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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mercurius" data-source="post: 8278883" data-attributes="member: 59082">Even though, in my middle age and with most of my creative energy and time going to other activities (writing), I can't seem to let go of homebrewing, so in terms of time-saving prep, I'm using pre-published adventures but adapting them to my homebrew setting. The bottom line is that I love world-building, from the big stuff--cosmology, gods, mytho-history--down to the nitty-gritty details like NPCs, taverns, local landscapes, unusual sites, etc. I've had moments of temptation where it would just be a lot easier to use a pre-published setting, but that would be taking out an intrinsic part of the joy of D&D for me.  But given that my current setting is only loosely based upon the setting I used for my last extended campaign that I ran in 2008-14, it needs a fair amount of work, which I enjoy, but have decided to only sketch out of the broad strokes and focus on "bottom-up" world-building. Meaning, start with a small region and build from there, although still provide an overall sketch of the bigger picture. One thing I'm finding a bit tedious is converting adventures to my homebrew. Most of it is just names, but it still takes a bit of work--more than I expected. Last session, I found myself struggling to come up with alternate versions of FR names on the fly, so am going to better prepare for next time.I'm curious what methods others use that take a similar approach. For instance, I just started running "Lost Mine of Phandelver." After two short sessions, one of which was mostly making characters, the PCs are still going through the goblin hideout. But next session (in a couple weeks) they'll reach Phandalin, which will require me to go through the town and figure out what I want to change.Now I don't need to radically change the Forgotten Realms lore, as the region the PCs are in is vaguely similar to the North of Faerun, if a bit wilder. For example, it isn't hard to adapt the basic backstory of the Wave Echo cave: there are dwarves, gnomes, and orcs, etc, in my world - even if they are all somewhat different than the Realms versions. But there's a lot I need to adapt: For instance, there's no Zhentarim in my world, no Tymora, no Lord's Alliance, etc.I'm trying to take a pro-active approach, though, and use the FR stuff as inspiration to build my world. So while the FR organizations and gods don't exist, they give me the opportunity to use them as seed ideas. For example, there's no Tymora, but there are gods, so I'm thinking, what sort of deity would fit instead? No Zhentarim, but perhaps there's a somewhat similar cabal...what are there motives? Where are they from? And so on.Any thoughts on this process? What does your process involve, in terms of adapting pre-published material to your own homebrew? How do you go about this? Any tips and tricks?</blockquote>

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