If you want to download the player's guide to the Jelwe Cities, as well as get the best-selling digital magazine, SIDEQUEST, every month, sign up to the $10 tier on www.patreon.com/icarus_games

I really like how 'Rimworld' goes about naming the months. They're basically two month blocks. 'Aprimay', 'Decembary', 'Jugust' 'Septober' they're like instantly recognizable, but also ...not quite normal.

Our DM, who spent a month, doing a campaign setting in a city that we were stopping through on our way to a quest. It was a series of murders in the commoners/poor part of town. As we got off the boat, typically a pickpocket tried to pick my dragon warriors purse only to get hit in the back of the head killing him, not intentional. Then we found out about the crime wave in the city as a series of murders against non-humans. The party was like five seconds thinking it over, and said nope we’re out of here. Always trust the party members to mess with your best laid plans!

This level of organization is absolutely bonkers. I can't imagine getting all of this worked out before the game even starts. Kudos though, definitely impressive. I like feeling the similarities between our DMing styles, even if I'm flying quite a bit more by the seat of my pants.

THIS IS BRILLIANT!! EXCELLENT WORK IN PREPARING YOUR CAMPAIGN SETTING!!!

I have always been partial to Matt Colville's kind of starting small and branching out from where the players start. If a DM really loves world building that's awesome, but for many it can become overwhelming and keeping the world building character focused can help.

I've been non-stop revising and expanding my own D&D world since the beginning of my DM journey 3 1/2 years ago now. Watching this video has inspired me to really crack on with making some form of properly organized documentation. I have a lot of notes, lore and information but it's all over the place. I had only recently started to pad out the history of the world and created a small document on the history/creation. That is one piece of the jigsaw in creating a book-style document for my players and for myself. Incredible detail, a very interesting world on the surface and a chilled out video from minute 1 that has very much inspired me. I will certainly be subscribing for more.

I must say I'm a fan of the little side quests flags you've planted. That will greatly help the group I play with as we're starting small and building up the area around the town first

Your content is incredible and your channel is such a cozy place to consume D&D content. Thanks for your efforts!

I want to really thank you for sharing your tools, your thoughts and everything! I won't be able to make a professional looking campaign booklet like you did. Not right now, at least. But knowing your tools and thought process really, really helps me make leaps I wouldn't have made by myself! Thanks a lot for sharing, Anto / Icarus Games!!

Love seeing your thought process. Gives me plenty of ideas for my new campaign I've just started.

Absolutely amazing man! keep up the good work.

woahhhhh I had no idea Legendkeeper was a thing. This is a game changer! Thanks so much for this video. That's going to help me organize my world sooooooo much!

Yaaay! My Legate Character i redeemed made into the Video! Also great Video! Gave me a lots of points and hints to work around for my P&P Stuff thanks!

I really enjoyed this video. Always fun to see how folks worldbuild!

Amazing work! Love detailed lore and world building and yours is a work of art

Amazing world!! Nice job Anto ♥️

Love the gallant goblin kobold plush you have there!

This was insanely helpful and inspired me quite a lot

Some of your systems like your currency and spellcasting focus for example are so intriguing to me. It's inspired me to make something like that when I start my next campaign!

Impressive work, congratulations 👏🏻👏🏻

Ok dude you won a subscriber... Incredible quality content. Bravo

Stumbled upon this video while laying the groundwork for my next campaign, I was looking for a "Campaign Primer" and I must say this video is one of the best I've seen. I'll be checking all of your other content for sure!

Awesome process. Thanks!

4 minutes in and I'm already stealing that calendar. Cheers!

This is the method we're taking to develop our product for release, which also includes minis. Fun stuff. Let me know if you're ever wanting to collaborate on projects for Kickstarter in the future

Very inspiring!

This is awesome man

I got really interested on the Legend Keeper, but for the time being I'll have to make due without it. But it looks like the perfect solution to what I needed.

This is an amazing video.

I'm totally stealing that coin idea for my own homebrew world. Such a great concept.

I've wanted to do a calendar based on seasons more than months. So you'd have like Sprun, Grown, Shorn, Challd. And for each Season you'd have a new, high, and waning.

This is the second player guide I have seen from you. Now we need to see a video on how you built and published that document. What template did you use?, where did you find your artwork?, How did you make your calendar?, etc., and all of the details that will allow us to make a similar document.

Your currency system is very creative.

Thanks for explaining your LegendKeeper pins. Sadly there's no one-time-purchase software for that sort of thing, but I've found that you can use the tool Obsidian and a plugin called Leaflet that does an okish job at letting you pin things on a map. But I've replicated your system from LK onto it and seeing how it goes. I'm feeling so much more organized now..

Adding competing historiographies has done more for my games than anything else for worldbuilding. One Dark Age is another's Golden Age.

For my "homebrew" setting I decided on using a modified Carolingian system of currency: 1 gold is 30 silver which is 360 copper - 1 silver is 12 copper. It's a fantastic system for using actual coinage because 360 is a superior highly composite number as is 12... 😅

That is epic!

