History, Not Everyone Has to be Tolkien

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Here's a list of some of my favorite sword and sorcery book series and their authors:

Lord of the Rings (and all the books published after his death) by J.R.R. Tolkien

Conan by Robert Howard (L. Srague De Camp and Lin Carter help)

Thieve's World series by many authors (Robert Asprin edited)

The Eternal Champion books (Elric, Corum, etc.) by Michael Moorcock

Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories by Fritz Leiber

Horseclans series by Robert Adams

Original Darwath trilogy by Barbara Hambly

Prince of Nothing trilogy by Scott Bakker

Malazan Book of the Fallen (all ten books) by Steven Erikson

All of these series (and more) have been hugely influential for sword and sorcery role playing games like Dungeons and Dragons.  Not only that, but some of them (Prince of Nothing and Malazan) were influenced by role playing games.  Things drawn from each of them show up in the AD&D campaigns that I run.  I also draw from them for characters when I play the games.  

Besides great stories and characters, what do they all have in common?  Tremendous world building!  Tolkien created thousands of years of history and languages.  Malazan takes world building to another level.  Thieve's World puts you into the world from the level of people just trying to get by.  Etc.

All of this creates a problem for the well-read aspiring dungeon master.  Those books set the standard for world building and we all feel like we have to do the same in our campaigns.  So let's address this in this post.

First, if you want to campaign in the above settings all but Darwath, Prince of Nothing, and Malazan have existing role playing games or settings.  All are on PDF and can be easily found online.  Thieve's World and Fafhrd both have AD&D campaign books, they rest exist out there as RPGs done by different companies (Lord of the Rings - Iron Crown Enterprises, Stormbringer by Chaosium, Conan by GURPS, Mongoose Publishing, others, Horseclans by GURPS, etc.).  It's easy enough to adapt these to your game system and go with it.

Second, for a homebrew campaign realize that you don't need to do this all at once and understand that your players won't appreciate the nuances of it anyway.    I'd start with a general world map, very general - here are the major countries, here's where this nonhuman race primarily lives, etc.  Then I'd go into high level politics (X empire is trying to expand, that sort of thing).  Finally, plan the first adventure's area in detail.

For example, in my current campaign I started out in the City of Greymane.  I had a general map of the rest of the "world" and cliff notes about each.  This city is a middle ages-type city of 14,000 on the banks of a river.  It has evolved into 221 pages and has politics, crime, factions, competing religions, and lost of potential adventures.  This is where we started our current campaign.  We remained there until the party got tired of how complicated city politics gets.

We then moved to the Dark Forest, then the Free Cities, and we'll soon move to the Eternal Empire, Sea of Grass, and Frozen North.  All of which are sketched out but get developed as we go.  It also helps out that I use these major areas in RPG cons to help make me think about them, develop them, and see where the problems and inconsistencies are.

Point is, you don't have to do all the work up front.  It can evolve as the campaign does.  This keeps you from completely developing the Pirate Isles (for example) with their geography, inhabitants, history, factions, and encounters and then never having a party go there.

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