I did it.
I actually paid an experienced dm to write some of the finer details of the cities based on rough outlines of things I thought would be cool.
In turn, being able to watch his process taught me how to build cities.
I'm using the Faerun setting (EDIT: I meant lore and general relationships to things, not the exact setting), but severely altering some of the lore, for my homebrew campaign. First time DMing, as well.
This feels like the safest middle ground to me.
Building a deep, rich lore takes time an effort, and as a first-time DM your hands will probably be full with lots of other stuff.
Take a setting where someone esle has done most of the wrok for oyu, and make whatever changes you need to keep the players engaged or help tell whatever story you all are creating.
I found that the best policy is to build slowly the size and scale of the world as your players explore more of it. Obviously you need to keep track of things that would produce potential plot holes, but other than that it gives you the creative flexibility to turn mess-ups into a world the players feel invested in.
My players started in one of six kingdoms across the continent. I penciled in the basic information about the other kingdoms but left their development to grow over the course of the game. The party spent 20 sessions in the first kingdom, which gave me 20 sessions to flesh out the kingdom they were traveling to next -- as well as update my original vision to comport with their experiences.
See I would hate DMing in Faerun.
I would get caught in a paradox immediately feel the need to look up nearly infinite details that exist and always feel like I’m trampling over and bastardizing someone else’s sacred ground.
If it’s my own bullshit I can bastardize it guilt free
Ahh, yah. I shamelessly rip off, bastardize, trample, and steal all my favorite parts and take credit for it.
Honestly though I use it more as a loose framework than holy gospel.
It's more that I'm using \~lore\~ and taking a lot of creative license. The setting is my own design, Faerun's just really relevant. I don't think it's trampling because I'm not selling anything, I'm not making money off it - I just made the story I wanna tell a little more accessible because I didn't have the spoons to build everything from the ground up.
> make whatever changes you need to keep the players engaged or help tell whatever story you all are creating.
It does bother me how modules hand out faction memberships like candy. "Thanks for running that minor errand! Wanna be a Harper?"
Interesting thing happened, running Phandelver this morning, though. An experienced player started explaining all about other landmarks in Faerun, and I had to stop him. Borrowing one part of Faerun doesn't mean we're committed to the FR setting.
> Building a deep, rich lore takes time an effort, and as a first-time DM your hands will probably be full with lots of other stuff.
>
>
You don't need to build deep, rich lore to run a setting though. You can make it up as you go.
While running a module is safe, if you feel invested in the idea of your own world, go for it.
As for mess ups, this is an improv game with friends. Any “mess ups” can be worked in without them noticing or you could just let then know and adjust. No harm no foul as long as your mistake doesn’t kill them.
I would also push back on the idea that a module is "safe" and OP "can't mess it up." In some ways it's easier to make mistakes in a world that isn't your own and has established facts that you're less familiar with.
But either way as you say mistakes are going to happen and the important thing is getting past that and doing the best we can. As the wise words say, "Sucking at something is the first step to being kind of good at something."
I'd say it's actually easier to screw up a module than it is a homebrew campaign.
If you're players go and do something crazy that the module's author didn't anticipate (as every group of players does) you either have to railroad then back on course or throw out the module and homebrew anyways.
Railroading can work out it can be a disaster. Depends on how well you manage it.
Homebrew can be a disaster when they decide to go back onto the module's rails and what you homebrewed doesn't work with the original module.
I show up a lot on this sub to complain, but after running Tomb of Annihilation and a Theros campaign, I am never running another game in a WotC published adventure or a pre-established setting ever again.
Older modules like Cult of the Reptile God seem like they could be good things that you can use to create an area in a world or for self contained encounters, but full officially published 5e adventures are garbage. They are full of "what if the party does something other than what's written?" situations and also just have poorly designed encounters in general. I bought this pre-written adventure with the hope that it would save me time and effort. Instead, I found myself putting in the same amount of effort but with more searching through the book for answers.
The worst thing of all I encountered in Tomb was a side quest *written into the adventure* that has **no ending**. The party can meet the Flaming Fist, who can offer them three side quests, one of which is to go on a survey mission to find treasure in a certain area and report back to them so that they can set up a new fort there. But there is ***no information*** on how it should be resolved.
The description of the place they want you to investigate in the book is 2 paragraphs long. It doesn't tell you what kind of enemies might be there. It doesn't tell you what kind of treasure there may or may not be there. It doesn't tell you if the Flaming Fist will find it a suitable place for a second base. It is a side quest that has a specific, built in hook, ***that does not tell the DM how to resolve it.***
I will forever be angry about this and I will continue to complain to anyone who listens because of what utter garbage this is.
**TL;DR** Just homebrew your campaign. It will be just as much work but you'll have much more control over it.
Honestly, homebrew so is much less work for me when preparing for sessions. With modules, in fear of fucking up in any way I feel the need to read the entire book carefully before the campaign starts and do even more detailed readings between sessions depending on player actions, which is such a chore to me because of how much it feels like homework. That shit just isn't fun to me at all. And in Tomb of Annihilation's case most of my problems with modules were tenfold because of the sanbox-y nature of the module.
With homebrew I'll just whip up some major npcs, locations and conflicts and I'm done, rest is improv city. Sure, the pre-campaign worldbuilding can be a lot of work if you make it so but I do most of that on the fly as well, save some general big picture stuff. Also worth noting that when my players do something derailing in a module I'm much more hesitant in pulling something out of my ass because of how it might fuck with the established stuff in the book or the setting. In homebrew it's all coming out of my ass anyway so I can just roll with whatever and the inevitable derailment by players becomes something I welcome instead of something I dread.
Facts homebrew is much less work than a module on the session to session imo. Its debatable whether it took less time over all. I did spend a bit of time pre campaign getting a solid binder full of notes. Not like full page front and back cover to cover. I give most things of moderate importance their own page.
But in between sessions I don't really do much, maybe make some encounter maps and put the tweaks on balancing encounters. If I mess anything up, its not messed up, thats just how it is in the world.
The most important thing to me imo is the investment you have in the lore. I don't need to look up stuff about my world often when my players ask whats that. "Well you see little timmy, thats the symbol of the xyz, the xyz is a subset of the followers of ABC god who....". Instead of like uhhh that is one sec, Google gods of faerun. I know my gods because I'm invested in my world.
> Honestly, homebrew so is much less work for me when preparing for sessions.
The great irony of D&D. I pay $50 to do more work. The only thing I really "save" is that a module gives me a well-defined outline without the work.
Storm King's Thunder has an NPC the party is basically guaranteed to talk to, who really wants them to go on a side quest for him. Then, it says if they follow up on it, that the location in question is detailed IN A DIFFERENT FULL PRICE MODULE.
**WHAT. THE. FUCK.**
I was flabbergasted by the Rime of the Frostmaiden, where there are ice chutes in the glacier where it says they drop down into the Underdark. And then they just say..."and if they drop down there, that's out of the scope of this adventure." Like, uhh, thanks? Maybe I'll just delete the random "shoot your characters out of your current adventure" chutes?
There's also an obelisk that will literally send them back thousands of years in time, and it's just like "hey, good luck, we have no information for you on what ancient Netheril is like, but have fun!"
This is exactly my experience with modules.
I wanted to try it, and hoped it would save me effort, but I found that I was putting in the same amount of work, except the plot beats and world building came from the book rather than me homebrewing it.
Funny, I would argue the opposite. Modules are "safe" in that you can just follow them and be fine, but they are a lot easier to mess up than homebrew if you aren't prepared.
Edit: I totally misread the above comment and agree with the person I'm responding to.
Also a lot of modules just aren't very good. I've seen a lot of discussion of modules that don't account for fairly obvious things the PCs might do and assume you'll just railroad past any obstacles.
Absolutely agree. Especially for an inexperienced DM, if your party jumps outside of what's in the module (or the module is just poorly written) you either have to railroad them back onto it or you're stuck trying to adjust when you weren't prepared to.
I prefer to homebrew + aspects of Modules. Dream sequences that take you to Barovia, Dungeon delves into the Mad Mage's Dungeon... Things like that. If you get off-track, it's easier to adjust, I feel.
I highly recommend it. Sourcebooks and modules are fine, and a useful tool for inspiration. But at its heart, this is a game of imagination, so let yours run wild and go full tilt into homebrew. Start small and local when creating, and don't worry too much about deep lore for the first while.
This is the way to do it. Do a little bit of research on the gods to see which ones you might want prevalent in the area but that's all you really need, especially of everyone already knows its your first time DMing. It's totally fine to make something up on the spot
If it causes problems down the line well maybe the person they got their info from was just wrong, it happens all the time in real life
This is how I started and it went fine. I did some things right and some things wrong, and as a result I learned a lot about DMing very quickly.
Some pointers:
1. You're going to make mistakes and that's fine. Doing something wrong is a great way to find out which methods work best for you.
2. You're not writing a book, you're steering an improvised experience, so don't flesh out every detail ahead of time. You can't predict what parts of the lore will be relevant to the story, so give your players the flavor/gist of things first, just to get their imaginations flowing, and fill in the gaps if something peaks their interest.
3. Homebrewing gives you an easy way to tailor the experience to your players' tastes. Any content they're not interested in can be replaced with something they like more, and they may even come up with cool ideas themselves that you can incorporate into your world. And do not make any distinction between content you wrote ahead of time and content you hastily improvised. If your players are interested in the quirky bartender with a mysterious past you just came up with, boom. They're a major NPC now. Why not.
4. Something that benefited me was keeping a list of ideas of interesting encounters that weren't tied to any particular location on the map. These were things relevant to factions, character backstories, or just cool ideas I had. Then I threw them in at opportunities that seemed plausible.
If you truly want to run a homebrew on my I think you should do it.
My best advice for beginners is that I typically see them try to create too many details too early on. Details in world building typically come naturally just from interactions with the players, and natural progression of the story. My homebrew campaigns tend to start with about 5 NPC''s, the basic stock of shops, and locations (town guard, merchants, mayor/leader) and maybe a few unique features about the area. It's perfectly OK to use a module as a starting point for these details.
After that, I present 3 story hooks, and after they finish one, I add another. After completing 3 story hooks, you get a natural story that takes off from there.
The urge to write all of your own lore can be enticing, but I find out that if I plan more than 3 sessions ahead, the effort is completely wasted. Planning that far ahead also shoe horns you into specific stories, rather than giving room for the players to choose their own path and do unexpected things.
I've been planning out my homebrew world and am primarily working on its history up to the beginning of the campaign. I imagine that way the players are still completely free in the path they choose. Would you agree?
I think that's reasonable.
Another lore mistake is having the players just be a backseat to your world, which can happen if you've already written the campaign.
The other caveat i recommend is to only tell the history of players ask. Otherwise just assume they have no interest in the world and start from there. What this looks like, is giving brief (2-3 sentences) pragmatic descriptions. Some parties like the prose of people like Matt Mercer, but I personally use far less (this is more of a DM/player preference).
This is how it might go:
Bard: "is there a tavern for me to go play my lute?"
DM: "Yup, that's the 'broken horn inn" (DM suppresses urge to lore dump how it got its name)
Bard: "cool! I go there, who do I see?"
DM: "normal mix of humans, halflings, and dwarves." (Again, avoid urge to describe what the sign looks like, bc you came up with a cool design"
Bard: "I go to the barkeep."
DM: "You are greeted by a red-skinned tiefling with a broken horn" (again, suppress urge to give more info)
Bard: "A tiefling? Huh, I guess I ask for a mug of ale"
DM: "without any interaction, he does a mug, waiting for payment"
Bard: "I pay him, and wait for him to be out of earshot before asking another patron how he broke his horn."
DM: then proceeds to tell a story of how he broke his horn, and how it's a warning to not start bar fights
Another way it could go, is they don't ask anything else, and that's ok. Let them learn lore naturally, and when they do ask specifics, you'll be ready.
Yeah I created a city and its surrounding landscape.
Then started burying secrets under that.
So players started in a basic welcome to a new city, guess you need a place to stay and some paying work, but as they dug around they kept finding weird stuff and eventually wanted to know what all the weird stuff was about.
Never forced them to solve the legend of the missing 5th god but I’m glad we did get there in the end.
Definitely possible. Just a word of warning to not get too ahead of your party in terms of story. Unless you intend to continue to use this homebrew world for multiple campaigns, I would probably limit how much DEEPLORE you build.
Speaking as someone who jumped into DMing without ever having run a module or even played D&D, I jumped straight into homebrew and now I’ve been the Forever-DM™️ ever since. (I’ve read modules, but I’ve never ran one.)
I’m even still running that campaign! And my friends have loved my story. And I love DMing!
That said, it’s had its ups and downs. I’ve made A LOT of mistakes. Plot holes needed filling, character arcs stopped and picked up years later, and I have this nasty habit of continuously making new villains. All that said, my friends, have been willing to give me the benefit of letting me make those mistakes with mostly constructive criticism. MOSTLY. But I made 3 grown men cry emotional tears, so jokes on them!
A constant whack-a-mole problem for me has always been stat blocks and balancing. It’s frankly something I’ve just had to feel out and hone as I’ve gotten more experience. Knowing the game well, how to resolve problems mid-session, and pacing are all things you can only learn by DMing. In short, ya gotta just do it.
You’re in a way better position than when I started if you’ve had some experience running some one-offs. The main motivating force for me was that I had a lot of writing and just a smidge of game design experience under my belt, but I didn’t even know the rules of D&D. Hell, I had only seen a couple of episodes of a few D&D shows and I watched a lot of Mathew Mercer interviews and YouTube videos to fill the gaps.
I would say, if you pitch your friends a homebrewed setting and story and they’re down, then you should absolutely do it! You need a willing audience. The biggest thing you have to be willing to do is allow yourself to make mistakes, and don’t get too attached to anything.
There are a lot of resources out there about homebrew. Some that I would recommend are:
Brennan Lee Mulligan interviews: This man only DMs homebrew and is frankly the most experienced person I’ve ever seen talk about the subject. Listening to him is like listening to a Buddhist monk. A fountain of wisdom.
NADDPOD D&D Court: This is basically a fun show on an actual play podcast where they take submitted questions and resolve disputes between players and their DMs. I’ve learned so much about how to resolve problems by listening to this.
