A homebrew campaign has two crucial components: the world and the story. At this point in the series, we’ve already built a beautiful, vibrant, living world that is populated with unique characters and filled with civilizations and stories waiting to be encountered. We’ve written one arc, the first arc of the campaign, and I’ve talked about one-shots. Now, however, it’s time to look at the most critical part of the story: the central arc, or the arc that covers the entirety of the campaign. Sure, there will be other stories and some detours along the way, but this is the trunk of the tree from which all of the branches extend. In fact, that’s how I want you to think of this session: we’re building the trunk of the tree.

In the previous lesson of my homebrew campaign creation course, I went over the process of writing copy for your players. We added details about our setting and the first arc of the campaign to a document that we could then send to our players. This document is created to enable our players to create characters that will mesh with the world and will serve the plot of the first arc in our campaign. After you wrote the copy for your players using the advice in that course, you should have sent that documentation along to your players so that they could create characters for you to work into the world. That’s exactly what we’ll be doing in this session, so you should start off by pulling up the characters your players made for your campaign!

In this session, we’re going to take what we developed in the previous session and really flesh it out. I’m going to break down how I write my arcs and talk about what I do to ensure successful, cohesive improvisation during a session. At the bottom of this post, you’ll find links to download the template that I use for writing an arc. If you have your own that you’d like to use, feel free to use that! My template is also fairly focused on Dungeons and Dragons, but it can easily be modified to any other system.