Create a Homebrew Campaign | #9: World History
Introduction
Today, we’re getting complicated. I’m going to talk about the history and politics of our world here in this video, and both of these world-building aspects can be exceedingly complicated. It can be a lot of work, but I often find it to be well worth it. When you spend a lot of time on the history and politics of your world, it saves you a considerable amount of work and effort later down the line as you plan out your campaign. You’ll have a lot of information to draw from that you prepared in advance, so drafting the campaign arcs becomes much more doable. Additionally, having a solid idea of your world’s history and politics can make improvising during a session more feasible than it otherwise would be.
Originally, I had planned for this to all be one, singular post. I thought I could get both the history of the world and current world politics into one post. However, after writing this out, I’ve found that it really needs to be two different posts, thus extending my homebrew campaign series. I’m sorry if you were hoping to see both of them today, but hopefully, you’ll be looking forward to the politics part of this post next week!
As always, there's a video version of this content available on my YouTube channel. You can check the video out below.
Historical Ages
We’ll start with history and my tips for ensuring that your world’s history is cohesive and rich. When you start considering your world’s history, the first thing you should know is roughly how old your world is. From there, determine how much of history is known and how much of it is theorized. Ancient ages before highly intelligent races are pretty easy to handwave and write vague paragraphs about, but once you start introducing highly intelligent beings and civilizations to the mix, history starts to get complicated and requires more detailed information in order to feel real and cohesive.
Early Ages
The first thing I do is draft the early ages. I like to write a version that is definitive, or what really happened, and then a few versions that are more mystical and based on the beliefs and theories of people alive in the world today. Some may believe, for example, that there was once an age where dragons alone resided in your world. Others could believe that only the gods and their angels existed, squabbling over bits of land and sea. Regardless of what really happened, different people groups are going to have different theories about these speculative periods of your world’s history.
Known Ages
After the early ages come the ages in which history was actually recorded. Yet, even still, written history is often incorrect. History is written by the victors, and so it tends to be twisted and falsified. Just as with the early ages, I write a history about what actually happened and then a version of history that the people of the world believe happened. There may even be multiple conflicting beliefs regarding the true events of your world’s history.
Additionally, I find that it can really enhance your history to have multiple concurrent timelines. Instead of your world only having one, a singular timeline of events, have other things happening at once. Look at how complex our own world history is. Especially in the early years of our real world’s history, there was always something happening somewhere in the world.
This can be a lot of work but is well worth it. For my own world that I’ve been working on for this video, I’m going to write out a history for the northernmost areas of the world while the central regions have their own history. The southern, more tropical areas will also have a separate history. Then, as we get closer to the last three or four hundred years of Elzveir’s history, these areas will start to converge as explorers, diplomats, and ambassadors begin to establish relationships with the people of the other areas.
This means that for the known ages, I’m going to have three separate timelines, each with a version of what really happened and then at least one or two versions of what people believe happened. That’s a lot, but it helps to create the realism that is necessary to immerse people in your world.
The Current Age
And now, we come to the current age. This is going to be the last ten or twenty years up to the present when your campaign begins. You’ll want to have more details, here, as this is going to be a period of time that the characters your players are portraying will have actually experienced. They might have different perspectives and ideas about what happened, but they should all have quite a bit of information about what has taken place. That doesn’t mean you need to write an entire novel that covers this period of time, it just means you need to give plenty of details to make sure that it is clear what has happened before and what is happening now.
Once again, you’ll get the best, most immersive history if you write a real timeline and then a couple of timelines based on what people believe happened. In fact, if you really want to complicate things, you can give your players differing timelines that affect what they each believe and their perspective of the world’s events. That’s also quite a bit of work, but… it could be fun, which would make it worth the effort.
My Timeline
My timelines for Elzveir will be quite expansive, so I'm not going to put everything here. However, I did want to set forth an example of what an "Early Timeline" will look like. This timeline is for the first hundred years or so of my southernmost region on the map, Nemlisi. In creating this timeline, I expanded the world considerably with only a half-hour spent working! I added depth to world history, this region, and even hinted at two other continents in my world just by creating this short, simple timeline. If you're wondering how I made the timeline look like this, it's just Canva. I personally pay for the service, but you can make something similarly appealing with a free account. You can make a free account with this link if you're interested!
Conclusion
Thanks so much for taking the time to check out this post, I really appreciate your time! I know I had originally sought to compress both history and politics into one post, but upon writing it all out, I found that they really needed to be split apart. So, next week, we’ll be taking a look at the politics of our world. Before then, take some time to create your own world’s timelines based on the information I provided in this video. As you write, consider the implications of the timelines of events you’re creating. Consider, for example, what possible quests could result from the history you’re writing. Perhaps at one point in history, a powerful enemy was sealed away… which opens the opportunity for the entity’s seal to be broken as part of your current campaign arc.
If you’d like to consider supporting me, the best way to do so right now would be to subscribe to my new YouTube channel. If you’d like, you can also follow me on social media. I’m @tlbainter on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, with Instagram being my most active if you’re hoping to interact with me and see more content!
I’m looking forward to the post about world politics. I’m going to talk about conflicts, systems of government, and continental rule. I’ve found world politics to be a really strong source of interesting questlines in a campaign, so this is something I’m passionate about and have seen the value in contributing a substantial amount of time to. Stay tuned for that post next week! Until then, bye!