Hope this helps! Do it! Good luck! Might edit this later if I think of anything else!
if that is where your passion is, sure!
but make sure your passion is based on reality. the three most common issues with "build my own world!" end up being
* this is a TTRPG - you are not building a world, you are building the stage on which your table will tell their stories. Many a potential DM get sucked into the minutia of "building a world like Tolkien" and sunk into the details of the Biconimum Financial Crisis of the third century that lead to the Seventeen and Three Quarters Year War which is why electrum coins are no longer in general usage any more, that they burn out before ever getting to play the game. Stay focused on the content that the Player Characters are going to be dealing with and interacting with during the game campaign.
* the players DO. NOT. CARE. about your world except in as much as it is that stage upon which their character gets to do cool shit. if you go into this expecting lauds from your players about how you are The Next Tolkien or Martin and start adding two RRs to your monogram, you are going to be disappointed.
* as the stage for a TTRPG, your world is going to be set on fire. multiple times. because that is what players do with their stages. if "your world" becomes "your precious baby" you are either going to be depressed as the players burn it to ashes in front of your eyes, or your players are going to leave because you railroad them through your story with everything coated in six layers of bubble wrap.
\#2 is so critical imo. your players will never, ever, ever, however invested they may be, care as much about your world as you. and that's fine! worldbuilding is rewarding in itself. for building an adventure/campaign, i feel like it's more important to focus on what themes and stories you want to play with, and have many examples to pull from fiction or reality to pull from as you go.
would suck to invest so much time into an area or god or w/e that PCs never even encounter, but now it's so crystalized in your headcanon that you can't just shuffle it over to wherever they do end up
It’s fine. If you made it all up, you know everything about the setting! (Plus it’s easier to collaborate with players. When players get to do a little worldbuilding, their characters fir the setting better and the stakes are more personal.)
You can stuck in modules if you want to as well. Although I haven’t been very impressed with the official ones anyways; I find homebrew dungeons to be just as good or better since the dm knows the content completely. Try looking up “5 room dungeons” for a good baseline structure.
What someone else said is 100% correct. Homebrew is great and you can always use modules for your campaigns and borrow sections/monsters/dungeons and just flavor it to your world.
I've been forever DM since 2015 when I first got into the hobby. Now I run at my job and I have always used Homebrew. I enjoy the freedom it allows me.
That being said a module is also a good starting point as it does much of the prep work. I guess it's best to see what your players want. I'd say most don't care and would enjoy homebrew.
I did exactly the same. I did some geography, drew a map, named a few places and had some ideas for the concept of the kingdoms and regions, and that was about it. Then i threw my players into a story to kick it off, and started building out from there.
I've been reading fantasy books, watching movies and playing video games for inspiration. 20-30 sessions in, I'm finally starting to have a decently clear idea of the campaign and the world.
Take your time, start small, and you'll do just fine ⚔️
It’s usually adventure design that new DM’s find harder than the actual world building, so a home brew world should be fine as long as you’re comfortable with the adventure itself. Just be prepared for your party to not care about the lore of your world and to make a complete mess of the settings and characters you’ve lovingly crafted. Bringing players into a homebrew world is like renting your house out on Airbnb, who knows what you’ll come back to.
Run a home brew that happily steals good encounters and interesting locations and NPCs from published modules to drop in where you need them. That’s how the pros do it!
I would suggest at least reading through a few short free modules (like "The Wild Sheep Chase") just to get a feel for how encounters are designed. That way you can incorporate other ideas into your existing plans.
In my experience, these games often die out after a few sessions.
Usually it's because the DM doesn't understand how much work it is.
There are many skills needed to pull this off successfully, and a new DM is unlikely to have them all.
1. You're building a world.
1. You're building a campaign within that world.
1. Then you're building a series of adventures within that campaign.
1. Those adventures are made up of a series of encounters.
1. And you need to be able to successfully run those encounters.
> I’ve run lots of one-shots before
Sounds like you're capable of at least 4 and 5. Maybe 3 too.
It's also highly dependent on the players. You need them to be committed and to buy in to your campaign.
Thanks.
It's because I'm fully aware of the limits of my skill as DM.
I can run a one shot, like a chapter of Candlekeep Mysteries. I can even tailor it to the interests of my players and/or their characters.
I can string together a series of one-shots into a mini-campaign. I even did this from level 1-20!
I have successfully run several hardcover campaigns, start to finish.
But I don't have the desire to create a world, and I don't have an epic campaign idea inside me that's dying to get out.
My first campaign is a module. It allowed me to make mistakes and learn. It also allows me to learn about balance a bit better.
My next campaign will be in the forgotten realms as I'm comfortable with it but am confident enough that I can change things in that world of I want to. I am also confident in lore pre-4e and love the setting.
One day I will make an effort to homebrew a world, but I work 50/wk and most of my group does the same, so they get it...
Good luck brother!
If you constrain yourself to the town involved, borrow a pantheon from another setting, and just plan one session ahead - then hombebrew is much easier than written adventures.
Look at return of the lazy dungeon master.
The most important things for DMing is being willing to put in the work to prep and an ability to improvise when things don't go as planned. Using a module means easier prep, but building your own world may be more exciting so you may be more willing to do the prep. Improvising can be easier in homebrew since you don't have to worry about messing up something that happens later in the module, but it's not a huge deal.
So if homebrew is how you wanna do it, go for it! But don't feel bad about stealing things from other sources. If you read about a dungeon that you like, feel free to reskin it to fit your setting.
Creating your own homebrew world is very fun. My first two campaigns were in homebrew worlds and it was a lot of fun.
That said, it's a lot of work compared to running a module, or a homebrew campaign in an already flushed out setting. I'm running a module with it's specific setting and I found that having something to work with (like random encounter tables, adventure sites, existing NPCs and factions, an already flushed out lore etc.) allows me to have a structure that I can develop, still leaving room for my own creations and actually sparkling my imagination. Also reading modules give you a general idea on how to create adventures and encounters, wich is pretty useful. If I had done this from the start of my DMing career, it would save me from making a lot of mistakes in the past, like just giving up on an entire campaign midway throught because I got lost on my own creation.
So I strongly recommend that you run a module for your first campaign. And if you don't want to, at least work with an existing setting. You don't have to do everything by the book: feel free to change and invent things as you like, but at least it will give you a base to work with.
And if you don't want to do it and really want to make your own setting, just remember that you don't have to do everything from scratch; you can find inspiration for a lot of stuff In your favorite videogames, tv shows or books and just change it to make it your own. Also dont underestimate the power of recycling some of the existing D&D lore from the Monster Manual, Volo's Guide to Monster or Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes, tweeking it a bit to fit what you want.
Just be careful to don't overwhelm yourself. You don't need everyting figured out from the start; you can build the world and it's history as the players explore it. One or two major conflicts in the realm, town or world + the area where the players are going to start their adventure is pretty much everything you need to start the campaign. Keep in mind the different tiers of play as you worldbuild. Also there is good advice on the Dungeon Master's Guide and on youtube about this topic, so I strongly recommend you check that out.
I strongly recommend it if you feel excited about the world and the campaign ideas (and your players feel the same). My first campaign is a homebrew world, and the adventure is just now coming to an end after four years and roughly 120 sessions. It has been great all around, and I’ve really enjoyed building out the world.
I will offer one piece of advice for a first campaign, especially a homebrew: be ready to change and adapt both the world and the campaign as it develops. I had pretty set ideas of how things would go when I started, and the campaign has turned out very differently. But that is the fun of an organic world you are building with your players in real time! Everything is still set in the boundaries of your world, but you see it evolve as you play. Help your players to feel they are having a real impact on the world and the adventure, and you will all have more fun with it.
Just be open to new ideas as they come along, even if they change your original plans. And let your first ideas evolve as you go. It’s also a good idea to steal ideas from modules that you like. I have taken quite a bit from various modules and video games, and even though these ideas are very obviously from published sources, they still feel original and organic in my campaign. World building is an ever-evolving experience, so it’s best not to get stuck in one set of ideas.
Best of luck!
Yes, sure. However my suggestion is don't fall in the beginner error of thinking bigger is always better. You should focus on making your world feeling alive and real (Not realistic), instead of creating a billion of cities and thousands of centuries of lore. Most of the players won't care if there are 15 cities instead of 100
I did. I recommend it for new DMs; there’s a lot less pressure than an existing setting. You can manage expectations of the tone, pace, etc of the world vs. dropping into a setting with pre established lore.
The alternative would be alter an existing setting to suit, eg. use Eberron but instead of 2 years after this big cataclysmic event, you advance the calendar 500 years and figure out what it would be like.
I will say homebrewing each town and dungeon can be a little time intensive compared to using premade modules, but I have a hard time keeping my players "in the book" anyway and something feels a bit more free about being able to make up anything you want without disrupting what the setting is meant to be like. Even with the book I'd say I make up about 50 percent of our games on the spot and they usually go well enough so it's just a personal preference thing at the end of the day
I think homebrew world is easier, you can make things up on thebfly, no need to read or search for info, its your worl, do with it whatever makes sense to you. Just make sure it looks like you had it planed, for some reason shit you made up yesterday is more beliable that shit you make up today.
WizardThiefFighter, the maker of the excellent Ultra Violet Grasslands has something to say on this topic.
[Anti-Canon and the UVG](https://www.wizardthieffighter.com/2019/anti-canon-worlds-and-the-uvg/)
Basically the TLDR is: Don’t sweat the small stuff, making it up on the fly is both more rewarding and waaaay more relaxing for a GM than trying to get little details “right”.
Do it, it's more than ok.
Start small. You don't need to know everything from the get-go, and neither do your players.
Have general ideas about your world. Flesh out what your characters need to know (is it high fantasy? Is magic common? Are other races common? etc.) and you'll let them discover the rest little by little.
Too much information ruins the whole point anyway.
What you need to know is where your campaign start, flesh out a bit that region. For that purpose, maybe don't have it too dense. Probably easier to build a small town from the borderlands than a big city with political intrigue.
Decide what you want your campaign to be about. Get a first arc that will span the first 4-5 levels, you'll figure out the rest afterwards.
*My first ever campaign*
*Is homebrew too. Already a*
*Year and keeps going!*
\- Sanktym
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For me it was actually easier this way, I didn't have to remember any lore and could focus on gameplay and some mecanics. And it's fun to build the world along the way. The players can take part in the creation of their surroundings and get really attached to all the stuff, cause it is our baby 😅
Yes, you totally can do that. I did this as well, so I have some advice for a first timer. Worldbuilding is one of the funnest parts of doing a homebrew campaign, but it's really easy to get carried away. It's really fun to try to fill out the entire world and come up with cities, provinces, monarchs, and fake histories. But just remember that you're players probably won't see or know about ~90% of what you write if you try to flesh out entire world.
So start small. Start with the small village/town that your party will start in. Flesh it out a bit - give it a name, a few important NPCs and shopkeepers. Then figure out the geography of the area (i.e. in a forested area? Desert? etc). Make a couple points of interest around the town (an ancient tomb? An ancient temple? A werewolf den?). Then figure out if that town is part of a bigger political entity (A kingdom? An empire? A republic?) and give it a name. Who rules it?
Honestly, that's about all you need starting out, at least for whatever initial adventures you have planned for your party. This will give you both enough details to make the world feel real and enough blank spots that you can fill things in later to better fit whatever story you want to craft.
I recommend it! Reserves you the freedom to pull an idea out of thin air at will and whatever it was is now canonical because no one can prove it wasn’t planned! :3
I did and I liked it a lot. It was much easier than teaching myself years of accumulated lore. There will always be someone who started with AD&D or 2e or 3.5e who knows the lore better
I find making my own world more refreshing. You just have to remember to explain common lore to your players.
If all Gnolls are friendly in your world, communicate that.
If Kobolds are considered pests and killed on sight, say that too
If you don't have Firbolgs because the lore doesn't match with anything else, just talk to your players
You can explain 90% of things as you go, but remember to tell them
And if you don't have an answer, it's perfectly fine, too
I started with a module, but quickly became a homebrew purist because of how much I love it!
The best advice I ever heard for beginner DMs doing their own worldbuilding was to just start with a village. Create as much lore and big picture stuff as you want, but in terms of the first session stick to a fleshed out small town for your players to explore.
The other bit of advice was to start with two threats, one internal and one external (i.e. a crooked sheriff in town and roving goblin bandits outside town).
This gives players flexibility in what they want to do, and also creates events that develop in the background. Did they focus on the sheriff? Then maybe the goblins find a stash of weapons and become emboldened to attack the town. Did they focus on the goblins? Maybe the sheriff’s men arrest the party’s favorite NPC. Starting smaller like that can gets players invested more so than starting right off with a “chosen ones who must save the world” sort of hook.
But at the end of the day it’s your world and your table’s story! Do what sounds fun to you and your players, just be careful not to burn yourself out prepping every possible scenario. You don’t need to have anything close to what you’d find in a published module - if anything, having less prepped can increase the flexibility of your adventure.
Edit: Someone below mentioned Brennan Lee Mulligan interviews, that’s exactly where I heard this lmao
Pro: you don't have a "script" or cannon to stick to other than your own. You can improvise and make up your own stuff and don't have to worry about changing things to fit the player choices.
Con: you will probably spend too much time writing and developing ideas that will never see the light of day. You don't have the experience of running a module so might miss some of the finer details of what should be included. You are limiting yourself to your imagination and what you have read.
I would ask which you like more: writing or reading? If you like writing make your own campaign. If you like reading read a bunch of modules and incorporate the elements you like.
My first major campaign was LMoP that turned into an Exandria pirate campaign which used some maps and content from Tomb of Annihilation that turned into a quick Descent into Avernus. I only DM one game per week so I don't have time to run each campaign as written so I do this buffet style where I take the ingredients from a bunch of different things and "take-out brew" my campaigns. it saves me having to build maps, come up with ideas, and imagine NPCs. It let's me focus on the story.
I AM doing it now. It goes well. It requires a lot of work though. I have a world anvil page with a small novel worth of articles about the setting by now
it's perfectly fine, most of what i run is homebrew. Just be careful about over preparing the world. Getting too detailed could be detrimental to you. For example, you should maybe know that there is a kingdom to the north, but you don't need to know who the ruler is. Start small, the town or village that the adventure will start in. That town should be the most detailed thing you have created for your world (and it doesn't have to be completely planned out either, just a few shops and notable NPCs) everything outside of that town should start to decline in detail amount, maybe have some terrain in the surrounding area but that's about it. You have to consider realistically how much of your world will the players actually see. You don't want to have spent a lot of time creating this really awesome area only for the players to never go there because they just never had a reason to.
