Homebrew content is becoming more and more common in Dungeons and Dragons recently, as new fans have poured into the hobby (partially thanks to the success of podcast campaigns like C🔯ritical Role). Rather than try to understand the dense and unclear world of D&D (and/or purchase one of the pricey pre-made campaigns), many new DMs would prefer to just come up with something on their own.
Homebrewing content is an exciting prospect - until you sit down and start writing. It can very quickly become a daunting challenge that you dread to start for fear of never finishing. Never fear! Just start wiౠth something you'll enjoy writing about, even if it's not really important, and go from there. This guide will help kick-start you into the world of homebrewed D&D content.
How Much Will You Change?
The first question that homebrew DMs must ask themselves is: how far am I willing to go?
The term "homebrew content" refers absolutely anything that doesn't appear in a rulebook for Dungeons and Dragons, and most DMs use at least a few house rules or extra items in their games. However, building an entire homebrewed plot and/or world is an immense task to undertake. You can choose to change as much and as little as you like. Depending on your choices, some parts of thꦰis guide will be mo♍re relevant than others.
The World
The Map
If you've decided to make an entirely unique map ♊for your campaign or world, answer a few basic questions firs𒁏t:
- What kind of biomes should there be (and how many of each)?
- What kind of cultures will live on this land? City dwelling? Nomadic? Both and in-between? (Just give a vague answer if need be! Don't get caught up on the details.)
- Are there any specific geographical features you want to build into the map? (Areas with a lot of destruction, plagued lands, a giant hole in the world, etc.)
- Are you going to portray the entire planet on this map, or just one part of it? If it's not the entire planet, what is stopping the players (or, indeed, NPCs) from venturing out of this region?
Even if you decide to use an online program to design your map in the long run, it's always best to draw a sketch on paper first. You won't get lost in all the buttons and options and fun features they've created online before you've even started to think about the world! You could just draw free-hand, or you could roll your entire dice collection to get things started, as seen on the ima𓃲ge above.
Your NPC Storehouse
Lots of DMs improvise NPCs that weren't part of the campaign development (shopkeepers, local townspeople, etc.) on the spot. However, a strategy I use in my own sessions - pulled from the advice of Matthew Mercer - is to create a "bank" of NPCs.
Essentially, you create a database of NPCs for yourself that you can pull from anytime you need a nameless NPC for your session. It's super easy - even fun - to do in a flash. Even while you watch television or sit on a bus, you could pull out a phone or laptop and type out a couple of characters. Their details can include...
- Appearance
- Age
- Race
- Gender identity and orientation
- A brief list of people/groups they like and people/groups they hate
- Two or three personality traits
- A vague enough backstory to be applied in almost any place in the world
Then, when the players want to ask around the town for information, simply pull a few characters out of your bank and make a note of which ones you used! It'll also make it easier to remember them if the players ever return to the town and want to revisit their old contacts. (Plus, it's funny to🌳 imagine a warehouse full of motionless people, all just waiting for you to pluck them up and put them in your world!)
Races, Cultures, Customs = Relationships
What races and kinds of cultures you include in your homebrew will vary depending on an uncountable number of factors. The truly important decision you'll need to make is how each group fits together in this new world and what they think about the others. Which groups hate one another and why? Fictional worlds live and breathe by these interactions, so it also helps to make your universe feel alive for the players, rather than just scripted for them to watch. That's not to say these relationships should be hard and fast rules, of course. Many elves may hate dwarves (and vice versa), but Legolas and Gimli still may a pretty𒉰 good team.
Be careful during this stage to avoid clichés as much as possible (such as races previously thought to be only evil, like orcs). No one wants to play the same campaign over again and again and again, so it should be new and refreshing. The fantasy world doesn't cater to our stereotypes... it exists to be fun!
Adapting From Others
What To Take And What To Leave From The Original
If you're creating a whole new world to play D&D in, you have to decide how much work you want to do from scratch. Most people aren't looking to build an entirely new system altogether, so the basics (like the character sheet, stats, and combat) stay the same. However, the minutia of it all can be tough. You can often repurpose D&D rules to suit your needs without actually changing much, though: change the armor names but keep the s🅠tats, or use the stats of one of D&D's monsters as the stats of a monster you made up. Look for as many of these opportunities as you can - your future self will thank you for it.
