Create a Homebrew Campaign | #0: Overview
Introduction
Hello and welcome to the first real post that will serve as part of my new dedication to consistent content! On Mondays, I plan to post content that is informative or educational in some fashion. I’m going to be starting with a fifteen-part series on creating a homebrew campaign setting for tabletop roleplaying games. Some of these principles could be applied to writing in general, but I think that this series will largely be unique to a homebrew campaign setting wherein you’re working in tandem with your players to make an experience that is distinct from all others.
If you'd like, you can actually check out a video version of this content here:
Who Am I and What is This?
Obviously, I’m someone who is publicly unproven, so what business do I have? What authority do I have on this subject? Well, technically none. But I do have quite a bit of experience and have run successful homebrew campaigns with several friends. My last campaign had six regular players and multiple guests. Our campaign finale was an epic battle that saw the return of most of our guests, resulting in a thirteen-hour-long, incredible session wherein I was the dungeon master for ten people (maybe more, I could be forgetting someone). In my current campaign, we have six regular players as our seventh has just returned to college (please shed a tear).
In addition to that, I’ve won two short story awards from the Writers of the Future competition, so I like to think my writing isn’t too bad. Plus, my players seem to like it and they haven’t quit, yet, so… I must be on to something, right?
Our system of choice is Dungeons and Dragons, right now--I find the fifth edition to be easy to get into and the D&D Beyond tool makes so much of what we do possible. I don’t think I would have the players or the engagement that I have in my campaign if it weren’t for this edition and tool. These are the primary reasons that we use D&D for our campaign, but this series is not solely for Dungeons and Dragons. My goal is to make sure that this series can be applied to any tabletop roleplaying game that is flexible enough for you to create a world and custom campaign.
What Will Be Covered?
In this series, I’m going to walk through a swath of topics and exercises. I have this fifteen-part series planned out fully. New parts of the series will be released every Monday until the series is completed and each part will be made available in both video and blog form, so you can access it in the manner that's most convenient for you! This series will, from start to finish, showcase me creating my own homebrew campaign from scratch. We'll make maps, cities, and story arcs. By the end of it, you should have everything that you need (and more) to sit down for the first session of your long-lasting tabletop campaign. Below, I'm going to break down what each entry into this fifteen-part series will cover.
#1: Macro View
The first part of this series will cover the big picture of your world. We’ll make a map, plan geography and settlement placement, and just get a very basic view of what our world is going to look like.
#2: Micro View
Following the map creation, we’ll dive into the micro view. This video will be a deep dive into one location on our map. We’ll flesh out the region as well as the town itself, populating it and adding shops, points of interest, guilds, and the like.
#3: The First Arc
We’re going to stay focused on that region that was fleshed out earlier by writing the first arc of the campaign. This is going to be what draws our party together, so we’ll discuss what you can do to make sure that this is seamless, as well as how you can avoid the trope of everyone meeting up at a tavern. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that trope necessarily if your goal is to just get the game going, but there are definitely more interesting ways to start a campaign.
#4: Fleshing out the First Arc
This is where we’ll get into the nitty-gritty of that arc, detailing the key players of the story, writing interesting NPCs, and plotting the playground that we’ll be tossing our players into.
#5: Expanding the Arc's Setting
Now that we know the story that we want, we need to breathe life into the place where that arc will take place. Some of this will already be done thanks to the micro view process, but there needs to be more depth to the place where this arc is taking place, particularly if we added things to our location in the process of writing the arc. This will also help us know what information to give to our players, beforehand, which we’ll dive into, next time.
#6: Writing Copy for Your Players
This is, for me, the most enjoyable part of this initial process. We have a big world that is truthfully quite empty, then we have this small region that we’ve really taken a dive into. We know what our first several sessions will look like thanks to drafting that arc and painting a picture of the surrounding area. Now, we have to present what we have to our players in a way that’s intriguing, exciting, and--most importantly--gets their creative gears turning as they start to plan their characters and backstories.
We’ll talk about questions you should ask your players to think about for their characters as well as what information your players will need to have to ensure they write someone who’s coherent for this world. I have a few questions I personally love to throw in there to get my players thinking.
#7: Working Your Player Characters into the World
At this stage, we’ll be taking what our players wrote for their backstories and working that into the setting we have in place. We’ll use what our players give us to add even more depth to the rest of our world, not just to the region that we’ve fleshed out and prepared for our players thus far. This is exciting because it gives you some fresh ideas for other regions and can even give your world a more diverse history than it would have if you were creating it without any input from your players.