My guy..you keep rasing the bar.

I love your currency part. And that everything is based on silver.

Wow!! I'd very much like to play in a game which went more than a handful of sessions because the DM got bored/gave-up/ran off to the next shiny thing. I came back to RPG games after a massive break and fell into the Forever DM role pretty much straight away.

Great video. I'm old schools myself, using paper and graph paper, but I recently started using online documents and Dungeondraft. I'm going to have to watch more of your videos because you appear well organized. I liked the part about making the calendar simpler. I also found that too many unfamiliar words just throw players off. I did the whole create my own language thing but when I named everything in that language it was just going too far. Although it's something of a fantasy trope, there's a lot of benefit in giving things names that the players can easily associate with them. The pirates may hang out in Brth'nk Thr'ml, but everyone's going to call it Pirate Town so why resist.

I would love to see your templates that you have made, they seem so organized and structured compared to mine, I always found them impossible to make myself.

Thanks!

Ok so you sir are a hidden gem. I have yet to make it through this entire video and I’m already blown away by how amazing your games sound. To that point. You said that “Due to player mistakes” this area has been blown apart and is now thousands of islands. I paused the video AGAIN right there to say. PLEASE TELL US WHAT HAPPENED. WOTC seemingly absolutely refuses to acknowledge the DM/GM’s and instead focuses on power creep for players to sell books. I’m begging you to please make a video about how you set up your game, to where the player’s actions eventually lead to the destruction of part of a continent. I spend upwards of 6-8 hours a day, at work with a ear bud Listening to countless videos on how to make this game better. And yet I still only ever hear about lore and encounters. Your on a Matt Covile level here with your game mechanics. And I would pay top level Patreon tiers to get information on how to make your player’s actions effect the world around them both positively and negatively.

What is the software you are using for the map? I can't seem to find the link, I'm currently using Onenote but the text boxes for my pins really gets in my way where this seems a lot cleaner. Fantastic video! Found I've been doing some similar things already but I'm going to try implementing a number of things you've talked about

Very cool. What software did you use to write the history, etc?

I would love to be able to download this document to use as a guide for my own that I am creating :)

Here after the OGL 1.1 draft got leaked. And goddamn, if I was WotC this is what I would steal through the new OGL, stay safe out there man #opendnd

Maybe the expanse is home to an ancient kingdom, that is why it is resource poor, however it is full of ruins, and monsters...

There is a power in a name, this is know.

If someone made a pdf like that for a campaign setting in my dnd group, no one would read it, wich is really sad, because is something so cool

damn, love the black company influences you have on the world. Always wanted to run a campaign in a similar setting

You've done a lot of the work to turn this into a hex crawl to sell. You could easily make it system agnostic by letting DMs determine their own stat blocks. Maybe just provide reference book/page numbers for the stat blocks since it's from so many sources

Amazing! What is the software at 19:12 to pin points of interest? Also mentioned "it's hidden for the players" where is the video to learn that?

Meanwhile I’m planning to use Dwarf Fortress to generate a world and history for a DND campaign

Awesome! Been using LegendKeeper since their beta, it's an amazing tool. By the way, how did you make the PDF for the Player's Guide itself? I've tried a couple of online editors but none of them have pleased me :(

What software are you using for the points of interest of the map and the color coded guide of players know and don't know etc?

Hey, is this in any part based on the Black Company book series by Glen Cook? I noticed a couple of similarities and thought that would've been kinda cool if it was.

Can you make a video on how you made the book on Publisher? I have the system but lack the know-how.

Just track time 1:1 out of session You can go as far into the future during the session as you want but then you have to wait for irl time to catch up with them (which is a great chance to play other characters!)

When you are going through the map and all of the pins, and discussing the players knowledge of things in blue with the secrets off to the side, is that world anvil or is that another program you are using to maintain all of those notes?

A Black Company fan I see!

Is this software that you’re using to write and build the world World Anvil? If not, what’s the name of it? Great things here in this video, congrats

which tools you use for the map generate

How did you make the calendar?

How did you decide what to put where? Like where to put a monster, and what level monster, as opposed to a quest hook, or a magic item?

Just wanted to ask, what program are you using from 19:00 onwards?

hey so ik this is an old video but is there maybe a video on where and how you keep your setting info stored?

My question would be: How do you balance the level of each encounter? If it's a fairly open world where they can go anywhere then they could be any level when they reach one of these points. This would make it difficult to plan ahead as the level you pick might be too low if they find it later or too hard if they reach it sooner.

what is the app being used at 19:12 is that still inkarnate? if so I really need to get into it because that looks amazing

Absolutely loving these tips, but damn is it making me feel like my own world pales in comparison to this lol.

I wonder if it is possible to do this in foundry itself

Any chance we can look at the lorekeeper made for this campaign?

Does it ever come up that your Autumn season has an extra month than the others? Is there a canonical reason as to why?

Is it possible to share this as a reference for DM’s?

How big is the map we see? It seems like the island is cramped with so many cultures? How big is the island?

