Homebrew is the bread and butter of pretty much everything I run. The freedom to place game elements down in the most appropriate moment they are needed is superior to the rigidity of a pre-made setting.

However it's an annoying fact that most players I ever had have the mentality that the setting is the game masters sacred territory and that they should never even attempt as much as name something, much less contribute details they'd like to see used as background lore.

As for the current game - I ran with an idea of making a high fantasy game using the nWoD ruleset with WWI stylised technology, magic and a shot of ridiculous. Also aliens.

I don't think I've ever run a game in a 'default' setting, there's always something that annoys me or could have been done better, and as I've gotten older and more experienced as a GM I've tended to homebrew both setting and system more and more.

Could someone tell me where OP's pic is from?

I've seen it floating around for ages.

>>7317734
It's from a book called Leviathan. Alternate history World War I, about Aleksandar Ferdinand (Archduke Ferdinand's son) and a reverse trap named Deryn Sharp. Europe is split between the Clankers (who use diesel-driven mechs) and the Darwinists (who splice together DNA and create outlandish creatures). It's a young adult book, but I rather enjoyed it. There are illustrations throughout the book in black and white by Keith Thompson.

>>7317994

.pdf of it perhaps?

>>7317994
I assume clankers=bad?

>>7318471
The main antagonists are Clankers but both sides have their good and bad people. It's war, basically. It does a decent job of showing that both sides just don't like each other. One isn't obviously good and one bad, but the Clankers view the Darwinists as godless monster-breeders and the Darwinists see the Clankers machines as clunky and messy and inferior. It's more a point of pride for them that their animals are 'better'.

>>7318440
I dunno. I got it at the library.

I want to make a homebrew campaign based on http://www.tohokingdom.com/articles/d20/gods.htm
It's the stats for all the Kaiju as deities. I think it'd be cool to have a low(ish) magic campaign set in a series of islands, each ruled over by one of the different gods. The deities are visible and feared. They'd either come from one island or from many, depending on how I set up how each views outsiders.

>>7318802
I like this.
I like this a lot.

>>7318748
I live in the middle of no where, the nearest three libraries I know of don't have a fantasy and sci-fi section except one and that's only because my father donated his older books to them.

(Chaotic evil mostly parry) Working for a benefactor that needs certain random acts carried out. Party spotted a pattern early, and wanted more money. Head mage pays out the ass epecting to kill them eventually. Double cross goes wrong, deus ex sub-boss dies, main boss reveals himself.

Five ancient chromatic dragons formed a pact and took over the world ages ago. Shaytair the Black Defiler infiltrated and poisoned human religion, killing the gods. Rask the Red Destroyer's laughter echoed for miles as fires from heaven burned the earth and boiled the waters. Zaeriel the Green Deceiver kept man's greatest leaders in the dark as Thoranzlkor the Blue Dominator lead his chained dog, Korgar the White Devourer, to obliterate all that stood before them.

Now the Green presides over an island nation of mist and madness while the anarchic Red Horde wars jovially with the fanatical Blue Legion over control of foreign lands in what amounts to little more than a vast wargame. The Black Lands are a warped jungle filled with mutation, corruption, addiction, slavery and thievery, where Shaytair searches for creative new ways to warp the human body and soul, while the ice-cults attempt to free their master from a mountain of ice- where the White was imprisoned after devouring so much magic that he threatened to overtake his masters- hoping only that he will emerge one day to consume the world and bring them all sweet oblivious.

Nothing stands against these five lords- except for this motherfucking phoenix, which won't stay dead, forcing the Wyrms to predict its returns and convene to kill it over and over.

The PCs are a rare few who witnessed such a battle, and grew up seared by the knowledge that the god-dragons could be injured.

tl;dr balls-to-the-wall dark fantasy where the heroes kick ass for a while then die fantastically, hoping only that they might live long enough to inspire rebellion in a few others.

Some of the homebrew threads on suptg are pretty sweet.

>>7319185
I fucking love it. Tell us more!

mmm, sorry for bad english

this is like 1700-1800 era. Something like Pirate of the Caribbean It´s not our world, but with some similarities. It´s a planet full of water, (almost 80% is cover with water, something like Water World, but with some big continents and islands).

