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!

We’re finally here! The session I’ve really been looking forward to… writing copy for your players. Today, we’re going to create something we can give to our players that they can use to build the backstory for their characters. I’m going to talk about the different things I include in this initial handout and I’ll even be giving you access to the handout that I’m creating for you to review. I’m eager to get started, so let’s just dive in!

Because we now know what all we want to happen in our arc—or what might happen—we have a lot of work to do to get the setting for our arc fleshed out and expanded. This course is going to be where we take care of that. By the time you've finished with this part of my homebrew campaign creation series, you'll have a solid grasp on the setting of your arc. We've done a lot of world-building so far and we're about halfway done with that, now. Soon, we'll be focusing largely on the stories of our campaign. Bear with me, we're nearly there!

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.

In this third part of my fifteen-part homebrew campaign series, we work out the necessary components of our arc and prepare to flesh it out.