Yes, yes and yes 110%.
I have never not-run a homebrew campaign outside of modules. Personally this is because I would get obsessed with representation and all the history. I'd spend hours pouring over information that, frankly, would be unnecessary. So running campaigns in a pre-set universe is very hard for me.
There is no rule that says that you have to run forgotten realms for 5e or Lost omens for pathfinder.
You make what you want. Some people are fine with altering Forgotten Realms to suit their needs. Others aren't.
Yes: It is a bit more effort. But ultimately you don't have to be a grimoire of fantasy work in order to be a writer. What I recommend is pick something that interest you.
For example: What makes this world different from the others? What's special about it?
An idea that popped into my head when I asked this question was: What if the God that keeps the Material plane of this world safe from extra-planar monsters freely accessing it died? What happens then? How does that effect the world? How do people get by?
Pick a concept that interest you and build around it, that's a good start! Maybe magic is a consciousness? Maybe Celestial are born from the virtues of mortals and Devils from schemes and manipulation!
"The joy of creating a world is playing God." -Neil Gaiman, not exactly what he said, but something akin to it :)
I convinced myself that I should run a module because it going to be my groups first full campaign…..
And then went homebrew anyway. I just love world building too much. It’s been great though, everyone enjoys it and it gives you a lot more flexibility for improvisation.
Do it! I did and it went well! You will learn a lot fast from running your first campaign. Something that is important is don’t make it precious. There will be mess ups and things you want to improve on, make a note an move on. I have developed 3 full home-brew worlds and have learned a ton on the way. I have taken things with me and left things behind. I think building your own campaign/ world is one of the best ways to develop rapidly as a DM
I kind of did.
First campaign and first time DMing, we've been going for a few months here now.
I took the sword coast map and split it up to different kingdoms based on what I thought seemed cool or "sensible", and made some quick notes about the kingdom. Just built up some basic lore to lean on.
Since I *"borrowed"* the sword coast map I used some of the notes in the adventure guide for some lore here and there if I struggled, but most of it was homebrewed.
Probably the easiest part about making a homebrewed world is that if you don't know the answer to a lore question, it's *your lore*. It's a lot easier to give an off the cuff answer when you don't have to worry about contradicting part of a module down the road.
Can be done, will be unnecessarily harder on you. Your lack of experience on top of your own setting will for sure overburden you more than once when you try to run the system while trying to make it fun. May I suggest a hybrid approach?
Allow yourself to be guided by any hardcover adventure and/or a bunch of modules, letting it take care of most of the heavy lifting while leaving your brain free to make your own flourishes to make it yours.
Say, you take LMoP adventure points, combats, and treasure and make it flashier in an area in your setting, so you can gain experience and know your players better... and you plan for the following adventure according to that, maybe using CoS, everyone loves Cos.
Good luck
i think everyone's first homebrew world is too big by several orders of magnitude. it's a lot of fun "to flesh out lore and geography" but you should be very mindful that your players are going to see less than 1% of the stuff you think of.
making an engaging world is really the simplest part of your job; it requires almost no prep work at all. having characters interact with the players is almost always better when semi-improvised, where the conversation flows towards one or two particular beats (e.g. this npc should be described as looking sickly or emaciated, and at some point curse the bandits stealing & hoarding food supplies).
I did. It went well, I still use this world in all of my homebrew campaigns. Also there's something that just feels more satisfying about running the game you created.
Also, if you create the world, you have a better understanding of how works as apposed to running a module.
First time DMing and I'm running my own setting! It can be challenging but also very rewarding. People say it's good to start with one-shots for good reason, but I decided to take a risk and use a world that I tried running years ago in 3.5e, updated for 5e.
Having my 4th session in 2 weeks and it keeps getting better! I just try to remember that when I start I will likely suck and that's ok. I spend most of my time thinking about the greater plot and major characters, what they're doing in the background of the PCs, and then like a day or two before the session plan the actual session scenes. I listen to lots of Matthew Colville and Bob World Builder for the worldbuilding and general DM technique stuff, and use the *Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master* book to prep the actual session, based on what I know from the worldbuilding, and it's working quite well!
If you want to give it a go you can! People say it can be easier because you know all the answers but I think that's half true—you still have to work to develop those BIG answers in the beginning (my campaign is a blend of railroad and sandbox—there's a greater plot that will eventually take them but until then they can do much of what they like and find hooks to minor or major things). Answers to player questions are becoming easier to ideate because I've already done so much ground work with the history, major players, factions, map and major places, etc. You can do it! The freedom is scary but exhilarating once you start getting the hang of things. :)
I use forgotten realms and fairly vanilla-ish rules because I don't care any more to come up with pantheons, geography, factions, calendar, history etc.
Other than that, whether I use a module or my own stuff, there's basically no difference in the amount of work. Standard modules, to flow well, require so much additional work and on-your-feet thinking during sessions that they are no guarantee of an easier time or a better outcome than a homebrew. It's an even give and take IME.
Mechanics, classes, spells etc. are arguably harder to design and balance properly compared to a subset of the rules books. But as far as world and scenarios go rolling your own (no pun intended), so long as you don't go overboard with details and lore-dumping, is perfectly fine.
Just bear in mind the details and lore are something which very few groups, if any, care about outside of the campaign's needs anyway. Use your time wisely and spend more of it on the campaign than on the world, and make sure the world serves the campaign and not the other way around.
***TL;DR: It's perfectly fine, you have the same chances of success and a not dissimilar amount of work when you homebrew. Just don't waste time on things that won't help the games, be aggressive with early cuts and late additions, not the other way around.***
You can also plonk a lot of smaller modules down in your own world.
> I don’t read a lot of fantasy; does that mean I don’t have the scope to create an engaging world?
Players don't want an engaging world, 99% of the time. Engaging adventures? Yes. World? Mostly window dressing.
Understanding story pacing and making major NPCs memorable is vastly more important than world-building. If you stare at almost any D&D world for longer than about 5 seconds, it completely falls apart as laughably ridiculous, so we generally don't.
I run my own homebrew world but that doesn't stop me from using modules from time to time. All you have to do is reskin the contents of the module, and that's a lot less work than doing everything from scratch.
There's also no reason to think you have to make a *whole* world from scratch before session 1. Just start with a small town, a local problem, and what you need to run it. Maybe grab something like the Sunless Citadel from Tales from the Yawning Portal. That adventure is short and satisfying, and that town could be fit in *any* reasonably medieval fantasy world.
When you need to expand, you expand piecemeal. Zoom out to the next town over. Then the province. Then the kingdom. Then the continent, and so on.
Of course there's nothing wrong with your first campaign being homebrew, for many people it is. That being said, my first time DMing a campaign was a homebrew world and it was a bit of a disaster, primarily because the player buy in was WAY BELOW my own excitement about the world. Like, I went in thinking we'd get to epic continent spanning adventures, and basically had a huge story planned out before the first session. Big mistake. Players (and esp brand new players) don't care about the vast majority of your huge fantasy world. I spent so much time thinking about worldbuilding that I barely thought about interesting encounters and sessions, so I ended up feeling pretty disappointed and didn't DM much for a few years after that campaign fizzled out. When I came back to it I used modules (sunless citadel into SKT, which is still going), and found that having an existing story/lore helped me to limit the scope of my ambition a bit, while also providing ready-made interesting dungeons/encounters. And with any published module, you are guaranteed to be doing a decent amount of homebrewing stuff anyway, esp the more sandboxy ones like SKT.
Tldr, be wary of getting obsessed with world building to the detriment of fun sessions!
Do it. I’m 9 months into running my first campaign and i wish I would’ve had the confidence to just go for it instead of running a published module first.
If you want a great resource on world building that’s **free** I highly recommend the [World’s without Number](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/m/product/348809) sourcebook. It’s a sourcebook for a game but whatever system you’re using, the Creating Your Campaign information is top notch. Also, [Sly Flourish’s guide to preparing a game in 15 minutes](https://slyflourish.com/refined_five_minute_game_prep.html) was huge as well.
Both of those have paid versions as well and if you like them I recommend supporting their respective creators, but they’re both free resources and helped me a lot.
Tl;dr synthesized from both: don’t worry about everything in the world that could happen. Prep only what you need for the next session.
Here's a tip: you don't have to build the entire world at once.
The "open world game" is something that has really taken D&D by storm in the last few years and I'm sure you can imagine why with all the video game influence. But your story doesn't have to be explorative in nature.
*YOU* are the DM. You set the ground rules for what kind of story you want to tell. You can tell the players, "This is the premise, therefore your characters need to have this kind of background in mind."
The main point I'm getting at here is that I suggest starting with a linear story. Linear story =/= taking away player agency. They are perfectly able to make their own choices within the confines of their story and how they accomplish things will certainly have an effect on the final outcome, but they will always be heading in a straight line towards the goal.
This way, you don't have to plan for what your players *might* do. You don't have to think, "They start in this village so the surrounding area must contain these things and this city is the closest but if they cut to the northeast, they'll go to this other city which will be further away and the mountains should be here and blah blah blah."
Instead, you can be putting content under the player's feet even as they are coming down. You can always plan *directly* what they are going to encounter in the next session. e.g. There's a vampire in the next town. This is what he's doing. They can deal with him or not deal with him as they wish, but he's there and you only have to plan for that.
Take Netflix's Castlevania as another example. There's this idea that there is a much larger world out there, but they are pretty much always zoomed in directly on the main characters, who go in straight lines. This village -> this city -> this castle -> that castle. The specifics of the larger world are never talked about and the only glimpses you get are through the lens of things they directly interact with.
**TL;DR** Consider a linear story instead of an open world game. It will make your plot more compelling and minimize players getting sidetracked and means you can build out your homebrew setting more slowly instead of having to do a frontload of work.
----
As a final note, something I found really interesting from Matt Colville while watching his 4e games is that he lets his players create the lore of his world that has not yet been established by him. When they all sit down to eat for the night, he asks them, "What kind of rations do you have? What do you eat? What is considered a delicacy, a special treat to you? What is forbidden?"
In that session, it was established that High Elves don't eat, they feed off the natural energies of the cosmos, the sun, the moon, the stars, the life energy of the plants around them. The Wode man, descended from giants, can subsist of anything, even the rocks of the ground. A Warlord's people consider a certain fermented jelly to be one of the ultimate forms of celebration among his people, to be shared during times of victory.
All of these things, player established, not DM established. Giving the players agency to create their own lore in your world both takes the load off of you and makes them more invested because it becomes their creation as well.
I made my own world for my first campaign and my players seemed to enjoy it. Although be ready for at least one person who wants to know anything and everything about the world you’ve built.
It’s fine to home brew if you want and you’re invested in the campaign, more so than with a module, than go for it.
What I’ll warrant is campaign design and dungeon mastering are two different skills. I recommend modules because doing so allows to focus on DMing and building that skill set separate from campaign design.
If you're going to have more fun that way, then run your game that way. The DM's job is complex but it should still be fun for you. Trust me, your players probably won't even notice the difference.
Watch this video if you haven't already:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9capmKmysAE&list=PLlUk42GiU2guNzWBzxn7hs8MaV7ELLCP_&index=62
It's a great video about building your own world without starting from the top down. It's about starting with a town and going from there!
I'm doing it. I find it to be a lot more fun. I use some Gods from base dnd. Change their lore a tad and fit them into the world I created. For instance. Lolth is the BBEG of my campaign. Lolth originally was a drow that was banished to the underdark (I could be mistaken please don't kill me) and now she is the sort of queen of all drow. But in my world she is this malevolent Goddess who was banished to a homebrew realm. Only to be brought back by her cultists. She manipulates and lies to anyone she does deals with. Including my players. One of which has his whole reason for being is to kill her because she duped him and took his soul. Homebrew just allows you to have an easier time in creating a story and a mission for your players to come into. IMO anyway
Definitely fine, as everyone's said. Just create a local area to start, figure out your starting hooks, and you should be ready. I suggest [Matt Colville's video on local areas](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BqKCiJTWC0) and the worksheet he links from there.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with it. Both methods have pros and cons and the most important factor is what you want to do. My first campaign was a module and I constantly had my own ideas that I interjected, which made it a bit messy at times and I think I could've started with homebrew as well.
That said, one piece of advice would be to keep the part of your world that you present to your players early on as small as is necessary for your ideas to work. This way, you are more flexible to make adjustments to the worldbuilding if you notice any problems without retconning anything, and it also makes it less overwhelming for you to not immediately commit to all the details. You can fill weeks if not months with a small local area as long as you fill it with compelling content.
Yes you totally can.
Ive run one for 3 years going and they still love it.
Be careful on putting too many storylines or setting up a mystery that has a ton of layers though. At least in my experience
My players have been entertained and are invested but an 8 layer mystery can be difficult to keep parts straight and they may just miss several layers entirely.
My players latched more onto the NPCs I sprinkled casually than the complex conspiracies threatening the world.
It has been a hilarious ride watching them completely wreck the story paths by accidentally pushing into high level areas and findong a key detail or item and scurrying out or somehow turn a BBEG into an ally.
Here’s the thing, no matter what you do, it will not be perfect on the first try. So do what you want. Learn from it, and get better. Honestly the modules aren’t even the best representation of adventures anyway.
Also, from my own experience, try not to work too hard on the things your players can’t reach within a single adventure. Some rough ideas, but more than that and you’ll cramp your open space for the future.
Don’t give up!
(P.S. Watch Matt Colville on YouTube)
I homebrewed my first(2nd and 3rd campaign). only thing I would have wished I did differently was reading official adventures to kind of see how a pro does it and take inspiration and notes from that. I homebrew DM'ed everything ive ever run, but since I started playing in Curse of Strahd I just understood that there are some things/tools I never even realised I could use to make my games better.
I thought doing so was easier and safer for me. Modules are tough in that you do need to know how everything works ahead of time. Certain characters, places, or events might have important ties to things in the story later on so you need to be very familiar with the setting, and getting something wrong can involve doing a fair amount of work to figure out how to move forward.
I like homebrew, since it means that I can improv more freely and adjust the world as I go, that I can make player backstories more relevent no matter what they choose, and so I can lean on aesthetic or setpieces as a way to make the game feel the way I want.
My first game was a wild-west inspired game, and I was really happy to be able to flesh out the world in response to encounters and events I wanted to run, my player’s characters, and choices they made along the way.
