Secrets of low-prep homebrew [+]

[Truename]

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I love the idea of a homebrew campaign, and I even ran one a few years ago, but I don't have a lot of energy for prep. Some weeks, an hour or two; most weeks, none at all. When I do prep, I enjoy the crafty side of DMing most: drawing battle maps (edit: copying, not creating them), tokens, handouts, house rules. I also enjoy daydreaming about how to turn players' actions into long-term world consequences that build a story. But I struggle with the details needed to make any given session "fun." I love interesting locations, challenging dungeons, exciting encounters, and compelling NPCs... but I can't seem to make myself enjoy creating them.

What are your secrets for low-prep homebrew? Share your resources, techniques, and tricks.

 

[Truename]

I'll start. For my homebrew campaign, I thought I could make it low-prep by making prep part of the game. I used Microscope to generate the campaign world, and I asked the players to submit one piece of content each: a map, an encounter, an adventure, etc. I also had a in-depth session zero where people made characters and came up with conflicts, bonds, NPCs they knew, and so forth.

Microscope worked great. We ended up with a genuinely interesting campaign world with lots of opportunities for adventure.

The session zero also worked pretty well. People had interesting characters and compelling backstories. Easy to build a campaign out of. The NPCs didn't work so well, because they wanted to do a lot of traveling, and so it was hard to fit them in.

The "bring one piece of content" failed utterly. Nobody was willing to do any homework outside of game night. Including me, I suppose! I had this idea that I'd always have three options in my back pocket: a dungeon, a wilderness location, and a urban location, so I could Schrodinger's Dungeon a response to anything the players tried, but it just didn't work out. I ended up spending a lot of time trying to find material that fit the direction of the campaign, and that wasn't fun at all.

If I were to do it again, I'd lean into the "players create the content at the table" aspect. Microscope worked really really well. I'm not sure how it would work, though—creating NPCs, encounters, maps at the table? I think it's more common in rules-lite games, but my players prefer 5e. But it does seem like there's some potential there for a truly low-prep approach.

 

[Reynard]

Certainly different games lend themselves better to low-prep campaigns than others. Shadowdark, for example, works really well. It is full of interesting tables that keep the game fresh and produce results that can build out the world as you go. Plus the statblocks are simple and the rules are relatively light, so winging it is easy.

Something like Pathfinder is harder, because the system is heavier and balance is more important. You can, of course, use tables to help build out the world as you go, but you might have to curate things more.

In general, though, the most important element of a low prep campaign is t hand a bunch of typically considered "GM duties" to the players. Have them tell you what the world looks like sometimes, and make sure they have strong motivations and are action oriented. When players drive the game, you have to do much less prep.

 

[MGibster]

What are your secrets for low-prep homebrew? Share your resources, techniques, and tricks.

Don't overthink things. When you're creating a setting, start with some generalities and don't worry about having all the details filled in unless you think it's important for the next scenario. You said you like creating things like maps, which is pretty cool, but don't feel as though you have to provide a detailed map of an entire city or kingdom on day one. If we're spending all our time in the small mining town of Kiruna we don't necessary need to know exactly how far we are from Uppsala or Stockholm.

 

[aco175]

I have a Word doc that I placed all the monsters in over the years as I need them. It helps to cut/paste into another Word Doc to make the adventure. I think you can find sites that have statblocks already formatted and you can just cut/paste them as pictures or something if you just need to have the monsters handy.

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

For campaigns I used a lot of pieces from published adventures. Seldom the whole thing, but a map, or a keyed dungeon, or a set of encounters. I put more effort into how the things connect, and what options will arise from layer choice -- typically trying to have three options for each major decision point ready to go at any point.

 

[overgeeked]

Random generators. Lots and lots of random generators. I’d rather take an hour creating a good random generator that will spit out thousands or millions of ideas than meticulously crafting one thing with that same hour of time. Sparks to get the creative juices flowing and riffing on things in the moment.

Start where the game will start and build out from there. There’s a “only three hexes” blog post somewhere in my post history mentioned below.

A similar post from other threads:

I went over some kind of limit trying to post my collection of sandbox resources.

Search my posts for the word “Azgaar.” I always mention it in these kinds of threads. There’s scores of links to blogs and resources. Maybe a dozen or so related videos.

Probably not mentioned are the Monster Overhaul by Skerples; Landmark, Hidden, Secret; and The Stygian Library.

All great resources.

 

[Rune]

I had a thread about this once upon a time. It predates 5e (or at least some of it does), but is still relevant to any system, really.

Here it is: Full-Time DM, Part-Time Prep