There is a Mercantile Alliance, a group of enterprises that get together and create a country. The goverment are all the head of this enterprises, like a congress with a representative, selected between all of them.

To protect all the trips the ships do from one continent to other, they create a military force, actually 2. The Navy, with powerful ships with the aim to protect against corsairs or pirate and the Continental Marines, the foot soldiers and infantry.

There is other country, conformed with people with dark skin (they look like africans). They are agressive, but with strong ethics and are a war culture. But with the difference with our africans, they advance and create a modern society that rivals with the Mercantile Alliance. There are nobles, they are the people that rules the country with the king.
They are tech savys but also use some kind of magic. They navy, are small boat, with porwerful weapon, fast but not too strong against attacks.
They foot soldier work like hunting packs, but modern technology and some of them like magic users (think like special forces)

>>7319617

There is another small country, another monarchy. The queen, a 18 years old girl, that take the crown, becox his father died of a heart attack. With two young brothers and her mother, she take the crow at the age of 15. Their country like a medieval country, but with a string use of magic. The best magic users come from this country. They not use too much technology, becox they don´t need it! They ships run with magical items. They have a small navy. They weapons are magical. Then, we have the royal guard, conformed of warrior-mages. They are like zealots and protect their queen with their lives. Also, the queen is in love with a pirate leader, this man is almost 25 and was a pirate for almost 10 years. The queen fall in love after he kidnaped her. This end in failure and with almost half of his men dead (royal guard work) . But the queen was rescued by the pirate when abyss monsters (I am still thinking how are they) attack them.

After that, the queen secretly create the Queen Corsairs, hired pirate with the mission of sabotage and steal goods form other ships. But with the only condition to not kill (lol drama).

The 3 countries live peacefully, but how you can see, the small country, is low in resources and use piracy too prevail.

Now, it is alike a steampunk setting, but with ships and a world full of water. The PC, can create a party of people from each different country. Also I am trying to create a cat-like race of marauders and pirates (lol mithra).

>>7319185
This is fucking amazing.

My only regret is I just copy-pasted it to all of my players so I can't steal parts of it for my next game.

>>7317289
hehe i love it how sweden and norway are quite literally two trolls.

I like to take the usual fantasy standbys and switch things around.
In the setting I currently have running, Dragons are endlessly regenerating oligarchs that rule most of the world and have mutagenic blood that eventually causes the reciever to become another dragon.
The players are fey, which reproduce by schizophrenia and are made out of insanity.
It's been fun so far.

>>7319614

Spellcasters in this world were all unique (like, "Gandalf and Radagast" unique), all personally trained by a dragon. One of them was a player character- Ithisis the Unspeaking, a soft-hearted boy who had become Shaytair's plaything. He was so scarred that he got a natural armor bonus out of it. His staff was a shaft of flesh topped with a crescent-shapped joker grin (sentient item) which spoke for him and delivered verbal components, because his mouth was stitched shut, and if it ever became unstitched he started screaming blasphemous bullshit that damaged every wisdom score within thirty yards. The player was a drama-whore who did a fantastic job portraying his creepy mix of mental fuckery and off-key attempts at kindness (for instance, he had a spell called 'sustain' which he cast on himself instead of eating. He also cast it on every hungry-looking peasant that he saw).

Another was an oathsworn, which if you play AE you know is a monk-like class embodying the will to complete a task. The party started out as agents of the conclave, out to recover the last baby gold dragon from the Whites before they could sacrifice it to their frozen god (dragon sacrifices grant a lot of power- possibly enough for him to get free...). Oathsworn swore his oath to keep the dragon alive- not recover it and turn it over to the other bigbads, but actually rescue it, which became the catylist for the rest of the party going rogue.

>>7319838
The climactic battle involved them rescuing the little gold dragon from the clutches of the White stronghold, an ice palace with the wyrmling hanging from a birdcage high above the floor. The oathsworn ran like the wind past all the enemies (taking AoOs), up the spiral stair, leaped ten feet onto the cage.

