The First Steps of an Organic Homebrew Campaign

Homebrew campaigns are usually meant to last, delivering stories over several years that excite both DMs and players. This high bar makes starting a homebrew campaign feel like an immense feat of effort and patience, which scares many people off and pushes them toward published adventures instead. It doesn't have to be that way.

In this post, I want to present an approach that keeps the workload of a homebrew campaign more or less constant, without overwhelming either the DM or the players. This approach simultaneously ensures that players are invested in the campaign from the very beginning. I'm assuming here that the campaign universe is already fixed—it doesn't matter whether it's a homemade setting or an already published one like the Forgotten Realms or Eberron.

It should also be emphasized that this is a personal take on handling the topic of homebrew campaigns. If you don't inherently disagree with the statement that follows, hopefully you'll find the approach presented here appealing.

Which direction, which theme, and which nuances the characters and the campaign itself will take will only become clear over the course of the first few episodes. No one can or should attempt to predict that.

Conflicts Shape Worlds

A common mistake is dropping players into a perfect world that's then suddenly beset by some danger. That's not how the world works.

However, it's also a mistake to lock down the theme and story of the campaign too rigidly ahead of time. Describing the social and geographic environment in which the campaign takes place in pages of exposition is, in most cases, a waste of time. For one thing, very few players can or want to remember all that information. For another, it's very likely that the vast majority of those details will never be explored, and will lose relevance over time regardless.

DMs can set the starting point of a campaign. However, the direction the campaign develops in rarely matches expectations. But that's not a bad thing—it's something you can use to your advantage. We give players a stage on which to create their characters, and see what they do with the props we provide them.

The stage is the world. The props are conflicts. Worlds are shaped by conflicts. These worlds are populated by the characters the players will create. That's why, as a first step, we think about conflicts that affect the world's population. The only thing that matters here is that these conflicts operate at the scale of a handful of villages and towns—not so large that the conflicts become completely independent of each other, and not so small that they become overly specific.

For example, one conflict could be that the local duke has disbanded the military for inexplicable reasons. Another conflict can build on that, hinting that there was recently a raid on a merchant caravan, with rumors circulating that the neighboring countess—whose lover left her for the duke—is behind the raids.

About six conflicts of this kind provide a solid foundation, both for character creation and for the DM to expand the world further. At this point, it's very important to phrase these conflicts in the past tense, since we're talking about things that shaped the characters.

The Perfect Time for Session Zero

The conflicts discussed above already hold a lot of potential for creating characters and their backstories, without pinning down the campaign's story and theme. Because all we've actually fixed is the one thing we're capable of fixing: the past.

Maybe one character is a soldier who lost his job when the military was disbanded. Another barely survived the raid and is searching for his brother, who, unlike him, was kidnapped. All these connections between characters and conflicts are crucial to the quality of a campaign and to limiting future workload. That's why it's all the more important to make the links between characters and conflicts as strong as possible.

On the one hand, this gives players food for thought for their characters' backstories, which they can bring into the still-unfixed world; on the other hand, it ties all the characters to one and the same set of conflicts. Both aspects mean that the DM doesn't have to build the world alone, and that players usually build their motivation to stay in this world and face its conflicts directly into their character's personality from the start.

A Small Adventure

Once the characters are set, it's important to keep in mind that these characters will have little in common with the characters who will experience the campaign in the future. Players usually have a vivid imagination. But it often differs greatly from what they actually end up embodying at the table—and that's not a bad thing, it's essential to the process of a homebrew campaign.

The direction of the campaign shouldn't be locked down until all the players have developed a sense of their character. That's why it always helps to start with a short adventure that lets the characters level up to level 3. The adventure should span multiple sessions, so players have time in between to reflect on their characters.

The first adventure is also meant to put the world to the test. At least one of the conflicts should be addressed by the adventure—ideally one that most of the characters have some connection to. The Dungeon Master's Guide offers excellent tools for building an adventure setting, populating it with a few NPCs, and giving the characters a handful of tasks to complete. It doesn't need to be anything special—it just needs to make the DM and players aware of the decisions they made on paper, so they can adjust them if needed.

The Great Evil

Once the first adventure is wrapped up, the first enemies defeated, and the first victories celebrated, everyone has a better sense of what they expect from the campaign and which conflicts interest them. The DM needs to gather this information from the players and, building on it, create the great evil lurking behind all the previously mentioned conflicts—whether directly or indirectly. This could be a person, a faction, a force of nature, or something else entirely. The important thing is that it's causally responsible for making these conflicts possible in the first place.

To define the great evil, we first need to explore its past. How did it come to this? What is the great evil's goal? How does it justify its actions? How does it connect to each of the conflicts? What perceptible steps were necessary for the world to become what shaped the characters?

Second, we turn our attention to the crystal ball. Because the great evil hasn't achieved its goal yet. It's right in the middle of its plan, and maybe even close to reaching a major milestone on the way to victory. These milestones are what we try to pin down. That gives us a sense of security and becomes the source for the majority of adventures the characters will experience.

Creating this great evil, its origin, and the plan it's pursuing can be a lot of work. But it's work that pays off, since we can be sure it isn't wasted effort. Additionally, because we've built the evil out of the previously defined conflicts, every character ends up having a stake in standing against it.

The conflicts were the symptoms. The great evil is the disease that needs to be defeated. Welcome the characters into the campaign with a bang, and make them aware of this disease.

What Happened Next...

The great evil is the source of everything in the campaign. Settlements, cities, and landscapes are all influenced by it and merely serve as a sounding board for the ever-recurring symptoms of this disease. It's important to give yourself the freedom to keep adjusting the great evil's background as you go. As long as those adjustments don't contradict established truths that have already been played out at the table, anything goes.

Above all, homebrew campaigns are one thing: one of the purest D&D experiences when it comes to collaborative storytelling. In my opinion, too many DMs, when faced with the idea of a homebrew campaign, seize the pen for themselves and see the format as a chance to become authors, presenting players with a stage play in which they're mere characters rather than influential actors. In a homebrew campaign, everyone shares responsibility for the direction it takes. Everyone should feel like they have at least some hand on the wheel. In my opinion, this is precisely what makes homebrew campaigns one of the most personal and exciting experiences you can have with friends.