I’ll also briefly go over what I do to give my players a “complete” backstory, taking what they gave me and writing it in a manner that is cohesive with the world, giving them unique information that only they will have.
#8: Shops and Notable Inhabitants
In previous parts of this series, we’ll have made some simple shops and written bits of basic information about our NPCs. Here, though, we’ll be writing the details about important shops that the players will truly experience as well as going over how to write an NPC that is integral to the story.
As an example, our earlier shop drafts consisted of a name, a summary of goods, maybe a few lines about the people who tend the shop, and a description of it. In this video, we’ll create a shop that will be more important than one that is played off the cuff. We’ll go over what items it contains, how pricing is handled, and create a shopkeeper who has a relevant backstory and a memorable personality.
#9: History and Politics
Our world has been fleshed out a bit already thanks to our macro view and what we added after getting character summaries from our players, but now it’s time to get into the hard stuff--or the fun stuff if this is your thing. We’ll draft a basic history of our world and work on how politics work. Is our world a monarchy? Are there multiple kingdoms here, or is it all just one? What is the current political situation? Is it tense? Is there an active war occurring that could serve as a backdrop for our campaign?
#10: Population and Cultures
A diverse population and unique culture will make a location memorable. We’ll talk about a few ways to make a city stand out with just a couple of paragraphs about how it functions. I’ll give suggestions for ways to create an interesting cultural dynamic that will make your world more believable for the players in your campaign, and we’ll zero in on devising a cultural conflict that your player characters could end up on either side of, making for unique dynamics within the party.
#11: Optional Quests and One-Shots
I find it important to have a few side-quests and one-shots under your belt, just in case you need some time to prepare for the next large arc in your campaign (or, as the case has been for me, in the event of an unexpected player absence during what would be a crucial session of the campaign). We’ll draft a one-session arc and discuss the key elements that can make a session like this memorable instead of a “filler”.
#12: Writing the Central Arcs
So you have most of your world at this point and you have a few one-shots under your belt. You even have the very first arc that will turn the rag-tag misfits your players have made into a semi-cohesive group. Now, it’s time to take everything you’ve built thus far and expand it by writing what I call the central arcs. These are the major story beats that will carry your campaign to its end. I personally like to have a few possible threads for the players to follow so that they can pick up on what really interests them. We’ll create one major arc together and I’ll talk about my process for doing so, then you can apply those same techniques to create additional arcs if you so choose.
#13: Writing the Character Arcs
Your players blessed you with backstories that should have answered the questions you gave them. Now, it’s your turn to bless them by really building those backstories into your world by writing character arcs. For these, I typically try to limit what I write prior to the campaign to about two pages, because I haven’t really gotten to know the characters until after the first several sessions (and neither have the players)! Here, I’ll take some sample backstory documentation and show you how I would write an initial character arc and lay the groundwork for that arc to take place within the world.
#14: Tools I Recommend
All of this advice is great, but I’ve found that tools really help me bring my world to life almost as well as decent prep work. I’ll talk about what I recommend using (unsponsored) and how I use it to enhance my campaign sessions. Some of these are paid services, others are just useful things to have for your game that you can get for little to no cost.
#15: Final Tips and Thoughts
Lastly, I’ll get into some final suggestions that I have for running the campaign. This will be a collection of different tips based on my own experience running a campaign in a homebrew world. I’ll especially focus on things you can do to make sure that the first session goes well and everyone has a good time.
Conclusion
Well, that’s a lot! I hope you’re looking forward to the series I have planned. I’m excited to share what insight I’ve gleaned from being DM for these past few years. There’s so much that I wish I’d known from the start; I hope that with this series, I can give someone out there a headstart on bringing their vision to the table for their players to enjoy. I’ll be putting up the first video next Monday! Each video after that will be put up on subsequent Mondays until we get through the entirety of the fifteen-part series. Don't worry, though; once this series ends, I have more advice and education content planned, so stay tuned for that after the homebrew campaign series comes to an end.
In the meantime, any support you can give is appreciated, whether you’re subscribing to me, sharing this content, or leaving a comment asking if you can see my cat. My social links will be below if you want to follow me. Thank you for checking out this post! Have a terrific day.
Bye for now!