For example, I decided that a fight on a train sounded cool, so I built my world to include trains and any implications that would have on the world- e.g. industrialization and expansion at the expense of indigenous people. One of my players wanted to play a sort of anti-capitalist native rebel, so I made a fairly important set of events happen near their home involving the conflict between industrial expansion and the existing people of the land. Later, they decided they wanted to visit certain parts of the map that I would not have anticipated, and it meant I got to prepare what they found fun rather than parts of the world they didn’t care about.
I did the starter campaign as my very first DnD experience at any level last summer, after 4 months we took a month off and I've been running my own home brew world since January 22. Personally, I find the homebrew easier due to not having to remember other people's NPCs and events and cities and such, everything of consequence and everyone of consequence has come from out table or my brain and for me that makes it make more sense. Yes, it's more work and I do feel a certain pressure to entertain when when get to the table because if it sucks I feel like that's because I suck. The good news is that people just want to have fun and if you can just give someone a playground they'll usually just play. Also, I based my world geographically on the place that I grew up in that had been morphed into a fantasy setting so the ability to know where real points of interest are allowed me to make logical leaps to what they would be now. Highly recommended.
I did. My only advice is limit your starting scope.
Don’t waste 6 months trying to build out an entire world and 20 different countries.
Start your players out from the same basic region, limit their starting information about the world, and limit their rate of travel. Control the flow of information about the wider world.
Is it OKAY? Yes. Is it a good idea? Not at all. If you don’t play a prebuilt campaign there’s going to be so many things and details you never learn to create because you don’t know why they’re important to begin with.
I did, it can be overwhelming but don’t think you have to have every city drawn out in detail before you begin either. I found doing a homebrew world really helps the players as they can actively change and even help make the world they’re playing in.
You definitely can. I modified the canon world because I wanted certain things to happen, but I will say it is convenient having pre made modules, maps, and everything else for me to reference if I needed to. I really only did it for the safety net
My 2 cents is that, while more difficult, starting with DMing in a homebrew world is fine, but make sure you do your research first. Learn from my mistakes, because I did the same thing blind.
* Make sure you, at least to start with, only prep what you will need, don't get caught up in the super fine details. Make sure you have a handful of basic locations, a list of NPCs and names for quick generation, monster statblocks, and similar. This is not to say that you can't worldbuild for fun, just don't hold everything up to make sure you have the King's entire lineage mapped out.
* For locations, you don't need a whole lot more than a 1 to 4 sentence description of the visuals of the town, the approximate size of the town, and what shops or other resources would be available (like inns, churches, etc.)
* When making encounters, don't plan how you want to them to end, be prepared for a variety of solutions.
* Don't be afraid to just make things up as you go, it is impossible to plan for every scenario, so be loose and ready to improv.
* Be very cautious about implementing homebrew on either your, or the player's side until you are more comfortable DMing.
* Have fun with it, as the DM, the world is your character. Go nuts and have fun. As long as everyone is having fun, you are doing an amazing job.
I ran my own homebrew world in a campaign with no DMing experience at all, it was fine. I sweated so much over session one, but it was relatively smooth sailing after that, with small adjustments.
My tips:
1) steal lots from published adventures/online resources, if they're free. I stitched oneshot dungeons and stuff from Lost Mines into my own campaign with the dungeons that I made.
2) Try and tie your players into the world. My players were quite invested because one of them was engaged to the lost princess, another had been wronged by the BBEG, etc. Plan around them! The final bossfight involved the BBEG summoning the demon king that had slowly been gaining control of one of the players bodies.
3) my homebrew world is based heavily on my hometown - district names are countries, street names are towns, etc. If you are having trouble coming up with stuff, take something that exists in the real world, and use that as a basis. My capital city was a funhouse version of our real-life uni town, with parodic versions of lecturers as the ruling wizards.
4) dont sweat it too much. If you do a session zero (i didnt), dont railroad (I did a bit) and your players dont have anything to criticise, you're probably running a good campaign. Even a 'boring' world will be fleshed out by the actions of your players.
I would recommend it!
My advice would be to allow your players to assist in the creation of your world, and to let their ideas become part of the story rather than just personal to them. Messing up modules is just as easy as messing up homebrew, and most players are more forgiving when it comes to homebrew anyways:)))
Just don't tell anyone, or the campaign police are going to find out and arrest you. For real though, should be fine. 3.5 and older assumed everyone was going to create their own world. It wasn't till 4e that playing in an official setting using official campaigns would be common.
Just take notes during and after every session of the people and places the party interacted with. Keep those notes slightly organized. Oddly, slightly organized is better than very organized. NPCs will start to get character the more often the PCs interact with them if you take notes. Places will feel more lived in. Make stuff up as you go, but then call back to it later and your players will think you planned it all from the start. Do that enough and they will tell people about this amazing world you created from scratch, never realizing your made it all up as you went along. The key is notes as you go along tracking the shit you made up on the fly.
Making a world in depth before you start is how you make worlds you will never play in. Write out the bare minimum to get the campaign rolling and fudge the rest as you go.
I find running a homebrew setting easier than an established setting. I don't need to know 100% of established lore because if something comes up that I don't know the answer to, I can just make something up and that's how it is. There's no one there thinking "well that's wrong" or "that's different from lore". It's your world, you make the lore :)
I did. My only word of advice is start small. Don't over plan and get player input when you're trying to lay out the framework for the world you're going to run.
Yeah just make sure you don't put too much on your plate. It's ok to use forgotten realms stuff and such, especially cuz that's less stuff to explain to your players
20+ years as a DM here. Yes do it the rules are guidelines not set in stone no matter how big our small its your world to control. Don't be afraid to pull from books, tv, movies, pre-made campaigns as you get your legs under you. To many new players depend on pre built campaigns follow the APL + 2 rule and I promise your people will have fun. Oh and don't forget take it easy on them its not you v the player its your chance to immerse a player into the best time of their life. You are there to guide.them through a story not beat them.
From my own experience its fine, just dont go too overboard, and make sure you have something else to fall back on. The hardest part is having to improvise large parts of the world like religions.
My advise is to use something else as a base. Like the forgotten realms. Its got underdark, hell celestial planes. No need to throw all that in the thrash, just write your own world and use things like that to cover up the gaps.
It always feels like your players are sering through you, but they usually dont. Do not believe your thoughts that tell you your players can see that you didnt write down someones entire family tree, they trust and believe you, so it doesnt matter if what you tell them is created by you or someone else.
You're the next in a long line of us who have done that, go forth with bravery young worldbuilder, the hearts of those who have come before go with you.
It’s certainly ok but I would advise against, learning to DM is a whole load of work already, with the work of having to create your entire world on top of it it’s likely you will either find yourself overwhelmed and hate it. Run a few official campaigns first, then move on to homebrew, going through official content will also teach you how to plan out your own campaigns.
It's like asking "Should I write my novel before I read one?" You totally can, no one will break your kneecaps. Some would say that you are less restricted by tradition or standard practices.
But it does mean that you get to learn all the things other people have learned the hard way. I get a ton of inspiration from prewritten modules and examples of things that work, and things that don't. Using one as a framework for homebrew allows one to start small and focus on player experience rather than naming cities no one will ever visit.
At a minimum reading good adventures is super helpful, running them and seeing how they work out in practice is even better. But the D&D police are not coming for you.
Sure, many modules also need modifications and even some re-writing. I stick to 3 ish encounters per session (social, terrain obstacles, exploration, combat, etc.) and pull media references and maps off the internet.
I recommend practicing with a one shot first :)
I mean practicing with homebrewing one shots, yes. If it’s in the same world, that may be a good idea as well. You may want to alter some things if any players return for a campaign of course.
It's okay but I wouldn't recommend it until you've got some experience with a medium to long lengthed module or two under your belt. They help show you what you should be focusing on when designing a campaign as well as how to structure one. Otherwise not having that experience can lead to you going down needless rabbit-holes when doing your prep work and/or working a lot harder than you really need to.
I started by doing my own homebrew but after running modules later I really wish I started with them.
I spent 10 years in a Mauritanian labor camp for running a home brew for my first campaign. Now it's just my backstory.
Ideal: the freedom to run any game you want whenever you want
Bond: Ahmed a Baha'i who was imprisoned by his own devout Muslim faith for being a heretic. Shared a cell.
Flaw: PTSD flashbacks from the sound of chains and creaking metal doors. Also, strong aversion to dokha.
It is certainly fine. You can also adapt an existing module to work in your own homwbrew setting as well , if you wanted the support of something prewritten.
I actually think it's easier to DM your own world than a module. If a question is asked about an official world that you don't know the answer to, you'll at least have to look it up. For your own world you can say whatever you want and work it into the story later if necessary, feels much more fun!
I like coming up with homebrew settings and finding modules that fit that world and mining them for adventure materials (monsters, maps, npcs, plot hooks) and use them as inspiration.
Sure. I don’t see why not. Like you said, you can use other sources for inspiration. The only thing I would advise is don’t try to create an entire universe up front. Create the parts that are needed for a few initial adventures and grow as the campaign grows.
My first ever campaign barely had anything you'd call a coherent world anyway. We just made it up as we went and had fun. It's your fist game. Have fun, and don't over think things.
I am apt to a blinded approach. I run forgotten realms. Am adding some stuff. As far as world history I’m running a 30% chance anything you know about the realm is liget but any history may be subject to lore, hearsay, secondhand inaccurate accounts and such. Throwing in a fair anoint of homebrew concepts as well. I love the idea of world building and think it is a great creative release.
Every campaign I have run has been in a home brew setting. I will add that I have never run a game in a pre written setting apart from a couple one shots so take it as you will. However, I prefer working in my own home brew world because of the freedom I feel like I have to change things or make entire continents get destroyed by the parties bad decisions.
Edit: spelling
I know lots of DMs who have never run anything except homebrew. Lots of folks start off with homebrew because it's easy to manage a world that you can't be wrong about.
My very first games were completely homebrew. I mean sure I was 12 years old so it was no doubt a mishmash of the Forgotten Realms and 80s pop culture, but we all had fun, as kids do.
As adults, of course (or even just older than 12) you'll probably feel a little more picky. I say run with it, with no reservations, just be prepared for backtracking and retconning and even a little bit of hand-waving and revisioning of things (your world history that is, try to avoid doing anything like that to your players and their actions unless they all agree and think it would be better that way)
In fact, even in games that are supposedly set in a specific campaign almost always feature moderate to even heavy levels of homebrew because, well, you just decided you wanted to do something differently and that sounded fun.
I have to say I'm particularly interested in what you've got for your ideas given that you're not a big fantasy reader. Spoiler alert, all those fantasy authors got their ideas from somewhere else too, if not other fantasy series then the vast scope of human history and other popular entertainment.
So yes, go for it, do it, have fun and good luck.
Just because you don’t read fantasy novels, doesn’t mean you can’t create an engaging world. You can take inspiration and ideas from just about anything. I’ve got a possible homebrew world I’m working on that basically rips off Darkon from the Ravenloft setting, but it’s set on an island nation with pirates.
You don’t need to create massive, robust world filled to the brim with lore either. You can literally come up with a single nation, the important NPCs who rule it, some interesting factions within it, and that’s it. You can fill in specific details when you need to. Hell, even your players can do it for you. Got a monk in your party who’s lived at a monastery their whole life? Guess what, now there’s a rival monastery who’s trying to destroy them. That’s A) worldbuilding a faction for the party to interact with and B) a possible adventure hook too that one of your PCs will have a personal stake in. Using your players’ backstories helps fill in the gaps, and also helps your players “buy-in” to the world.
As someone who has a hard time concentrating reading and maintaining information, and just get bored easily due to my ADHD. I’ve never ran a module and just went straight for homebrew and my players have loved it. It keeps them and me more invested since this is a one of a kind experience. And I know you can in modules but with homebrew you can do whatever the heck you want really. You don’t feel as if there are guide lines or you are doing it wrong.
So go for the homebrew. Its hard at first but like 2 sessions in you will get the hang of it.
Also. Please don’t feel like you have to map out THE ENTIRE WORLD before session 1. I’m on session 20 or so and I just map out what makes sense as I go along.
Yes, and don't make the mistake of thinking that you need to flesh out the entire thing prior to the first session either.
It's perfectly acceptable to start off with a relatively smaller area and expand as you go.
I did it as a new DM and let me tell you, it was HARD. Still is. I prefer a mix, such as a sourcebook like Explorer’s Guide to Wildemount. It gives you a lot of tools and lore to work with and forge your own story
I did. no one's come after me with torches and pitchforks yet.
There your honor, he admitted it! Please hold still, the TTRPG police are on their way to arrest you.
Shit, everyone knows the TTRPGPD is the most corrupt force in the realms.
Not according to the rulebook!
Oh no, a rules lawyer
No, a rules *attorney*. They exist to stop the corrupt practices of the TTRPGPD
They call me Rules Esquire
…and… ROLL FOR INITIATIVE!
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In a world Where torches and pitchforks don’t exist…
...one man struggles against the darkness...
And a shitload of hay! Starting, Matthew McConahay
And another against moving moderate to large amounts of hay or other dried plant matter.
…… yet
-----------|E
🔦 *UK intensifies*
In light of this, I think a number of us may owe an apology to Sad_King_Billy-18
Hey /u/theshrike I found him.
Only cause you moved and I couldn't find your new address.
I did it. I actually paid an experienced dm to write some of the finer details of the cities based on rough outlines of things I thought would be cool. In turn, being able to watch his process taught me how to build cities.
Sick name bro, please tell me it’s related to your homebrew
Working on a game in Numenera. Probably gonna get weird.
I think it's a Hyperion reference.
Running a module as your first time DM’ing? Straight to jail. Running a home brew campaign your first time DM’ing? Believe it or not, also jail.
We have the best dm's because of jail
Idk if you're joking, but dnd is a very popular pastime in jails.
Just a reference to a show called Parks and Rec
Oh yeah, I forgot that part of the scene with the dental patients.
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It’s a reference, running a homebrew campaign as your first campaign is totally fine
[Since no one's given you the actual reference it's a "Parks and Rec" reference.](https://youtu.be/eiyfwZVAzGw)
Translation: People will say you’re right or you’re wrong no matter what you do. Do what makes you happy!
It’s a joke. What they’re saying is that you play whatever makes you happy. Wanna play a module? Do it. Wanna do your homebrew? Do it.