Meanwhile, a blind savant called the "Lake Dancer" (who had shown off her ridiculous balance mod while fighting them on icy terrain in previous battles) was also dancing across the cage, hacking at him with her picks, while at the same time the wyrmling was spitting fire at HER and struggling against its shackles. He dangles over the battle below (which involves the knight wrestling with a shark-toothed white dragon champion in spiked armor and the quickling scriptmage chucking gambit-like exploding cards at ice behemoths) by one arm while punching the lock with the other until it broke, got into the cage, snapped the dragon's manacles and rode it down to the floor; bleeding from every pore.

Ridiculous? Damn right it was.

I posted a thread asking for opinions regarding this one a little while back. My homebrew setting is inspired by Weyard, with some major geographical changes. The Karagol Sea is now a gulf between two major countries, for example, and the towns of Altin and Loho have been rolled into one.

This setting was created more for the mythology than geography. In this world, the summons of the GS games are instead the gods. Most are fairly benevolent or at least indifferent, but there are three dark gods--Haures, the god of betrayal and subterfuge; The Dullahan, god of revenge; and Catastrophe, the god of destruction, sealed safely away in the sunken ruins of ancient Lemuria.

In recent years, a devastating mage war nearly awoke Catastrophe from his eternal slumber as the site of the Lemurian Ruins was locate-city-nuked by accident. The tremors caused by his stirring rendered a huge area of the land ruined for decades to come.

I also included a system in which the PCs can discover the Djinn, tiny portions of the gods' elemental powers, which grant the character who can defeat them in combat a passive bonus which can be foregone temporarily to generate a spell-like effect. My primary reason for including this is to give martial characters a leg up and close the power gap between them and spellcasters slightly.

>>7319850
Ridiculous?
FUCKInG AWESOME, more like.

>>7319850
Zaeriel basically leads an orwellian zombie-nation of quasi-buddhist ascetic scholars that don't believe in truth, heavily influenced by the mind-warping mists that permeate the place. Everyone on the main knows that their "philosophy" is a load of shit, yet somehow her missionaries still penetrate broadly and deeply into other lands, luring the discontent away to her illusory paradise.

Rask is a sanguine, scarred-up old bastard who lives in a chamber of a live volcano bathing in molten gold. The ramshackle, anarchic city of Holocaust sprawls around this volcano- Rask's boys are basically laughing, bloodthirsty vikings who pillage around the world and bring their spoils here. The blasted lands are both the most dangerous and most free place on the continent to live. Rask humors and encourages his warriors, if only to drive them towards terrible bloodsports. He misses living in a world with foes who are a match for him, and if not for the magical pacts binding him would have turned his own claws on the other Wyrms ages ago.

Thoranzlkor's brutal military-nation believes that perfect, worldwide order can only be achieved with a perfect ruler at the top- and that he is that ruler. His highest guard is actually an order of templar who wandered the earth for hundreds of years, searching for their "One King", before they found Thoranzlkor (or he found them). The blue kingdom, it goes without saying, is a place of brutal law and punishment and the anchor which holds the conclave together.

>>7320146
Shaytair the Defiler considers herself a sensual artist- the most sensual, in fact, for it is bodies and minds that she molds. Vast pits of "protoflesh" bubble in lightless chambers miles beneath the fetid, craggy earth, a stringy red mulch milled from innumerable victims and reshaped into creatures of her Fleshcrafter's choosing. The jungles here are brutal, for she delights in making them more deadly, filling them with oceans of acid-spiting snakes and swarms of flying scorpions who deliver a narcotic venom then feast on their drunken prey. The people are hard, furtive, and opportunistic; religions are common here, built around foul and fictitious gods of Shaytair's invention, and by them she nurtures an ember of cobbled divinity which threatens to burst alight and make her a true god.

Korgarites are hard, dour men and women scraping together what living they can at the edges of civilization. Not so much a nation as an illegal cult, many are nevertheless quite powerful, for enough of Korgar's might leaks from his prison to make ice witches of the children of his disciples. They are perhaps the most willful of all peoples, for they have made the choice to defy the conclave openly, if only to try to bring about what they believe to be the end of all life.

