small part of Aquerra I had never developed much and yoinked it out and built a new setting round it, heavily influenced by Greyhawk since I am running Ghosts of Saltmarsh.

 

[GnomeWorks]

I've been writing about my setting since '94, and started running games in '98. Still working on it, and still running games in it today.

I've literally never run a game that wasn't in that setting. It's changed over the years, both due to my tastes evolving and the actions of characters, but the underlying themes and ideas have remained more-or-less constant.

 

[nevin]

1985 in college, was when I started my first Campaign my world just kind've evolved as we played, I didn't want to play in Greyhawk and money was always tight so I just made it up as I went along. the players have changed things and things have changed over the years as I started fleshing it out more.