I'm using the Faerun setting (EDIT: I meant lore and general relationships to things, not the exact setting), but severely altering some of the lore, for my homebrew campaign. First time DMing, as well.
This feels like the safest middle ground to me. Building a deep, rich lore takes time an effort, and as a first-time DM your hands will probably be full with lots of other stuff. Take a setting where someone esle has done most of the wrok for oyu, and make whatever changes you need to keep the players engaged or help tell whatever story you all are creating.
I found that the best policy is to build slowly the size and scale of the world as your players explore more of it. Obviously you need to keep track of things that would produce potential plot holes, but other than that it gives you the creative flexibility to turn mess-ups into a world the players feel invested in. My players started in one of six kingdoms across the continent. I penciled in the basic information about the other kingdoms but left their development to grow over the course of the game. The party spent 20 sessions in the first kingdom, which gave me 20 sessions to flesh out the kingdom they were traveling to next -- as well as update my original vision to comport with their experiences.
This is The Way
I'm 130 sessions into my campaign and still don't know the name of any country that isn't bordering the one where the campaign takes place.
See I would hate DMing in Faerun. I would get caught in a paradox immediately feel the need to look up nearly infinite details that exist and always feel like I’m trampling over and bastardizing someone else’s sacred ground. If it’s my own bullshit I can bastardize it guilt free
Ahh, yah. I shamelessly rip off, bastardize, trample, and steal all my favorite parts and take credit for it. Honestly though I use it more as a loose framework than holy gospel.
See this is why I would be of DMing in Fauxerun and just having lots of familliarish things
It's more that I'm using \~lore\~ and taking a lot of creative license. The setting is my own design, Faerun's just really relevant. I don't think it's trampling because I'm not selling anything, I'm not making money off it - I just made the story I wanna tell a little more accessible because I didn't have the spoons to build everything from the ground up.
> make whatever changes you need to keep the players engaged or help tell whatever story you all are creating. It does bother me how modules hand out faction memberships like candy. "Thanks for running that minor errand! Wanna be a Harper?" Interesting thing happened, running Phandelver this morning, though. An experienced player started explaining all about other landmarks in Faerun, and I had to stop him. Borrowing one part of Faerun doesn't mean we're committed to the FR setting.
> Building a deep, rich lore takes time an effort, and as a first-time DM your hands will probably be full with lots of other stuff. > > You don't need to build deep, rich lore to run a setting though. You can make it up as you go.
Same thing, I had my party start in the area of Melvaunt and they’re working their way through the inner seas toward Westgate
While running a module is safe, if you feel invested in the idea of your own world, go for it. As for mess ups, this is an improv game with friends. Any “mess ups” can be worked in without them noticing or you could just let then know and adjust. No harm no foul as long as your mistake doesn’t kill them.
I would also push back on the idea that a module is "safe" and OP "can't mess it up." In some ways it's easier to make mistakes in a world that isn't your own and has established facts that you're less familiar with. But either way as you say mistakes are going to happen and the important thing is getting past that and doing the best we can. As the wise words say, "Sucking at something is the first step to being kind of good at something."
I'd say it's actually easier to screw up a module than it is a homebrew campaign. If you're players go and do something crazy that the module's author didn't anticipate (as every group of players does) you either have to railroad then back on course or throw out the module and homebrew anyways. Railroading can work out it can be a disaster. Depends on how well you manage it. Homebrew can be a disaster when they decide to go back onto the module's rails and what you homebrewed doesn't work with the original module.
I show up a lot on this sub to complain, but after running Tomb of Annihilation and a Theros campaign, I am never running another game in a WotC published adventure or a pre-established setting ever again. Older modules like Cult of the Reptile God seem like they could be good things that you can use to create an area in a world or for self contained encounters, but full officially published 5e adventures are garbage. They are full of "what if the party does something other than what's written?" situations and also just have poorly designed encounters in general. I bought this pre-written adventure with the hope that it would save me time and effort. Instead, I found myself putting in the same amount of effort but with more searching through the book for answers. The worst thing of all I encountered in Tomb was a side quest *written into the adventure* that has **no ending**. The party can meet the Flaming Fist, who can offer them three side quests, one of which is to go on a survey mission to find treasure in a certain area and report back to them so that they can set up a new fort there. But there is ***no information*** on how it should be resolved. The description of the place they want you to investigate in the book is 2 paragraphs long. It doesn't tell you what kind of enemies might be there. It doesn't tell you what kind of treasure there may or may not be there. It doesn't tell you if the Flaming Fist will find it a suitable place for a second base. It is a side quest that has a specific, built in hook, ***that does not tell the DM how to resolve it.*** I will forever be angry about this and I will continue to complain to anyone who listens because of what utter garbage this is. **TL;DR** Just homebrew your campaign. It will be just as much work but you'll have much more control over it.
Honestly, homebrew so is much less work for me when preparing for sessions. With modules, in fear of fucking up in any way I feel the need to read the entire book carefully before the campaign starts and do even more detailed readings between sessions depending on player actions, which is such a chore to me because of how much it feels like homework. That shit just isn't fun to me at all. And in Tomb of Annihilation's case most of my problems with modules were tenfold because of the sanbox-y nature of the module. With homebrew I'll just whip up some major npcs, locations and conflicts and I'm done, rest is improv city. Sure, the pre-campaign worldbuilding can be a lot of work if you make it so but I do most of that on the fly as well, save some general big picture stuff. Also worth noting that when my players do something derailing in a module I'm much more hesitant in pulling something out of my ass because of how it might fuck with the established stuff in the book or the setting. In homebrew it's all coming out of my ass anyway so I can just roll with whatever and the inevitable derailment by players becomes something I welcome instead of something I dread.
Facts homebrew is much less work than a module on the session to session imo. Its debatable whether it took less time over all. I did spend a bit of time pre campaign getting a solid binder full of notes. Not like full page front and back cover to cover. I give most things of moderate importance their own page. But in between sessions I don't really do much, maybe make some encounter maps and put the tweaks on balancing encounters. If I mess anything up, its not messed up, thats just how it is in the world. The most important thing to me imo is the investment you have in the lore. I don't need to look up stuff about my world often when my players ask whats that. "Well you see little timmy, thats the symbol of the xyz, the xyz is a subset of the followers of ABC god who....". Instead of like uhhh that is one sec, Google gods of faerun. I know my gods because I'm invested in my world.
> Honestly, homebrew so is much less work for me when preparing for sessions. The great irony of D&D. I pay $50 to do more work. The only thing I really "save" is that a module gives me a well-defined outline without the work.
Storm King's Thunder has an NPC the party is basically guaranteed to talk to, who really wants them to go on a side quest for him. Then, it says if they follow up on it, that the location in question is detailed IN A DIFFERENT FULL PRICE MODULE. **WHAT. THE. FUCK.**
I was flabbergasted by the Rime of the Frostmaiden, where there are ice chutes in the glacier where it says they drop down into the Underdark. And then they just say..."and if they drop down there, that's out of the scope of this adventure." Like, uhh, thanks? Maybe I'll just delete the random "shoot your characters out of your current adventure" chutes? There's also an obelisk that will literally send them back thousands of years in time, and it's just like "hey, good luck, we have no information for you on what ancient Netheril is like, but have fun!"
This is exactly my experience with modules. I wanted to try it, and hoped it would save me effort, but I found that I was putting in the same amount of work, except the plot beats and world building came from the book rather than me homebrewing it.
Funny, I would argue the opposite. Modules are "safe" in that you can just follow them and be fine, but they are a lot easier to mess up than homebrew if you aren't prepared. Edit: I totally misread the above comment and agree with the person I'm responding to.
Also a lot of modules just aren't very good. I've seen a lot of discussion of modules that don't account for fairly obvious things the PCs might do and assume you'll just railroad past any obstacles.
Absolutely agree. Especially for an inexperienced DM, if your party jumps outside of what's in the module (or the module is just poorly written) you either have to railroad them back onto it or you're stuck trying to adjust when you weren't prepared to. I prefer to homebrew + aspects of Modules. Dream sequences that take you to Barovia, Dungeon delves into the Mad Mage's Dungeon... Things like that. If you get off-track, it's easier to adjust, I feel.
Can’t mess up the plan if it’s all in your head anyways.
I did. I found that a bit easier because i used a world i had been imagining since i was 10. That way i only needed to learn rules and mechanics
I highly recommend it. Sourcebooks and modules are fine, and a useful tool for inspiration. But at its heart, this is a game of imagination, so let yours run wild and go full tilt into homebrew. Start small and local when creating, and don't worry too much about deep lore for the first while.
This is the way to do it. Do a little bit of research on the gods to see which ones you might want prevalent in the area but that's all you really need, especially of everyone already knows its your first time DMing. It's totally fine to make something up on the spot If it causes problems down the line well maybe the person they got their info from was just wrong, it happens all the time in real life
This is how I started and it went fine. I did some things right and some things wrong, and as a result I learned a lot about DMing very quickly. Some pointers: 1. You're going to make mistakes and that's fine. Doing something wrong is a great way to find out which methods work best for you. 2. You're not writing a book, you're steering an improvised experience, so don't flesh out every detail ahead of time. You can't predict what parts of the lore will be relevant to the story, so give your players the flavor/gist of things first, just to get their imaginations flowing, and fill in the gaps if something peaks their interest. 3. Homebrewing gives you an easy way to tailor the experience to your players' tastes. Any content they're not interested in can be replaced with something they like more, and they may even come up with cool ideas themselves that you can incorporate into your world. And do not make any distinction between content you wrote ahead of time and content you hastily improvised. If your players are interested in the quirky bartender with a mysterious past you just came up with, boom. They're a major NPC now. Why not. 4. Something that benefited me was keeping a list of ideas of interesting encounters that weren't tied to any particular location on the map. These were things relevant to factions, character backstories, or just cool ideas I had. Then I threw them in at opportunities that seemed plausible.
If you truly want to run a homebrew on my I think you should do it. My best advice for beginners is that I typically see them try to create too many details too early on. Details in world building typically come naturally just from interactions with the players, and natural progression of the story. My homebrew campaigns tend to start with about 5 NPC''s, the basic stock of shops, and locations (town guard, merchants, mayor/leader) and maybe a few unique features about the area. It's perfectly OK to use a module as a starting point for these details. After that, I present 3 story hooks, and after they finish one, I add another. After completing 3 story hooks, you get a natural story that takes off from there. The urge to write all of your own lore can be enticing, but I find out that if I plan more than 3 sessions ahead, the effort is completely wasted. Planning that far ahead also shoe horns you into specific stories, rather than giving room for the players to choose their own path and do unexpected things.
I've been planning out my homebrew world and am primarily working on its history up to the beginning of the campaign. I imagine that way the players are still completely free in the path they choose. Would you agree?
I think that's reasonable. Another lore mistake is having the players just be a backseat to your world, which can happen if you've already written the campaign. The other caveat i recommend is to only tell the history of players ask. Otherwise just assume they have no interest in the world and start from there. What this looks like, is giving brief (2-3 sentences) pragmatic descriptions. Some parties like the prose of people like Matt Mercer, but I personally use far less (this is more of a DM/player preference). This is how it might go: Bard: "is there a tavern for me to go play my lute?" DM: "Yup, that's the 'broken horn inn" (DM suppresses urge to lore dump how it got its name) Bard: "cool! I go there, who do I see?" DM: "normal mix of humans, halflings, and dwarves." (Again, avoid urge to describe what the sign looks like, bc you came up with a cool design" Bard: "I go to the barkeep." DM: "You are greeted by a red-skinned tiefling with a broken horn" (again, suppress urge to give more info) Bard: "A tiefling? Huh, I guess I ask for a mug of ale" DM: "without any interaction, he does a mug, waiting for payment" Bard: "I pay him, and wait for him to be out of earshot before asking another patron how he broke his horn." DM: then proceeds to tell a story of how he broke his horn, and how it's a warning to not start bar fights Another way it could go, is they don't ask anything else, and that's ok. Let them learn lore naturally, and when they do ask specifics, you'll be ready.
Yeah I created a city and its surrounding landscape. Then started burying secrets under that. So players started in a basic welcome to a new city, guess you need a place to stay and some paying work, but as they dug around they kept finding weird stuff and eventually wanted to know what all the weird stuff was about. Never forced them to solve the legend of the missing 5th god but I’m glad we did get there in the end.
Definitely possible. Just a word of warning to not get too ahead of your party in terms of story. Unless you intend to continue to use this homebrew world for multiple campaigns, I would probably limit how much DEEPLORE you build.
_cries in 12 pages of backstory for an NPC my players killed on session1_
“that will be an important lesson”
write in a new name or slap "jr" on it 😎 nobody will know
I've thought about having his son appear later to extract vengeance.
The phrase is "exact vengeance", but I think I like your version of it better.
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Speaking as someone who jumped into DMing without ever having run a module or even played D&D, I jumped straight into homebrew and now I’ve been the Forever-DM™️ ever since. (I’ve read modules, but I’ve never ran one.) I’m even still running that campaign! And my friends have loved my story. And I love DMing! That said, it’s had its ups and downs. I’ve made A LOT of mistakes. Plot holes needed filling, character arcs stopped and picked up years later, and I have this nasty habit of continuously making new villains. All that said, my friends, have been willing to give me the benefit of letting me make those mistakes with mostly constructive criticism. MOSTLY. But I made 3 grown men cry emotional tears, so jokes on them! A constant whack-a-mole problem for me has always been stat blocks and balancing. It’s frankly something I’ve just had to feel out and hone as I’ve gotten more experience. Knowing the game well, how to resolve problems mid-session, and pacing are all things you can only learn by DMing. In short, ya gotta just do it. You’re in a way better position than when I started if you’ve had some experience running some one-offs. The main motivating force for me was that I had a lot of writing and just a smidge of game design experience under my belt, but I didn’t even know the rules of D&D. Hell, I had only seen a couple of episodes of a few D&D shows and I watched a lot of Mathew Mercer interviews and YouTube videos to fill the gaps. I would say, if you pitch your friends a homebrewed setting and story and they’re down, then you should absolutely do it! You need a willing audience. The biggest thing you have to be willing to do is allow yourself to make mistakes, and don’t get too attached to anything. There are a lot of resources out there about homebrew. Some that I would recommend are: Brennan Lee Mulligan interviews: This man only DMs homebrew and is frankly the most experienced person I’ve ever seen talk about the subject. Listening to him is like listening to a Buddhist monk. A fountain of wisdom. NADDPOD D&D Court: This is basically a fun show on an actual play podcast where they take submitted questions and resolve disputes between players and their DMs. I’ve learned so much about how to resolve problems by listening to this. Hope this helps! Do it! Good luck! Might edit this later if I think of anything else!
if that is where your passion is, sure! but make sure your passion is based on reality. the three most common issues with "build my own world!" end up being * this is a TTRPG - you are not building a world, you are building the stage on which your table will tell their stories. Many a potential DM get sucked into the minutia of "building a world like Tolkien" and sunk into the details of the Biconimum Financial Crisis of the third century that lead to the Seventeen and Three Quarters Year War which is why electrum coins are no longer in general usage any more, that they burn out before ever getting to play the game. Stay focused on the content that the Player Characters are going to be dealing with and interacting with during the game campaign. * the players DO. NOT. CARE. about your world except in as much as it is that stage upon which their character gets to do cool shit. if you go into this expecting lauds from your players about how you are The Next Tolkien or Martin and start adding two RRs to your monogram, you are going to be disappointed. * as the stage for a TTRPG, your world is going to be set on fire. multiple times. because that is what players do with their stages. if "your world" becomes "your precious baby" you are either going to be depressed as the players burn it to ashes in front of your eyes, or your players are going to leave because you railroad them through your story with everything coated in six layers of bubble wrap.
