LTB Worldbuilding Wednesdays: Intro/How I Got Here
When I spun up this blog my goal was simple: a place to dump screenshots of my Tavs and other BG3-related brainrot. My personal site's blog wasn't a good place for it, since I'm a freelancer and it's gotta have at least some concessions to "professionalism," so here we are. But it feels a bit too aloof to do these "Tav Tuesdays" posts chock-full with names and places unfamiliar to 99.9999% of readers here, so "LTB Worldbuilding Wednesdays" have arrived.
They won't be convoluted or super lore-dumpy, but they will provide context for my characters, who've been my 5e mainstays for years—with lives and stories and whatnot—before I imported them into BG3 and forced tadpoles in their heads. For every subsequent post in this series, I'll try to distill the TL;DR of a place or faction or whatever—but only enough for it to be relevant to a given Tav's story, because (again) I don't want to drown a reader in lore (unless that's your thing, which is totally fine and I'm down for asks about that).
I'm also in the middle of churning out a second homebrew fantasy atlas (more on the first one below the fold), so ideally these posts will keep me in the mindset of getting that work done instead of running yet another BG3 playthrough. Wednesdays are the weekly game night for my tabletop 5e group, so it's already a good day to be in worldbuilding-brain.
While it's been extremely fun and fulfilling to do over the past five years, I won't claim that it's the right way or only way to worldbuild, because that's silly given the wealth of other resources out there and the galaxy of creativity we're all capable of. It's worked for me, though, so it's not nothing. Here's a quick rundown of how I got here, with "here" being "a sufficiently fleshed out campaign setting with plenty of room to grow":
Creating a Unique Map Style
I'm a huge map nerd, and have reached a point in my life/career where I get to do freelance map design as a part-time job. I'm shaking off the aesthetic snobberies I learned as a graphic designer, because snobbery is too close to gatekeeping, but I'm still enough of a snob about map style to want my own stuff to be unique. In a sea of samey-looking hand-drawn-hobbit-maps, I wanted my homebrew world to stand out, so here's how I did that:
Creating "Homeworlds" - a brief process piece about my April 2019 digital map illustration project.
Creating "The Game Board" - process and background for my 2019 found-texture fictional map project.
Creating "Found Islands" - a smaller 2021 side-project that sorta refined that found-texture style.
Creating Compelling Names
Once I had a unique visual style, I had to populate the world (or at least start to, one region or place at a time), which required some decisions about toponymy for names of places, people, and in-world history/lore, because pretty world maps can still feel boring without stories of who lives there:
What’s in a Name? Fictional Toponymy for Fantasy Maps - process piece for how I developed naming conventions.
Custom Fantasy Map Illustration - portfolio page for my found-texture digital map work.
The Game Board, 2022 Version - One result of all this was a big fat map poster I'm still proud of.
Creating a Homebrew Fantasy Atlas
A map can only show the names, though—it can't tell the stories to a compelling level of detail—so here's where I got to combine lots of my different personal and professional interests and experience: my own fantasy gazetteer. I made all the maps (aforementioned map nerd), I did all the design work (two decades of experience in publication layout), I created/edited all the iconography/imagery (two decades in design plus two more before that as a generally creative person), and I composed/compiled all the lore (I have an English BA and I dabbled in journalism for a few years). Et voila: "The Nua Gazetteer, Vol. 1" was born.
The Nua Gazetteer, Volume 1: Lands and Lore of Aviridia - portfolio page for the main gazetteer project.
The Nua Gazetteer: Announcement - kickoff/kick in the pants for me to get going on this beast.
The Nua Gazetteer: Production Notes - process and influences on the project as a whole.
The Nua Gazetteer: Release Notes - posts for the digital (2022) and print (2023) gazetteer release.
And that's not even getting into the recording project I did for seven of my bard's songs. Maybe I'll do, like, a brief "Music Monday" series. None of this will ever have the juice of my one runaway Minthara post, but whatever. If it's compelling for me (a brain-rotted lore-bard), it won't be bullshit for you. Thanks for reading all the way to the end!
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Your group of adventurers has discovered strange goings on at a local tavern... A bar open only at night... Garlic banned from the kitchen... customers going missing in the dark caverns of the city.....
The cave with the pond holds the remains of the last adventurer who tried to stop the vampire menace. They tried to make it through a hidden cave, but a cave in locked them in to starve to death. The path will be hidden from the players, although it can be found with an investigation check, and then the rocks may be cleared with a strength check.
Only one of the coffins is actually occupied (with a vampire) who will be alerted to the party’s presence if the trap on the door is not disarmed. The rest of the coffins are trapped.
The small room with hay contains a human captive who can be rescued.
The northwest room is another form of prison, for a fellow vampire who betrayed the order. The path to them is guarded, but they can give helpful information and aid if they are rescued. The final room contains a ritual that must be interrupted to stop a more powerful vampire from rising