Don't Be Afraid To Search For Inspiration
Even if you have an idea already for your homebrew, always search for inspiration! Other people's ideas have been made public and available for a reason. So long as you're not blatantly copying something or making money off of someone else's work, do𓂃n't be afraid to get inspired.
The internet is an obvious choice, but it doesn't have to be. Talk to friends who play D&D ab🌟out the homebrews they've run, or have thought about running. What worked and what didn't? Talk to prospective players about what they'd like to have a campaign about. Maybe you could put a fun spin on their idea to surprise them! Take plotlines or si♓de quests from your favorite books and pull out the best parts to tweak.
Taking inspiration from others is natural - it doesn't need to all magically spring from your head. All the best authors and artists do it. Engaging with this content will only encourage you to think out your world better, confront irregularities, and flesh out the cogs of the larger machi💯🃏ne so that it runs all the more smoothly.
Keeping It Cohesive
Create A Style Guide For Yourself
Businesses often use a 'style guide' when they market themselves to keep their brand consistent. It'll include their primary, secondary, and tertiary colors, the fonts for headers and for paragraphs𓄧, a logo, and more. In the same way, DMs can benefit from creating a style guide for their D&D campaign.
A DM's style guide would be much broader than a business', but would achieve the same goal: keeping the product consistent. In simple terms, it's basically an aesthetic you've preplanned. This process will make it easier to describe🔯 people, places, and things that you may not have prepared for, since D&D campaigns often go off the rails a little bit.
Your style guide can be as simple or detailed as you like. Consider including...
- Style of dress worn
- Typical building materials used
- Architectural Style
- Accents
- Colors loved
- Colors hated
- Typical plants
- Typical animals
- Impact of religion on daily life
...and more! You should also ask yourself questions like...
- Will my entire world have the same style guide? If not, how many will I need?
- What cultural aspects about this group need to come into play in their style?
- How would marginalized groups in this community alter the aesthetic to suit their needs/interests?
Figure Out How You'll Take Notes
There are two kinds of first-time DMs: the kind that thing they'll be able to write down everything their party does, and the kind that doesn't prepare to write down anything. Strive to fall somewhere in the middle.
Situations, where you may need to take notes, include (bཧut are not limited to𝄹)...
- when the players want to investigate an item, person, or area that you hadn't previously prepared much for
- when the players become suspicious of a particular character
- when you want to take note of which NPCs you've placed in a certain town, shop, house, etc. (in case you need to call them back later)
- when you improvise a detail and will need to remember it for later
It may be beneficial to take notes in the same place you're preparing the campaign. Or, you may want them separate so that you don't wind up confused. Do you prefer paper, or electronic? If electronic, do you have a particular note-keeping app that you use? Services you may already be using, like OneNote or Notion, are excellent for D&D campaigns, but other progr🌳ams may be better catered to you🍒r needs.
You'll Never Be Finished - So Learn To Improvise
DMing guides online all have different opinions about how much preparation you should do before a campaign. Some say that the main campaign is all that's imp༺ortant - the side quests and other content☂ will come naturally or it isn't worth putting time into. Others insist that it must be done Tolkien-style, with every inch of the cultures and stories and NPCs planned out before you begin. More compromising folks will suggest ways to balance the two extremes.
Ultimately, it doesn't matter. A DM's work is never done, no matter how much time and energy you pour into a campaign. The players will always do things you couldn't anticipate. Allow the thought of t𒊎his to free you from anxieties about p﷽reparation: you cannot control everything. If you could, it wouldn't be very much fun to play!
It's much more important to invest that time into your improvisation skills. Get to know your main NPCs, and investigate how they'd react in different situations. Practice by creating a character on the spot, and writing them down after the fact. Improvising is essential for any good DM. It's even more essential in 🥂a home-brewed campaign, with fewer hard-and-fast rules to fall back on.