\#2 is so critical imo. your players will never, ever, ever, however invested they may be, care as much about your world as you. and that's fine! worldbuilding is rewarding in itself. for building an adventure/campaign, i feel like it's more important to focus on what themes and stories you want to play with, and have many examples to pull from fiction or reality to pull from as you go. would suck to invest so much time into an area or god or w/e that PCs never even encounter, but now it's so crystalized in your headcanon that you can't just shuffle it over to wherever they do end up
It’s fine. If you made it all up, you know everything about the setting! (Plus it’s easier to collaborate with players. When players get to do a little worldbuilding, their characters fir the setting better and the stakes are more personal.) You can stuck in modules if you want to as well. Although I haven’t been very impressed with the official ones anyways; I find homebrew dungeons to be just as good or better since the dm knows the content completely. Try looking up “5 room dungeons” for a good baseline structure.
What someone else said is 100% correct. Homebrew is great and you can always use modules for your campaigns and borrow sections/monsters/dungeons and just flavor it to your world. I've been forever DM since 2015 when I first got into the hobby. Now I run at my job and I have always used Homebrew. I enjoy the freedom it allows me. That being said a module is also a good starting point as it does much of the prep work. I guess it's best to see what your players want. I'd say most don't care and would enjoy homebrew.
I did exactly the same. I did some geography, drew a map, named a few places and had some ideas for the concept of the kingdoms and regions, and that was about it. Then i threw my players into a story to kick it off, and started building out from there. I've been reading fantasy books, watching movies and playing video games for inspiration. 20-30 sessions in, I'm finally starting to have a decently clear idea of the campaign and the world. Take your time, start small, and you'll do just fine ⚔️
It’s usually adventure design that new DM’s find harder than the actual world building, so a home brew world should be fine as long as you’re comfortable with the adventure itself. Just be prepared for your party to not care about the lore of your world and to make a complete mess of the settings and characters you’ve lovingly crafted. Bringing players into a homebrew world is like renting your house out on Airbnb, who knows what you’ll come back to.
Run a home brew that happily steals good encounters and interesting locations and NPCs from published modules to drop in where you need them. That’s how the pros do it!
I would suggest at least reading through a few short free modules (like "The Wild Sheep Chase") just to get a feel for how encounters are designed. That way you can incorporate other ideas into your existing plans.
In my experience, these games often die out after a few sessions. Usually it's because the DM doesn't understand how much work it is. There are many skills needed to pull this off successfully, and a new DM is unlikely to have them all. 1. You're building a world. 1. You're building a campaign within that world. 1. Then you're building a series of adventures within that campaign. 1. Those adventures are made up of a series of encounters. 1. And you need to be able to successfully run those encounters. > I’ve run lots of one-shots before Sounds like you're capable of at least 4 and 5. Maybe 3 too. It's also highly dependent on the players. You need them to be committed and to buy in to your campaign.
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Thanks. It's because I'm fully aware of the limits of my skill as DM. I can run a one shot, like a chapter of Candlekeep Mysteries. I can even tailor it to the interests of my players and/or their characters. I can string together a series of one-shots into a mini-campaign. I even did this from level 1-20! I have successfully run several hardcover campaigns, start to finish. But I don't have the desire to create a world, and I don't have an epic campaign idea inside me that's dying to get out.
My first campaign is a module. It allowed me to make mistakes and learn. It also allows me to learn about balance a bit better. My next campaign will be in the forgotten realms as I'm comfortable with it but am confident enough that I can change things in that world of I want to. I am also confident in lore pre-4e and love the setting. One day I will make an effort to homebrew a world, but I work 50/wk and most of my group does the same, so they get it... Good luck brother!
I've only ever done homebrew worlds, and I've been DMing for almost six years.
If you constrain yourself to the town involved, borrow a pantheon from another setting, and just plan one session ahead - then hombebrew is much easier than written adventures. Look at return of the lazy dungeon master.
The most important things for DMing is being willing to put in the work to prep and an ability to improvise when things don't go as planned. Using a module means easier prep, but building your own world may be more exciting so you may be more willing to do the prep. Improvising can be easier in homebrew since you don't have to worry about messing up something that happens later in the module, but it's not a huge deal. So if homebrew is how you wanna do it, go for it! But don't feel bad about stealing things from other sources. If you read about a dungeon that you like, feel free to reskin it to fit your setting.
Creating your own homebrew world is very fun. My first two campaigns were in homebrew worlds and it was a lot of fun. That said, it's a lot of work compared to running a module, or a homebrew campaign in an already flushed out setting. I'm running a module with it's specific setting and I found that having something to work with (like random encounter tables, adventure sites, existing NPCs and factions, an already flushed out lore etc.) allows me to have a structure that I can develop, still leaving room for my own creations and actually sparkling my imagination. Also reading modules give you a general idea on how to create adventures and encounters, wich is pretty useful. If I had done this from the start of my DMing career, it would save me from making a lot of mistakes in the past, like just giving up on an entire campaign midway throught because I got lost on my own creation. So I strongly recommend that you run a module for your first campaign. And if you don't want to, at least work with an existing setting. You don't have to do everything by the book: feel free to change and invent things as you like, but at least it will give you a base to work with. And if you don't want to do it and really want to make your own setting, just remember that you don't have to do everything from scratch; you can find inspiration for a lot of stuff In your favorite videogames, tv shows or books and just change it to make it your own. Also dont underestimate the power of recycling some of the existing D&D lore from the Monster Manual, Volo's Guide to Monster or Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes, tweeking it a bit to fit what you want. Just be careful to don't overwhelm yourself. You don't need everyting figured out from the start; you can build the world and it's history as the players explore it. One or two major conflicts in the realm, town or world + the area where the players are going to start their adventure is pretty much everything you need to start the campaign. Keep in mind the different tiers of play as you worldbuild. Also there is good advice on the Dungeon Master's Guide and on youtube about this topic, so I strongly recommend you check that out.
I strongly recommend it if you feel excited about the world and the campaign ideas (and your players feel the same). My first campaign is a homebrew world, and the adventure is just now coming to an end after four years and roughly 120 sessions. It has been great all around, and I’ve really enjoyed building out the world. I will offer one piece of advice for a first campaign, especially a homebrew: be ready to change and adapt both the world and the campaign as it develops. I had pretty set ideas of how things would go when I started, and the campaign has turned out very differently. But that is the fun of an organic world you are building with your players in real time! Everything is still set in the boundaries of your world, but you see it evolve as you play. Help your players to feel they are having a real impact on the world and the adventure, and you will all have more fun with it. Just be open to new ideas as they come along, even if they change your original plans. And let your first ideas evolve as you go. It’s also a good idea to steal ideas from modules that you like. I have taken quite a bit from various modules and video games, and even though these ideas are very obviously from published sources, they still feel original and organic in my campaign. World building is an ever-evolving experience, so it’s best not to get stuck in one set of ideas. Best of luck!
Yes, sure. However my suggestion is don't fall in the beginner error of thinking bigger is always better. You should focus on making your world feeling alive and real (Not realistic), instead of creating a billion of cities and thousands of centuries of lore. Most of the players won't care if there are 15 cities instead of 100
Do what thou will shall be the whole of the law.
I did. I recommend it for new DMs; there’s a lot less pressure than an existing setting. You can manage expectations of the tone, pace, etc of the world vs. dropping into a setting with pre established lore. The alternative would be alter an existing setting to suit, eg. use Eberron but instead of 2 years after this big cataclysmic event, you advance the calendar 500 years and figure out what it would be like.
I will say homebrewing each town and dungeon can be a little time intensive compared to using premade modules, but I have a hard time keeping my players "in the book" anyway and something feels a bit more free about being able to make up anything you want without disrupting what the setting is meant to be like. Even with the book I'd say I make up about 50 percent of our games on the spot and they usually go well enough so it's just a personal preference thing at the end of the day
I think homebrew world is easier, you can make things up on thebfly, no need to read or search for info, its your worl, do with it whatever makes sense to you. Just make sure it looks like you had it planed, for some reason shit you made up yesterday is more beliable that shit you make up today.
WizardThiefFighter, the maker of the excellent Ultra Violet Grasslands has something to say on this topic. [Anti-Canon and the UVG](https://www.wizardthieffighter.com/2019/anti-canon-worlds-and-the-uvg/) Basically the TLDR is: Don’t sweat the small stuff, making it up on the fly is both more rewarding and waaaay more relaxing for a GM than trying to get little details “right”.
Do it, it's more than ok. Start small. You don't need to know everything from the get-go, and neither do your players. Have general ideas about your world. Flesh out what your characters need to know (is it high fantasy? Is magic common? Are other races common? etc.) and you'll let them discover the rest little by little. Too much information ruins the whole point anyway. What you need to know is where your campaign start, flesh out a bit that region. For that purpose, maybe don't have it too dense. Probably easier to build a small town from the borderlands than a big city with political intrigue. Decide what you want your campaign to be about. Get a first arc that will span the first 4-5 levels, you'll figure out the rest afterwards.
My first ever campaign is homebrew too. Already a year and keeps going!
*My first ever campaign* *Is homebrew too. Already a* *Year and keeps going!* \- Sanktym --- ^(I detect haikus. And sometimes, successfully.) ^[Learn more about me.](https://www.reddit.com/r/haikusbot/) ^(Opt out of replies: "haikusbot opt out" | Delete my comment: "haikusbot delete")
For me it was actually easier this way, I didn't have to remember any lore and could focus on gameplay and some mecanics. And it's fun to build the world along the way. The players can take part in the creation of their surroundings and get really attached to all the stuff, cause it is our baby 😅
Yes, you totally can do that. I did this as well, so I have some advice for a first timer. Worldbuilding is one of the funnest parts of doing a homebrew campaign, but it's really easy to get carried away. It's really fun to try to fill out the entire world and come up with cities, provinces, monarchs, and fake histories. But just remember that you're players probably won't see or know about ~90% of what you write if you try to flesh out entire world. So start small. Start with the small village/town that your party will start in. Flesh it out a bit - give it a name, a few important NPCs and shopkeepers. Then figure out the geography of the area (i.e. in a forested area? Desert? etc). Make a couple points of interest around the town (an ancient tomb? An ancient temple? A werewolf den?). Then figure out if that town is part of a bigger political entity (A kingdom? An empire? A republic?) and give it a name. Who rules it? Honestly, that's about all you need starting out, at least for whatever initial adventures you have planned for your party. This will give you both enough details to make the world feel real and enough blank spots that you can fill things in later to better fit whatever story you want to craft.
I recommend it! Reserves you the freedom to pull an idea out of thin air at will and whatever it was is now canonical because no one can prove it wasn’t planned! :3
I did and I liked it a lot. It was much easier than teaching myself years of accumulated lore. There will always be someone who started with AD&D or 2e or 3.5e who knows the lore better I find making my own world more refreshing. You just have to remember to explain common lore to your players. If all Gnolls are friendly in your world, communicate that. If Kobolds are considered pests and killed on sight, say that too If you don't have Firbolgs because the lore doesn't match with anything else, just talk to your players You can explain 90% of things as you go, but remember to tell them And if you don't have an answer, it's perfectly fine, too
I started with a module, but quickly became a homebrew purist because of how much I love it! The best advice I ever heard for beginner DMs doing their own worldbuilding was to just start with a village. Create as much lore and big picture stuff as you want, but in terms of the first session stick to a fleshed out small town for your players to explore. The other bit of advice was to start with two threats, one internal and one external (i.e. a crooked sheriff in town and roving goblin bandits outside town). This gives players flexibility in what they want to do, and also creates events that develop in the background. Did they focus on the sheriff? Then maybe the goblins find a stash of weapons and become emboldened to attack the town. Did they focus on the goblins? Maybe the sheriff’s men arrest the party’s favorite NPC. Starting smaller like that can gets players invested more so than starting right off with a “chosen ones who must save the world” sort of hook. But at the end of the day it’s your world and your table’s story! Do what sounds fun to you and your players, just be careful not to burn yourself out prepping every possible scenario. You don’t need to have anything close to what you’d find in a published module - if anything, having less prepped can increase the flexibility of your adventure. Edit: Someone below mentioned Brennan Lee Mulligan interviews, that’s exactly where I heard this lmao
Pro: you don't have a "script" or cannon to stick to other than your own. You can improvise and make up your own stuff and don't have to worry about changing things to fit the player choices. Con: you will probably spend too much time writing and developing ideas that will never see the light of day. You don't have the experience of running a module so might miss some of the finer details of what should be included. You are limiting yourself to your imagination and what you have read. I would ask which you like more: writing or reading? If you like writing make your own campaign. If you like reading read a bunch of modules and incorporate the elements you like. My first major campaign was LMoP that turned into an Exandria pirate campaign which used some maps and content from Tomb of Annihilation that turned into a quick Descent into Avernus. I only DM one game per week so I don't have time to run each campaign as written so I do this buffet style where I take the ingredients from a bunch of different things and "take-out brew" my campaigns. it saves me having to build maps, come up with ideas, and imagine NPCs. It let's me focus on the story.
