What's the big idea?

This article is part of a series describing how our team has been piecing together a new campaign world. Take it for what it's worth-- I don't make any grandiose claims or pretend that I have discovered some radically new way to create fantasy worlds. If you like what you see, feel free to use it.

Humble Beginnings
Vardalon began with a Photoshop tutorial. This may not not seem all that impressive since the world isn't all that well defined yet, but as we gather steam I hope this humble origin story will gain in significance.

As I said, Vardalon began with a Photoshop tutorial. One workday at lunch, I remembered seeing some fantastic maps on a website called the The Cartographer's Guild. This particular site is a haven for some truly gifted artists (so check it out. NOW!), and I thought I'd go back there since I had recently gotten access to Adobe's Creative Cloud. I hoped to find a tutorial that would walk me through creating one of those gorgeous pieces, and I was fortunate to stumble across Ascensions' Atlas Tutorial. There's a PDF version and a complementary video series on YouTube, so there's more than one way to work through the steps. Since I was on a newer version of Photoshop it took a bit of time to get through everything, but the end result was the map that you see scattered in various pieces throughout this wiki.

Excited by how everything turned out, I printed off a copy and brought it home to show my son who, I'm glad to report, loves D&D every bit as much as I do. After goggling at the colorful landscapes and imagined countries, we began talking about coming up with names for various areas. Before we knew it we were excitedly talking about the possibility of turning this map into a custom D&D game setting.

An Idea Grows
At about the same time, I was still catching up on a marvelous podcast series called Sneak Attack! A group of five friends who have exceptional table chemistry release weekly episodes on a number of podcast outlets, and from the first few episodes I knew this was A Good Thing. As my son and I talked about creating a new playable world, I offhandedly mentioned that I thought it might be fun to podcast the games we ran in it. He latched onto the idea quickly, and the more excited he grew about the possibility, the more seriously I considered it. Had it not been for this podcast, I might have been content to let Vardalon gather dust.

All this goes to say that if you haven't yet given Sneak Attack! a listen, I highly recommend it. Reid, the DM, does a great job of rolling with player decisions, and the players work well together. In addition to being fun, it's also good for DM inspiration. Best of all, it's fairly family friendly, and both my kids enjoy catching up on the latest adventures.

Finding the Hook
In my mind the first obstacle to overcome with getting Vardalon started was to figure out how to make it stand apart. We wanted there to be something significantly different about our world as compared to others, so we started talking through a bunch of different options, all at a pretty high level. To condense the timeline, what we eventually arrived at was a variant of the work of my favorite fantasy author, J. R. R. Tolkien.

In his Silmarillion, Tolkien described his imaginary Middle Earth as being the result of a divine song. At first all was fine so long as the music was true to its melody, but one of the so-called Ainur grew angry at Eru, the head of the Ainur, and began to sing against the melody, thus bringing corruption into the new creation.

We both really liked this idea and thought it made for compelling backstory. But to what end? What effects could the introduction of discord into a heavenly song produce? As we talked over the idea, we realized that just about everything could stem from the rising tension between harmony and discord: different races, changing landscape, the people's concept of the gods, and even magic itself.

That last bit about magic was where we really decided to focus our attention. What if our fantasy world's ability to use magic was hampered somehow due to a past conflict between the gods? And what if magic wasn't directly in the world at the start of the game?

I don't want to reveal too much right about this part of the backstory now until we're able to get some podcasts behind us, but the big idea had arrived.

Creation Considerations
When it comes to working through your own creative process, it might be helpful to sift through a lot of really big concepts. Don't be afraid to consider complex, over-involved, or even wacky ideas. Given enough time you'll be able to come up with something that feels right for your world, and can lead to that bit of lore that really grabs your players and makes it feel memorable.

With all this said, I don't claim to have made the best possible campaign setting out there. Vardalon likely leans a bit too heavily (and obviously) on a single inspiration for it to really have a shot at becoming a published product, but for purposes of pulling together a group of friends and fueling a podcast, it should be just enough.