In truth, Korgar might not be a match for the combined force of the other four, but he is powerful enough to shatter their ancient pact. That done, there would be little to keep the remaining four from turning upon each other in earnest, ushering in an age of unfathomable violence.

>>7320324
>>7320146
>>7319850
>>7319838
>>7319185
This is awesome. YOU are awesome. God damn.

Dragon-guy here, I"m out, but thanks for the props guys.

bump

>>7317289
Wow. OP pic is amazing. Zombie bear Russia rocks ass.

...got any more?

>>7320971
It's from Scott Westerfeld's Leviathan.
It's a good book, but it's "young adult" which means it is not nearly as awesome as it could have been.

I had a setting idea, where is was a dark fantasy universe has, in a way, 'over written' large swaths of our own world, to the point where normal humans are the majority now.

Dark fantasy basically rules the world now. Orc war bands march and burn, elves act all high and mighty, Dorfs STRIKE THE EARTH, and the humans from dark fantasy world are basically from the dark ages, and see 'natives' as witches to be burned.

Stuck in a hostile world that no longer makes sense, the PCs must fight to survive and search for *INSERT MAGIC MCGUFFIN HERE* to restore the world to how it was before. The problem with that being that any PCs are playing from day one of the "over writing", so the group is made up of a Office manager, a house wife, a wal-mart cashier, a lawyer, and a retired cop.

Part one of campaign would be "OH GOD WHAT THE FUCK RUN AARURGURGUHRGH"

I've mentioned it before on /tg/, unfortunately, I have no means to run a game with this, so feel free to steal the idea. Seriously, it would make my week.

>>7319852
haha, Hesperia is a mental asylum in Finland.

>>7321117
I've actually had a similar idea but have done nothing with it.
I've been wanting to run a D20 campaign with a splatbook whose name I forget since I haven't opened it ages ,which adds elves and vampires and dragons and shit. It's a little similar to what you're talking about. Except that book was a little inverse; the normal world won the war and the other humans and Elves etc have to hide. Meanwhile shapeshifted Dragons run the big companies, a mindflayer is behind the giant multimedia corporation, a mafia hires bugbears as muscle etc.

I like your idea better.

I might keep it in the drawer for later.

>>7321227
>finfag
>mental asylum
>/tg/
computes

>>7321431
Hey, the winter is pretty long here. For anyome.

>>7321528
And it's always preferable to 4chan's endless summer.

>>7319185
Holy fucking Crapsack World. I love it.

>>7319755
>>In the setting I currently have running, Dragons are endlessly regenerating oligarchs that rule most of the world and have mutagenic blood that eventually causes the reciever to become another dragon.
So you're running an Iron Kingdoms campaign?

Space Marines - hard science + aliens - solar system - dystopia - a few hundred years from now

MYTH ARC
Rogue planetoid disintegrates between Mars and Jupiter and creates dense rich asteroid fields. Colonists establish independent colonies in the field. Large statelike corporations compete over the resources with large industrial mining facilities and power armored space marines 1 year travel time from earth.
A microbial alien infestation lingers in the remains of the rogue planetoid, unknown to mankind. Incorporeal aliens of different origin have been covertly studying mankind for decades.

THE PARTY
The players constitute a marines squadron of specialists beginning the game on a large fleet carrier of one of the industrial conglomerates mining the asteroid field. After a few introductory missions and minor battles against other companies, they are dispatched a liaison officers to a nearby settler stronghold. They have to befriend and eventually defend a large settler city inside an asteroid, complete with ore and food industry, miner and settler hub, and red light district. During the course of which they will encounter first signs of alien infestation in humans, and an elusive serial killer who seems to be hunting the infested.

GAMEPLAY
The basic setup is a military campaign with lots of room for intrigue and personal drama. The world is very diverse and full of conflicts. Socially it's a wild west setting, but the plot arcs will feature more mystery and military scifi. After the first arc concludes I will introduce a political subplot as the characters rise in the hierarchy.

SYSTEM
Basic D20. I've given up on attempting to express scalability of power from pulled punch to orbital kinetic projectile within a comprehensive ruleset. Instead I generously apply DM's privilege and set the dice rolling difficulty according to dramatic impact.

>>7321744
You are a good DM.

>>7321744
HURR