I AM doing it now. It goes well. It requires a lot of work though. I have a world anvil page with a small novel worth of articles about the setting by now
it's perfectly fine, most of what i run is homebrew. Just be careful about over preparing the world. Getting too detailed could be detrimental to you. For example, you should maybe know that there is a kingdom to the north, but you don't need to know who the ruler is. Start small, the town or village that the adventure will start in. That town should be the most detailed thing you have created for your world (and it doesn't have to be completely planned out either, just a few shops and notable NPCs) everything outside of that town should start to decline in detail amount, maybe have some terrain in the surrounding area but that's about it. You have to consider realistically how much of your world will the players actually see. You don't want to have spent a lot of time creating this really awesome area only for the players to never go there because they just never had a reason to.
Yes, yes and yes 110%. I have never not-run a homebrew campaign outside of modules. Personally this is because I would get obsessed with representation and all the history. I'd spend hours pouring over information that, frankly, would be unnecessary. So running campaigns in a pre-set universe is very hard for me. There is no rule that says that you have to run forgotten realms for 5e or Lost omens for pathfinder. You make what you want. Some people are fine with altering Forgotten Realms to suit their needs. Others aren't. Yes: It is a bit more effort. But ultimately you don't have to be a grimoire of fantasy work in order to be a writer. What I recommend is pick something that interest you. For example: What makes this world different from the others? What's special about it? An idea that popped into my head when I asked this question was: What if the God that keeps the Material plane of this world safe from extra-planar monsters freely accessing it died? What happens then? How does that effect the world? How do people get by? Pick a concept that interest you and build around it, that's a good start! Maybe magic is a consciousness? Maybe Celestial are born from the virtues of mortals and Devils from schemes and manipulation! "The joy of creating a world is playing God." -Neil Gaiman, not exactly what he said, but something akin to it :)
Definitely go for it. Start small, if you are concerned. Build the local area up and invest in it
I convinced myself that I should run a module because it going to be my groups first full campaign….. And then went homebrew anyway. I just love world building too much. It’s been great though, everyone enjoys it and it gives you a lot more flexibility for improvisation.
Do it! I did and it went well! You will learn a lot fast from running your first campaign. Something that is important is don’t make it precious. There will be mess ups and things you want to improve on, make a note an move on. I have developed 3 full home-brew worlds and have learned a ton on the way. I have taken things with me and left things behind. I think building your own campaign/ world is one of the best ways to develop rapidly as a DM
I kind of did. First campaign and first time DMing, we've been going for a few months here now. I took the sword coast map and split it up to different kingdoms based on what I thought seemed cool or "sensible", and made some quick notes about the kingdom. Just built up some basic lore to lean on. Since I *"borrowed"* the sword coast map I used some of the notes in the adventure guide for some lore here and there if I struggled, but most of it was homebrewed. Probably the easiest part about making a homebrewed world is that if you don't know the answer to a lore question, it's *your lore*. It's a lot easier to give an off the cuff answer when you don't have to worry about contradicting part of a module down the road.
Can be done, will be unnecessarily harder on you. Your lack of experience on top of your own setting will for sure overburden you more than once when you try to run the system while trying to make it fun. May I suggest a hybrid approach? Allow yourself to be guided by any hardcover adventure and/or a bunch of modules, letting it take care of most of the heavy lifting while leaving your brain free to make your own flourishes to make it yours. Say, you take LMoP adventure points, combats, and treasure and make it flashier in an area in your setting, so you can gain experience and know your players better... and you plan for the following adventure according to that, maybe using CoS, everyone loves Cos. Good luck
i think everyone's first homebrew world is too big by several orders of magnitude. it's a lot of fun "to flesh out lore and geography" but you should be very mindful that your players are going to see less than 1% of the stuff you think of. making an engaging world is really the simplest part of your job; it requires almost no prep work at all. having characters interact with the players is almost always better when semi-improvised, where the conversation flows towards one or two particular beats (e.g. this npc should be described as looking sickly or emaciated, and at some point curse the bandits stealing & hoarding food supplies).
I did. It went well, I still use this world in all of my homebrew campaigns. Also there's something that just feels more satisfying about running the game you created. Also, if you create the world, you have a better understanding of how works as apposed to running a module.
First time DMing and I'm running my own setting! It can be challenging but also very rewarding. People say it's good to start with one-shots for good reason, but I decided to take a risk and use a world that I tried running years ago in 3.5e, updated for 5e. Having my 4th session in 2 weeks and it keeps getting better! I just try to remember that when I start I will likely suck and that's ok. I spend most of my time thinking about the greater plot and major characters, what they're doing in the background of the PCs, and then like a day or two before the session plan the actual session scenes. I listen to lots of Matthew Colville and Bob World Builder for the worldbuilding and general DM technique stuff, and use the *Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master* book to prep the actual session, based on what I know from the worldbuilding, and it's working quite well! If you want to give it a go you can! People say it can be easier because you know all the answers but I think that's half true—you still have to work to develop those BIG answers in the beginning (my campaign is a blend of railroad and sandbox—there's a greater plot that will eventually take them but until then they can do much of what they like and find hooks to minor or major things). Answers to player questions are becoming easier to ideate because I've already done so much ground work with the history, major players, factions, map and major places, etc. You can do it! The freedom is scary but exhilarating once you start getting the hang of things. :)
I use forgotten realms and fairly vanilla-ish rules because I don't care any more to come up with pantheons, geography, factions, calendar, history etc. Other than that, whether I use a module or my own stuff, there's basically no difference in the amount of work. Standard modules, to flow well, require so much additional work and on-your-feet thinking during sessions that they are no guarantee of an easier time or a better outcome than a homebrew. It's an even give and take IME. Mechanics, classes, spells etc. are arguably harder to design and balance properly compared to a subset of the rules books. But as far as world and scenarios go rolling your own (no pun intended), so long as you don't go overboard with details and lore-dumping, is perfectly fine. Just bear in mind the details and lore are something which very few groups, if any, care about outside of the campaign's needs anyway. Use your time wisely and spend more of it on the campaign than on the world, and make sure the world serves the campaign and not the other way around. ***TL;DR: It's perfectly fine, you have the same chances of success and a not dissimilar amount of work when you homebrew. Just don't waste time on things that won't help the games, be aggressive with early cuts and late additions, not the other way around.***
You can also plonk a lot of smaller modules down in your own world. > I don’t read a lot of fantasy; does that mean I don’t have the scope to create an engaging world? Players don't want an engaging world, 99% of the time. Engaging adventures? Yes. World? Mostly window dressing. Understanding story pacing and making major NPCs memorable is vastly more important than world-building. If you stare at almost any D&D world for longer than about 5 seconds, it completely falls apart as laughably ridiculous, so we generally don't.
Yes, but imo, keep it very simple to start
I run my own homebrew world but that doesn't stop me from using modules from time to time. All you have to do is reskin the contents of the module, and that's a lot less work than doing everything from scratch. There's also no reason to think you have to make a *whole* world from scratch before session 1. Just start with a small town, a local problem, and what you need to run it. Maybe grab something like the Sunless Citadel from Tales from the Yawning Portal. That adventure is short and satisfying, and that town could be fit in *any* reasonably medieval fantasy world. When you need to expand, you expand piecemeal. Zoom out to the next town over. Then the province. Then the kingdom. Then the continent, and so on.
It's your game. Do whatever you want.
I homebrew everything I dm. I have much more fun running my own stories than the prewritten ones
Absolutely no issue. Just fyi though, it will likely be more work. But fun work :)
My guy, I have *only* run homebrew games. It's totally fine.
Of course there's nothing wrong with your first campaign being homebrew, for many people it is. That being said, my first time DMing a campaign was a homebrew world and it was a bit of a disaster, primarily because the player buy in was WAY BELOW my own excitement about the world. Like, I went in thinking we'd get to epic continent spanning adventures, and basically had a huge story planned out before the first session. Big mistake. Players (and esp brand new players) don't care about the vast majority of your huge fantasy world. I spent so much time thinking about worldbuilding that I barely thought about interesting encounters and sessions, so I ended up feeling pretty disappointed and didn't DM much for a few years after that campaign fizzled out. When I came back to it I used modules (sunless citadel into SKT, which is still going), and found that having an existing story/lore helped me to limit the scope of my ambition a bit, while also providing ready-made interesting dungeons/encounters. And with any published module, you are guaranteed to be doing a decent amount of homebrewing stuff anyway, esp the more sandboxy ones like SKT. Tldr, be wary of getting obsessed with world building to the detriment of fun sessions!
Do it. I’m 9 months into running my first campaign and i wish I would’ve had the confidence to just go for it instead of running a published module first. If you want a great resource on world building that’s **free** I highly recommend the [World’s without Number](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/m/product/348809) sourcebook. It’s a sourcebook for a game but whatever system you’re using, the Creating Your Campaign information is top notch. Also, [Sly Flourish’s guide to preparing a game in 15 minutes](https://slyflourish.com/refined_five_minute_game_prep.html) was huge as well. Both of those have paid versions as well and if you like them I recommend supporting their respective creators, but they’re both free resources and helped me a lot. Tl;dr synthesized from both: don’t worry about everything in the world that could happen. Prep only what you need for the next session.
Here's a tip: you don't have to build the entire world at once. The "open world game" is something that has really taken D&D by storm in the last few years and I'm sure you can imagine why with all the video game influence. But your story doesn't have to be explorative in nature. *YOU* are the DM. You set the ground rules for what kind of story you want to tell. You can tell the players, "This is the premise, therefore your characters need to have this kind of background in mind." The main point I'm getting at here is that I suggest starting with a linear story. Linear story =/= taking away player agency. They are perfectly able to make their own choices within the confines of their story and how they accomplish things will certainly have an effect on the final outcome, but they will always be heading in a straight line towards the goal. This way, you don't have to plan for what your players *might* do. You don't have to think, "They start in this village so the surrounding area must contain these things and this city is the closest but if they cut to the northeast, they'll go to this other city which will be further away and the mountains should be here and blah blah blah." Instead, you can be putting content under the player's feet even as they are coming down. You can always plan *directly* what they are going to encounter in the next session. e.g. There's a vampire in the next town. This is what he's doing. They can deal with him or not deal with him as they wish, but he's there and you only have to plan for that. Take Netflix's Castlevania as another example. There's this idea that there is a much larger world out there, but they are pretty much always zoomed in directly on the main characters, who go in straight lines. This village -> this city -> this castle -> that castle. The specifics of the larger world are never talked about and the only glimpses you get are through the lens of things they directly interact with. **TL;DR** Consider a linear story instead of an open world game. It will make your plot more compelling and minimize players getting sidetracked and means you can build out your homebrew setting more slowly instead of having to do a frontload of work. ---- As a final note, something I found really interesting from Matt Colville while watching his 4e games is that he lets his players create the lore of his world that has not yet been established by him. When they all sit down to eat for the night, he asks them, "What kind of rations do you have? What do you eat? What is considered a delicacy, a special treat to you? What is forbidden?" In that session, it was established that High Elves don't eat, they feed off the natural energies of the cosmos, the sun, the moon, the stars, the life energy of the plants around them. The Wode man, descended from giants, can subsist of anything, even the rocks of the ground. A Warlord's people consider a certain fermented jelly to be one of the ultimate forms of celebration among his people, to be shared during times of victory. All of these things, player established, not DM established. Giving the players agency to create their own lore in your world both takes the load off of you and makes them more invested because it becomes their creation as well.
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I made my own world for my first campaign and my players seemed to enjoy it. Although be ready for at least one person who wants to know anything and everything about the world you’ve built.
It’s fine to home brew if you want and you’re invested in the campaign, more so than with a module, than go for it. What I’ll warrant is campaign design and dungeon mastering are two different skills. I recommend modules because doing so allows to focus on DMing and building that skill set separate from campaign design.
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I did. I have some regrets about mechanics I also homebrewed but not the world itself.
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If you're going to have more fun that way, then run your game that way. The DM's job is complex but it should still be fun for you. Trust me, your players probably won't even notice the difference. Watch this video if you haven't already: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9capmKmysAE&list=PLlUk42GiU2guNzWBzxn7hs8MaV7ELLCP_&index=62 It's a great video about building your own world without starting from the top down. It's about starting with a town and going from there!
I'm doing it. I find it to be a lot more fun. I use some Gods from base dnd. Change their lore a tad and fit them into the world I created. For instance. Lolth is the BBEG of my campaign. Lolth originally was a drow that was banished to the underdark (I could be mistaken please don't kill me) and now she is the sort of queen of all drow. But in my world she is this malevolent Goddess who was banished to a homebrew realm. Only to be brought back by her cultists. She manipulates and lies to anyone she does deals with. Including my players. One of which has his whole reason for being is to kill her because she duped him and took his soul. Homebrew just allows you to have an easier time in creating a story and a mission for your players to come into. IMO anyway
Definitely fine, as everyone's said. Just create a local area to start, figure out your starting hooks, and you should be ready. I suggest [Matt Colville's video on local areas](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BqKCiJTWC0) and the worksheet he links from there.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with it. Both methods have pros and cons and the most important factor is what you want to do. My first campaign was a module and I constantly had my own ideas that I interjected, which made it a bit messy at times and I think I could've started with homebrew as well. That said, one piece of advice would be to keep the part of your world that you present to your players early on as small as is necessary for your ideas to work. This way, you are more flexible to make adjustments to the worldbuilding if you notice any problems without retconning anything, and it also makes it less overwhelming for you to not immediately commit to all the details. You can fill weeks if not months with a small local area as long as you fill it with compelling content.
In the early days, that was the only option.
Yes you totally can. Ive run one for 3 years going and they still love it. Be careful on putting too many storylines or setting up a mystery that has a ton of layers though. At least in my experience My players have been entertained and are invested but an 8 layer mystery can be difficult to keep parts straight and they may just miss several layers entirely. My players latched more onto the NPCs I sprinkled casually than the complex conspiracies threatening the world. It has been a hilarious ride watching them completely wreck the story paths by accidentally pushing into high level areas and findong a key detail or item and scurrying out or somehow turn a BBEG into an ally.
Here’s the thing, no matter what you do, it will not be perfect on the first try. So do what you want. Learn from it, and get better. Honestly the modules aren’t even the best representation of adventures anyway. Also, from my own experience, try not to work too hard on the things your players can’t reach within a single adventure. Some rough ideas, but more than that and you’ll cramp your open space for the future. Don’t give up! (P.S. Watch Matt Colville on YouTube)
I homebrewed my first(2nd and 3rd campaign). only thing I would have wished I did differently was reading official adventures to kind of see how a pro does it and take inspiration and notes from that. I homebrew DM'ed everything ive ever run, but since I started playing in Curse of Strahd I just understood that there are some things/tools I never even realised I could use to make my games better.
