The Backstory

If you haven't checked out the extra pages at the story, I suggest you do so to get a bigger sense of the world of Brittania. Actually come to think of it, I'll have to do some geography as well, but I've added information on the characters, backstory, and the gods to the main page.

So you may be wondering then, where did Brittania come from? How do you come up with an entire world?

Like many ideas, Brittania came from a failed campaign. I was trying to plan a 4th edition campaign to learn the rules and see if a campaign could be run entirely online. The campaign never got started, probably because you can't run a campaign online, but I had an encounter built that had some interesting battles and a good cliff hanger. I can't obviously reveal what that is, since the characters will be playing through it, but you should be pleased by it.

But the problem with an encounter is that it doesn't make a plot, so that's where some planning was necessary. I've always loved the idea of Utopia and Dystopia, but it wasn't an idea that I had seen in D&D much. So about a year after creating that encounter, I decided to experiment in running my very first campaign after having a campaign I was playing in fall apart. I brought on the players from the previous campaign, and then some new people who were unfamiliar with the game. So I made them level one, and decided to only use the base rule book.

This made creating the world easy. Humans would be the main race since Humans reproduce fast and are good farmers. I decided to mix up the histories of the Elves and Dwarves to give a reason for the two races to tick each other off. I can't go into too much more detail on the world since it'll all be revealed, but fleshing out the world was pretty easy with no major conflicts to worry about. I decided to also create a mysterious "Mainland" which would allow me to expand the campaign if necessary, and allow a little more war and misery that D&D players are used to.

As for the gods, it became a game of make up names for the common needed gods, and create a backstory of war between law and chaos. I liked having the nature of the gods be a little mysterious, and you can see a little of that mystery in their back stories. I also enjoy having gods who interact with mortals, so I ensured that evidence of their work can be seen in the world, and used the war to create a reason for them to not be causing massive change to the world.

As for the rest, I'll discuss it as the story unwinds. But I wanted to give you guys just a little background of how Brittania came to be.

~David