Your players may have given you the names and a few details of some people they may know who could be part of your story’s first arc. I know mine did! If that’s the case, take time to note down everything your players told you about those characters. It’ll be important for this lesson! Once you’ve got that, you’re ready to dive into creating the shops and notable inhabitants for the setting of our first arc. I’ll be creating some NPCs and stores for the town of Kessit, where the first arc of my homebrew campaign will be taking place.

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!

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 session, we’re going to zoom into the map and focus on one of those regions and one population center within it. You should select a region that has a few interesting features to it, rather than something that is less interesting like a grassy plain or desert. Those can be made interesting, of course, but we want to pick an area that’s interesting right from the start, for this. Note that this is going to be where we write the first arc, too, so keep that in mind when selecting the region you’re going to focus on for this.