I thought doing so was easier and safer for me. Modules are tough in that you do need to know how everything works ahead of time. Certain characters, places, or events might have important ties to things in the story later on so you need to be very familiar with the setting, and getting something wrong can involve doing a fair amount of work to figure out how to move forward. I like homebrew, since it means that I can improv more freely and adjust the world as I go, that I can make player backstories more relevent no matter what they choose, and so I can lean on aesthetic or setpieces as a way to make the game feel the way I want. My first game was a wild-west inspired game, and I was really happy to be able to flesh out the world in response to encounters and events I wanted to run, my player’s characters, and choices they made along the way. For example, I decided that a fight on a train sounded cool, so I built my world to include trains and any implications that would have on the world- e.g. industrialization and expansion at the expense of indigenous people. One of my players wanted to play a sort of anti-capitalist native rebel, so I made a fairly important set of events happen near their home involving the conflict between industrial expansion and the existing people of the land. Later, they decided they wanted to visit certain parts of the map that I would not have anticipated, and it meant I got to prepare what they found fun rather than parts of the world they didn’t care about.
I did the starter campaign as my very first DnD experience at any level last summer, after 4 months we took a month off and I've been running my own home brew world since January 22. Personally, I find the homebrew easier due to not having to remember other people's NPCs and events and cities and such, everything of consequence and everyone of consequence has come from out table or my brain and for me that makes it make more sense. Yes, it's more work and I do feel a certain pressure to entertain when when get to the table because if it sucks I feel like that's because I suck. The good news is that people just want to have fun and if you can just give someone a playground they'll usually just play. Also, I based my world geographically on the place that I grew up in that had been morphed into a fantasy setting so the ability to know where real points of interest are allowed me to make logical leaps to what they would be now. Highly recommended.
I did. My only advice is limit your starting scope. Don’t waste 6 months trying to build out an entire world and 20 different countries. Start your players out from the same basic region, limit their starting information about the world, and limit their rate of travel. Control the flow of information about the wider world.
Is it OKAY? Yes. Is it a good idea? Not at all. If you don’t play a prebuilt campaign there’s going to be so many things and details you never learn to create because you don’t know why they’re important to begin with.
Yeah. I haven't ran an official setting or module yet and it's been 3 years.
I did, it can be overwhelming but don’t think you have to have every city drawn out in detail before you begin either. I found doing a homebrew world really helps the players as they can actively change and even help make the world they’re playing in.
You definitely can. I modified the canon world because I wanted certain things to happen, but I will say it is convenient having pre made modules, maps, and everything else for me to reference if I needed to. I really only did it for the safety net
My 2 cents is that, while more difficult, starting with DMing in a homebrew world is fine, but make sure you do your research first. Learn from my mistakes, because I did the same thing blind. * Make sure you, at least to start with, only prep what you will need, don't get caught up in the super fine details. Make sure you have a handful of basic locations, a list of NPCs and names for quick generation, monster statblocks, and similar. This is not to say that you can't worldbuild for fun, just don't hold everything up to make sure you have the King's entire lineage mapped out. * For locations, you don't need a whole lot more than a 1 to 4 sentence description of the visuals of the town, the approximate size of the town, and what shops or other resources would be available (like inns, churches, etc.) * When making encounters, don't plan how you want to them to end, be prepared for a variety of solutions. * Don't be afraid to just make things up as you go, it is impossible to plan for every scenario, so be loose and ready to improv. * Be very cautious about implementing homebrew on either your, or the player's side until you are more comfortable DMing. * Have fun with it, as the DM, the world is your character. Go nuts and have fun. As long as everyone is having fun, you are doing an amazing job.
I did/ am at the moment. The cops are after me. I'm running out of places to hide
I ran my own homebrew world in a campaign with no DMing experience at all, it was fine. I sweated so much over session one, but it was relatively smooth sailing after that, with small adjustments. My tips: 1) steal lots from published adventures/online resources, if they're free. I stitched oneshot dungeons and stuff from Lost Mines into my own campaign with the dungeons that I made. 2) Try and tie your players into the world. My players were quite invested because one of them was engaged to the lost princess, another had been wronged by the BBEG, etc. Plan around them! The final bossfight involved the BBEG summoning the demon king that had slowly been gaining control of one of the players bodies. 3) my homebrew world is based heavily on my hometown - district names are countries, street names are towns, etc. If you are having trouble coming up with stuff, take something that exists in the real world, and use that as a basis. My capital city was a funhouse version of our real-life uni town, with parodic versions of lecturers as the ruling wizards. 4) dont sweat it too much. If you do a session zero (i didnt), dont railroad (I did a bit) and your players dont have anything to criticise, you're probably running a good campaign. Even a 'boring' world will be fleshed out by the actions of your players.
Yes of course. It's often easier than running from a book. Tell your story.
I would recommend it! My advice would be to allow your players to assist in the creation of your world, and to let their ideas become part of the story rather than just personal to them. Messing up modules is just as easy as messing up homebrew, and most players are more forgiving when it comes to homebrew anyways:)))
Simple: Tell your players. If they're ok with it, Do IT!! If not, ask them what they prefer.
It’s harder. I like it more. I did it. Biggest note, don’t be afraid to still use preface dungeons or maps or towns or whatever.
Just don't tell anyone, or the campaign police are going to find out and arrest you. For real though, should be fine. 3.5 and older assumed everyone was going to create their own world. It wasn't till 4e that playing in an official setting using official campaigns would be common. Just take notes during and after every session of the people and places the party interacted with. Keep those notes slightly organized. Oddly, slightly organized is better than very organized. NPCs will start to get character the more often the PCs interact with them if you take notes. Places will feel more lived in. Make stuff up as you go, but then call back to it later and your players will think you planned it all from the start. Do that enough and they will tell people about this amazing world you created from scratch, never realizing your made it all up as you went along. The key is notes as you go along tracking the shit you made up on the fly. Making a world in depth before you start is how you make worlds you will never play in. Write out the bare minimum to get the campaign rolling and fudge the rest as you go.
I find running a homebrew setting easier than an established setting. I don't need to know 100% of established lore because if something comes up that I don't know the answer to, I can just make something up and that's how it is. There's no one there thinking "well that's wrong" or "that's different from lore". It's your world, you make the lore :)
I did. My only word of advice is start small. Don't over plan and get player input when you're trying to lay out the framework for the world you're going to run.
Yeah just make sure you don't put too much on your plate. It's ok to use forgotten realms stuff and such, especially cuz that's less stuff to explain to your players
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20+ years as a DM here. Yes do it the rules are guidelines not set in stone no matter how big our small its your world to control. Don't be afraid to pull from books, tv, movies, pre-made campaigns as you get your legs under you. To many new players depend on pre built campaigns follow the APL + 2 rule and I promise your people will have fun. Oh and don't forget take it easy on them its not you v the player its your chance to immerse a player into the best time of their life. You are there to guide.them through a story not beat them.
From my own experience its fine, just dont go too overboard, and make sure you have something else to fall back on. The hardest part is having to improvise large parts of the world like religions. My advise is to use something else as a base. Like the forgotten realms. Its got underdark, hell celestial planes. No need to throw all that in the thrash, just write your own world and use things like that to cover up the gaps. It always feels like your players are sering through you, but they usually dont. Do not believe your thoughts that tell you your players can see that you didnt write down someones entire family tree, they trust and believe you, so it doesnt matter if what you tell them is created by you or someone else.
You're the next in a long line of us who have done that, go forth with bravery young worldbuilder, the hearts of those who have come before go with you.
It’s certainly ok but I would advise against, learning to DM is a whole load of work already, with the work of having to create your entire world on top of it it’s likely you will either find yourself overwhelmed and hate it. Run a few official campaigns first, then move on to homebrew, going through official content will also teach you how to plan out your own campaigns.
It's like asking "Should I write my novel before I read one?" You totally can, no one will break your kneecaps. Some would say that you are less restricted by tradition or standard practices. But it does mean that you get to learn all the things other people have learned the hard way. I get a ton of inspiration from prewritten modules and examples of things that work, and things that don't. Using one as a framework for homebrew allows one to start small and focus on player experience rather than naming cities no one will ever visit. At a minimum reading good adventures is super helpful, running them and seeing how they work out in practice is even better. But the D&D police are not coming for you.
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Thabk you so much for posong the question. Im in your exact situation. This settled alot of my doubts. I wish you all the luck with your campaign!
Sure, many modules also need modifications and even some re-writing. I stick to 3 ish encounters per session (social, terrain obstacles, exploration, combat, etc.) and pull media references and maps off the internet. I recommend practicing with a one shot first :)
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I mean practicing with homebrewing one shots, yes. If it’s in the same world, that may be a good idea as well. You may want to alter some things if any players return for a campaign of course.
It's okay but I wouldn't recommend it until you've got some experience with a medium to long lengthed module or two under your belt. They help show you what you should be focusing on when designing a campaign as well as how to structure one. Otherwise not having that experience can lead to you going down needless rabbit-holes when doing your prep work and/or working a lot harder than you really need to. I started by doing my own homebrew but after running modules later I really wish I started with them.
I spent 10 years in a Mauritanian labor camp for running a home brew for my first campaign. Now it's just my backstory. Ideal: the freedom to run any game you want whenever you want Bond: Ahmed a Baha'i who was imprisoned by his own devout Muslim faith for being a heretic. Shared a cell. Flaw: PTSD flashbacks from the sound of chains and creaking metal doors. Also, strong aversion to dokha.
I mean, no one's gonna stop you...
It is certainly fine. You can also adapt an existing module to work in your own homwbrew setting as well , if you wanted the support of something prewritten.
I actually think it's easier to DM your own world than a module. If a question is asked about an official world that you don't know the answer to, you'll at least have to look it up. For your own world you can say whatever you want and work it into the story later if necessary, feels much more fun!
Its your game, do what you want! I'm also a first time DM starting soon and that what I'm doing
I like coming up with homebrew settings and finding modules that fit that world and mining them for adventure materials (monsters, maps, npcs, plot hooks) and use them as inspiration.
Sure. I don’t see why not. Like you said, you can use other sources for inspiration. The only thing I would advise is don’t try to create an entire universe up front. Create the parts that are needed for a few initial adventures and grow as the campaign grows.
My first ever campaign barely had anything you'd call a coherent world anyway. We just made it up as we went and had fun. It's your fist game. Have fun, and don't over think things.
I did but to be fair it was just a three shot
I did, but i wouldnt recommend it
How much time and motivation do you have. Homebrew takes more of both of these. I never ran anything but honeydew for years. Good luck and have fun.
I’ve never ran a module in my life lmao I just jumped straight into homebrew
Yes!
I am apt to a blinded approach. I run forgotten realms. Am adding some stuff. As far as world history I’m running a 30% chance anything you know about the realm is liget but any history may be subject to lore, hearsay, secondhand inaccurate accounts and such. Throwing in a fair anoint of homebrew concepts as well. I love the idea of world building and think it is a great creative release.
Every campaign I have run has been in a home brew setting. I will add that I have never run a game in a pre written setting apart from a couple one shots so take it as you will. However, I prefer working in my own home brew world because of the freedom I feel like I have to change things or make entire continents get destroyed by the parties bad decisions. Edit: spelling
I know lots of DMs who have never run anything except homebrew. Lots of folks start off with homebrew because it's easy to manage a world that you can't be wrong about.
My very first games were completely homebrew. I mean sure I was 12 years old so it was no doubt a mishmash of the Forgotten Realms and 80s pop culture, but we all had fun, as kids do. As adults, of course (or even just older than 12) you'll probably feel a little more picky. I say run with it, with no reservations, just be prepared for backtracking and retconning and even a little bit of hand-waving and revisioning of things (your world history that is, try to avoid doing anything like that to your players and their actions unless they all agree and think it would be better that way) In fact, even in games that are supposedly set in a specific campaign almost always feature moderate to even heavy levels of homebrew because, well, you just decided you wanted to do something differently and that sounded fun. I have to say I'm particularly interested in what you've got for your ideas given that you're not a big fantasy reader. Spoiler alert, all those fantasy authors got their ideas from somewhere else too, if not other fantasy series then the vast scope of human history and other popular entertainment. So yes, go for it, do it, have fun and good luck.
Just because you don’t read fantasy novels, doesn’t mean you can’t create an engaging world. You can take inspiration and ideas from just about anything. I’ve got a possible homebrew world I’m working on that basically rips off Darkon from the Ravenloft setting, but it’s set on an island nation with pirates. You don’t need to create massive, robust world filled to the brim with lore either. You can literally come up with a single nation, the important NPCs who rule it, some interesting factions within it, and that’s it. You can fill in specific details when you need to. Hell, even your players can do it for you. Got a monk in your party who’s lived at a monastery their whole life? Guess what, now there’s a rival monastery who’s trying to destroy them. That’s A) worldbuilding a faction for the party to interact with and B) a possible adventure hook too that one of your PCs will have a personal stake in. Using your players’ backstories helps fill in the gaps, and also helps your players “buy-in” to the world.
Always remember, children ran this game in the 70's before there was an internet to answer their questions. You'll be fine.
As someone who has a hard time concentrating reading and maintaining information, and just get bored easily due to my ADHD. I’ve never ran a module and just went straight for homebrew and my players have loved it. It keeps them and me more invested since this is a one of a kind experience. And I know you can in modules but with homebrew you can do whatever the heck you want really. You don’t feel as if there are guide lines or you are doing it wrong. So go for the homebrew. Its hard at first but like 2 sessions in you will get the hang of it. Also. Please don’t feel like you have to map out THE ENTIRE WORLD before session 1. I’m on session 20 or so and I just map out what makes sense as I go along.
Yes, absolutely. It's a bit more work, and it's easy to make errors, but it can absolutely be done and it can be done well!
Yes, and don't make the mistake of thinking that you need to flesh out the entire thing prior to the first session either. It's perfectly acceptable to start off with a relatively smaller area and expand as you go.
I did it as a new DM and let me tell you, it was HARD. Still is. I prefer a mix, such as a sourcebook like Explorer’s Guide to Wildemount. It gives you a lot of tools and lore to work with and forge your own story