How much do you prepare for a homebrew?

[Bendris Noulg]

Another tack might be to ask if folks start small and work out (i.e. detail one geographic area and use that as a springboard for the world) or start big and work in (i.e. start with with the cosmology and use that to determine everything else). Or does anyone start in the middle?

I tend to start with a world-map, and then "zoom in" to a specific area. I'll "zoom out" to detail a plane when I get the idea for it.

 

[Liminal Syzygy]

I tend to overprepare, spending dozens of hours, and burning out before I ever get to actually use the world.

 

[Gez]

Ditto...

 

[AlphaOmega]

thanks for the responses and votes so far... keep em coming...

I've probably run the spectrum in preparing for campaigns thru the years so its nice to hear stories and maybe pick up a few ideas to make it a smoother process.

 

[diaglo]

overprepare.

why do you think i buy all the crap from companies and editions i will never use. i glean them for any nuggets i might consider. and then pick, pick, pick until i get it right.

 

[d4]

I remember reading the Dungeoncraft articles that basically said only prepare what you need.

i don't necessarily think that's good advice.

for me, i prefer worldbuilding to actually GMing a game session, so of course i create way more stuff than i'd ever use in a game.

it's all part of the hobby. why should i deny myself the enjoyment of coming up with cool little tidbits for my world, just because i probably won't get a chance to use them in a session? everything i add to my homebrew world makes it more alive in some way, even if it's only in the background, or even only in my notes and in my head.

 

[Bendris Noulg]

it's all part of the hobby. why should i deny myself the enjoyment of coming up with cool little tidbits for my world, just because i probably won't get a chance to use them in a session? everything i add to my homebrew world makes it more alive in some way, even if it's only in the background, or even only in my notes and in my head.

My thoughts exactly. I'm constantly getting new ideas for a myth, country, island, subterranean lair, or other feature that virtually creates itself in my mind and won't let me be until it's on paper (or in Word, as is most often the case now-a-days). Heck, sometimes focusing on the specific location of an adventure isn't easy because something on the other side of the world is trying to get my attention.

Oh, hey, time for my medication...

 

[Shallown]

Last Home brew I had

A map large 40 mile hexes map

A paragraph about each major city.

A 2-3 page recent history last 3 years which included a war the main reason I did the history otherwise probably wouldn't have bothered.

A pantheon - one I had used before just added domains to it and was done.

A calender - simple just 30 days each month added religious and national/racial holidays and phases of the moon by shading the blocks of the calender.

2 pages of character generation/house rules/variant rules. That was in large type so about 8-10 sentences total.

That was it. I mean I have lots of info in my head but not much on paper. I tend to think out a little and wing a lot more. I tend to create better, more cohesive stuff on the fly then with long thought.

The homebrew campaign is very typical epic fanatsy type stuff. I wanted to do that verus my very character driven small scale adventures.


Later

 

[ichabod]

I'm with the both ends people. That is, I start by thinking big, with grand plots, timelines, cosmology, and so on. But once I have a solid idea of the big stuff, I go small, and detail the one area the players will be adventuring in. The thing is, I stick the players in between. So I get the generalities of the world set up, then ask the players what sort of campaign they want to play, they build the local stuff around what they want.

I remember reading the Dungeoncraft articles that basically said only prepare what you need.

It's more complicated than that. On the one hand, you want to keep things loose. You don't want to get straight-jacketed by something you've already planned, and lead the game into no fun land. On the other hand, you have to take into account what you're good at as a DM. If you're good at ad libbing, you can get away with being loose. If you're not, you need to prepare more, and need a more solid background to work off of when you are forced to ad lib.

As for how much I prepare, when I started my current Dome of Heaven campaign, I gave the players a 52 page handout. After talking to the players, I wrote about 35 pages of adventure material before we started playing. When 3.5 came out, I revised the original handout, which is now 72 pages. I hope to eventually get it up to around 300 pages and release it as a pdf.

 

[Altalazar]

Sometimes I have great details, sometimes just a bare outline. And sometimes the players go off in an unexpected direction, and so I just make it up as I go - sometimes making for great enjoyment. Usually the players can't tell the difference. I have enough of an established homebrew world that many directions are possible. And when i make stuff up, I keep careful track of what I create on the fly so as to keep it consistent. Later, I'll even go back and fill in details - whole cities have been built up (in details, at least - the cities did exist as a dot on the map) from that. I have made up small villages, too, adding new dots to my world map.

I think it does depend on the type of adventure - some seem to require a lot of advance planning - others actually work better if they are on the fly and not worked out too much in advance. So I'm somewhere in the middle.