Would it be alright if I used your month names in my own worldbuilding on worldanvil? My articles are public, but I doubt I'll ever "publish" anything officially.

The level of detail in this is insane, I'm 99% sure in a good way, but maybe 1% not 😅. I do think though that things like renaming days, months etc is not only pointless, it's actively harming to immersion because it feels like homework. I always remember an author intro to the book nightfall by isaac asimov quoted below because - as in most things - asimov says it better than I ever could. "Kalgash is an alien world and it is not our intention to have you think that it is identical to Earth, even though we depict its people as speaking a language that you can understand, and using terms that are familiar to you. Those words should be understood as mere equivalents of alien terms-that is, a conventional set of equivalents of the same sort that a writer of novels uses when he has foreign characters speaking with each other in their own language but nevertheless transcribes their words in the language of the reader. So when the people of Kalgash speak of "miles," or "hands," or "cars," or "computers," they mean their own units of distance, their own grasping-organs, their own ground-transportation devices, their own information-processing machines, etc. The computers used on Kalgash are not necessarily compatible with the ones used in New York or London or Stockholm, and the "mile" that we use in this book is not necessarily the American unit of 5,280 feet. But it seemed simpler and more desirable to use these familiar terms in describing events on this wholly alien world than it would have been to invent a long series of wholly Kalgashian terms. > In other words, we could have told you that one of our characters paused to strap on his quonglishes before setting out on a walk of seven vorks along the main gleebish of his native znoob, and everything might have seemed ever so much more thoroughly alien. But it would also have been ever so much more difficult to make sense out of what we were saying, and that did not seem useful. The essence of this story doesn't lie in the quantity of bizarre terms we might have invented; it lies, rather, in the reaction of a group of people somewhat like ourselves, living on a world that is somewhat like ours in all but one highly significant detail, as they react to a challenging situation that is completely different from anything the people of Earth have ever had to deal with. Under the circumstances, it seemed to us better to tell you that someone put on his hiking boots before setting out on a seven-mile walk than to clutter the book with quonglishes, vorks, and gleebishes. > If you prefer, you can imagine that the text reads "vorks" wherever it says "miles," "gliizbiiz" wherever it says "hours," and "sleshtraps" where it says "eyes." Or you can make up your own terms. Vorks or miles, it will make no difference when the Stars come out."

My favorite way to make language relevant is writing. NPC notes and random books should all be written in relevant languages. The dwarvish necromancer wouldn't have a post-it note in common, he should use dwarvish

You really need to drop "The" from the names on the map. Makes it 10,000x better. (It's also not something you'll ever see on a real map)

Wait are the tabs and points of interest stuff in inkarnate now?

This is awesome campaign creation skills! A truly amazing setup! But I don't think players will generally read all that...

I can’t seem to find ledger keeper! Is is a app????

the automatic CC says it's " The Dual cities of Taliban" :D thought that was funny

Could you link your video of the creation of this document? Would be amazing

Ok…. I’m just absolutely blown away. I have managed to make it through this entire video now, and this is my 3rd comment. I want to play in this world, I want to run this world, this is the evolution of DnD. I’m totally in. Please, break this video down into individual sections, teach us sensei.

I just want to know more about the "Se7ven vs Ratatouille" quest hook...

I'd never do this for any group because I have never met players that wouldn't drop out on a whim.

I’m absolutely fascinated by your world map! My only concern’s from what I’ve read on Inkarnate’s terms and services, couldn’t they sue you if you begin to make profit off your game using their map software? I assume there’s a way around this since you’re using it in your own game? This is the primary thing stopping me from purchasing membership for designing the world map in my own TRRPG. :/ I’m considering buying ‘Wonderdraft’ but in terms of a FULL world map - what’s the better choice between these two? :x Battle maps would also be extremely useful; I know there’s ‘Dunegondraft’ for that (thanks to your other amazing video)! 🙌 Any feedback from anyone with experience on this matter would be sincerely appreciated! 🙏 Amazing & insightful content Icarus! 🔥 Thank you - Subscribed! (:

Talaawar or Talwar means Sword in some languages.

Is there a guide or template or something to making a fancy book like this? To make it look that cool not just a plain googledoc :P

100% thought you were saying Dual Cities

Hi, i wanted to make something like that, but i´m not an artist, im just a designer, where can i get images of monsters and stuff (with no copyright of course)

hey. I think the video is great, but I don't get why you split your coin in two and then into five? surely it would be hard splitting anything in 5 evenly? wasn't the real life equivelent to split it in 2, then 4, then 8?

Que programa se usa para eso??

Lot of black company vibes I see

I would like to make a campaign setting but I feel like it'd be hard for me since I'm worse at DMing war, political, or really anything to do with intelligent NPCs. I'm better at doing monsters and other stuff like that.

11:56 hey, saw you wrote off Changelings as shapechangers. In pathfiinder changelings are not shapechangers. Might want to give them a better read.

I am trying to imagine my players actually caring enough to read a pdf. my table is the worst (family)